Rise of the Evolutionary Theory

This guest post is written by Jessica Reynolds, who loves all aspects of science, especially anthropology and archaeology. After obtaining a degree in anthropology she decided to give up her trowel in favor of pursing writing. She currently writes about various scientific topics, including resources for students who need a scientific poster or other resources for research projects and presentations.

Evolution is always a hot topic in the scientific world and Charles Darwin is the man seen at the forefront of it all due to his explanations of natural selection. While Darwin did play a large role in the explanation and implementation of evolutionary theory, he was not alone in creating the largest paradigm shift known throughout history. Natural selection and other key components of evolutionary theory have a long history of important figures whose ideas are often overlooked. The beginnings of selectionist ideas and advances in racial science set the standards and methods that make up how evolutionary theory is seen today, especially in regards to humanity.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, questions about the physical and cultural differences among people of various populations were widely debated among scholars. These question sparked many different ideas and theories concerning variation among populations.

Monotheistic and Polytheistic Views

The monogenesis and polygenesis origin debate stemmed from these questions and are the frameworks in which possible explanations are developed. Monogenesis is of the belief that there is only one origin of humans. Joseph-Francois Lafitau suggested a theory of degeneration where human populations all started out the same but have “fallen from Eden”. The reason for differences in populations is because some have fallen farther than others and different populations fall in different ways. Lewis Henry Morgan embraced a monogenist view in a slightly different light. He suggested that human populations rise as oppose to fall and some populations have risen closer to perfection than others.

Polygenesis is the counterpart to monogenesis and is the belief of multiple human origins. In a polygenesis context, differences in physical and cultural characteristics are seen as a deficiency – not everyone is created equal. Ellsworth Huntington suggested that people are physically different based on the geographic and climatic factors of the environment. These factors not only affect the physical characteristics of a population but the cultural characteristics as well. Jean Bodin’s ideas on the difference between Northerners and Southerners only enforced this idea.

Racism Setting the Standards

Because of ideas like Huntington’s, racism prevailed, even among those who had a reputation for advocating human rights, and becomes a backdrop to evolution. Thomas Jefferson, for example, believed that all men were created equal but he only applied this standard to white men. Therefore he believed that black people were inferior to whites and continued to own slaves throughout his life.

Scholars such as Johann Blumenbach argued for white supremacy but racists rarely tried to link their racist ideas with scientific reasoning. The few attempts of racists to use scientific reasoning, however, have led to the first methods and standards of science which are crucial in evolutionary thinking. Adolf Retzius and his invention of the cranial index, which is a formula for measuring the head, had set the standard for which racial science should be conducted in.

Tracks of Evolution Development

Alongside racial science, evolutionary theory was developed by following three tracks; biological, geological and historical. It is suggested that Darwin pulled the ideas articulated in On the Origin of Species from ideas of various scholars that followed these three tracks.

There were several figures who laid out the framework for evolutionary theory along a biological track. Louis Agassiz introduced three fold parallelism which says that embryonic variability, as well as variability among adult forms, must be identified and then the gradation along a timeline must be configured. Herbert Spencer, who is in some cases considered the father of sociology, coined and described the term survival of the fittest. This is the first time fitness is even taken into consideration in regards to evolution. Perhaps the biggest contribution on the biological track to the evolutionary theory though is Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principles of Population. It is in this essay that selection and the struggle to survive is introduced.

Geographic analysis published by various figures also influenced Darwin’s work. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck publishes Hydrogeology in 1802 in which he argues that the earth is several billions of years old. 31 years later Charles Lyell published Principles of Geology which takes on scriptural authority and was the first major formal critique of Lamarck. He rejects Lamarck’s work because he sees it as a theory of perfectibility.

Lamarck invented many of the terms we use today in regards to animal classification. You can learn more in this previous post about Lamarkism.

Charles Darwin, Himself

It’s not surprising that such a large shift in thinking did not happen because of one man and it’s true that many people were involved in causing such a shift. All the same, Charles Darwin has been known as the Father of Evolution and rightly so. Had it not been for On the Origin of Species, evolution may have taken a completely different trajectory and more misconceptions regarding evolution could have manifested themselves. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin explains natural selection as a random process as opposed to upward mobility of a species.

The public view of evolution has shifted due to many factors, not all of them scientific. The early history of evolution in regards to race was often used to justify racism. Social aspects also include religion, of course, since many sacred texts do not refer to the process of evolution or allow for enough time for evolution to take place in their historical accounts of Earth’s existence.

Even the scientific study of evolution has so many factors (geological and biological being the main ones) that it is difficult to narrow down even a specific aspect of evolution to one discovery or discover. This is why it is important to give names and voices to those scientists, writers, and texts that have formed evolutionary theory as it exists today and is refined and explored further in the future.

