Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral - David Dobbs (2005)

Part I

Chapter 6. Transmutation

I

ALEXANDER AGASSIZ’S response to the controversy over Darwinism offers one of science history’s more adept displays of fence sitting. He managed never to take a clear public stand either for or against Darwin’s main tenets. But privately and between the lines of his often rather dense technical publications, Alexander revealed a slow but certain conversion to evolution. He always rejected the more speculative flights that sent some Darwin supporters out Gray’s garret window. The empiricism he shared with Gray however, led him to a similar if more private acceptance. It did not happen overnight. But over the decade or so following Origin, Alexander embraced some of the most radical elements of Darwin’s theory, including those most fundamentally opposed to his father’s thinking.

At first, Alexander did not seem to see that a son can’t fight his father’s battles any more than a father can his son’s. In early 1863, while Theo Lyman was still in Europe, Alex wrote asking him to check some fish specimens in London to bolster Louis’s arguments against Asa Gray, who was being “uncooperative.” He also asked Theo to sniff around Germany to see who was spreading rumors there about Louis’s authorship fight with Henry Clark. In defending his father he indulged and took on some of his vindictiveness. Of Christian Hansen, one of first rebels to leave the museum in the early 1860s, Alex wrote to Theo in late 1863:

Alexander Agassiz, circa 1860, the year The Origin of Species changed the landscape of science

I heard today that Hansen tried to cut his throat in Scot land …; his neck being too fat he did not cut half deep enough to reach any vital part. He has been stiched up and he is alive and kicking. It seems [a pity] to be so fat that you can not kill yrself by hanging drowning or cutting your throat. The only thing left for him to do is to swallow a shell with a long fuse and then explode it, perhaps he will burst, but perhaps his fat will save him again.

Clearly Alex, watching his father besieged on the eve of the Salem secession, does not yet see how avidly Louis cooked his own grief It naturally pained him to see his father rail and flail as he found him self rejected by students and forced from the center of American science. That Alex himself suffered Louis’s excesses, scrambling to patch relations, fill vacancies, and defer debtors, only made it harder. Thus the cycles of frustration, anger, and distress, each one ending in a bitter crash after which he would foreswear heroics and pledge to distance himself

Alexander Agassiz faced a particularly vexing challenge in con fronting Darwinism. Even for other scientists, the early, rapid polarization of the dispute between Darwinists and traditionalists made it hard to weigh the scientific issues dispassionately. Absorbing Darwinism demanded difficult choices and the sometimes excruciating rejection of long-held assumptions-a sort of secular exorcism. Even Darwin’s prime defenders flinched at this task. Huxley, Lyell, and most other early Darwin allies rejected natural selection, and even Gray, one of the few to accept it, would not acknowledge it as a completely mechanistic force. Yet Alex had to grapple with Darwinism as the son, prime assistant, and housemate of the scientist most famous for opposing it.

In retrospect, Alex separated the personal from the scientific remarkably well. He did this by considering the theory privately, well outside of the ideological battle that was consuming his father, and by rejecting the most extreme and rigid ideas coming from either side. In an important sense he responded to this central intellectual and philosophical conflict of his time much as his acquaintance and sometime dinner companion William James responded to the Civil War: He sought a sort of scientific pragmatism. Pragmatism was the name of the school of philosophy established in the post-Civil War years by James and his colleagues and friends Charles Peirce (Ben’s son), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., John Dewey, and others. It was a roughly relativist philosophy that had as a chief tenet a scepticism of all ideology and absolutist thought. James and his philosopher friends (most of them acquaintances of Alex’s) had gained this leeriness by witnessing (and in the case of the thrice-wounded Holmes, directly suffering) the butchery of the Civil War, which they saw as partly a clash between fiercely held ideologies-national unity and abolition in the North and slavery and states’ rights in the South.

Likewise, Alexander viewed skeptically the more strident expressions of Darwinism and creationism because he had seen the mad ness made when scientists took theory as dogma.

