Abstract
HOW LOCAL interactions between individuals in a human crowd or in a bee’s nest give rise to a group functioning as a single entity – how strong these interactions need to be, whether they are disbursed from a single leader or among equal individuals, whether there is a minimum number of individual organisms needed for the formation of the group – remained unclear, even after the pioneering work of Durkheim. But the problem of collective behavior at least had the advantage of possessing an indisputable underlying mechanism: interaction between individuals within the group. The problem of classification, however, was stymied on that front. Scholars attempting to group organisms in into species had no mechanism by which to organize their classificatory schemes. It is true that classification schemas based on common descent were proposed by Ray and others. But in most cases, common descent was nearly impossible to trace, and all natural historians could do in order to classify plants, for example, was to collect them and order them according to some parsing of their taxonomic properties. The key to classification did ultimately lie in common descent, but applying this concept to the classification of biological species was not potentiated until the discovery of deep geological time and the Darwinian revolution which followed.
Mr. Charles Darwin had the balls to ask –
R.E.M.
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- 1.
Cuvier did not at first include the nervous system among these critical processes, but he added it to the list in 1812 and eventually came to see it as dominant over the other systems (Appel 1987, pp. 43–46).
- 2.
It is important to emphasize (see Gould 2002, pp. 183–186) that Lamarck’s evolutionary theory was far subtler than the clichéd view most people know from textbooks, with the giraffe lengthening its neck to reach leaves on high branches. While Lamarck did argue for the inheritance of acquired characteristics, an inherent tendency toward increased complexity or perfection – which resulted in series of organisms moving upward along the chain of being throughout time – was an even more important element of his theory. He also held that new “simple” organisms at the base of the chain would arise by spontaneous generation, resulting in organisms mounting upward along the chain in a series of continually renewed “escalators”, some of which were farther advanced than others. Lamarck’s attempts to classify species, however, led him to conclude that the chain, such as it was, exhibited several branches, whose divergence was caused by a combination of environmental factors and the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Gould presents Lamarck’s view as envisioning a hierarchy of causal factors, but one can also interpret it as a tension between a “pulling apart” (branching) and a drawing together (tendency toward increased complexity or perfection). Interestingly, Lamarck also considered a biologically null model, in which the environment remained constant, presaging twentieth and twenty-first century studies of genetic drift and neutral theory in ecology.
- 3.
The term homology was first used in this sense by Richard Owen in 1843; following Owen’s change in usage, homology is still used today essentially to mean what Geoffroy called an “analogy”. For that reason, I use the “modern” term here in the description of Geoffroy’s ideas. See Gould (2002, pp. 1070ff), for a discussion of this lexical shift.
- 4.
According to Appel, Laurencet’s first name has been lost to history, as has been the original paper by Laurencet and Meyranx (Appel 1987, p. 145).
- 5.
- 6.
Burnet’s system also contains these elements of arrow and cycle, as Gould discusses in depth. Gould’s theme in Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle is how these two structural motifs have driven (and have been misrepresented in) the history of geology.
- 7.
Cuvier was strongly opposed to Hutton’s arguments, considering them an overly broad “system” in the same category as Geoffroy’s formalist taxonomy or the great chain of being.
- 8.
For example, Lyell presented Hutton as an empiricist champion of fieldwork. In fact, Hutton, though a gentleman farmer for a decade and a half, published the first version of his theory (1785) before seeing a single unconformity. Far from deducing a theory from observations, Hutton wrote that his “theory [was] confirmed from observations made on purpose to elucidate the subject” (Gould 1987, p. 72). Gould also points out that Hutton’s system was entirely cyclical, and contained no “arrow” metaphor, no vector of change. “The discoverer of deep time”, Gould acidly remarks, “denied history.”
- 9.
The name was actually bestowed by Whewell, in an 1832 review of Lyell’s work.
- 10.
There is a true irony in this, since Lyell’s criticism of Cuvier is based on the latter’s perceived abdication of empiricism; Cuvier, of course, attempted to dismember Geoffroy’s theories using the same tactic.
- 11.
This argument was originally presented in Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (Chap. 4). What follows in this paragraph is an outline of Gould’s analysis of Lyell’s rhetorical tactics.
- 12.
Robinet was later mocked by many in the scientific community for his belief in mermaids and mermen.
- 13.
Lovejoy (1964, p. 276) also raised the question of whether emergent properties are possible in a world defined by continuity and plenitude: does emergence imply discontinuity? (Note his early use of the contemporary buzzphrase “emergent property”!)
- 14.
This does not mean, of course, that the idea of nature in general, and stars in particular, did not also retain a metaphorical image as fixed and unchangeable: some seventy years later Keats was to write “Bright star! Would I were steadfast as thou art!”
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Bahar, S. (2018). Time, Just Time: Integrating Up the Great Chain of Being. In: The Essential Tension. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1054-9_3
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