François Jacob (1920-2013)

François Jacob. Source.

François Jacob (1920-2013) is pretty much a household name for biologists. He was a French molecular biologist who was one of the three 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine winners (the other two were André Lwoff and Jacques Monod). Monod and Jacob got it for their work on the lac operon, which laid down the foundations for the study of the mechanisms behind gene regulation and expression. He died 3 days ago. Carl Zimmer already has an excellent article on him, but it doesn’t hurt to help spread his legacy around. I’m sure many of the obituaries will concentrate on the molecular biology he is most famous for, so I want to take a different tack and discuss his contribution to evolution through his highly-influential 1977 Science paper, Evolution and tinkering.

In it, he introduced the world to the concept of gene co-option. Co-option of morphological traits had been well-known, but it was Jacob who showed that “evolutionary tinkering” can occur also at the genetic level, with old genes being repurposed to serve new functions.

Jacob’s envisioning of how this would work stems from his previous work on gene expression and regulation. Instead of requiring completely new genes to produce novel morphologies, genes can simply be controlled by regulator genes. These can have slight changes in activity, which results in the target genes being switched on and off at different times during development, leading to new morphologies at the end. If the new morphologies are successful, then the new pattern of regulatory gene activity is automatically selected for, and the new morphology is retained.

In other words, an important source of morphological novelty can come from evolution “tinkering” with pre-existing systems. It’s similar to cooking: if you’re frying a piece of chicken, adding onions at the start of the frying, in the middle, or at the end of the frying will produce very different flavours (burned vs. caramelised vs. raw). Similarly, if your regulatory gene does its thing at the 4-cell stage, at the start of gastrulation, or the start of neurulation, the end result will be pretty different in each case. Of course, things are more complex in real life, since location and co-interactions also come into play, but I’m simplifying to illustrate the point.

The existence of such mechanisms is now routine knowledge, and examples are present in any evolution and developmental biology textbook, as it’s an important concept for evo-devo.

He did go a bit too far in arguing his case when he claimed that “the probability that a functional protein would appear de novo by random association of amino acids is practically zero”, which is factually wrong (linked is just one random example). In all fairness though, at time of his writing, it was probably a sensible claim to make since there were no examples, so we can’t fault him for it.

That paper was also a rather philosophical one on the nature of evolution, and is an excellent text to use against Intelligent Design creationists with its description of how natural selection is constrained by historical contingency, forcing it to work by tinkering rather than by following a preconceived plan as a designer would. It also contains some excellent quotes and passages on the nature of science itself. Here’s one of my favourites:

[Science] operates by detailed experimentation with nature and thus appears less ambitious, at least at first glance. It does not aim at reaching at once a complete and definitive explanation of the whole universe, its beginning, and its present form. Instead, it looks for partial and provisional answers about those phenomena that can be isolated and well defined. Actually, the beginning of modern science can be dated from the time when such general questions as “How was the universe created? What is matter made of? What is the essence of life?” were replaced by such limited questions as “How does a stone fall? How does water flow in a tube? How does blood circulate in vessels?” This substitution had an amazing result. While asking general questions led to limited answers, asking limited questions turned out to provide more and more general answers.

If you want to read more about him, what better way than to read what he wrote himself? He has a very interesting autobiography from 1988, highly-recommended: The Statue Within: An Autobiography.

References:

Jacob F. 1977. Evolution and tinkering. Science 196, 1161-1166.

Jacob F. 1988. The Statue Within: An Autobiography.

Li C-H, Zhang Y, Wang Z, Zhang Y, Cao C, Zhang P-W, Lu S-J, Li X-M, Yu Q, Zheng X, Du Q, Uhl GR, Liu Q-R & Wei L. 2010. A Human-Specific De Novo Protein-Coding Gene Associated with Human Brain Functions. PLoS Computational Biology 6, e1000734.

Lamarckism, The First Theory of Evolution

These are the slides from a lecture I gave on Lamarckism last week, along with explanatory text. It goes through the intellectual precedents of Lamarckism, an explanation of Lamarckism, how it fares against natural selection, and an outline of its history. Here’s a PDF version.

Lamarckism may have been the first comprehensive theory of evolution, but it wasn’t invented out of thin air by Lamarck. As with any theory, it’s founded on thoughts and principles already found in scientific circles of the time. With Lamarckism, the two most important pre-existing thoughts were the idea of the scala naturae, and the idea that species could change in different environments.

