darwin
Erasmus Darwin
05/14/2009 14:54
Erasmus Darwin translated Linnaeus from Latin to English, inventing dozens of botanical terms in the process. His two long poems, The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of Plants (combined as The Botanic Garden) introduced mainstream readers to the sciences, especially plant biology, with hundreds of pages of essays and notes explaining the concepts in Darwin’s verse. Erasmus used the poems to comment on the events of the day, making no secret of his support for abolition of slavery and the French Revolution.
Zoonomia was Erasmus Darwin’s major scientific publication and the leading medical/biological book of its day. Published in London in 1796, Zoonomia was reprinted the same year in New York, by “T. & J. Swords, printers to the Faculty of physic of Columbia College,” and again the following year by Thomas Dobson of Philadelphia. A “second edition” was published in 1803 by “Thomas and Andrews” of Boston. By 1818, a “Fourth American Edition” was printed in Philadelphia, by Edward Earle. The continued popularity of Zoonomia over more than two decades suggests a wide readership outside of medical schools. The 1815 “Catalog of the Library of the United States” lists Zoonomia, The Botanic Garden, and Erasmus’ posthumous poem, The Temple of Nature.
Like his grandson, Erasmus Darwin wrote about evolution through natural selection. Chapter 39 of Zoonomia, “On Generation,” presents Erasmus’ ideas on competition, extinction, and how “different fibrils or molecules are detached from…the parent…to form” the child. The Temple of Nature goes even farther, declaring “all vegetables and animals now existing were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones, formed by spontaneous vitality” in ancient oceans.
Zoonomia was immensely successful. In addition to American and Irish editions, it was translated into German, Italian, French and Portuguese. The European Magazine said Zoonomia “bids fair to do for Medicine what Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia has done for Natural Philosophy.” The Vatican responded to Darwin’s ideas by placing Zoonomia on its Index of banned books. The Temple of Nature was reviled by the Anti-Jacobin Review for its “total denial of any interference of a deity,” while the Gentleman’s Magazine called the poem “glaringly atheistical.” Even Erasmus one-time friend, Unitarian Joseph Priestley, said “if there be any such thing as atheism, this is certainly it.” Priestley was living in Pennsylvania by this time, and may have seen the poem in T. & J. Swords’ 1804 American edition.
Erasmus Darwin was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1793. His fame in the new United States may be partly due to his friendship with Franklin and sympathy for revolutionary struggles in America and France. And it may be partly due to Zoonomia, which was read widely in the nation’s new medical colleges. But Erasmus popularity among regular people may also spring from his straightforward, secular presentation of evolutionary ideas, and his skepticism of authority. Erasmus warned against unreasoning belief. “In regard to religious matters,” he said, “there is an intellectual cowardice instilled into the minds of people from their infancy; which prevents their inquiry: credulity is made an indispensable virtue; to inquire or exert their reason in religious matters is denounced as sinful; and…is punished with more severe penances than moral crimes.”
So the questions for me to address include, who read all these editions of Darwin in the U.S.? Was Darwin part of a written “tradition” including other popular, straight-talking skeptics like Franklin and Paine? What was it in Darwin’s writing that inspired so many people to name their children after him?
Erasmus in Darwin books
04/21/2009 11:57
There’s a rush to publish books on Darwin for his bicentennial. A pile of books on prominent display in the library. Half on Darwin and half on Lincoln. It’s great that people want to call attention to evolution, especially given the rise in Creationism and its cousins. But it’s interesting what people who write about Charles Darwin have to say about his grandfather, Erasmus.
David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (New York: WW Norton, 2006)
Discussing Charles Darwin’s thought process around 1837, Quammen says “As a heading on the first page of [notebook] ‘B’ he wrote “Zoonomia,” in genuflection to a book of that title published forty years earlier by his own grandfather” (27). He goes on to say that Erasmus was a boozy, gouty sire of bastards, and that “Zoonomia, mainly a medical treatise, included a section in which old Erasmus had floated evolutionary ideas of his own, suggesting that ‘all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament,’ and that the common lineage possessed a capacity ‘of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity,’ with those improvements transmissible from parents to offspring.” But “Erasmus Darwin had never pressed this idea too far, nor clarified it, nor supported it with evidence,” all things that Charles now committed himself to do. (28)
Quammen identifies both Erasmus and his son Robert as freethinkers (34), but suggests that Charles was afraid to go that far, because he was worried about an academic career.
