Watercolour of Charles Darwin painted by George Richmond after Darwin’s return from the voyage of HMS Beagle (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

If he had held a passport Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) might have been described as a naturalist, but he was one of the greatest of scientists, a titan among biologists. His theory of evolution by natural selection unified biology in its widest sense, providing a coherent explanation for how the diversity of life came to be. Alongside related enquiries it made sense of diverse lines of evidence: how species were related, how the fossil record shed light on vanished worlds, why some organs were vestigial, where our emotions may come from, how oceanic coral reefs formed, and much more besides. This contribution to our understanding of life on Earth has led to Darwin being elevated to the top-most pantheon of great scientists and he remains one of the truly key figures in the history of science. Few scientists have had their career more exhaustively documented.

Darwin had initially intended to follow in his father’s footsteps as a doctor, beginning this career at Edinburgh University. He found, however, the medical work to be repugnant. His fascination for natural history led him to neglect his studies, with his father ultimately sending him to Cambridge to study divinity with the intention of his son becoming an Anglican parson. This, of course, did not happen, but it underlines the often serendipitous nature of science. When Douglas Adams wrote “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” (1988, p.142) he wasn’t referring to Darwin, but it can with some justice be applied to him.

In 1831, one of Darwin’s mentors at Cambridge, the botanist Professor John Stevens Henslow, recommended him as a gentleman companion and naturalist to accompany Captain Robert Fitzroy, who was about to embark on what turned out to be a five-year trip around the world, on HMS Beagle. This experience had a profound impact upon Darwin and formed the basis for many of the observations he used to develop his seminal publication On the Origin of Species.

On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 and sold out immediately. Today it is available in almost every language (including Esperanto), and within Darwin’s lifetime ran to six editions. An insight into its impact, as well as to Darwin’s scientific integrity, is relayed by Desmond and Moore (1991, p.582). They describe how, upon hearing that working men in Lancashire were clubbing together in order to afford a copy of Origin of Species, Darwin insisted that the cost of the book be reduced because he wanted it to be available to everyone. Its fundamental thesis was the ground-breaking idea of evolution by natural selection. As is well-known, the germ of this idea derived from the economist Thomas Malthus, but in Darwin’s hands the concept of natural selection provided a cogent explanation as to how adaptations occurred and, by implication, species arose.

Yet so familiar is the idea of natural selection that its sheer explanatory power has on occasion led to it becoming misunderstood. So it is that natural selection is sometimes thought of as a ‘force’ seeking out to destroy ‘stupid’ individuals. For example, images of an individual carrying out some foolish act (such as diving into an empty swimming pool) are tagged with a heading along the lines of “Natural selection in progress”. One needs to remember that natural selection is not a ‘force’ striving to produce ‘progress’, a balanced ecosystem, or for that matter anything else. Rather, it is the consequence of differential ratio of reproduction, and as such is mechanistic.

Natural selection, therefore, has neither fore-knowledge nor a particular goal in mind. Put simply, natural selection is a process by which biological traits increase or decrease in a population because some individuals have more offspring than others.

It is also important to note that whilst natural selection is a key mechanism of evolution, it is by no means the only one. Thanks largely to the field of work founded by the botanist Gregor Mendel (regarded as the father of genetics) we know that evolution is also driven by genetic mutation, gene duplication, migration, genetic drift, and other factors. Broadly speaking, whilst evolution is universally accepted, the field of neo-Darwinism continues to explore not only natural selection but a range of other mechanisms that lead to the diversity of life we see around us.

A second matter that perhaps needs clarification is the word ‘theory’. This is because anti-evolutionists attempt to undermine evolution on the grounds that it is “only a theory”. This stems from a misunderstanding of what is meant by the scientific idea of a ‘theory’. In everyday life ‘theory’ tends to mean an unsubstantiated opinion or the postulated outcome of an event or hunch. In this way the word ‘theory’ is often used interchangeably with the word ‘guess’. However, in the scientific world, a theory is an overarching explanation for an aspect of the natural world that is supported by hypothesis-driven evidence.

One does not need to subscribe to the idea of paradigm shifts (in the manner of physicist Thomas Kuhn) or that science is dependent on a cultural context (although it would be otiose to deny that scientific ideas might more readily arise in some settings as against others) to realise that no theory can be entirely secure. In principle, new lines of evidence may lead to radical reformation or even the abandoning of a theory. But seldom, if ever, does one new observation have this consequence. In the case of Darwin one can be as sure as possible that while there is much about evolution yet to be discovered (and if Darwin was with us, he surely would have been delighted to acknowledge this), but that its foundations are secure.