The scala naturae, the “great chain of being”, is an idea that can be traced back to Aristotle and probably before, and is basically a hierarchical classification system whereby those at the bottom of the hierarchy are the simplest organisms and those at the top are the most complex. Imagery based on it is still way too common and its influence is still pervasive in bad evolution popularisation – the ideas that evolution has a direction or that humans are the pinnacle of evolution are direct descendants of the scala naturae. The classical scala naturae is fairly similar to that presented on the right: the four elements at the bottom, then metals, salts and rocks, then mosses and plants, then insects, then seashells, then reptiles, then fish, then birds, then quadrupeds, then humans. In less scientifically-minded texts, humans would be followed by angels and, of course, God.

Scala naturae source: Bonnet C. 1745. Traité d’Insectologie.Vol. 1.

Ideas that species could change somehow were quite common in the early 19^th century – this was not Lamarck’s breakthrough. For example, Buffon, his mentor, pioneered his own ideas about this, although all these concepts were rather vague.

Lamarck himself had a somewhat torturous road to academia, having served well in the army before being discharged, and going on to study four years of medicine before being dissuaded by his brother. He became an understudy of leading French naturalist Bernard de Jussieu, concentrating on botany and, in 1978, publishing a three-volume compendium of the French flora that was impressive enough to attract Buffon, who took him under his wing and got him a position at the French Academy of Sciences and the royal botanical gardens. The aftermath of the French Revolution was a reforming of the gardens into the National Museum of Natural History in 1793, in which he gained the position of invertebrate professor (despite this not being his specialty), a position he held until his death.

Biographical information aside, Lamarck is most famous for Lamarckian evolution (although, as we will see, what we nowadays call Lamarckism is actually neo-Lamarckism). Besides this, we take many of his advances for gratned – the word “biology” is his invention, as are the now-ubiquitous systematic categories of “vertebrate”, “invertebrate”, “insect”, “crustacean”, “arachnid”, “echinoderm”, and “annelid”. So do not think that he’s just some wacky naturalist of the past who is now completely discredited: some of his work does still live on.

Anyway, our topic here is Lamarckism, his milestone idea about evolution that he outlined in three of his publications. He first came to think about such things while sorting through Bruguière‘s collection of fossil and extant molluscs at the Natural History Museum – he was the previous curator of invertebrates and died. Lamarck realised that the fossil molluscs and the extant ones are analogous, and by plotting their distribution in time, he could trace a direct lineage from the ancestral species to the recent ones. This triggered the rest of the thoughts, which he first exposed in his 1801 book, Recherches sur l’Organisation des Corps Vivants.

But the real explanations details of the evolutionary process came in what is considered his magnum opus, 1809′s Philosophie Zoologique. 1815 saw the release of the first volume of his new invertebrate textbook series, Histoire Naturelle des Animaux Sans Vertèbres, where he also provides a summary of Lamarckism.

I already said that Lamarck was highly-influenced by ideas already floating around, especially that of the great chain of beings. Lamarckism takes the idea of progression as its first core foundation – organisms can be classified from simplest to most complex, and evolve in that direction.

However, Lamarck went further than his contemporaries by trying to postulate a mechanism for this progression, rather than taking it for granted. He proposed that animal life has some sort of endowment built into it, an inherent ability to become more complex, and that would explain the presence of a natural hierarchical classification.

This natural complexification can thus best be pictured not as a climb up a ladder, but by the species staying static on an escalator. The axis naturally carries the species up an axis of complexity – it’s just a matter of time for the species to transform from a simple morphology to a complex one.

But if you think about it – as Lamarck did, of course – you would realise that there is a theory-breaking problem with this proposition of an automatic, linear progression. It’s the classic creationist argument: if we evolved from monkeys, why are monkeys still around? If this is a linear progression, then they should already be human.

This is solved by saying that biogenesis – the formation of new life – is constantly happening. In other words, there are many escalators (one for each category of life), and each one represents a different starting point. Humans are the oldest organisms, and “worms” (they still lumped the Vermes all together back then) are among the youngest, given their apparent simplicity.

But there is also a second problem, one of scale. A hierarchical classification that goes something like worm-fish-reptile-bird-mammal-primate-human can be somehow justified by the standards of of the day.

Now pick one category from those, the mammal for example. You have rodents, bats, canids, felines, cetaceans, ungulates, pinnipeds. Making a sensible hierarchy out of these may be possible.

Now choose on ofe these categories, for example the felines. You have house cats, bobcats, ocelots, lions, tigers, pumas, leopards. At this point, making a hierarchy becomes an exercise in senseless futility, and Lamarck recognised this, and this is where the most famous part of Lamarckism comes in as an explanatory mechanism: the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

It must be noted, though, that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is not Lamarck’s original idea and was very widespread, although he did (unsuccessfully, as we will see) expand it with his own original additions.

