Humboldt,Darwin, and population

Conclusions I have attempted to clarify some of the pathways in the development of Darwin's thinking. The foregoing examples of influence by no means include all that can be found by comparing Darwin's writings with Humboldt's. However, the above examples seem adequate to show the nature and extent of this influence. It now seems clear that Humboldt not only, as had been previously known, inspired Darwin to make a voyage of exploration, but also provided him with his basic orientation concerning how and what to observe and how to write about it. An important part of what Darwin assimilated from Humboldt was an appreciation of population analysis as a tool for assessing the state of societies and of the benefits and hardships which these societies can expect to receive from the living world around them.Darwin exhibited in his Journal of Researches a casual interest in the economic and political conditions of the countries he visited, but these considerations were much less important to him than to Humboldt. Instead, Darwin, with the assistance of Lyell's Principles of Geology, shifted from Humboldt's largely economic framework to a biological one built around the species question. This shift led Darwin away from a consideration of how the population biology of animals was related to man's economy to focus instead upon how population biology fitted into the economy of nature.Humboldt's Personal Narrative served very well as a model for Darwin's Journal of Researches, thereby helping Darwin gain scientific eminence. The Journal of Researches, like virtually all of Humboldt's writings, was a contribution to scientific orthodoxy. But Darwin had, along the way, acquired an urge to do more than just add his building blocks to the orthodox scientific edifice. He decided to rearrange those blocks of knowledge into a different structure, and for that task neither Humboldt's Personal Narrative nor any other of his works could serve as a model. Humboldt had lacked the confidence which Darwin needed that biogeography and the origin of species could be understood. Humboldt had not explored very far the possible connections between biology and geology. Nor had he provided a general synthetic account of population biology. Had he done so, he might have been more explicit about the extent of his endorsement of Malthus. But even if he had, Humboldt's strong orientation toward cooperation would probably have inhibited his recognition of the importance of competition in nature.Lyell, who had also benefited from reading Humboldt, gave Darwin insights that were lacking in Humboldt's Personal Narrative. Lyell admirably demonstrated how stratigraphy, paleontology, biogeography, and population biology could be interrelated, and his reasons for doing so were essentially the same as Darwin's. Lyell's understanding of biogeography and ecology came from the writings of Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle as much as from Humboldt's, and from the former Lyell derived an appreciation for the importance of competition and also a confidence that the mysteries of biogeography could be explained.¹¹⁷ Furthermore, Lyell's discussion of all these subjects and also of evolution in his Principles of Geology is a good synthetic argument that was the ideal model for Darwin's greatest book.Darwin, having become convinced that species change through time, was able to synthesize in his mind the contributions which he had derived from the writings of Humboldt and Lyell as they applied to the species question. When Darwin wrote his Journal of Researches there were two large gaps in his thinking about evolution that bothered him—the mechanism of evolution and the causes of extinction. It was only after reading Malthus in 1838 that he realized, as Lyell had more or less pointed out, how important was competition in nature. He now had the general outlines for his theory, and in the 1845 abridged edition of his Journal, now retitled The Voyage of the Beagle, he inserted a fuller discussion of competition in nature which showed his awareness of its importance as an ecological factor.¹¹⁸An abridged version of this paper was presented at the meeting of the History of Science Society in Washington, D.C., on 29 December 1969.     

Alas, poor Darwin

No, not a reflection on the environmental threat to the Galapagos. Rather, it is a reference to Darwin's own complaint, towards the end of his life, concerning those who misunderstood and misrepresented his theories.     