Darwin was befriended at Edinburgh by “a dazzling young instructor,” Robert Grant. Grant “venerated” Erasmus Darwin “as an evolutionary pioneer” (72). Quammen doesn’t take the hint, and insists on calling him “old Erasmus” throughout.
Quammen mentions the Vestiges a few times in passing, without ever really explaining it or its place. In his story, it was racy, popular (he says Queen Victoria read it), and unprofessional. Darwin wanted to publish something better. Quammen says Darwin was hng up on the idea of evidence and solid references. Is this accurate, or anachronistic? Does it really stand, as an argument for Darwin’s apparent disrespect – not only for Vestiges, but for Zoonomia?
Cyril Aydon, Charles Darwin (New York: Caroll & Graf, 2002)
Aydon says he writes from a lifelong fascination with Darwin and his work. He describes Erasmus as a giant: “one of the most famous men in England. King George III had offered him the post of Royal Physician…He had written a book called The Botanic Garden, which set out the whole of current botanical knowledge in the form of an extended poem. It had taken literary London by storm. He later wrote a massive work on animal life, entitled Zoonomia, in which he put forward a theory of what would later come to be called evolution. The Zoonomia was one of the most talked-about books of its day. It was paid the complement of being pirated in New York, and the even greater compliment of being placed on the Papal Index.” (3)
“In July 1837, with his Journal ready for the press, [Darwin] opened a small brown notebook, and wrote on its title page the single word Zoonomia. It was the title of the book in which his grandfather Erasmus had set out his ideas on the subject of animal evolution sixty years before. Darwin had read it as a student, and found it unconvincing. His admiration had been reserved for Paley’s Natural Theology, and its Argument from Design. But now, at twenty-eight, as he began to set down his thoughts on the subject of species and their origins, from the perspective of his five-year voyage, Paley was dismissed, and he proudly, secretly, claimed his intellectual inheritance.” (122)
But still secretly. Timid Darwin. And Paley’s argument from design? Give me a break! Aydon blames some of Darwin’s timidity on his wealth, but also on the fact that Vestiges was savaged in the Edinburgh Reiview by Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s old Geology mentor. Aydon says Darwin imagined his own ideas being treated similarly, concluding “Whatever else ‘Mr. Vestiges’ had achielved, he had made it even less likely that Darwin would ever voluntarily expose his ideas to the risk of similar treatment.” (167)
Others (Michael Shermer) point out that when Charles left Edinburgh for Cambridge, he matriculated in Theology. Still others (Richard Darwin Keynes) suggest that Charles didn’t credit Erasmus, Lamarck, or anyone else because he thought the principle of development he was “proving” for the first time was actually so obvious as not to need acknowledgment. In this sense, Charles is supposed to have perceived himself as the guy who proved a point that should have been obvious to everyone? Doesn’t add up.
David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (New York: WW Norton, 2006)
Discussing Charles Darwin’s thought process around 1837, Quammen says “As a heading on the first page of [notebook] ‘B’ he wrote “Zoonomia,” in genuflection to a book of that title published forty years earlier by his own grandfather” (27). He goes on to say that Erasmus was a boozy, gouty sire of bastards, and that “Zoonomia, mainly a medical treatise, included a section in which old Erasmus had floated evolutionary ideas of his own, suggesting that ‘all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament,’ and that the common lineage possessed a capacity ‘of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity,’ with those improvements transmissible from parents to offspring.” But “Erasmus Darwin had never pressed this idea too far, nor clarified it, nor supported it with evidence,” all things that Charles now committed himself to do. (28)
Quammen identifies both Erasmus and his son Robert as freethinkers (34), but suggests that Charles was afraid to go that far, because he was worried about an academic career.
Darwin was befriended at Edinburgh by “a dazzling young instructor,” Robert Grant. Grant “venerated” Erasmus Darwin “as an evolutionary pioneer” (72). Quammen doesn’t take the hint, and insists on calling him “old Erasmus” throughout.
Quammen mentions the Vestiges a few times in passing, without ever really explaining it or its place. In his story, it was racy, popular (he says Queen Victoria read it), and unprofessional. Darwin wanted to publish something better. Quammen says Darwin was hng up on the idea of evidence and solid references. Is this accurate, or anachronistic? Does it really stand, as an argument for Darwin’s apparent disrespect – not only for Vestiges, but for Zoonomia?