He sought a place less wearing to stand, one to advance from rather than defend. During the period in which he was venting to Theo about conniving students, he was also cursing the difficulties of living with a righteous idealist. In the same letter in which he imagined detonating the hapless Hansen, for instance, he lamented the departure of another, clearly more valuable student-assistant. A month later he complained of Louis’s fury at Asa Gray, of whom “it is dangerous,” he wrote, “to speak … in father’s presence.” Over the following months he ceased regularly defending his father and assumed a still-aggravated but more distant point of observation. He railed at the worst personal indignities Louis suffered. But he increasingly saw the damage Louis’s imperiousness caused the museum and himself

Father I am sorry to say is in no better condition than he was last summer. The boils on his head are as thick as blackberries and keep him in a perfect fever day and night. He will not have a pleasant summer and has thus far not done a thing. He walks into the Laboratory once in the morning and that is all for the day.

It is no coincidence that it was about this time that Alex began thinking more independently about Darwinism. In early 1864 he wrote to Fritz Müller, a German zoologist becoming known as a Darwin champion, expressing what might be called his growing scientific pragmatism. His statements are striking given Louis’s presence in the same building.

Nothing will give me greater pleasure than to answer your questions about [a phylum of marine invertebrates that both Alex and Müller studied] and Darwin. It is only by discussing these broad questions in the most unprejudiced manner that we may hope to arrive at the truth, and mere dogmatic expressions of opinion ought never to influence us in the least, no matter what the source from which they come, and how great the authority may be. I trust that henceforth in Natural History, workers will not allow themselves to be biased by any weight of authority, either on one side or the other, but will examine the facts and carefully analyze them to see what they mean. We should not have so many wild theories in our science, did not every one who has studied a subject give generally such disproportionate importance to the particular part which they have examined.

This is the language of one warning of the costs of righteous narrow-mindedness. He then silently refutes his father even while rejecting Darwin:

With regard to the Darwinian theory, it seems to me to be only bringing up the same arguments as those used by Lamarck, only backed up by greater research and greater knowledge. The same objections which were fatal to the Lamarckian theory … will in due time cause the death of [Darwin’s] theories; but good his scrutiny has undoubtedly done, as it is always a salutary thing for science to have a skillful skeptic attack its most religiously held dogmas.

Though Alex went on in this letter to mount an embryological argument against Darwin’s theory (an argument he would later drop during his correspondence with Müller), his repudiation of Louis’s reaction to that theory is clear. What Louis rejected as “unscientific” and “mischievous,” Alex receives as a well-informed, constructive argument founded on extensive research and knowledge. While he has not yet accepted Darwin, he has done something for the time more important: He has found a stance distinct from his father’s by rejecting the ideologization of science by which Louis rose and fell.

This stance freed Alex intellectually and emotionally to pursue his own path in science. For the time, however, he was starting to feel stuck at the museum. The war increased his restlessness; things went so poorly for the North in 1864 that he began preparing the museum and his own affairs for his resignation so he could enlist. By early 1865 he had things ready for his departure.

That spring, of course, Louis took off for Brazil; and with the war going better, Alex agreed to stay and tend the museum. But his restlessness increased while Louis was gone. Though he no longer faced constant reversal of his organizational efforts, he missed the income Louis usually brought in, especially after a closer, unimpeded look at the accounts unearthed previously undisclosed debts. Des perately needing seven thousand dollars to pay one debt, he secured another by offering as security his father’s library and the land on which stood the family house. It was either that, he wrote Theo, “or shut up [the] Museum for the year and pay the thing from income… Things cannot go on as we are now.”

