Introduction

In looking at episodes in our philosophical tradition that bear in various ways on what we now call biological questions – and anticipating what we have come to call the philosophy of biology – we have been dealing so far with figures at the opening and the close of the Aristotelian tradition, a tradition lasting more than 2,000 years. If Descartes wanted to overturn Aristotelian science, he wanted to do so from within a Scholastic environment, and he was speaking to Scholastic readers. However, when we come to Georges-Louis Leclerc, famous in his time as the Comte de Buffon, we enter a different world. Before we look at some of the major features of Buffon's work, we need to specify briefly the most striking novelty in the intellectual climate of his time: that from the last days of Scholasticism, we have moved to a post-Newtonian era. Looming over every area of scientific work, there falls the shadow of “the great Newton.” There were still thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition, such as Buffon's critic Malesherbes (Malesherbes 1798). But, on the whole, Newton was the authority figure to be followed, or perhaps in some ways challenged. In cosmology, Newton, rather than Descartes or Aristotle, commonly served as the starting point for new speculations. When, for example, in his account of the origin of the planets, Buffon invoked an “impulsive force” in addition to gravitation, he was reflecting against a Newtonian background (Buffon, “Proofs of the Theory of the Earth,” OP, p. 1).

Introduction

In the Descent of Man, Darwin admitted that, in his enthusiasm for what appeared to him a major discovery, he had perhaps overstressed the importance of natural selection. He now sees that there may be changes in the biota that are merely “chemical” – we would say, neutral – but, as he has always recognized, only adaptations are subject to natural selection. Still, Darwin's theory was, in his view, basically a theory of natural selection. Yet, paradoxically, as we noticed earlier, although the Origin persuaded many of the fact of descent with modification, it did not convince so many of natural selection as the chief agency of change. The Darwinism, or “Darwinismus,” of the Origin's first fifty years is certainly evolutionary, but it is scarcely recognizable as Darwin's theory. With respect to this period, Peter Bowler has written both of “the eclipse of Darwinism” (an expression introduced by Julian Huxley in his Evolution: The Modern Synthesis [Huxley 1942]) and of a “non-Darwinian revolution” (Bowler 1983; 1988).

However, the situation is more complicated than that. Before we move on to the evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s to 1950s and the philosophical questions associated with it, we need to identify some strands in that complex story. Again, as with Darwin, we will have to select a few points from a very rich subject-matter. Indeed, we are already restricting our account of the nineteenth century severely by focusing on evolution – let alone Darwinian evolution – and neglecting such topics as vitalism or the growth of the cell theory.

Beginning with Aristotle

It is no longer possible to begin an account of modern philosophy of physics in modernity itself; one must go back at least to the Middle Ages. In the case of philosophical thought about living things, however, or what has recently come to be called philosophy of biology, one must go back even further – to the figure of Aristotle, who lived in the fourth century b.c.e. (384–323). For one thing, Aristotle is the only major philosopher in our tradition who is also a major biologist. One cannot read him for any length of time without seeing that his central philosophical concerns were closely related to his biological interests. Moreover, Aristotle first raised the questions that have preoccupied philosophers of biology ever since: arbitrary imposition versus “cutting nature at the joints” when it comes to naming traits and classifying kinds of organisms; purposive function versus haphazardness and accident in the distribution of traits to various kinds; mechanistic reduction versus teleology or goal-orientation in the process of embryogenesis. These topics are all explicitly formulated in Aristotle's biological treatises, which comprise no less than a quarter of the corpus of his writings that have come down to us.

We must begin with Aristotle, however, not only because we find him raising issues that recur, but because Aristotle's biological way of thought forms the background of subsequent philosophy of biology.

Introduction

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the unquestioned center of work in the life sciences was the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. One of Darwin's early teachers, Robert Grant, spent time there, as did Darwin's friend, and later enemy, Richard Owen. It is an institution worth studying in itself, but the most notorious episode associated with it, on which we will focus here, was the debate in 1830 between two of its professors, Georges Cuvier, by then the unquestioned doyen of French science, and his long-time colleague Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Their disagreement had been building up for more than a decade, but it came to a head in the spring of 1830. We may put the nub of their quarrel very briefly, before providing a sketch of its historical background, and then returning to analyze their contrasting positions in a little more detail.

Geoffroy was a man of one idea. As early as 1796, at the age of twenty-three, he had written, in an essay on a species of lemur (the “maki” or “macaco”): “It seems that nature has confined itself within certain limits, and has formed all living beings only on one unique plan” (Geoffroy 1796 in Le Guyader 1998, p. 35). Later, Geoffroy was to prefer the expression “unity of composition,” but the thought of looking for widespread unities remained.

Introduction

Although Immanuel Kant produced an important body of occasional writing about biological topics to which we will turn more explicitly at the end of this chapter, the bulk of his work on the philosophical aspects of biology can be found in the section of the Critique of Judgment entitled “Critique of Teleological Judgment” (Kant 1790; 2nd ed. 1793). Kant reflects there on the key philosophical issues in the life sciences, especially teleology and reductionism. It must be conceded that these issues were not central to Kant's lifework, and that they play only a supporting role in the overall line of argument of the Critique of Judgment itself. Nonetheless, Kant's ideas about the central questions of biological inquiry were influenced by, and in turn influenced, practicing biologists in early nineteenth-century Germany, as well as later philosophers. Indeed, some of those with whom Kant interacted, especially Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, were at that very time laying the foundations of the modern science of biology. For these reasons, Kant deserves a place in a history of the philosophy of biology.