Bronze sculpture of Charles Darwin as a young man by Anthony Smith. The sculpture, which was unveiled in 2009, is located in the grounds of Christ’s College, Cambridge (Image: Used with the kind permission of the ... moreMaster and Fellows of Christ’s College, Cambridge)

What of Darwin the individual? It is easy to sink into hagiography, although by most accounts he had many admirable characteristics. Nevertheless, one can note he oscillated between times of exceptional excitement and others of introspection, even pessimism. He was patient (up to a point) with critics, but acerbic with those who he judged (perhaps not always fairly) to have misunderstood his ideas. What surely marks him as almost entirely original is his extraordinary ability to ‘join the dots’, to see how apparently unrelated facts made sense from a wider perspective.

So too, Darwin knew that his theory was vulnerable, with weak points, but as has often been noted, when these were ultimately resolved the overall theory was strengthened. Stories of a return to his Christian faith on his death-bed may not be as misplaced as have generally been thought, but there is little doubt that he had little time for the apparent niceties of religion. As is often the case with great thinkers, Darwin had a grand vision that was perhaps more akin to a deist, even a pantheist, but significantly he never lost his sense of wonder, even awe. Was Darwin good at everything? No! When it came to philosophical skills he himself admitted that his abilities were limited, but was content to emphasize the empirical data that spoke to him more clearly than anything else. Nobody can do everything, and Darwin remains a giant upon whose shoulders we now see a little further.

Text copyright © 2015 Victoria Ling. All rights reserved.

References

Adams, D.N. (1988)  The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.  Pan Books.

Desmond, A. and Moore, J.R. (1991)  Darwin.  Penguin.

Photograph of Michael Faraday taken in the 1860s by John Watkins. Watkins was known for his portrait photographs of high-profile individuals (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

Michael Faraday (1791-1867) stands out as one of the most influential of scientists. His career began as a chemist but it is his work in physics, particularly electromagnetism, where he made his greatest scientific contributions, opening the doors to the age of electricity. Faraday was also one of the founders of electrochemistry, an area of research which seeks to understand the interplay between electricity and chemical reactions. Faraday was a man of high morals and he strongly believed in the importance of communicating science to the general public. He established the renowned Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 1825, and these have continued in different guises to this present day.

Faraday’s journey into science reads like a work of fiction; the tale of a gifted underdog who through hard work, imagination, dedication, and an insatiable sense of curiosity for how the world works, overcame overwhelming odds to become one of the world’s greatest scientists. But this is not fiction, it is a true story, and is all the more inspirational for it.

Faraday came from a poor background, which in the world of nineteenth century England stacked the odds against anyone hoping to pursue a scientific career. In order to help support his family Faraday left school at the age of 13 to take a job as an errand boy for a local bookshop, run by one Georg Riebau. This became the initial rung of the ladder in Faraday’s scientific career and the first in a series of serendipitous events. Faraday’s hard work impressed his employer who promoted him to apprentice bookbinder. This opened up a new world to the young Faraday, providing him with access to a wealth of information that with his poor background he would otherwise have had no access to.

Faraday spent his free time reading the precious books that all day he had worked to bind. Of all that he read it was science that piqued his interest, particularly chemistry. Although his wages were small, he saved what he could in order to purchase materials that would enable him to replicate and test the experiments and principles that he learnt in the books. So began Faraday’s fondness – and natural ability – for scientific discovery through practical experimentation, something he was encouraged to undertake by Riebau who allowed him to use a space at the back of the bookshop.

In another serendipitous moment, one of Riebau’s customers gave Faraday a ticket to a series of lectures by the chemist and inventor Sir Humphry Davy. At the time Davy was one of the most famous scientists in England and Faraday took detailed notes at the lectures. These he later bound and sent to Davy as a token of respect. This act of veneration was to have fortuitous ramifications for the young Faraday; when Davy was injured in an experiment that impeded his ability to write, he remembered the impeccable notes that Faraday had sent and contacted him to ask if he would like to serve as his amanuensis for a few days. Faraday jumped at the opportunity and ultimately this led to Davy offering him the position of Chemical Assistant at the Royal Institution in 1813.