Inheritance of acquired characteristics is a fairly simple concept (at least it is if you forget all you know about modern biology, as you’re supposed to do when examining history of science). I will explain Lamarck’s version using the usual example of the giraffe.

So the giraffe is living in a savannah where the trees are growing taller. This induces a besoin (= “need“, not “want” as is usually wrongly translated) in the giraffe, and it changes its behaviour to be able to reach the taller branches. For example, it would extend its neck more. According to Lamarck, this extra use of the neck would cause the neck to grow through the flow of more vital fluid. This new neck state is an acquired characteristic, and it can be passed on to the offspring, hence why we speak of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

The opposite is also true: if an organ is disused, then vital fluid will flow out of it and it will atrophy. This explains why cave animals have reduced eyes, for example.

Giraffe source: gmacfadyen

Another example Lamarck used, just for your interest, is the membrane between the digits of many swimming animals, like frogs, sea turtles, otters, and beavers. By swimming more, the animal has a need to push water out of the way, and so the interdigital membrane gets used as a paddle, causing more vital fluid to flow into it.

The key novelty in Lamarck’s concept of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was the invocation of vital fluid. The real ruckus here isn’t much any physiological discovery (vital fluid or anything close to it has never been discovered). Instead, it’s the completely naturalistic and mechanistic view that postulating something like vital fluid espouses, and it was fairly controversial at the time. One the social side, it was controversial because it does away with any need for a God guiding evolution (although, as we will see later, theologians did a complete U-turn when Darwin came into the picture!). And the concept of such a dynamic system went against the predominant view of the time that while organisms may change, they only change in preset ways – “there is an optimal phenotype for each environment. How it gets there, we don’t know, but vital fluid isn’t it” would have been the reaction of the typical naturalist of the time.

So, to summarise, there are two foundational principles of Lamarckism. The first is the idea of a natural, linear progression along a scale of complexity. However, as the diversity of life demonstrates, there is a confounding factor leading to large meanders on the way to perfection: organisms will adapt to their local environments, leading to a diversity of forms even at the same level of complexity.

So, now that we know what Lamarckism is all about, we can get back to the modern age and look at it critically, starting with what he got correct.

Any philosopher of science or thesis advisor will tell you that identifying the correct problems and asking the right questions is half the step towards good science. And in that respect, Lamarck excelled: he successfully figured out the four core problems of natural history of the time:

1. Why are fossil forms different than extant ones?

2. Why are some organisms more complex than others?

3. Why is there so much diversity?

4. Why are organisms well-suited to their environment?

But beyond that, he failed at providing any correct explanation – although it must be stressed that it was not through any fault of his own. If any of us (or Chucky) were alive at the time and working with the same material, we most probably would have converged on a similar set of ideas, and not on natural selection or mutationism.

Lamarck said that fossil forms are different because they always get replaced by the more complex ones as the lineage goes up the escalator of complexity. We now know that fossil forms are on a different part of a phylogeny and hence are different.

There is no such thing as a scale of complexity; complex traits arise in individual taxa as a result of their unique circumstances. Most typical examples of complexity, e.g. multicellularity, are unique phenomena that are in no way indicative of pervasive trends.

Diversity is not a product of constant biogenesis; all the evidence points to a single origin of life. Diversity is a result of speciation.

There is no such thing as vital fluid. Organisms are seemingly well-suited to their environment because the organisms that we see have made it through the unforgiving grinder of natural selection. It’s a perceptory illusion more than anything else, really.

In natural selection as understood today, you consider a whole population of giraffes with variable neck sizes. Those with the taller necks will be able to reach higher tree branches and thus have access to more food. This gives them more energy and thus a slight advantage in reproduction, meaning that in the long run, they will produce more offspring. Assuming a genetic basis to neck length, this means that more offspring with taller necks are likely to be born, meaning that they will outcompete the shorter-necked ones over many generations.

In Lamarckism, the giraffe needs to reach taller trees and so its neck lengthens, and that longer neck gets passed on to the offspring.

It’s obvious to us now that this, the second core of Lamarckism, fails.

The idea of a progression up a scale of complexity fails even on a molecular level, as the entire basis of molecular evolution shows. Motoo Kimura and Tomoko Ohta are the founders of the dominant neutral and nearly-neutral theories of molecular evolution, respectively. What they show is that mutations are overwhelmingly neutral – they have no effect on the fitness of an organism; nerly-neutral theory expands this a bit by saying that many of these neutral mutations will have an effect that is too tiny to really be noticeable. The rest of the mutations are deleterious, with only a small amount of mutations actually being beneficial.

