- Email: [email protected]
The correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 8:1860
books
TREE vol. 8, no. 7, July 1993
Oxford University Press 2 Desmond, A. (1982) Archetypes and Ancestors, Blond & Briggs 3 Foster, M. and Lankester, E.R. (1898-1902) The Scientific Memoires of Nicholas Court Thomas Henry Huxley, Macmillan 4 Gould, S.J. (1987) Nat. Hisr. 96, 16-25 SedgwickMuseum,Universityof Cambridge, 5 Simpson, G.G. (1951) Horses, Oxford DowningStreet, Cambridge,UK C823EQ University Press 6 Prothero, DR. and Shubin, N. (1988) in References The Evolution of Perissodactyls 1 Prothero, DR. and Schoch, R.M., eds (Prothero, DR. and Schoch, R.M., eds), pp. 142-175, Oxford University Press ( 1988) The Evolution of Perissodactyls, attention on his beloved fossil horses, Macfadden succeeds in illuminating much of general palaeobiological interest.
The DarwinIndustry Makes it to 1860 The Correspondenceof Charles Darwin, Vol. 8: 1860 edited by Frederick Burkhardt, Duncan M. Porter, Janet Browne and Marsha Richmond, Cambridge University Press, 1993. f 40.001 $59.95 hbk (xl + 766 pages) ISBN 0 5214424 I 9 So great is the figure of Darwin in the history of western science - even western culture -that along with the usual group of intellectual heirs, Darwin has attracted a large and colourful assemblage of followers the ‘Darwin industry’. Composed mainly of professional historians, philosophers and some historically minded scientists, this group is renowned for the energy, enthusiasm and the single-minded dedication with which it pursues the highfidelity historical reconstruction of the life and work of the great master. Within the wider circle of the Darwin industry is a group that is especially renowned for its ability to fine-focus on the minutest of details in the meticulous reconstruction of Darwin’s life. These individuals, who labour in Darwin’s bountiful manuscript vineyards (the ‘Darwin papers’), specialize in the sorting, deciphering and decoding of Darwin’s prodigious letters, manuscripts and hastily scribbled notes. Ultimately, their goal is not only to understand the historical record of Darwin’s life, but to make these valuable documents accessible for a wide intellectual audience. Given the sheer volume of these papers, and the difficulty inherent in the accurate reconstruction of handwritten and often personal notes not originally intended for public use, the task of compiling and editing the papers is a Herculean effort. This task has proved so onerous 264
that it has demanded not only boundless energy and expertise, but also intelligent advanced planning and skillful organization on the part of its numerous workers. Every so often the collective efforts of what is justifiably designated as an ‘industry’ is rewarded by the appearance for public consumption of a weighty tome representing the completion of yet another stage in the planned compilation and editing of the Darwin papers. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 8, is the latest such contribution. The product of the group who have concentrated their efforts on editing and making available Darwin’s complete correspondence - this volume includes the correspondence for the year 1860 alone. Though the past volumes have received their share of justly deserved attention and critical acclaim, the most recent volume, which is the record of the year immediately following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, has special interest. The value of this volume is heightened by the curious fact that Darwin never published formal responses to his commentators or critics. His voluminous correspondence for 1860, which records his immediate reactions to both critics and supporters, is thus critical to understanding the sequence of events following the publication of Origin, and how this criticism affected the direction of Darwin’s subsequent work. The completed volume more than lives up to all these expectations. Beginning with the initial favourable Times review (the correspondence here indicates that Darwin was well aware of the identity of the anonymous reviewer as his close friend Thomas Henry Huxley), the correspondence tells an engrossing story