Cyril Aydon, Charles Darwin (New York: Caroll & Graf, 2002)
Aydon says he writes from a lifelong fascination with Darwin and his work. He describes Erasmus as a giant: “one of the most famous men in England. King George III had offered him the post of Royal Physician…He had written a book called The Botanic Garden, which set out the whole of current botanical knowledge in the form of an extended poem. It had taken literary London by storm. He later wrote a massive work on animal life, entitled Zoonomia, in which he put forward a theory of what would later come to be called evolution. The Zoonomia was one of the most talked-about books of its day. It was paid the complement of being pirated in New York, and the even greater compliment of being placed on the Papal Index.” (3)
“In July 1837, with his Journal ready for the press, [Darwin] opened a small brown notebook, and wrote on its title page the single word Zoonomia. It was the title of the book in which his grandfather Erasmus had set out his ideas on the subject of animal evolution sixty years before. Darwin had read it as a student, and found it unconvincing. His admiration had been reserved for Paley’s Natural Theology, and its Argument from Design. But now, at twenty-eight, as he began to set down his thoughts on the subject of species and their origins, from the perspective of his five-year voyage, Paley was dismissed, and he proudly, secretly, claimed his intellectual inheritance.” (122)
But still secretly. Timid Darwin. And Paley’s argument from design? Give me a break! Aydon blames some of Darwin’s timidity on his wealth, but also on the fact that Vestiges was savaged in the Edinburgh Reiview by Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s old Geology mentor. Aydon says Darwin imagined his own ideas being treated similarly, concluding “Whatever else ‘Mr. Vestiges’ had achielved, he had made it even less likely that Darwin would ever voluntarily expose his ideas to the risk of similar treatment.” (167)
Others (Michael Shermer) point out that when Charles left Edinburgh for Cambridge, he matriculated in Theology. Still others (Richard Darwin Keynes) suggest that Charles didn’t credit Erasmus, Lamarck, or anyone else because he thought the principle of development he was “proving” for the first time was actually so obvious as not to need acknowledgment. In this sense, Charles is supposed to have perceived himself as the guy who proved a point that should have been obvious to everyone? Doesn’t add up.
Erasmus Darwins in Massachusetts
04/15/2009 18:30
That’s right. Erasmus Darwin came up with the idea that all life on earth was descended from a single microscopic ancestor in 1770. In 1796, he published the first volume of his Zoonomia, which was heralded as the Principia of the medical profession, and discusses his ideas on evolution. And in 1803, Darwin’s posthumous poem The Temple of Nature elaborated his position even more explicitly. Darwin also founded Birmingham’s Lunar Society, translated Linnaeus, and was a member of the Royal Society, the Linnean Society, and the American Philosophical Society. When his grandson Charles published On the Origin of Species, his critics thought they’d be able to silence him by quoting verbatim from tracts written against his grandfather’s theories.
Erasmus Darwin never visited America, and although he was a political radical and a supporter of American independence (and critic of the Pitt government’s repressions in the 1790s), I’m surprised that he was so well-known in a remote western-Massachusetts hill-town like Ashfield. Looking a little farther, I’ve found there are sixty-three towns in Massachusetts where children were apparently named after Darwin before 1849! I also found 96 towns where there is no record of a child named “Erasmus” or “Darwin” in the Vital Records. (these two groups represent all the towns whose records I was able to find online)
It’s possible that a few of the children named “Erasmus” may have been named for the fifteenth-century humanist, or for remote family members (close ones would have showed up in the records I was searching). But I think most of them were named for the scientist, especially because in most cases they’re actually named “Erasmus Darwin.” Similarly, there is no record of “Darwin” being a common family name in these Massachusetts towns, and Charles Darwin’s only significant publication before 1849 was his The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, published in 5 parts, 1838-1843.
In all, I found 112 children named “Erasmus,” “Erasmus Darwin,” “Darwin,” or, in a couple of cases, “Erastus Darwin.” But this initial search of Vital Record books available online missed 187 towns, whose records are not yet available electronically. So the odds are high that there are many more Erasmus Darwins I haven’t yet discovered!
As bizarre as the mere fact of all these young Darwins in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts towns, is where the towns were. If people were going to be naming their children after a British scientist (obscure or famous), you’d expect them to live in cities, close to institutions of higher learning like Harvard, wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be dead wrong.
Most of the people naming their children after Darwin lived in central or western Massachusetts. I found most of them in Worcester, Hampshire, and Franklin Counties. Though they weren’t completely absent from the Boston area, there were more towns close to the coast without a Darwin than with one. The towns marked in green on the map have at least one “Darwin.” Several have more than one. Two, Ashfield and Leominster, have six.