Faraday remained with the Royal Institution for the next 54 years. Here he succeeded Davy in 1825 (in the previous year he had been elected to the Royal Society), and in 1833 was made Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution.

Faraday was a prolific scientist and inventor. One could write volumes detailing his many and varied discoveries, but consider a few of his ‘greatest hits’:

– Gas liquefaction (1823). Using mechanical pumps to apply pressure, gases with high critical temperatures such as ammonia can be liquefied. Faraday also observed that when ammonia evaporates it causes its surroundings to cool. This ‘absorption cooling’ is the principle upon which refrigerators work;

– Discovery of benzene (1825). Faraday originally named this chemical compound ‘bicarburet of hydrogen’, and today benzene is used in the manufacture of a wide range of drugs, plastics, and detergents;

– Discovery of electromagnetic induction (1831). When a magnet is moved inside a coil of wire it causes electricity to flow. Accordingly, electricity could be generated by the rotation of magnets rather than by using metal plates and chemical solutions. Most of the electricity we use is a direct result of Faraday’s insight;

– Invention of the ‘Faraday Cage’ (1836), a cage-like structure composed of a metallic mesh which shields its contents from electromagnetic energy by distributing the charge around the exterior of the cage. The Faraday cage has a vast array of applications, from microwave ovens where it restricts the escape of electromagnetic radiation, to purpose-built cages around telecommunications equipment to protect them from lightning strikes;

A Faraday cage in operation. The women inside are perfectly safe because the charge is distributed around the outside of the cage (Image: Antoine Taveneaux/Wikimedia Commons)

– Discovery of the Faraday Effect (1845), the first experimental evidence to show that electromagnetism and light are related. The idea was later developed by the Scottish mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s, which established that light is an electromagnetic wave.

Faraday also flags up a common misconception that science and religion are mutually exclusive. In the media today, there is a time-worn formula for presenting the interplay between science and religion. On the one hand we have coverage of extreme religious opinions, whilst on the other hand we have prominent scientists (and comedians) who adopt a vocal atheist stance.

Any topic which presents a conflict of opinion between these two views has become staple ‘news’, but does it represent reality? This over-simplified polarization of views bears little resemblance to day-to-day life, with reality being somewhat more nuanced. Today, as in the past many scientists are atheists, some (like the great biologist Thomas Huxley) are agnostic, whilst others subscribe to a specific faith. For example, Faraday had no doubt of what he thought of as God’s agency in the world. Specifically, he belonged to the Sandemanian denomination which was an offshoot of the Church of Scotland. Nor was he alone. Recall, for example, that Gregor Mendel (the father of genetics) was an Augustinian monk, and Charles Lyell (the father of modern geology) was a devout Christian.

We know that Faraday was one of the world’s finest scientists, but where did he stand upon the subject of evolution? The answer is that we do not know. Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1861, just six years before Faraday’s death. Faraday made no disparaging comments about evolution, but Colin Russell (2000) suggests that his silence on the matter may have been because, like many physical scientists of the time, he dismissed evolution as “only a theory”.

However, one cannot help but wonder how, had Faraday lived longer, he may have reconciled his faith with the ever-growing body of scientific evidence for evolution. For example, Charles Lyell had enormous difficulty reconciling his Christian beliefs with natural selection. Despite this, Lyell and Darwin remained firm friends, happy to discuss their differences with respect and candor; a fitting tribute to the intelligence and open-mindedness of both men.

Faraday was hugely respected within his lifetime and so too the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein held Faraday in enormous esteem as one of his three scientific heroes (the other two being Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell). Regardless of his success and veneration, Faraday remained a man of modesty and firm principles; twice he was offered the presidency of the Royal Society, one of the world’s oldest and most eminent scientific institutions, but on both occasions declined the honour. Faraday had come a long way, and it is worth noting that Joseph Banks, an earlier President, had rejected Faraday’s application for a job as a bottle washer as unworthy of a reply.

Faraday’s expertise in chemistry led the British government to ask him how chemicals could be used against Russia in the Crimean War. Faraday was more than capable of applying his knowledge to develop such weapons, but he found the very notion morally repugnant and refused to assist. Faraday also made a tremendous contribution to the public understanding of science, which included 123 Friday evening public discourses. Similarly, he was keen to apply science to the broader public good and this he did through his work on the efficiency of lighthouses and safety in coal mines. During his life he was offered a final resting place in the company of Kings and Queens at London’s Westminster Abbey, but he respectfully declined, choosing instead to be interred in the more humble surroundings of Highgate Cemetery, London.