of this eventful year. Especially interesting is the pattern of Darwin’s fluctuating moods as the reviews of Origin poured in. Many of the early letters demonstrate a patience - at least as far as formal communiques went - with his critics. The initial ease gave way to feelings of anxiety, and even pain by April, as adversaries like Richard Owen and Adam Sedgwick launched a series of what Darwin viewed as unfair public attacks. Enraged by a hostile attack by Owen in April, Darwin exclaimed ungenerously to his friend Joseph Hooker, ’...what a base dog he is‘. As the number of unfavourable reviews increased in June, Darwin’s mood appeared to have turned to despair as he confided to Charles Lyell, ‘I must be a very bad explainer’ and then cried I... how little I am understood’. But by far the most vituperative public attack came later that same month at the celebrated Oxford debate. Unable to attend the meeting (he was undergoing water cures), Darwin corresponded with the participants who shared their news of the debate. The letters to and from Darwin describing one of the finest hours in the history of evolutionary thought make for delightful reading. Darwin’s own reaction to Hooker’s support in the debate was warm to the point of appearing ingratiating: ‘Talk of fame, honour, pleasure, wealth, all are dirt compared with affection...‘. By far the bulk of the correspondence includes letters to and from his closest friends Lyell, Hooker, Huxley, and his American ally Asa Gray, all of whom served as confidants to Darwin at this difficult period. These letters are exceptionally rich in providing details of not only Darwin’s response to his critics, but also his philosophical, theological and methodological reflections as he saw his claims interpreted, and to his horror, misinterpreted by his readers. In one letter to Gray, a God-fearing supporter of Darwin’s work, he responded emotionally to the theological question raised by his critics with: ‘this is always painful to me. - I am bewildered. - I had no intention to write atheistically.’ Other important developments in Darwin’s life for the year 1860 include the planning and preparation of Darwin’s intended larger book (it will be recalled that Origin was only an abstract of a planned larger work) and the numerous experiments that Darwin executed to garner evidence in support of his theory. Especially noteworthy were
books
TREE vol. 8, no. 7, July 1993
the detailed studies on plants that included study of the adaptive mechanisms in orchids, primroses, and in insectivorous plants like Drosera. Also of note are the letters describing the arrangements that Darwin made to have his work made even more widely available by the preparation of editions for audiences in the USA and Germany. On the personal front, the letters point to an anxious year as the result of the prolonged illness of Darwin’s eldest daughter Etty (Henrietta). These letters reveal the extent to which both Darwin and Emma, traumatized by the earlier death of their beloved Annie, lived in constant fear of a similar end for their surviving children.
In addition to the actual correspondence reproduced and annotated for the reader, the editors have also included seven valuable appendices to accompany the correspondence and to cover relevant events for the same year. They include Darwin’s list of the ‘presentation’ copies of Origin, the new material added to the American edition of Origin, the letter by Patrick Matthew to the Gardener’s Chronic/e which had precipitated a minor priority dispute, the official Report of the British Association Meeting in Oxford (my own personal favourite), and the list of reviewers for Darwin’s Origin for the year 1860. These appendices all serve to en-
hance the record of correspondence for 1860. Taken as a whole, the volume is much more than a mere survey or catalogue of the mundane everyday correspondence of Darwin. So important are the events of 1860, and so engaging are the letters, that the volume has much to offer a wide intellectual audience. It is a splendid example of the high calibre of historical research that has come to be associated with the Darwin industry.