If there was a preset linear progression to perfection, then we would expect all mutations to be advantageous, and that’s just not corroborated by any evidence.

Diagram source: Bromham L & Penny D. 2003. The modern molecular clock. Nature Reviews Genetics 4, 216-224.

The bit at the bottom of the slide snuck in because I co-opted this slide from my natural selection lecture. It’s not really relevant here, go to that post to see what it’s all about.

So we now know that Lamarckism is false, but it hasn’t always been this way. A full coverage of the history of Lamarckism would require a lecture/post all on its own, so this is just a broad look.

The idea of vital fluids never really took off, and thus Lamarckism – and evolution – remained contested until Darwin’s Origin of Species took the world by storm. Darwin showed the reality of evolution, but hadn’t managed to bring everyone on board with natural selection.

The idea of inherited acquired traits (IAT) which had been present (and even used by Darwin in his thoughts on social evolution) became synonymised with Lamarckism, and a whole host of neo-Lamarckisms with IAT at their core sprung up to counter natural selection. In scientific circles, these neo-Lamarckisms generally won out over natural selection. Outside of science, a curious thing happened: theology, which half a century ago was fervently opposed to Lamarckism, now endorsed it fully – only because Lamarckism, gutted of vital fluids and only retaining IATs, could easily be endowed with the action of a creative deity intelligently designing adaptations, much more comfortable than the supposed “randomness” of natural selection (these people were never that bright).

In 1900, both the neo-Lamarckists and the selectionists got beaten down by the rediscovery of genetics and the evolutionary movement that arose therefrom: mutationism. The three movements were at odds with each other. The difference betweent he three are what they stress as the dominant force in evolution: mutations (mutationism), natural selection (selectionism), IAT (neo-Lamarckism).

By 1910, the neo-Lamarckisms had started their decline, with Weismannism gaining more prominence. Weismannism is pure selectionism, what we now would term ultra-Darwinism. It generally became a two-dog race between mutationism and selectionism, which endured until the 1930s, when the Modern Synthesis began to get crafted – the Modern Synthesis, completed in the 1950s, was basically a fusion of mutationism and selectionism, with a heap of other stuff added to the mix. None of that other stuff included neo-Lamarckism, which had by then well and truly died.

At least it was so in the European and American academias. In Russia, a radically different story was unfolding, one of the dark chapters of the history of biology and of science in general: lysenkoism. Trofim Lysenko was a so-so scientist with very high political acumen. He used the latter to rise to the top of Soviet biological academia and became head of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences by the 1930s. And there, he began a dictatorship where he imposed his own idea of evolution – michurinism, rebranded neo-Lamarckism – and executed those geneticists who did not agree with this stance. Michurinism became the “new biology”, well-suited to collectivization and communism – there was a very heavy mixing of politics with the (non-existent) science, no doubt because Lysenko was Stalin’s little lap dog. The spread of Lysenkoism is also directly tied to the failure of Soviet collectivization and all the associated agricultural crises, because that’s just what you get when you base your country’s agricultural system on disproven theories. Lysenkoism went away officially in 1964, although strands of it remained for a couple of decades afterwards. Now it’s remembered as a blotch on the history of Russia and Russian science.

So, now, all Lamarckisms and neo-Lamarckisms are dead. However, the rise of epigenetics has led to a burgeoning and, in my opinion, misguided movement of neo-neo-Lamarckism (they get referred to as neo-Lamarckists, but that’s wrong, since neo-Lamarckism refers to the Lamarckisms of the 1860s-1930s). It bears little resemblance to the Lamarckism of yore, and postulates that epigenetic modifications – environmentally-induced changes to DNA and gene regulation that really require their own post – are an important driving force in evolution.

I don’t quite see their argument for the simple reason that epigenetic modifications must be made in germ cells to be passed on to the offspring (although internally-brooding organisms can also modify the environment of the womb to induce epigenetic changes in the developing fetus). So, for example, a snail that develops spines in response to predators in the water will not pass these spines on to its offspring automatically. What will get passed on is the capability to develop spines in the same situation… but this is regular heredity which doesn’t need any fancy neo-neo-Lamarckism to explain.

It’s my job, so I will keep an open mind about this – there may be cases where epigenetics does indeed play an important role in evolution. I just haven’t seen them yet. I do see epigenetics as important for ecology though, so that may be a more viable bridge for neo-neo-Lamarckists to attempt to build.

For books on Lamarckism, I recommend these two:

Burkhardt Jr.’s 1977 The Spirit of System: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology goes over Lamarckism, and is the best overview you can wish for.