Text copyright © 2015 Victoria Ling. All rights reserved.

References

Arianrhod, R. (2005)  Einstein's Heroes: Imagining the world through the language of mathematics.  Oxford University Press.

Cantor, G. (1991)  Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist.  A study of science and religion in the nineteenth century.  Palgrave Macmillan.

Ecklund, E.H. and Scheitle, C.P. (2007)  Religion among academic scientists: Distinctions, disciplines, and demographics.  Social Problems 54, 289-307.

Gooding, D. (1991)  Experiment and the Making of Meaning: Human Agency in Scientific Observation and Experiment.  Springer.

Gooding, D. and James, F.A.J.L.  (eds.) (1985)  Faraday Rediscovered: Essays on the Life and Work of Michael Faraday, 1791‐1867. Stockton Press.

Hamilton, J. (2003)  Faraday: The Life.  HarperCollins.

James, F.A.J.L.  (ed.)( 2002)  The Common Purposes of Life: Science and Society at the Royal Institution of Great Britain.  Ashgate Publishing Limited.

James, F.A.J.L. (2010)  Michael Faraday: A very short Introduction.  Oxford University Press.

Russell, C. A. (2000)  Michael Faraday: Physics and faith. Oxford University Press.

Studio portrait of Thomas Henry Huxley taken by Maull & Polyblanc, a London-based commercial photographers who, in the nineteenth century, specialised in images of eminent figures (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) was an English biologist who also carried out research in the fields of palaeontology and marine zoology. He acquired the nickname ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ because of his vociferous defence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

However, Huxley was a pioneering biologist in his own right; he was a leading expert on reptile fossils, an excellent anatomist, a fine illustrator and one of the key intellectual figures of the nineteenth century. He coined the word ‘agnostic’ to describe people such as himself who believed that it is not possible to know whether a deity exists or not. As a child, Huxley received only two years of formal education, and was largely self-taught in the sciences, history, philosophy and German.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, and soon after in June, 1860 the British Association for the Advancement of Science met in Oxford. The ensuing debate between Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, became the stuff of legend and – as succinctly described by John Hedley Brooke (1991) – the idea that it represents an absolute polarisation of views is far too simplistic. Nevertheless, all those debating were of high intelligence, saw what was at stake if Darwin’s views proved correct, and were not shy of a rhetorical flourish. Wilberforce was fiercely opposed to the idea that species change through time, although his view was not based on untutored ignorance but rather a view that Darwin’s hypothesis was flawed. Nor, it needs to be emphasised, was Wilberforce alone in this regard.

Significantly, however, this debate was also attended by another opponent to Darwin’s theory of evolution, the eminent palaeontologist Richard Owen. Owen coached Wilberforce prior to the debate in order to strengthen his case against Huxley. Quite what was said in the famous exchange of views is now a matter of legend, but it seems that in an attempt to ridicule Huxley, Wilberforce asked if he was descended from an ape on his mother’s or father’s side. Huxley responded by saying that he was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but that he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.

The professional rivalry between Thomas Huxley and Richard Owen was so well known during their time that the writer Charles Kingsley made reference to it in his classic children’s book The Water Babies, published ... morein 1863. In this illustration from the 1885 edition, drawn by Linley Sambourne, we see Richard Owen (left) and Thomas Huxley examining a water-baby: “But they would have put it [the water baby] into spirits, or into the Illustrated News, or perhaps cut it into halves, poor dear little thing, and sent one to Professor Owen, and one to Professor Huxley, to see what they would each say about it.” (Kingsley, 1889, p.69) (Image by Linley Sambourne via Wikimedia Commons)

As an afterword to the Huxley-Wilberforce altercation, a little known fact – brought to light in 1980 by Harvard-based biological anthropologist Professor Richard Wrangham  – is that there is evidence to suggest that Wilberforce may have eventually softened his stance towards the concept of evolution.  Specifically, Wrangham discusses a poem written by Wilberforce (and subsequently discovered in his private papers held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford) written after his debate with Huxley. It ends with the lines:

“To soothe each fond regret, howe’er I can;

And, at the least, to dream myself a Man!”