Organisms as Natural Purposes

On its theoretical side, Kant's critical philosophy was an effort to demonstrate that the logical forms inherent in the very act of thinking (like the subject-predicate, if-then, and other such relationships) correspond to categories into which our objective experience – our experience of objects – falls. Our experience can be objective only because this conjunction of sensible matter and categorical form occurs.

British Geology in the 1830s

British science came of age in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was then that associations devoted to this or that particular scientific field began to spring up – the Geological Society, the Zoological Society, and the Linnean Society, to speak only of those closely connected with our subject. These organizations – more like elite clubs than modern academic societies – afforded a meeting place in which learned clerics from Cambridge and Oxford could consult with urbane gentleman scientists such as the lawyer-turned-geologist Charles Lyell. The societies afforded no financial support to their members. They merely received scientific reports from the field – from people such as the field geologist William Smith, for example, whose lack of social standing and wealth precluded him from membership in the Geological Society, even though he was later lionized by it – and then engaged in formal debates about these reports. Institutions like these, and the networks of friendship and animosity they fostered, figure prominently as forums in which the issues raised in this chapter were discussed. They also formed the matrix in which the young Charles Darwin made his mark, first as the protégé of the Cambridge professionals John Henslow and Adam Sedgwick, and then of Lyell.

The decade of the 1830s, during the first half of which Darwin was circumnavigating the globe aboard the Beagle, was an especially important moment in the development of modern British scientific institutions.

The idea for this book emerged in the late 1980s when I attempted to find an interesting Darwin quote to add to a volume I was then editing on the impact of El Niño on Peruvian fishes and fisheries. I remembered from earlier readings that Darwin had been in Peru, where he collected specimens of the species which Leonard Jenyns later described as Engraulis ringens, the Peruvian anchoveta.

But I did not find any suitable quote: the indexes of books by, or about, Darwin that I consulted all covered ‘finches’ but not ‘fishes’. Still, the pun was obvious, and I decided to write a short essay on Darwin's work on fishes, to be titled Darwin's Fishes, if only to get it out of my system.

However, caught in the iron grip of the Law of Unintended Consequences, I ended up writing a book-size chrestomathy. Fortunately, I had the help of Darwin (who contributed about 45 000 of his words, i.e. almost one third of the entire book) and, as we shall see, the help of friends who provided relevant information and helped verify facts.

The book now completed, I will attempt to cover my tracks, and pretend that this was written to fill the ‘major gap in scholarship’ that is usually recruited in such cases.

This list is taken from a full manuscript list of Beagle fish that was transcribed from the relevant catalogues. The list below includes only those specimens that should currently be in the Museum collections. Many specimens were transferred to the British Museum (Natural History) in 1917 [see Appendix II].

The entries are mostly as found in the catalogues. Vagaries of spelling, style and punctuation have generally been retained, except where this would introduce confusion or ambiguity. Generic names have been expanded from their single-letter abbreviations where this is all that is given in the catalogue. Generic and specific names have been converted to italics for ease of reading.

Roman numerals refer to the volume numbers of the British Museum fish catalogues that were used as the basis of the Cambridge catalogues. The numbers that precede each entry are based on this volume number. Numbers refer to pages, not to individual specimens: several specimens may therefore be listed separately under the same number.

Round and square brackets are as used in the catalogue; curly brackets denote a comment included during the preparation of the list.

Most specimens were noted as present in the 1939 stock-take. Four (‘dry’) specimens not noted as present at the 1939 check remain missing. A few specimens not noted as present in 1939 are noted as present in subsequent years (and that information is included). Several specimens have no confirming marks from stock-taking.

The ‘EXHIBITED SERIES’ does not order the entries according to the British Museum catalogue.

The first letter of the Roman alphabet, and hence the place where the systematic reader and the author of an encyclopedia first meet. It is therefore the place where the reader is urged not to judge this book by its first letter(s) – just as it shouldn't be judged by its cover. Rather, continue to read further down, ‘alphabetically’ as it were, or browse. You can do this randomly, or by following the links connecting the entries in this book.

Thus, you can go from here to *Darwin the person (a.k.a. *CD), or to a *darwin, the unit of evolutionary change. (Note the subtle introduction of ‘a,’ the indefinite article, also much used by CD). Or, if you don't already know, you can find out what a *chrestomathy is, or look at the references, either to see if you are cited (you might be if you are an ichthyologist, or a Darwin scholar), or to read some of the nasty remarks CD penned about authors such as Chambers, or *Lamarck. Or you can check on the epistemological problem posed by CD's often strange *spelling.

In this book, CD's writings are always in this font; italics are used for emphasis, for Latin or French expressions, and for scientific names (see alsoZZZ).