For more on the battles between neo-Lamarckism, selectionism, and mutationism, see Bowler’s classic 1992 study in the history of evolution, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900.

Top Books of 2012: History of Science

Jump to another list: Environmental and Climate Change; Evolution; Historical Geology; Human Evolution and Anthropology; Palaeontology; Zoology

These are books about the history of science. Unlike the other lists, all of these books are affordable and readable, without needing to know much background knowledge to appreciate them.

Dallal. Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History. (Yale University Press)

I recommend this book for anyone interested in the medieval period of science history when Muslim scholars picked up the mantle as the dominant scientists, and for those interested in the conflict between science and religion. The book not only covers the contributions of those Islamic scholars to science and the position of science in modern Islam, it also makes an implicit point (or maybe it was only me who saw this) that those medieval scholars were superior to modern religiously-motivated scientists in that they didn’t try to find religion and Allah through their science – compare that to the rise of Western science, which was largely driven by a want to discover the natural laws that God created. It’s a very interesting contrast, and an important point to keep in mind, especially nowadays that we have these debates with Muslims and Christians who try to twist scientific findings as proof of their deity.

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Norton. Smoking Ears and Screaming Teeth: A Celebration of Scientific Eccentricity and Self-Experimentation. (Pegasus Books)

Cheating by putting a 2012 paperback release of a 2011 hardback, but this book is so entertaining that it’s worth circumventing the rules a bit. As an avid fan and promoter of self-experimentation, I enjoyed the numerous (hilarious/absurd/disgusting) tales from my scientific ancestors doing horrific things to themselves in the name of SCIENCE. I recommend this book to anyone considering being a scientist, especially a child looking for an admirable rolemodel.

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Brown. The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages. (Basic Books)

Another 2012 paperback of an older hardback, but this book deals with one of my biggest pet peeves that I consider it important enough to place here: the very popular fable that the Church of the Dark Ages was anti-science and killed scientific progress (the myth is usually capped off with an equally ridiculous rendition of the Galileo Affair). In fact, science may not have been as active as today, but it certainly made a lot of advancements on the technological side – how do you think the ever-expanding populations were kept fed, for example? Or the new technologies employed in the wars (crusades) of the period? This book concentrates on Pope Sylvester II, but makes a good accompaniment to any general history of science book that deals with this era. I implore anyone who buys into the “Church kept science in the dark” story to at least give this one a spin.

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Agar. Science in the 20th Century and Beyond. (Polity)

Science in antiquity and the medieval period is cool and all, but the most exciting times in science happened in the 20th century. It was in the 20th century that the very best and the very worst of science became readily apparent, from the myriad medical and technological advancements on one side to the horrifically mangled genetic ideologies (eugenics) and weapons of war on the other side. The former outweigh the latter by far of course, and this book is even-handed in its approach to describe the leaps and bounds made by science globally and in every field in the 20th century, highlighting the most important advances – I could nitpick about some choices and omissions, but the book is truly a monumental effort, and a great read for anyone interested in the power and modern history of science.

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Cormack & Ede. A History of Science in Society: From Philosophy to Utility. (2d ed.; University of Toronto Press)

I love this book because I consider its theme to be as important as the history of science itself. Scientific ideas are as much the product of their times and societies as they are the products of experiments and observations, and while this is made clear in all history of science texts, it’s very useful to have a dedicated book for it. If you’re at all interested in the development of science and the origin of scientific ideas and their eventual acceptance/rejection, then this book is for you.

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Al-Khalili. Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science. (Penguin Books)

Yet again, a 2012 paperback of an older hardback. Blame it on the publishers, not me. You can blame me for putting another religion+science book, but that complaint would be stupid: the widespread coupling of science with secular scientists is a relatively modern phenomenon in the grand scheme of things (2 centuries vs. 20+). And for a while, science was done predominantly by scholars in the Muslim world (many of who did conduct it secularly, admittedly). If you have no idea about the science that they did and its importance, then get this book: it’s a very good introduction. Then you can move on to book #1 if you wish.

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Levenstein. Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat. (University of Chicago Press)

Few people irk me more than those who continuously change the way they eat, following the bullshit “advice” of some dude on TV or in a magazine, advice that can be debunked with basic physiological knowledge and some googling. I blame the gullible and paranoid people, and this book skewers the other side of the equation: the scientists and charlatans who provoke the false hysteria due to a conflict of interest. It’s a great book if you enjoy reading about how easy it is to manipulate people – the same tactics have been used by food scaremongers since the 19th century!