In the words of Wrangham, the poem “..implies a man [Wilberforce] too committed to accept the evolutionary argument, yet too honest in the end to deny it. Who knows? Darwin may have had one more convert than he knew.”

Be that as it may, there is no doubt that in terms of science Huxley and Owen remained lifelong opponents. Nowhere were these differences more animated than in the debate over the degree of similarity between ape and human brains (sometimes referred to as the Great hippocampus question). This was significant because at the time, Huxley and Owen were the two leading British authorities on anatomy, yet they held entirely opposing views on the matter.

Owen believed that human beings should be taxonomically assigned to a separate mammalian subclass, thus distancing man from the rest of the animal kingdom. Owen claimed that ape brains were missing three uniquely human components; technically these are the posterior lobe, posterior horn of the lateral ventricle and the hippocampus minor (now called the calcar avis). Their purported absence in the apes Owen took as evidence against Darwin’s theory. Cosans (2009) describes how Huxley was so astonished by Owen’s claims – which he considered contradictory to the facts – that he saw no alternative but to refute them.

Huxley’s 1863 publication Evidence on Man’s Place in Nature, presented his definitive stance on the matter. The second chapter (On the relations of Man to the lower animals) was the most controversial, presenting a comprehensive review of the fossil and anatomical evidence for the similarities between man and apes. The debate was brought to a close when Sir Charles Lyell, Britain’s most eminent geologist and one of the era’s leading scientists, threw his support behind Huxley’s stance.

Equal to this contribution was the question of the origin of birds. Today, it is widely accepted that birds are descended from a branch of theropod dinosaurs, but fewer, however, are aware that it was Huxley who first proposed this evolutionary relationship.

In 1861,the German palaeontologist Christian Erich Hermann von Meyer described a fossilized feather discovered the previous year from Upper Jurassic sediments in southern Germany in the famous Solnhofen Limestone. Von Meyer named the fossil Archaeopteryx lithographica (meaning ‘the ancient wing from the lithographic limestone’). Shortly afterwards, the first skeleton of Archaeopteryx with feathers was described. At first its interpretation was rather convoluted, but Huxley made extensive and detailed comparisons of Archaeopteryx with various reptilian fossils and initially found that it was most similar to the small, chicken-sized theropod dinosaur Compsognathus: “Surely there is nothing very wild or illegitimate in the hypothesis that the phylum of the Class of Aves has its foot in the Dinosaurian Reptiles…” (Huxley, 1868, p.74).

Huxley was a great biologist and anatomist, and he played the key role in promoting and defending the theory of evolution by natural selection in the nineteenth century. He was also a pioneering educator, encouraging science students to carry out practical work in addition to book-based research, something which is now standard practice. He was a prolific writer, an articulate communicator and his pragmatic, no-nonsense approach to research was the embodiment of good academic form. He was also a man of high moral purpose and although he was lucky not to have seen the catastrophes of the twentieth century, had he done so he would have been horrified.

Sample of two handwritten letters from Thomas Huxley to the French ornithologist Alphonse Milne-Edwards. The letters appear to form part of Huxley’s research for his book The Crayfish: An introduction to the study of ... morezoology (1880). In them, Huxley requests to borrow two specimens of Madagascan crayfish in order to complete his examination of the southern hemisphere forms. (Photo & private collection: Victoria Ling, 2015).

Huxley famously remarked that so obvious was Darwin’s hypothesis that he wished he had thought of it. He would not have been alone, and one of the paradoxes of science is that the obvious may stare us all in the face, but only the person with the chutzpah of lateral thinking finds the solution.

The fact remains that when Huxley passed away in 1895, the world was a very different place to the one he was born into; he had played a key role in not only developing our understanding of the natural world, but more broadly speaking, encouraged unbiased, fact-based thinking. He founded a generation of open-minded scientists and his own descendants carried on his chain of perspicacious thinking: most notably, his grandson was the biologist Julian Huxley, who founded the World Wildlife Fund, and his other grandson Aldous Huxley was a writer, most famously known for the dystopian novel Brave New World.

The humble grave of one of the nineteenth century’s finest minds; Thomas Henry Huxley. Located in East Finchley Cemetery, London (Image: Victoria Ling)

Text copyright © 2015 Victoria Ling. All rights reserved.

References

Brooke, J.H. (1991)  Science and Religion: some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge University Press.