Wilson and Sober called for the revival of the superorganism as a model for group-level selection. They, like Wheeler, argued that superorganisms actually exist and placed four conditions on their definition: (II a population of individual organisms must be subdivided into a number of groups (colonies); (2) groups have differential group fitness; (3) the variation in group fitness is caused by underlying heritable variation; and (4) there is no differential fitness among individuals within groups (no reproductive competition). Moritz and Southwick also argue that some insect colonies are true superorganismic entities. For them, essential components of superorganisms are that: (I) they have a large number of individuals so that the efforts of single individuals are insignificant; (2) they are perennial; (3) they reproduce something like themselves; (4) they have at least two nonuniform-type individuals (reproductives and sterile workers); and (5) that natural selection acting on the colony itself exceeds selection acting on individual queens. As a metaphor, the superorganism should provide a conceptual framework in which to raise questions, generate explanations, and explore testable hypotheses in the study of social insects. Metaphors, however, are both enabling and constraining. They structure our perceptions, allowing us to ‘see’ causal relationships in new contexts via the similarity to such relationships in known contexts. At the same time, they
proscribe certain observations, blinding us to other features. To be useful, the superorganism metaphor must be consistent. It should illuminate aspects of social insect biology hitherto overlooked and provide explanations based on organisms that are useful for understanding features of the superorganism. A problem with adopting the superorganism metaphor is that there seems to be no uniform conceptual framework. Moritz and Southwick, at the beginning of their book, endorse Wilson and Sober’s model, emphasizing that it only makes sense to invoke this framework when natural selection acts ‘chiefly’ at the colony level. But how strong a condition is this? For Wilson and Sober it appears to be essential: ‘social insect colonies really do cease to be superorganisms, to the extent that natural selection operates within single colonies’. This strong requirement smacks of an ‘ideal’ Weismannian interpretation of the individual organism, in which there is early and complete separation of germ and somatic cell lineages. This form of organization precludes selection within the organism from having any evolutionary consequences, As Buss’ has argued, ‘ideal’ Weismannism is not approximated by most taxa or throughout most of geological time. As a classification schemata, it obscures more than it illuminates. If it is metaphorically transferred to the superorganism level, it suffers the same failure of applicability and
Vassiliki
Betty Smocovitis
Deptof History,University of Florida,Gainesville, FL32611,USA
The Superorganism:New Perspective or Tired Metaphor? Bees as Superorganisms: An Evolutionary Reality by R.F.A. Moritz and E.E. Southwick, Springer-Verlag, 1992. DM 188.00 hbk (xvi + 395 pages) ISBN 3 540 5482 11 Wheeler’,* believed that cooperative societies, whether insect or human, could not be explained within a darwinian theory of evolution narrowly based on individual conflict and competition. Although he offered no alternative theory for their evolution, he proposed a model of insect colonies as superorganisms to aid biologists in their investigations of functional organization. In Bees as Superorganisms, Moritz and Southwick draw upon a cornucopia of analogies derived from the superorganism metaphor to describe honeybee societies. They endorse and elaborate a formal model of superorganisms based on colony level selection recently proposed by D.S. Wilson and E. Sobe?. Wheeler’,* described social insect colonies as true superorganisms which were functionally organized for nutrition, reproduction and protection. Their ‘reality’ was insured by three conditions: (I) individuality - they behave as unitary wholes, (2) duality - they have separate germ and somatic lineages in the component parts, and (3) ontogenetic and phylogenetic development. Moritz and Southwick join a recent chorus of voices singing the praises of reviving some such superorganism modeP. The song is, however, not in unison.
265
TREE vol. 8, no. 7, July 1993
Oxford University Press 2 Desmond, A. (1982) Archetypes and Ancestors, Blond & Briggs 3 Foster, M. and Lankester, E.R. (1898-1902) The Scientific Memoires of Nicholas Court Thomas Henry Huxley, Macmillan 4 Gould, S.J. (1987) Nat. Hisr. 96, 16-25 SedgwickMuseum,Universityof Cambridge, 5 Simpson, G.G. (1951) Horses, Oxford DowningStreet, Cambridge,UK C823EQ University Press 6 Prothero, DR. and Shubin, N. (1988) in References The Evolution of Perissodactyls 1 Prothero, DR. and Schoch, R.M., eds (Prothero, DR. and Schoch, R.M., eds), pp. 142-175, Oxford University Press ( 1988) The Evolution of Perissodactyls, attention on his beloved fossil horses, Macfadden succeeds in illuminating much of general palaeobiological interest.