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Powers. Inventing Chemistry: Herman Boerhaave and the Reform of the Chemical Arts. (University of Chicago Press)

Besides an obsession with alchemy, I know little beyond the basics about the history of chemistry, so this book appealed to me. I hadn’t heard of Boerhaave, but his work as described here was pretty awesome: he “invented chemistry” not primarily through discoveries, but through innovative education. He fused chemistry with its scientific roots, thus allowing it to be studied as a scientific discipline rather than a fireworks and colourful bubbling beaker sideshow.

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Principe. The Secrets of Alchemy. (University of Chicago Press)

If, like me, you have an attraction to the history of alchemy, then this is the best book to have. Alchemy has a strange popular image, and this book puts everything in its place. While alchemy had its fair share of weird mysticism, it was a serious science that encompassed not only chemistry, but also herbalism and associated fields – this is why the very simplistic view of alchemy giving way to chemistry is false: the death of alchemy was a drawn-out process since it involved various fields. Anyway, the book isn’t just a history of alchemy, but also examines how alchemy is viewed in the modern world through its place in the arts. Basically, it’s a one-stop resource for all your alchemy interests.

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Black. War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. (Expanded ed.; Dialog Press)

A bit of a contentious book, but then again eugenics is always a contentious issue. This is an expanded edition of the 2004 version, so counts as a new edition in my books. It basically traces the eugenics movement of the USA (I wonder if it’s taught in schools over there) and its links to other eugenics movements, notably the Nazi one. If this is of interest to you, then get the book. The last chapters on modern eugenics I find to be a bit overstated, but others may disagree.

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Jump to another list: Environmental and Climate Change; Evolution; Historical Geology; Human Evolution and Anthropology; Palaeontology; Zoology

The Origin of Natural History Museums and Zoos

This post is about the earliest research-dedicated natural history museums of Europe. Their roots go back to the aftermath of the French Revolution. After the storming of the Bastille (14.07.1789), it was realised that the specimen collections housed in the royal collections in Versailles, Paris, and Trianon would be in danger.

At the time, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck was the curator of the herbarium in the Jardin du Roi (royal botanical garden, Paris). In 1790, he published a monograph outlining his ideas to transform the herbarium and gardens into a national museum dedicated to natural history. As colleagues in this plan, he enlisted Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond (mineralogy), Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton (mammals, birds) and Bernard Germain de Lacépède (reptiles, fish); two other colleagues were also mentioned but not by name, one for insects and the other for other invertebrates. Burkhardt (1977) suggests that Guillaume Antoine Olivier was the entomologist and Jean Guillaume Bruguière the invertebrate zoologist. Lamarck took the botany, of course.

The royal gardens were closed from 1791 to 1793 during the political upheavals. On the 10^th July 1793, it was decided by the politicians that Lamarck’s plans had merit, and permission was granted to set up the natural history museum along with 9 professorships. Daubenton was chosen to be the first director of the museum.

The effect of this step forward was enormous. Combined with the reorganised Institut de France and the opening of the École Polytechnique in 1794, Paris quickly became the center for the natural sciences of Europe. Cuvier (1817; p. ix-x) praised these developments, as you can see in the paragraphs highlighted above. For the non-French readers, here’s a translation I did (not word for word, just rough meaning):

This book [about the systematics of animals] would not have been possible to complete by a single person, even with a long lifespan and no other occupation, were it not for the prodigious advancement of science over the past few years. […] Living with so many taleneted naturalists; having access to their research as it appears; using their collections whenever I wanted; given space to form my own specialised collection; my work mostly consisted of using these materials and conditions that were available to me. I didn’t have to do much with the shells studied by Lamarck, nor with the tetrapods studied by Geoffroy [Saint-Hilaire]. Lacépède’s work on fishes merely had to be laid out for my fish plate. I adapted Levaillant‘s work on birds as it came in. My own research used and built on the work done by other naturalists, producing a work that I could not have built by myself. And when de Blainville and Oppel perused the cabinets I had prepared with reptilian anatomy and systematics, they could gain more insights than I ever could have figured out.

Tl;dr version: the natural history museum allows collaboration and synthesis of knowledge on unprecedented scales, leading to the ability to undertake larger projects (such as systematising the animals).

Part of this natural history museum was also a new type of garden to complement the natural history museum by being a “living” museum: the zoological garden, placed under the control of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. At first, only the animals from the Menagerie Royale de Versailles (the royal menagery, Versailles) were released there, followed in 1795 by 2 elephants captured by French troops from the conquest of the Netherlands, and in 1827 by a giraffe gifted to France by the Egyptian viceroy Muhammad Ali. The zoo became a popular attraction, especially since it was free and open all day.