Chambers, P. (2002)  Bones of Contention: the Archaeopteryx scandals.  John Murray.

Cosans, C.E. (2009)  Owen's Ape & Darwin's Bulldog: Beyond Darwinism and creationism. Indiana University Press.

Feduccia, A. (1996)  The Origin and Evolution of Birds. Yale University Press.

Gross, C.G. (1993)  Huxley versus Owen: the hippocampus minor and evolution.  Trends in Neurosciences 16, 493-498.

Huxley, L. (1900)  Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley.  Macmillan.

Huxley, T.H. (1863)  Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature.  Williams and Norgate.

Huxley, T.H. (1868)  On the animals which are most nearly intermediate between birds and reptiles.  Annals and Magazine of Natural History 2, 66–75.

Huxley, T.H. (1870)  Further evidence of the affinity between the dinosaurian reptiles and birds.  Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 26, 12–31.

Kingsley, C. (1889)  The Water Babies.  Macmillan and Co.

Lyell, C. (1863)  The Antiquity of Man.  Murray.

von Meyer, C.E.H. (1861)  Archaeopteryx lithographica (Vogel-Feder) und Pterodactylus von Solnhofen.  Neues Jahrbuch für Mineralogie, Geologie und Paläontologie 1861, 678–679.

Wrangham, R.W. (1980) Bishop Wilberforce: Natural selection and the Descent of Man. Nature 287, 192.

Barbara McClintock in her laboratory in 1947 (Image from the Smithsonian Institution collection via Wikimedia Commons)

Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) was an American geneticist and a pioneer in the field of cytogenetics, a branch of genetics that focuses on the function of chromosomes in individual cells. McClintock’s work on chromosomes in maize revolutionised this field. In her time, she was widely respected, receiving a number of prestigious awards and fellowships, not least the National Medal of Science. However, it is her discovery of transposons – which revolutionised our understanding of genetics – that was entirely radical. Yet it took thirty years for the scale of her discovery to be fully acknowledged, with the award of the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology “for her discovery of mobile genetic elements” in 1983 (NobelPrize.org).

A trademark of McClintock’s research was her unwavering attention to detail. Meticulous data analysis remains essential if one is to have confidence in one’s scientific hypotheses, and all the more vital if such assertions are novel and so question established ideas. Challenging the status quo is precisely what McClintock’s discovery of transposons achieved.

It was her thorough interrogation of the data that enabled her to have first confidence and eventually conviction as to what at that time seemed to be an unlikely – even implausible – scenario. In effect, her data showed that genes could be mobile, moving around the chromosomes, hopping from one place and re-inserting themselves elsewhere. McClintock discovered these peculiarly behaving genes whilst working on maize plants in the late 1940s. We now call these genes ‘transposons’, often aptly referred to as ‘jumping genes’. In November 1953 McClintock published her findings in the journal Genetics, with a paper entitled Induction of instability at selected loci in maize.

Mechanism of transposition
(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

McClintock’s discovery did not sit comfortably with the twentieth century consensus as to how genes should behave. At the time, geneticists considered that genes were stable entities and the notion that there could be ‘renegade’ strands of DNA moving about the genome was treated with extreme caution. But if one places McClintock’s discovery in a broader social and historical perspective, given the nature of the proposal – that is, the idea that something which was perceived as stable, was actually subject to change – one could almost see the skepticism with which it was initially received as less surprising, maybe even predictable.

In some broad sense this might say something about a human desire for stability. If one looks back over the history of science it is not unreasonable to suggest that the scientific theories which met with the most vehement, almost visceral resistance were often those which are not only ‘big ideas’, but those which have championed ‘change’ in a previously accepted framework of ‘permanency’.

This is all the more true when it comes to natural phenomena that an individual cannot observe with the naked eye and/or witness over the course of their own short life-span. Notable examples include the idea of the Big Bang, and nearer to home that of continental drift; a proposal by the meteorologist Alfred Wegener who suggested (quite rightly) that Earth’s continents were once joined together and slowly drifted apart (and continue to move) over millions of years. From the time it was first proposed in 1912 the idea of continental drift found little favour and until the late 1960s the consensus remained that the Earth’s continents were static.

Another example is of course Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which was proffered at a time when society at large was still committed to the notion of the permanency of species (i.e. that each species on Earth was created in its current form and was not the result of evolution). Here too, Darwin was correct, but some of the resistance stemmed from people who saw weaknesses in the theory, and ones that Darwin lost little time in addressing.