2

Soon came an opportunity that not only sprang Alex from the museum but permanently solved the institution’s financial problems. In 1865 Alex’s uncle, Quincy Shaw, received a visit from a mining surveyor seeking investors for an idle copper mine, the Calumet, that he had found in Upper Michigan. Shaw, familiar with the area from his Oregon Trail trip, promptly visited the site and liked what he saw. When he returned he asked Alex, who had studied mining for his engineering degree, to see if he thought there was some way to extract the copper at reasonable cost. Alex traveled to Michigan to look at the Calumet mine soon after Louis returned in August 1866. What he saw so overwhelmed his usual pessimism that on return he told Shaw he should buy the whole outfit. He then borrowed ten thousand dollars from Theo so he could buy a stake too. Shaw bought a majority share, and Theo, Alex’s sisters, and several other family members bought in as well. Shaw hired Alex to get the mine going, and in March 1867, leaving Theo in charge of the museum’s finances, Alex traveled by train to Upper Michigan, where Annie, five-year-old George, and infant Max soon joined him.

For the following eighteen months, Alex left the world of science almost completely (though he did find time to write papers on the ducks and beaver dams he saw everywhere in Michigan) and engaged instead the challenge of making a poorly operating mine successful. Working one long week after another for months, learning every detail of the mine’s operation, he efficiently solved the mine’s two main problems: how to extract the property’s diffuse copper from the soil and how to efficiently transport large quantities of copper to market. When he arrived in March, the Calumet mine was running on a skeleton crew and losing money. When he left eighteen months later, it was operating at full crew, expanding its shaft and transport- ton systems, and producing more copper every month. It began paying dividends in December 1869, and within five years it ranked among the world’s most productive mines. During the 1870s and 1880s, still under Alexander’s directorship, it would produce half the nation’s copper, and it continued to yield large amounts and profits for the next five decades. Alex also made what were then progressive labor innovations, establishing injury and pension funds and building schools, hospitals, and libraries for the several thousand families whose incomes depended on the mines.

While Alex did not return from Michigan rich, he and the other family investors soon knew they would do quite well, and indeed they did. The earliest investors eventually saw returns exceeding 10,000 percent. This bonanza would save Quincy Shaw from financial ruin, for he lost almost all his immense family fortune in a banking collapse in early 1867. But though Shaw began 1870 on the verge of bankruptcy and financial scandal (having borrowed from a family trust fund), he ended it on his way to being obscenely wealthy. Theo Lyman, meanwhile, still blessed monetarily as well as every other way, simply became trebly rich. Alex’s sisters also grew flush. And Alex, who had invested more heavily than anyone but Shaw, borrowing from Theo the stunning sum of $110,000 altogether to invest in the early going, eventually became one of the United States’ richest citizens, earning many millions from the mine alone. From the mid-1870s on, he would be able to pursue science with a freedom that few have ever known.

When he first returned from Michigan in October 1868, how ever, he was excited less about his prospects for wealth than about simply returning to science. The museum for once did not seem to need him. Theo had guarded the books well, curbing Louis’s worst excesses, and Louis had charmed another $150,000 out of the legislature to expand the building. Alex left well enough alone, taking only a few background duties from Theo and advising on the building expansion but otherwise keeping his distance. He seemed deter mined to preserve his newly won independence. For the first time, he and Annie rented their own home, a small house near the museum. Mornings she would walk him to his office, where, surrounded by cases and drawers of specimens he and Theo had unpacked years before, he resumed his work.

He concentrated primarily on a project he had tended intermittently for years, an exhaustive account of the great marine phylum echinodermata: the world’s starfish, brittle stars, sea urchins, sand dollars, and sea cucumbers. Alex, fascinated by these animals since he’d hunted them as a boy, had studied them seriously since his student days. In the early 1860s he had published several articles and monographs that made him an authority on this much-studied clade. Now he wanted to write the comprehensive taxonomy he had long pondered. Consolidating his existing research over the winter of 1868-1869, he entered the spring of 1869 feeling he had done everything he could from Cambridge and now needed, if the thing was to be complete, to visit several collections in Europe. But though he would soon be rich, he yet lacked the means. Here one of his father’s many wealthy friends, James Lawrence (yet another textile millionaire), stepped forward to underwrite the trip, insisting that Alex take Annie and the boys. The money, Lawrence truthfully assured him, would hardly be missed, and the cause was good. Alex accepted.