Note, however, that the very first real zoo is the Imperial Menagerie at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, which existed as a private menagerie since 1752, and opened to the public in 1765. Menageries themselves have existed since ancient times. In Ancient Egypt they played a special role as some of the animals were seen as representatives of the gods; in China, they were a sign of wealth. The first public menagery was opened by Alexander the Great in Alexandria. Kublai Khan (1200s) kept a menagery. Montezuma (Aztecs, 1500s) had a particularly cool one, with not only jungle animals, but also human dwarves and slaves thrown in for curiosity.

The developments in Paris were groundbreaking and revolutionary from all perspectives (scientific, pedagogic, institutional), and the model was soon applied all over Europe. Alexander von Humboldt was an especially ardent pusher of the natural history museum. Having had the opportunity to work in the Paris Natural History Museum after returning from his expeditions, he founded his own at the University of Berlin in 1809 with the help of entomologist Johann Karl Wilhelm Illiger, focused on taxonomy and biogeography (obviously). After Illiger’s death, Martin Lichtenstein took over and expanded the museum to include a zoo.

In 1820, the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden was founded, housing the largest bird collection in Europe, that of Coenraad Jacob Temminck. In England, things started taking off in the 1820s. Sir Stamford Raffles, with the support of Sir Joseph Banks (the long-standing President of the Royal Society), pushed for the building of a zoo (with an emphasis placed on it being greater than the Parisian one) as soon as he returned from his travels to the East Indies. In response to this demand, the Zoological Society of London was formed in April 1826, and King George IV gave his approval, dedicating most of Regent’s Park as space for the zoo. In April 1828, it was opened; initially only for Society members, but tickets could be purchased by anyone by 1834, and it was officially opened to the public in 1846 (Ritvo, 1990).

The “zoo” shortening of zoological garden also comes from this zoo, from a music hall artist called the Great Vance, who sang the following in 1867 (Cherfas, 1984):

Weekdays may do for cads, but not for me or you, So dressed right down the street, we show them who is who… The O.K. thing on Sundays is the walking in the zoo.

The other notable openings in Europe of the first half of the 19^th century were the St. Petersburg Zoologische Museum der Kaiserlichen Akademie (1832), the Nature Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam (1838), and the Jardin Zoologiques in Antwerp (1843). It was only in 1859 that the USA joined the party, with the opening of the Zoological Society of Philadelphia’s zoo.

While they are nowadays viewed as mere public attractions, at least the big zoos are actually scientific establishments, playing not only roles in conservation of threatened species, but also in routine experimentation, and this role has remained unchanged since those early days. As an example, Charles Darwin used the Zoological Garden in London to conduct several seed dispersal experiments – he fed seeds to the fish, and stuffed the mouths of dead sparrows full of seeds and fed them to the eagles, to see if seeds can survive the digestive tract of such dispersive animals. Nowadays, all sorts of studies from behaviour to ecological preference studies are conducted at zoos.

References:

Burkhardt RW. 1977. The Spirit of System. Lamarck and evolutionary biology.

Cherfas J. 1984. Zoo 2000: A Look Beyond the Bars.

Cuvier G. 1817. Le règne animal distribué d’après son organisation, pour servir de base à l’histoire naturelle des animaux et d’introduction à l’anatomie comparée. Vol.1.

Ritvo H. 1990. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age.

“Gradients” and “Fields” in Developmental Biology: A history of the ideas

Anyone who’s taken a course in developmental biology will have heard of “developmental gradients” or “embryonic fields” or “morphogenetic fields”; I learned these in German, so the English names might be different (I’ve seen those three being used). This post is about the history of these ideas of fields and gradients in developmental biology.

Joseph Dalton Hooker

Lynn Margulis

Via Jerry Coyne, I learned that Lynn Margulis died yesterday. Those who’ve seen my public talks will know that most of the time, I refer to famous scientists with an affectionate nickname (never done this in an academic talk. Not yet anyway). Lynn Margulis’s is “the crazy cat lady”.  This post will give my opinion of her. I’ll warn you that a lot might seem negative, but I’m not judging her as a person, only her contributions (see the last 2 paragraphs).

Avicenna

Avicenna (a.k.a. Avicenna of Balkh; Ibn Sina; Shaykh Al-Ra’ees Abu Ali Al-Hussein Ibn Abdullah Ibn Sina Balkhi) was one of the most influential philosophers and scientists at the turn of the first millenium, and can rightly be named as the first of the Islamic philosophers.

German Idealism and Systematics

This post is about how Naturphilosophie, the natural science branch of German idealism, was expressed in systematics back in the first third of the 19^th century. Reads those two links as background knowledge, if needed. The idealists (the natural scientists who followed Schelling and Oken‘s idealism) were also trying to classify organisms, the job wasn’t left only for the empiricists.