Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin discovered in 1857 that they had a fundamental disagreement about biological classification. Darwin believed that the natural system should express genealogy while Huxley insisted that classification must stand on its own basis, independent of evolution. Darwin used human races as a model for his view. This private and long-forgotten dispute exposes important divisions within Victorian biology. Huxley, trained in physiology and anatomy, was a professional biologist while Darwin was a gentleman naturalist. Huxley agreed with (...) John Stuart Mill's rejection of William Whewell's sympathy for Linnaeus. The naturalists William Sharp Macleay, Hugh Strickland, and George Waterhouse worked to distinguish two kinds of relationship, affinity and analogy. Darwin believed that his theory could explain the difference. Richard Owen introduced the distinction between homology and analogy to anatomists, but the word homology did not enter Darwin's vocabulary until 1848, when he used the morphological concept of archetype in his work on Cirripedia. Huxley dropped the word archetype when Richard Owen linked it to Plato's ideal forms, replacing it with common plan. When Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species that the word plan gives no explanation, he may have had Huxley in mind. Darwin's preposterous story in the Origin about a bear giving birth to a kangaroo, which he dropped in the second edition, was in fact aimed at Huxley. (shrink)

I propose we abandon the unit concept of "the evolutionary synthesis". There was much more to evolutionary studies in the 1920s and 1930s than is suggested in our commonplace narratives of this object in history. Instead, four organising threads capture much of evolutionary studies at this time. First, the nature of species and the process of speciation were dominating, unifying subjects. Second, research into these subjects developed along four main lines, or problem complexes: variation, divergence, isolation, and selection. Some calls (...) for 'synthesis' focused on these problem complexes (sometimes on one of these; other times, all). In these calls, comprehensive and pluralist compendia of plausibly relevant elements were preferred over reaching consensus about the value of particular formulae. Third, increasing confidence in the study of common problems coincided with methodological and epistemic changes associated with experimental taxonomy. Finally, the surge of interest in species problems and speciation in the 1930s is intimately tied to larger trends, especially a shifting balance in the life sciences towards process-based biologies and away from object-based naturalist disciplines. Advocates of synthesis in evolution supported, and were adapting to, these larger trends. (shrink)

Zoologist A. J. Cain began historical research on Linnaeus in 1956 in connection with his dissatisfaction over the standard taxonomic hierarchy and the rules of binomial nomenclature. His famous 1958 paper ‘Logic and Memory in Linnaeus's System of Taxonomy’ argues that Linnaeus was following Aristotle's method of logical division without appreciating that it properly applies only to ‘analysed entities’ such as geometric figures whose essential nature is already fully known. The essence of living things being unanalysed, there is no basis (...) on which to choose the right characters to define a genus nor on which to differentiate species. Yet Cain's understanding of Aristotle, which depended on a 1916 text by H. W. B. Joseph, was fatally flawed. In the 1990s Cain devoted himself to further historical study and softened his verdict on Linnaeus, praising his empiricism. The idea that Linnaeus was applying an ancient and inappropriate method cries out for fresh study and revision. (shrink)

The word ``deme'' was coined by the botanists J.S.L. Gilmour and J.W.Gregor in 1939, following the pattern of J.S. Huxley's ``cline''. Its purposewas not only to rationalize the plethora of terms describing chromosomaland genetic variation, but also to reduce hostility between traditionaltaxonomists and researchers on evolution, who sometimes scorned eachother's understanding of species. A multi-layered system of compoundterms based on deme was published by Gilmour and J. Heslop-Harrison in1954 but not widely used. Deme was adopted with a modified meaning byzoologists (...) leading the evolutionary synthesis – Huxley, Simpson, Wright,and Mayr. Connections are shown between Gilmour's ideas around definingthe deme, his role in founding the Systematics Association, and his chapter``Taxonomy and Philosophy'' in the book The New Systematics. Thishistorical episode raises questions about the role of carefully-definedwords in scientific practice. (shrink)

Nineteenth-century British entomologist William Kirby is best known for his generic division of bees based on tongues and his vigorous defence of natural theology. Focusing on these aspects of Kirby's work has lead many current scholars to characterise Kirby as an "essentialist." As a result of this characterisation, many important aspects of his work, Monographia Apum Angliœ (1802) have been over-looked or misunderstood. Kirby's religious devotion, for example, have lead some scholars to assume Kirby used the term "type" for connecting (...) an ontological assumption about essences with a creationist assumption about species fixity, which I argue conceals a variety of ways Kirby employed the term. Also, Kirby frequently cautioned against organising a classification system exclusively by what he called "analytic reasoning," a style of reasoning 20th century scholars often associate with Aristotelian logic of division. I argue that Kirby's critique of analytic reasoning brought the virtues of his own methodological agenda into sharp relief. Kirby used familiar metaphors in the natural history literature-Ariadne's thread, the Eleusinian mysteries, and Bacon's bee and spider metaphors-to emphasise the virtues of building tradition and cooperation in the goals and methodological practices of 19th century British naturalists. (shrink)

The progress towards mathematization or, in a broader context, towards an increased “objectivity” is one of the main trends in the development of biological systematics in the past century. It is commonplace to start the history of numerical taxonomy with the works of R. R. Sokal and P. H. A. Sneath that in the 1960s laid the foundations of this school of taxonomy. In this article, I discuss the earliest research program in this field, developed in the 1920s by the (...) Russian entomologist and biometrician Eugen (Evgeniy Sergeevich) Smirnov. The theoretical and methodological grounds of this program are considered based on the published works of Smirnov as well as some archival sources. The influence of Smirnov’s evolutionary (mechano-Lamarckian) convictions on the development of this project of “exact systematics” is analyzed as well as the author’s attempts to establish a novel concept of “mathematical essentialism” in animal taxonomy. The probable causes of the failure of Smirnov’s project are viewed from both externalist and internalist perspectives, including the opposition to the use of quantitative methods in biology by some of the Lysenkoist ideologists in the USSR. A brief comparison of Smirnov’s research program with that developed 40 years later by Sokal and Sneath is provided. (shrink)