In September 1869, not quite a year after he had returned from Michigan, Alex and family sailed from Boston for Liverpool. Over the next fourteen months he took what amounted to a scientific grand tour, traveling all over western and central Europe, examining every zoological collection that held echninoderms. He visited Lon don, Belfast, and Paris; Rome, Florence, Bologna, and Venice; Berlin, Hamburg, Bonn, Munich, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Würzberg, Leipzig, Vienna, Breslau, and Kiel; Copenhagen and Stockholm; doubled back to Switzerland to hike with Annie and show her the train platform where he’d stomped on his violin; and finally returned to Great Britain.

He was widely received as both the son of the famous Louis and, thanks to his own publications and the clear knowledge he showed of his subject, a promising scientist in his own right. His reception gave him a survey not just of museums but of scientific perspectives, from the idealist ruminations of Ernst Haeckel, whom he visited in Jena, to the hard-eyed empiricism of the English. “Haeckel I liked extremely,” he wrote Liz Cary his most frequent correspondent after Theo; “he is, however, of a most enthusiastic disposition and in the Okenistic direction he has taken he is doing himself a great deal of harm. [Oken, who had taught Louis Agassiz as well as Haeckel, was a leader of the Naturphilosophie school.] He has left the positive for the speculative, and indulges in fancies which are more like the dreams of Swedenborg than Natural History.”

This might have been Asa Gray speaking. And given Alex’s Gray like devotion to empiricism, it’s unsurprising that he felt most com fortable among Gray’s friends in England. His reception there was particularly warm. Gray had given them good advance notice several years before, writing Darwin that he “expected better things” of Alex than what Louis had become, and since then Alex’s own sparse but intelligent correspondence with Darwin himself had confirmed his promise. He spent over a month altogether in London, enjoying himself thoroughly.

“Britain is great,” he wrote Theo. “I have been perfectly feasted since I came to London, have seen all the swells … and taken a good dose of their claret which is usually very good. Huxley I like particularly.”

It neither intimidated Alex nor put him off that most of these men had championed the cause that brought his father low. He met and liked not just Darwin and Huxley but Lyell, Hooker, and Wallace, the cofounder of the theory of natural selection. The man he liked least was Richard Owen, the superintendent of natural history at the British Museum, who gained extra fame as the most prominent British scientist to stiffly resist Darwinism. Owen struck Alex as vain and grandiose.

Darwin, on the other hand, Alex found to be “the most simple and unpretending man I have met and exceedingly cordial,” as he told Theo. Alex visited him twice, once soon after arriving and again shortly before he returned to America. Darwin did not often go to town, so Alex and Anna traveled to Down. Alex carried with him a letter of introduction from his father advising Darwin that he would “find Alex more ready to accept your views than I will ever be. So he proved. He and Anna spent the whole day with the Darwins, having what Alex described to Theo as “a very pleasant time” during which the conviviality (or perhaps the claret) apparently went to Alex’s head. For it was here at Down that Alex, clearly charmed by Darwin, possibly emboldened by his father’s letter, and likely loosened up by almost two months of socializing and study with Darwin’s empirical friends, finally felt it safe to tell someone-Darwin of all people- that he believed in evolution. So Darwin relates, in a letter written immediately after Alex’s first visit, to Fritz Müller, the German zoologist and evolutionist to whom Alex had written several years before about Darwin, embryology, and the value of questioning dogma:

We liked [Alexander] very much. He is a great admirer of yours, and he tells me that your correspondence and book first made him believe in evolution. This must have been a great blow to his father.

