The Little-Known Origins of the Word "Replication"

Geoffrey M. Hodgson

The terms replication and replicator are prominent in various kinds of writings on evolution, in both the natural and human social world. Charles Darwin did not use these words, and he had no knowledge of genes or DNA. But he often used the word inherit to refer to the passing of something unknown from parents to offspring that would help account for similarities between them.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the concept of replication stems from the post-1945 literature in information theory, communication theory and cybernetics. This, plus Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 book on What is Life?, led biologists to consider the informational aspects of evolution. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry shows a Google plot with rare usage of the term replicator before 1945, but a steady increase afterwards (Wilkins and Bourrat 2020).

Another factor behind the adoption of the concept of replication was the so-called ‘modern synthesis’ between Darwinism and genetics in the 1930s and 1940s. The discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953 gave even greater impetus to the view that the process of replication was largely informational in character.

In his famous book entitled The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins (1976) described genes as replicators and the processes of retaining and copying genetic information as replication. Without necessarily agreeing with Dawkins on every point, some philosophers of biology have adopted the replicator concept. There has been an extended discussion about its definition and utility (Hull 1988, Sterelny et al. 1996, Hodgson and Knudsen 2010, Wilkins and Bourrat 2020).

But what is the true origin of the terms replicator and replication? The results of an electronic search of documents are reported here. The answers are rather surprising.

The Italian verb replicare means to replicate or to repeat. The phrase ‘sei volte replicando una medesima parola’, meaning ‘six times repeating the same word’ appears in The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, written in the fourteenth century. Longer words beginning with replica- are more common in Italian than in English.

Confining our search to English texts, it seems that the term replication comes from law. The first appearance of the word in English in the huge JSTOR electronic database of documents is in 1801, is in a pamphlet on legal aspects of Catholic emancipation, written by the barrister John Dillon (1801, p. 24). The next appearance of the term is also in a legal context (Anonymous, 1812, p. 374).

The online Law Dictionary (2021) explains that replication refers to a plaintiff’s reply to a defendant’s plea, an answer, or a counterclaim. This legal use of the term is probably very old. According to the Merriam-Webster (2021) online dictionary, the first known use of the term replication was in the fourteenth century, in the sense of an answer to a reply, which is a generalization of the legal usage.

Of course, the meaning in terms of a reply is not the same as of making a copy of stored information. But still, the legal meaning and its origins are important.

In 1816 there followed a document that refers to the ‘replication in print’ of a written letter (Benett 1816, p. 5). This is the first detected use of the concept outside law. It is also a clear early use of replication as making a copy of some kind of stored information.

From 1816 to 1829, the next eight instances in the JSTOR data base all come from law. Then replication is used in a geological context. Many further legal uses of the term follow. Then the famous physicist Michael Faraday (1857, p. 151) referred to leaves of silver that ‘may consist of an infinity of parts resulting from replications, foldings and scales, all laid parallel by the beating which has produced them’. Faraday clearly used the term to refer to a process of copying.

This JSTOR search establishes that replication has for some while been largely a legal concept, with growing uses in other contexts, often with the sense of making a copy. No appearance has been found in English in a biological context in the nineteenth century. Well into the twentieth century, the term was used rarely in biology. While still infrequent, it became more common in the 1930s, especially in botanical contexts referring to replication with seeds. It was also used to refer in multiple disciplines to the replication of experiments.

The term replicator was generally much less frequent than replication. But again, the first appearances of replicator are in law, to refer to the person who initiates a legal act of replication. Outside law, the word replicator appeared first in the twentieth century. Before 1945 it was rarely used and largely confined to botany. 

In sum, the word replication has been used in law for centuries, it was prominent in information science just after the Second World war, and with those informational connotations it spread to parts of biology and then especially to the philosophy of biology.

The concept of ‘replicator dynamics’ first appeared in 1983 (Michod 1983). Within a few years it had been used in the Economic Journal (Silverberg, et al. 1988). These replicator concepts were then applied more widely in game theory and to evolutionary phenomena in the social sciences.

Replication neither begins nor ends as a biological concept. It has replicated, and will replicate, in other contexts too.

First posted 11 September 2021. Edited 12 September 2021, with thanks to Ugo Pagano.

References

Anonymous (1812) ‘Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of the Late John Horne Tooke’, Belfast Monthly Magazine, 31 May, 8(46).

Benett, John (1816) Replies to the three additional letters of the Rev. William Coxe, Archdeacon of Wilts, on the subject of commutation of tithe (London: Carpenter and Son).

Dawkins, Richard (1976) The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Dillon, John Joseph (1801) The question as to the admission of Catholics to Parliament, considered upon the principles of existing laws: with supplemental observations on the coronation oath; by a barrister (London: Spilsbury).

Faraday, Michael (1857) ‘The Bakerian Lecture: Experimental Relations of Gold (and Other Metals) to Light’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 147, pp. 145-181.

Hodgson, Geoffrey M. and Knudsen, Thorbjørn (2010) Darwin’s Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Hull, David L. (1988) Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Law Dictionary (2021) ‘Replication’. https://thelawdictionary.org/replication/. Retrieved 11 Sept 2021.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2021) ‘Replication’. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/replication. Retrieved 11 Sept 2021.

Michod, Richard E. (1983) ‘Population Biology of the First Replicators: On the Origin of the Genotype, Phenotype and Organism’, American Zoologist, 23(1), pp. 5-14.

Schrödinger, Erwin (1944) What is Life? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Silverberg, Gerald, Dosi, Giovanni and Orsenigo, Luigi (1988) ‘Innovation, Diversity and Diffusion: A Self-Organization Model’, Economic Journal, 98(4), December, pp. 1032-54.

Sterelny, Kim, Smith, Kelly C. and Dickison, Michael (1996) ‘The Extended Replicator’, Biology and Philosophy, 11, pp. 377-403.

Wilkins, John S. and Bourrat, Pierrick (2020) ‘Replication and Reproduction’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2020 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/replication/. Retrieved 11 Sept 2021.