I’ve started looking into the histories of these towns, to see who these “Darwins” were. And, perhaps more importantly, who their parents were. In looking at the first dozen or so, it seems that some of them were educated people, ministers or doctors. Others were farmers, shoemakers, and tavern-keepers. The whole thing suggests that people in some of the remotest parts of Massachusetts were thinking about issues and reading books I would never have expected them to be so interested in. It’s a whole different picture of the intellectual life of regular people in the early 19th century than you get in the “standard” texts!
I’m going to try to write little sketches of the lives of some of these people, because I think they’ll turn up interesting insights. Maybe this’ll turn into something, if I can pull together enough of them and they turn up some of the surprises that seem to be lurking in this material…
Scientists
03/20/2009 16:05
John Gribbin, The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors (New York: Random House, 2002).
This is a conflicted book. The first thing the author tells us in the Introduction is that “the most important thing that Science has taught us about our place in the Universe is that we are not special.” Of course, he then goes on for 647 pages telling us all about the special people who proved this fact. He tells us that “what is much more important than human genius is the development of technology, and it is no surprise that the start of the scientific revolution ‘coincides’ with the development of the telescope and the microscope.” But technology is also developed by intelligent people – some might call them geniuses. And he repeatedly argues against rapid change, believing instead that “we see science progressing by evolution, not revolution.” (561) He reminds us that catastrophism was connected with religious arguments like the story of the Great Flood (314), which may explain some of his dislike for theories of rapid change. But the reader gets the impression he's arguing against Thomas Kuhn (an Amazon reviewer picked this up, too. Is Gribbin known for this? I haven't read anything else by him), even though he never mentions Kuhn.
The best feature of The Scientists is its focus on the wider cast of characters surrounding the well-known names, and on the families of the famous scientists and the environments they lived and worked in. This provides a basis for Gribbin’s argument that science advances through the contributions of many. The story of evolution is richer when Darwin is surrounded by Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, not to mention his grandfather Erasmus (who in addition to his original theories of evolution translated Linnaeus into English -- and who I’ve been interested in for a while, so I ordered Desmond King-Hele’s book on him) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Gribbin doesn’t mention Robert Chambers’ Vestiges). Similarly, Gribbin explains the connection between chemistry (molecular bonding and especially Linus Pauling’s discovery of hydrogen bonds), X-ray crystallography, and Watson & Crick’s elaboration of the DNA molecule. It’s interesting that Pauling (originally a quantum physicist) was quite close to solving the puzzle, and that Rosalind Franklin’s “crucial X-ray data” played a “vital role” in the building of the double-helix model, for which she never received proper credit. (565)
This is a conflicted book. The first thing the author tells us in the Introduction is that “the most important thing that Science has taught us about our place in the Universe is that we are not special.” Of course, he then goes on for 647 pages telling us all about the special people who proved this fact. He tells us that “what is much more important than human genius is the development of technology, and it is no surprise that the start of the scientific revolution ‘coincides’ with the development of the telescope and the microscope.” But technology is also developed by intelligent people – some might call them geniuses. And he repeatedly argues against rapid change, believing instead that “we see science progressing by evolution, not revolution.” (561) He reminds us that catastrophism was connected with religious arguments like the story of the Great Flood (314), which may explain some of his dislike for theories of rapid change. But the reader gets the impression he's arguing against Thomas Kuhn (an Amazon reviewer picked this up, too. Is Gribbin known for this? I haven't read anything else by him), even though he never mentions Kuhn.
The best feature of The Scientists is its focus on the wider cast of characters surrounding the well-known names, and on the families of the famous scientists and the environments they lived and worked in. This provides a basis for Gribbin’s argument that science advances through the contributions of many. The story of evolution is richer when Darwin is surrounded by Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, not to mention his grandfather Erasmus (who in addition to his original theories of evolution translated Linnaeus into English -- and who I’ve been interested in for a while, so I ordered Desmond King-Hele’s book on him) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Gribbin doesn’t mention Robert Chambers’ Vestiges). Similarly, Gribbin explains the connection between chemistry (molecular bonding and especially Linus Pauling’s discovery of hydrogen bonds), X-ray crystallography, and Watson & Crick’s elaboration of the DNA molecule. It’s interesting that Pauling (originally a quantum physicist) was quite close to solving the puzzle, and that Rosalind Franklin’s “crucial X-ray data” played a “vital role” in the building of the double-helix model, for which she never received proper credit. (565)