Darwin and Dostoyevsky: twins

The Russian poet Fyodor Dostoyevsky published an insightful treatise on human nature in his novel ‘The Brothers Karamazov'' in 1880. His account of humanity may offer as much insight into human nature for scientists as Darwin''s The Descent of Man.Late in the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) published accounts of their investigation of humankind. Darwin did so in 1871 in his book The Descent of Man, Dostoyevsky in 1880 in the parable of The Grand Inquisitor in his book The Brothers Karamazov. Last year we celebrated Darwin''s anniversary; for biologists, 2010—the 130th anniversary of Dostoyevsky''s book—might have been the year of Dostoyevsky.Dostoyevsky was familiar with Darwin''s doctrine and he was willing to admit “man''s descent from the ape”. An orthodox Christian, he put this sentiment in religious terms: “It does not really matter what man''s origins are, the Bible does not explain how God moulded him out of clay or carved him out of stone. Yet, he saw a difference between humans and animals: humans have a soul.The philosopher Nikolay Berdyayev noticed: “[Dostoyevsky] concealed nothing, and that''s why he could make astonishing discoveries. In the fate of his heroes he relates his own destiny, in their doubts he reveals his vacillations, in their ambiguity his self-splitting, in their criminal experience the secret crimes of his spirit.”The Grand Inquisitor can be read as Dostoyevsky''s treatise on human nature. In the tale, Jesus Christ revisits Earth during the period of the Inquisition and is arrested by the Church and sentenced to death. The Grand Inquisitor comes to visit Jesus in his prison cell to argue with him about their conceptions of human nature. He explains that humankind needs to be ruled to be happy and that the true freedom Jesus offered doomed humanity to suffering and unhappiness. Dostoyevsky''s superposition of these two points of view on humankind reminds us of the principle of complementarity, by which the physicist Niels Bohr attempted to account for the particle-wave duality of quantum physics.Dostoyevsky conceives of humans as complex, contradictory and inconsistent creatures. Humans perceive personal liberty as a burden and are willing to barter for it, as the Grand Inquisitor explained to Christ, for “miracle, mystery, and authority”. In addition, “the mystery of human being does not only rest in the desire to live, but in the problem: for what should one live at all?” We might say that these faculties make Homo sapiens a religious species. Not in the sense of believing in gods or a god, but in the sense of the Latin word religare, which means to bind, connect or enfold. Humans are mythophilic animals, driven by a need to find a complete explanation for events in terms of intentions and purposes.Research into the neurological bases of imagination, transcendence, metaphorability, art and religion, as well as moral behaviour and judgement (Trimble, 2007) is consistent with Dostoyevsky''s views. It has identified areas of the brain that have been labelled as the ‘god module'' or ‘god spot'' (Alper, 2001). These areas represent a new stratum of evolutionary complexity, an emergence specific to the human species. Their mental translations might be tentatively designated as the Darwinian soul, anchored in the material substrate and neither immortal nor cosmic. As consciousness and volition have become legitimate subjects of neuroscience (Baars, 2003), the Darwinian soul, and with it spirituality, seems to be ripe for scientific inquiry: the quest for meaning, creation and perception of metaphors, the experience of the trinity of Truth, Good and Beauty, the capacity for complex feelings that Immanuel Kant called sublimity, the thrill of humour and play, the power of empathy and the follies of boundless love or hate. Secularization does not erase the superstructure of spirituality: it is reflected, however queer it might seem, in the hypertrophy of the entertainment industry and also, more gloomily, in spiritual conflicts on a global scale.Dostoyevsky''s views on the human soul might be closer to those of Alfred Russel Wallace, who believed that an unknown force directed evolution towards an advanced organization. We can identify this ‘force'' as the second law of thermodynamics (Sharma & Annila, 2007). By moving evolving systems ever farther away from equilibrium, the second law eventually became the Creator of the ‘Neuronal God''.Christ, in the parable of the Grand Inquisitor, might be conceived of as a symbol of the truth outside the human world. Christ was listening to the assertions and questions of his interlocutor, but did not say a single word. His silence is essential to the parable.Similarly, the cosmos, to which humanity has been addressing its questions and predications, remains silent. By science, we increase knowledge only by tiny increments. The ‘god modules'' of our brains, unsatisfied and impatient, have hastily provided the full truth, deposited in the Holy Scripture. There are at least three books claiming to contain the revealed and hence unquestionable truth: the Judaic Torah, Christian Bible and Muslim Qur''an. A dogma of genocentrism in biology might offer an additional Scripture: the sequence of DNA in the genomes.Dostoyevsky''s legacy may suggest an amendment to the UN Charter. We, united humankind, solemnly declare: No truth has ever been revealed to us; we respect and tolerate each other in our independent searching and erring.     

