Edward Hitchcock’s Pre-Darwinian (1840) “Tree of Life”

The “tree of life” iconography, representing the history of life, dates from at least the latter half of the 18th century, but evolution as the mechanism providing this bifurcating history of life did not appear until the early 19th century. There was also a shift from the straight line, scala naturae view of change in nature to a more bifurcating or tree-like view. Throughout the 19th century authors presented tree-like diagrams, some regarding the Deity as the mechanism of change while others argued for evolution. Straight-line or anagenetic evolution and bifurcating or cladogenetic evolution are known in biology today, but are often misrepresented in popular culture, especially with anagenesis being confounded with scala naturae. Although well known in the mid 19th century, the geologist Edward Hitchcock has been forgotten as an early, if not the first author to publish a paleontologically based “tree of life” beginning in 1840 in the first edition of his popular general geology text Elementary Geology. At least 31 editions were published and those between 1840 and 1859 had this “paleontological chart” showing two trees, one for fossil and living plants and another for animals set within a context of geological time. Although the chart did not vary in later editions, the text explaining the chart did change to reflect newer ideas in paleontology and geology. Whereas Lamarck, Chambers, Bronn, Darwin, and Haeckel saw some form of transmutation as the mechanism that created their “trees of life,” Hitchcock, like his contemporaries Agassiz and Miller, who also produced “trees of life,” saw a deity as the agent of change. Through each edition of his book Hitchcock denounced the newer transmutationist hypotheses of Lamarck, then Chambers, and finally Darwin in an 1860 edition that no longer presented his tree-like “paleontological chart.”     

Isolation and charaterization of 12 dinucleotide microsatellite loci from Belenger’s jewfish (Johnius belengerii Cuvier 1830)

We describe the first isolation of 12 polymorphic microsatellite markers from Belenger’s jewfish (Johnius belengnerii Cuvier 1830). From a (GT)n-enriched genomic library, 54 microsatellites were selected for designing microsatellite primers, of which 36 gave working primer pairs. 12 of these loci were polymorphic in a test population of 21 individuals with alleles ranging from 3 to 18, and expected and observed heterozygosities from 0.5772 to 0.9449 and from 0.4286 to 0.9231, respectively. No significant linkage disequilibrium between pairs of loci was found, however, loci Jobe24 significantly deviated from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium after Bonferroni correction. These polymorphic microsatellite loci should provide sufficient level of genetic diversity to investigate population structure in Belenger’s jewfish.     

Ethology, Natural History, the Life Sciences, and the Problem of Place

Investigators of animal behavior since the eighteenth century have sought to make their work integral to the enterprises of natural history and/or the life sciences. In their efforts to do so, they have frequently based their claims of authority on the advantages offered by the special places where they have conducted their research. The zoo, the laboratory, and the field have been major settings for animal behavior studies. The issue of the relative advantages of these different sites has been a persistent one in the history of animal behavior studies up to and including the work of the ethologists of the twentieth century. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The theory of the Earth of the Barnabite cleric Ermenegildo Pini: a mostly unknown Italian catastrophist

At the turn of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Earth sciences were in a period of heated debates, with an arduous acquisition of basic principles for geology. Among the unresolved debates, was the well-known between Neptunists and Plutonists, and there was still disagreement between the supporters of a catastrophic flood and a long permanence of the sea in areas currently occupied by emerged lands. In such a climate of uncertainty appears the ‘Theory of the Earth’ of Ermenegildo Pini, an Italian Barnabite cleric. Pini was a many-faceted figure, including naturalist-scientist and technician, with interests ranging from architecture and engineering to natural sciences sensu lato. As a Diluvialist and a Neptunist, Pini strongly rejected the igneous theory – with Earth completely molten in origin – preferring instead one involving a fluidity in water and formation of ‘primary mountains’ due of centrifugal acceleration induced by Earth’s rotation. Alternatively, the so-called ‘transitional’ and ‘secondary’ mountains were entirely attributed to the rapid, catastrophic and universal flood literally interpreted from the Holy Scriptures. Despite his strongly theistic approach to the evolution of our planet, some of the intuitions and methodological approaches of Pini are extremely interesting and worthy of review and renewed discussion.     