The DarwinIndustry Makes it to 1860 The Correspondenceof Charles Darwin, Vol. 8: 1860 edited by Frederick Burkhardt, Duncan M. Porter, Janet Browne and Marsha Richmond, Cambridge University Press, 1993. f 40.001 $59.95 hbk (xl + 766 pages) ISBN 0 5214424 I 9 So great is the figure of Darwin in the history of western science - even western culture -that along with the usual group of intellectual heirs, Darwin has attracted a large and colourful assemblage of followers the ‘Darwin industry’. Composed mainly of professional historians, philosophers and some historically minded scientists, this group is renowned for the energy, enthusiasm and the single-minded dedication with which it pursues the highfidelity historical reconstruction of the life and work of the great master. Within the wider circle of the Darwin industry is a group that is especially renowned for its ability to fine-focus on the minutest of details in the meticulous reconstruction of Darwin’s life. These individuals, who labour in Darwin’s bountiful manuscript vineyards (the ‘Darwin papers’), specialize in the sorting, deciphering and decoding of Darwin’s prodigious letters, manuscripts and hastily scribbled notes. Ultimately, their goal is not only to understand the historical record of Darwin’s life, but to make these valuable documents accessible for a wide intellectual audience. Given the sheer volume of these papers, and the difficulty inherent in the accurate reconstruction of handwritten and often personal notes not originally intended for public use, the task of compiling and editing the papers is a Herculean effort. This task has proved so onerous 264
that it has demanded not only boundless energy and expertise, but also intelligent advanced planning and skillful organization on the part of its numerous workers. Every so often the collective efforts of what is justifiably designated as an ‘industry’ is rewarded by the appearance for public consumption of a weighty tome representing the completion of yet another stage in the planned compilation and editing of the Darwin papers. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 8, is the latest such contribution. The product of the group who have concentrated their efforts on editing and making available Darwin’s complete correspondence - this volume includes the correspondence for the year 1860 alone. Though the past volumes have received their share of justly deserved attention and critical acclaim, the most recent volume, which is the record of the year immediately following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, has special interest. The value of this volume is heightened by the curious fact that Darwin never published formal responses to his commentators or critics. His voluminous correspondence for 1860, which records his immediate reactions to both critics and supporters, is thus critical to understanding the sequence of events following the publication of Origin, and how this criticism affected the direction of Darwin’s subsequent work. The completed volume more than lives up to all these expectations. Beginning with the initial favourable Times review (the correspondence here indicates that Darwin was well aware of the identity of the anonymous reviewer as his close friend Thomas Henry Huxley), the correspondence tells an engrossing story
of this eventful year. Especially interesting is the pattern of Darwin’s fluctuating moods as the reviews of Origin poured in. Many of the early letters demonstrate a patience - at least as far as formal communiques went - with his critics. The initial ease gave way to feelings of anxiety, and even pain by April, as adversaries like Richard Owen and Adam Sedgwick launched a series of what Darwin viewed as unfair public attacks. Enraged by a hostile attack by Owen in April, Darwin exclaimed ungenerously to his friend Joseph Hooker, ’...what a base dog he is‘. As the number of unfavourable reviews increased in June, Darwin’s mood appeared to have turned to despair as he confided to Charles Lyell, ‘I must be a very bad explainer’ and then cried I... how little I am understood’. But by far the most vituperative public attack came later that same month at the celebrated Oxford debate. Unable to attend the meeting (he was undergoing water cures), Darwin corresponded with the participants who shared their news of the debate. The letters to and from Darwin describing one of the finest hours in the history of evolutionary thought make for delightful reading. Darwin’s own reaction to Hooker’s support in the debate was warm to the point of appearing ingratiating: ‘Talk of fame, honour, pleasure, wealth, all are dirt compared with affection...‘. By far the bulk of the correspondence includes letters to and from his closest friends Lyell, Hooker, Huxley, and his American ally Asa Gray, all of whom served as confidants to Darwin at this difficult period. These letters are exceptionally rich in providing details of not only Darwin’s response to his critics, but also his philosophical, theological and methodological reflections as he saw his claims interpreted, and to his horror, misinterpreted by his readers. In one letter to Gray, a God-fearing supporter of Darwin’s work, he responded emotionally to the theological question raised by his critics with: ‘this is always painful to me. - I am bewildered. - I had no intention to write atheistically.’ Other important developments in Darwin’s life for the year 1860 include the planning and preparation of Darwin’s intended larger book (it will be recalled that Origin was only an abstract of a planned larger work) and the numerous experiments that Darwin executed to garner evidence in support of his theory. Especially noteworthy were
books
TREE vol. 8, no. 7, July 1993
the detailed studies on plants that included study of the adaptive mechanisms in orchids, primroses, and in insectivorous plants like Drosera. Also of note are the letters describing the arrangements that Darwin made to have his work made even more widely available by the preparation of editions for audiences in the USA and Germany. On the personal front, the letters point to an anxious year as the result of the prolonged illness of Darwin’s eldest daughter Etty (Henrietta). These letters reveal the extent to which both Darwin and Emma, traumatized by the earlier death of their beloved Annie, lived in constant fear of a similar end for their surviving children.