Darwin would have loved DNA: celebrating Darwin 200

Analysis of DNA sequences now plays a key role in evolutionary biology research. If Darwin were to come back today, I think he would be absolutely delighted with molecular evolutionary genetics, for three reasons. First, it solved one of the greatest problems for his theory of evolution by natural selection. Second, it gives us a tool that can be used to investigate many of the questions he found the most fascinating. And third, DNA data confirm Darwin''s grand view of evolution.     

Experimenting with Transmutation: Darwin, the Beagle, and Evolution

Detailed analysis of Darwin’s scientific notes and other writings from the Beagle voyage reveals a focus on endemism and replacement of allied taxa in time and in space that began early in the journey. Though it is impossible to determine exactly when Darwin became a transmutationist, the evidence suggests that he was conversant with the transmutational ideas of Lamarck and others and testing (“experimenting” with) them—before he received a copy of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, vol. 2, in November 1832, in which Lyell describes and disputes Lamarck’s theory. To the two rhea species of Patagonia and the four mockingbird species of the Galapagos, we can now add the living Patagonian cavy (rodent) species, and its extinct putatively related species that Darwin collected at Monte Hermoso (Bahia Blanca) in the Fall of 1832, as a replacement pattern absolutely critical to the development of Darwin’s transmutational thinking. Darwin developed his first transmutational theory by adopting “Brocchi’s analogy” (Rudwick 2008)—i.e. that births and deaths of species are analogous to the births and deaths of individuals. Births and deaths of species, as of individuals, are thus explicable in terms of natural causes. Darwin explored these themes and the replacement of the extinct cavy by the modern species explicitly in his February 1835 essay (Darwin 1835a).

Boas, Darwin, science, and anthropology

This paper presents a new reading of Franz Boas's philosophy of science and his approach to the understanding of culture and behavior. It points out that his approach had important parallels with the worldview of the major figures associated with pragmatism and suggests that a similar perspective can be useful today.     

Allometric variation among juvenile, adult male and female eastern bearded dragons Pogona barbata (Cuvier, 1829), with comments on the behavioural implications

The functional significance of allometric change in reptiles has received limited attention and the reason for such changes has been regarded as ‘obscure’. In this paper we report data on the Australian Pogona barbata, the eastern bearded dragon, from across their range and review changes in allometric growth among juveniles, and adult males and females and consider the functional relevance of these changes. There were significant differences in the population for mass, tail length, tail width, rear leg length and jaw length. These differences were consistent with differences required in locomotor performance and thus habitat use, together with access to different preferred dietary components.     

Charles Darwin,embryology, evolution and skeletal plasticity

Darwin provided us with the theory of evolutionary change through natural selection. Just as important to the science of biology was Darwin’s recognition that all organisms could be classified and were related to one another because they arose from a single common universal ancestor – what we know as the universal tree of life (UtoL). All the features of the skeletal biology of fish therefore can be explained, both in an evolutionary framework (ultimate causation) and in the framework of development, growth and physiology (proximate causation). Neither approach is complete without the other. I will outline the elements of Darwin’s theories on evolution and classification and, as importantly, discuss what was missing from Darwin’s theories. An important class of evidence for evolution used by Darwin came from embryology, both comparative embryology and the existence of vestiges and atavisms. After discussing this evidence I examine some fundamental features of skeletal development and evolution These include: the presence of four skeletal systems in all vertebrates; the existence of two skeletons, one based on cartilage, the other on bone and dentine; the modular nature of skeletal development and evolution; and the plasticity of the skeleton in response to either genetic or environmental changes.