Response to the amoebocyte-producing organ of sensitized Biomphalaria glabrata after exposure to Echinostoma caproni miracidia

Stimulation by exposure to Echinostoma caproni miracidia triggered the activity of the amoebocyte-producing organ (APO) of sensitized Biomphalaria glabrata snails. This organ is the site of formation of cells which subsequently migrate to all parts of the body. Amoebocyte production started very soon after exposure, and was maximal at 3 or 4 days; it then declined very fast and, at 6–7 days, the organ had almost returned to its initial state.     

Atomism, transformism and the fossil record

The modern debate between exponents of classical evolutionary classification and of cladistic analysis of phylogenetic relationships mirrors to some extent the arguments that were put forward in the debate between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1830. Put into a historical perspective the problems of comparative biology centre around two complementary traditions, atomism and transformism.     

Darwin on Aristotle

Charles Darwin's famous 1882 letter, in response to a gift by his friend, William Ogle of Ogle's recent translation of Aristotle's Parts of Animals, in which Darwin remarks that his “two gods,” Linnaeus and Cuvier, were “mere school-boys to old Aristotle,” has been thought to be only an extravagantly worded gesture of politeness. However, a close examination of this and other Darwin letters, and of references to Aristotle in Darwin's earlier work, shows that the famous letter was written several weeks after a first, polite letter of thanks, and was carefully formulated and literally meant. Indeed, it reflected an authentic, and substantial, increase in Darwin's already high respect for Aristotle, as a result of a careful reading both of Ogle's Introduction and of more or less the portion of Ogle's translation which Darwin says he has read. Aristotle's promotion to the pantheon, as an examination of the basis for Darwin's admiration of Linnaeus and Cuvier suggests, was most likely the result specifically of Darwin's late discovery that the man he already knew as “one of the greatest ... observers that ever lived” (1879) was also the ancient equivalent both of the great modern systematist and of the great modern advocate of comparative functional explanation. It may also have reflected some real insight on Darwin's part into the teleological aspect of Aristotle's thought, indeed more insight than Ogle himself had achieved, as a portion of their correspondence reveals. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

How to make oneself nature's spokesman? A latourian account of classification in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century natural history

Classification in eighteenth-century natural history was marked by a battle of systems. The Linnaean approach to classification was severely criticized by those naturalists who aspired to a truly natural system. But how to make oneself nature's spokesman? In this article I seek to answer that question using the approach of the French anthropologist of science Bruno Latour in a discussion of the work of the French naturalists Buffon and Cuvier in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. These naturalists followed very different strategies in creating and defending of what they believed to be a natural classification in zoology. Buffon failed, whereas Cuvier's work appeared to be very successful. My argument will be that, to explain Buffon's failure and Cuvier's success, we should not focus on the epistemological or theoretical concerns and justifications of these naturalists, but on the concrete and heterogeneous means or tools through which animals were mobilized, stabilized and combined into ever more comprehensive systems of classification.     

Naturalising purpose: From comparative anatomy to the ‘adventure of reason’

Kant’s analysis of the concept of natural purpose in the Critique of judgment captured several features of organisms that he argued warranted making them the objects of a special field of study, in need of a special regulative teleological principle. By showing that organisms have to be conceived as self-organizing wholes, epigenetically built according to the idea of a whole that we must presuppose, Kant accounted for three features of organisms conflated in the biological sciences of the period: adaptation, functionality and conservation of forms. Kant’s unitary concept of natural purpose was subsequently split in two directions: first by Cuvier’s comparative anatomy, that would draw on the idea of adaptative functions as a regulative principle for understanding in reconstituting and classifying organisms; and then by Goethe’s and Geoffroy’s morphology, a science of the general transformations of living forms. However, such general transformations in nature, objects of an alleged ‘archaeology of nature’, were thought impossible by Kant in §80 of the Critique of judgment. Goethe made this ‘adventure of reason’ possible by changing the sense of ‘explanation’: scientific explanation was shifted from the investigation of the mechanical processes of generation of individual organisms to the unveiling of some ideal transformations of types instantiated by those organisms.