In addition to the actual correspondence reproduced and annotated for the reader, the editors have also included seven valuable appendices to accompany the correspondence and to cover relevant events for the same year. They include Darwin’s list of the ‘presentation’ copies of Origin, the new material added to the American edition of Origin, the letter by Patrick Matthew to the Gardener’s Chronic/e which had precipitated a minor priority dispute, the official Report of the British Association Meeting in Oxford (my own personal favourite), and the list of reviewers for Darwin’s Origin for the year 1860. These appendices all serve to en-
hance the record of correspondence for 1860. Taken as a whole, the volume is much more than a mere survey or catalogue of the mundane everyday correspondence of Darwin. So important are the events of 1860, and so engaging are the letters, that the volume has much to offer a wide intellectual audience. It is a splendid example of the high calibre of historical research that has come to be associated with the Darwin industry.
Wilson and Sober called for the revival of the superorganism as a model for group-level selection. They, like Wheeler, argued that superorganisms actually exist and placed four conditions on their definition: (II a population of individual organisms must be subdivided into a number of groups (colonies); (2) groups have differential group fitness; (3) the variation in group fitness is caused by underlying heritable variation; and (4) there is no differential fitness among individuals within groups (no reproductive competition). Moritz and Southwick also argue that some insect colonies are true superorganismic entities. For them, essential components of superorganisms are that: (I) they have a large number of individuals so that the efforts of single individuals are insignificant; (2) they are perennial; (3) they reproduce something like themselves; (4) they have at least two nonuniform-type individuals (reproductives and sterile workers); and (5) that natural selection acting on the colony itself exceeds selection acting on individual queens. As a metaphor, the superorganism should provide a conceptual framework in which to raise questions, generate explanations, and explore testable hypotheses in the study of social insects. Metaphors, however, are both enabling and constraining. They structure our perceptions, allowing us to ‘see’ causal relationships in new contexts via the similarity to such relationships in known contexts. At the same time, they
proscribe certain observations, blinding us to other features. To be useful, the superorganism metaphor must be consistent. It should illuminate aspects of social insect biology hitherto overlooked and provide explanations based on organisms that are useful for understanding features of the superorganism. A problem with adopting the superorganism metaphor is that there seems to be no uniform conceptual framework. Moritz and Southwick, at the beginning of their book, endorse Wilson and Sober’s model, emphasizing that it only makes sense to invoke this framework when natural selection acts ‘chiefly’ at the colony level. But how strong a condition is this? For Wilson and Sober it appears to be essential: ‘social insect colonies really do cease to be superorganisms, to the extent that natural selection operates within single colonies’. This strong requirement smacks of an ‘ideal’ Weismannian interpretation of the individual organism, in which there is early and complete separation of germ and somatic cell lineages. This form of organization precludes selection within the organism from having any evolutionary consequences, As Buss’ has argued, ‘ideal’ Weismannism is not approximated by most taxa or throughout most of geological time. As a classification schemata, it obscures more than it illuminates. If it is metaphorically transferred to the superorganism level, it suffers the same failure of applicability and
Vassiliki
Betty Smocovitis
Deptof History,University of Florida,Gainesville, FL32611,USA
The Superorganism:New Perspective or Tired Metaphor? Bees as Superorganisms: An Evolutionary Reality by R.F.A. Moritz and E.E. Southwick, Springer-Verlag, 1992. DM 188.00 hbk (xvi + 395 pages) ISBN 3 540 5482 11 Wheeler’,* believed that cooperative societies, whether insect or human, could not be explained within a darwinian theory of evolution narrowly based on individual conflict and competition. Although he offered no alternative theory for their evolution, he proposed a model of insect colonies as superorganisms to aid biologists in their investigations of functional organization. In Bees as Superorganisms, Moritz and Southwick draw upon a cornucopia of analogies derived from the superorganism metaphor to describe honeybee societies. They endorse and elaborate a formal model of superorganisms based on colony level selection recently proposed by D.S. Wilson and E. Sobe?. Wheeler’,* described social insect colonies as true superorganisms which were functionally organized for nutrition, reproduction and protection. Their ‘reality’ was insured by three conditions: (I) individuality - they behave as unitary wholes, (2) duality - they have separate germ and somatic lineages in the component parts, and (3) ontogenetic and phylogenetic development. Moritz and Southwick join a recent chorus of voices singing the praises of reviving some such superorganism modeP. The song is, however, not in unison.
265