Pigmentation on corn kernels reveals the activity transposons (Image: Damon Lisch via Wikimedia Commons)

In the case of McClintock her work perhaps reflects more than a hint of our collective human condition inasmuch as although the existence and behaviour of transposons was relatively swiftly accepted by other geneticists who conducted research on maize, when it came to applying these ideas to other forms of life, not least humans, the implications were far more slowly accepted. In the case of transposons, interest in these small pieces of mobile DNA remained largely dormant until the 1970s when they were found in viruses and bacteria. From there, interest was ignited and further research revealed that transposons are found in most life-forms, including of course humans.

Let us leave the last words to McClintock. After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1983 she remarked: “You just know sooner or later, it will come out in the wash, but you may have to wait some time.” (quoted in McGrayne 2001, p.144)

Text copyright © 2015 Victoria Ling. All rights reserved.

References

McClintock, B. (1953)  Induction of instability at selected loci in maize.  Genetics 38, 579–99.

McGrayne, S.B. (2001)  Nobel Prize Women in Science.  Carol Publishing Group, Secaucus, NJ.

Pray, L. and Zhaurova, K. (2008)  Barbara McClintock and the discovery of jumping genes (Transposons). Nature Education 1, 169.

Ravindran, S. (2012)  Barbara McClintock and the discovery of jumping genes.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 109, 20198-20199.

Oil painting of Richard Owen painted in 1844 by Henry William Pickersgill. In the portrait Owen holds the leg bone of a moa, and is wearing robes of Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons (Ima... morege: © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. Used with permission)

A British newspaper described Richard Owen (1804-1892) as: The greatest scientist you’ve never heard of (Shindler, 2010). This statement is all the more surprising when one learns that Owen’s scientific career was immensely productive. This is evident from the fact that he published over 600 scientific books and papers, was frequently called upon to describe the latest fossils to Queen Victoria herself, and possessed an outstanding ability to interpret fossils often from just a few bones. This gifted biologist, comparative anatomist, and palaeontologist however is today best known for coining the word ‘dinosaur’. With the prescient recognition that those Mesozoic behemoths were not some sort of gigantic lizard – echoed in Gideon Mantell comparing his Cretaceous Iguanadon to living iguanas – but a wholly distinct sort of reptile now vanished from Earth, giving us a glimpse into deep time. Owen, therefore, deserves to be better known than his Victorian reputation suggests. Or does he?

One reason that Owen is not well known today is because although he was a pioneer in the art of detailed anatomical descriptions, that kind of meticulous writing can also make for laborious reading. He had a tendency to invent complex nomenclature, much of which failed to be adopted by the scientific community, thus making it a difficult read for contemporary audiences. The proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ however, is Owen’s reputation for being a ‘difficult character’. He could be a harsh critic, was almost ruthlessly ambitious, was not infrequently accused of plagiarism, and was unpopular amongst his fellow scientists. One of his most infamous acts was to credit himself with fossil discoveries that were actually made by the palaeontologist Gideon Mantell. Ironically therefore, it is perhaps Owen’s own formidable reputation that has eclipsed his scientific contributions for so long.

Owen’s character lacked the affable appeal of many of his better remembered contemporaries (such as Charles Darwin), which in turn – it could be argued – failed to inspire the modern public imagination. We now live in a media-driven world with a tendency to make ‘heroes and villains’ of historical figures in order to simplify and make them and their work easier to understand. Real life, however, is much more various and Owen was a complicated character. Undoubtedly there were parts of his personality that were not particularly attractive, but this is not sufficient reason to deny or ignore his scientific contributions.  Owen wasn’t ‘good’ enough to be a hero, and he wasn’t ‘bad’ enough to be an outright villain, so he sits largely forgotten under the ambiguous label of ‘complicated’. A modern world that likes its history presented in neat juxtapositions does not easily cope with ‘complicated’. To quote Paul Chambers (2002, p.69):

“Yes he was gifted, but he had an attitude problem to go with it.”

Some of Owen’s nomenclature however was adopted. Next to the term ‘dinosaur’, the word ‘homology’ is today one of the most commonly used terms in evolutionary studies, and Owen’s concept of homology was critical in developing evolutionary thought because it expressed a fundamental belief in the relatedness of all organisms (with endoskeletons – see the below image) and sparked discussion about evolutionary ancestors.

Owen described homologue as “the same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function.” (1843, p.674). In other words, homology is a characteristic present in two or more biological species which is derived from a common ancestor. Owen noted that there are often very different structures which display a common plan. For example, the human arm and the flipper of a whale might at first sight look very different but both are derived from the mammalian limb, and as we now know, ultimately a fish fin. Owen reasoned that there must be a structural plan for each class of the vertebrates and he called this plan the ‘Archetype’.

Richard Owen’s vertebrate archetype from his 1847 book On the archetype and homologies of the vertebrate skeleton (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

The idea of homology not only remains central in evolution, but is also the lynchpin of cladistics, where the term ‘synapomorphy’ is roughly equivalent, that is a character shared by two or more taxa. So too archetype retains more force than is sometimes realized because it begs questions as to both ancestral arrangements and evolutionary mechanisms of transformation. But his invocation of archetype has also led to Owen perhaps being a victim of misinterpretation or misrepresentation. More specifically, Owen’s views are often labelled as ‘anti-evolutionary’, but this is incorrect. Owen may have been outspoken in his objections to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, but it is important to remember that Owen agreed with the concept of evolution. Where he differed was because in his view acknowledging the reality of evolution was one thing, but deciding how it actually worked was another. Owen received considerable criticism for his evolutionary remarks in his book Nature of the Limbs (1849, pp.85-86) where he suggested that humans had evolved from fish. This may sound like a fairly tame remark to make in the present day, but what Owen was saying was that humans had not been created in their present form by God; an extremely controversial statement in the mid nineteenth century and written of course before Darwin’s epochal book On the Origin of Species.

So, if both Owen and Darwin subscribed to evolution, where did they differ? Christopher Cosans (2009) sums up nicely the underlying divergence between Owen and Darwin: they simply looked at nature in two very different ways. Darwin may have accounted for the origin of species as the result of natural laws, but he could no more explain how that life came to exist on Earth than Owen could account for how life follows laws of morphological form.  While each side, therefore, had a point Owen’s staunch rejection of Darwin’s theory, combined with his challenging personality, led to Owen alienating himself from the younger generation of scientists. This included the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, also known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, who became a life-long opponent of Owen.

Perhaps Owen’s most enduring and prominent achievement was the establishment of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London. In the mid nineteenth century Owen was Superintendent of the British Museum’s Natural History Department. Along with George Robert Waterhouse, Keeper of the Geological Department, Owen campaigned for two decades to have its natural history collection housed in a separate dedicated building. The need for such a museum, along with the adjacent Victoria and Albert Museum, was overwhelmingly obvious and Owen won the day. As a result, the Natural History Museum in London was established in 1881. Today, this architecturally stunning building, whose resemblance to a cathedral is far from accidental, continues to house a world renowned collection of fossils from across the globe, providing high quality public education about Earth history, alongside conducting its own scientific research.

The Natural History Museum, London (Image: David Iliff via Wikimedia Commons)

In conclusion, it cannot be denied that Owen’s personal character contributed to his lack of popularity amongst his peers and even eclipsed his own scientific achievements, whilst his intricately detailed writing style and nomenclature made much of his work less accessible to the modern reader. However, rightly Owen deserves credit for his contributions towards our understanding of man’s origins and the re-evaluation of Earth history and deep time.

Text copyright © 2015 Victoria Ling. All rights reserved.

References

Chambers, P. (2002)  Bones of Contention: The Archaeopteryx scandals.   John Murray.

Cosans, C. (2009)  Owen's Ape & Darwin's Bulldog: Beyond Darwinism and creationism. Indiana University Press.

Owen, R. (1843)  Lectures on the comparative anatomy and physiology of the invertebrate animals: delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons, in 1843.  Longman, Brown, Green and Longman.

Richards, E. (1987)  A question of property rights: Richard Owen's evolutionism reassessed.  British Journal of the History of Science 20, 129–171.

Rupke, N. (1993)  Richard Owen's vertebrate archetype. Isis84, 231-251.

Rupke, N. (1994)  Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist. Yale University Press.

Shindler, K. (2014)  Richard Owen: The greatest scientist you’ve never heard of.  The Daily Telegraph, 7 December 2010. (Accessed 04.02.2014)