It is both stunning and completely in character-revealingly typical-that amid all available written record the first clear statements of Alex’s belief in evolution appear in letters penned by his father and Charles Darwin. Whence the conversion? Judging from his confession to Darwin, Alex’s swing had come between 1864 and 1867, a period during which he and Müller discussed at length the embryological evidence for evolution that Müller presented in his 1864 Für Darwin. Alex was then studying the embryonic forms of various classes of echinoderms and finding their close resemblance suggestive of common descent, much as Gray had with plant specimens. If Darwin’s letter is accurate (and he had little reason to lie), Alex, like Gray, became convinced of evolution when a respected colleague persuaded him to take a fresh look at the evidence before his own eyes. It is strange that Alex apparently didn’t confess directly to Müller his apparently Müller-inspired conversion, especially as Müller had been one of Alex’s first friends from the larger world of science, having thrilled Alex by writing a kind response to one of his earliest papers on echinoderms. But though Alex’s long-running correspondence with Müller includes some of Alex’s frankest, most unguarded letters, none of them refer to this conversion. Alex seems to have felt it proper to inform the principals in the Darwin-Agassiz dispute of his beliefs while seeing no reason to tell anyone else. He probably confided his belief in evolution to Theo and other friends. And he obviously had to his father, at least by late 1869, apparently without hard feelings. Now he had confessed the same to Darwin himself. Yet he kept a public silence ever afterward.

He would hold his cards almost as close in writing the Revision of the Echini, which he took up in earnest as soon as he returned home in November 1870. He worked hard on it for two strong years at the museum, in a new, bigger house he and Anna rented, and in summers at the coast. He produced a specialist’s tome: meticulous, thorough, detailed, and largely unapproachable. Most of its 762 pages are devoted to defining the anatomical and embryological distinctions of the five classes and many orders, families, and genera into which he categorized the thousands of known species of echinoderm. Like Gray’s botanical publications, the Revision is an empirical work of the most fundamental sort, drawing heavily on the author’s own first hand observation of specimens. It was almost all description and definition. This 1873 publication was mostly indistinguishable, in other words, from a taxonomic work that Alex or any other smart, punctilious zoologist might have written before Darwin blew things up in 1859.

Yet the Revisions few pages of interpretation embrace one of Darwin’s least obvious but most vital and troublesome insights. Of all the ideas Darwin pushed, none was more fundamentally and deeply radical than the notion that species were categories of taxonomic convenience rather than real divisions in nature. Darwin did not simply say that borders between species changed as the species altered; he insisted that the borders were arbitrary boundaries imposed by our own needs, like lines on a map, their artifice proven by evolution. Species, in other words, were quite literally “only strongly defined varieties,” as Darwin had put it to Gray, for a species was not a more specific real thing than a variety was, but only a firmer semantic category.

This concept proved hard for many scientists, much less laypeople, to swallow. It infuriated fixed-species creationists like Louis. And it defied long-held assumptions and habits of Western thinking, particularly in science. It contradicted the essentialist and determinist principles then accepted as science’s bedrock, for instance, for it ultimately denied that we could know or calculate anything about the biological world, or at least about species, with absolute certainty. It insisted that you practiced biology not with sure laws and categories but with probabilities and flexible definitions. It also defied the “common sense” notion that words named things rather than just our ideas about things. People could buy that one thing could turn into another; it was harder to believe that the one thing was an arbitrary category to start with.

A working taxonomist could accept this idea readily enough, however, for it explained why the occasional specimen lay maddeningly on the border between species: The border did not really exist. It was just an instrument handy to our need to classify

Alex had run smack into this problem while parsing echinoderms. In 1872 he had written Darwin that
the number of young I have been compelled to examine has led me to modify my views of the nature of genera, species, and in fact of all subdivisions. I cannot find anything that is stable … and the gradual passage in Echini of the most widely separated groups leaves in my mind but little doubt that our classification is nothing but the most arbitrary convenient tool.

He could hardly reject more completely his father’s definition of the reality of species, genera, families, and orders. But this was just a private letter to Darwin. Would he say as much in public?

He did, if less plainly, in the Revision of the Echini. There he made a plea for a more flexible taxonomy that recognized that species boundaries are vague and arbitrary.

Are we to attempt to define with mathematical accuracy what we mean by a species … ? [We might] as well attempt to solve an equation of an infinite number of unknown quantities… The fact is, … we can no longer define species as is custom ary… [Yet] we need not trouble ourselves as to the metaphysical existence of species, genera, etc., or because we have no suitable definition of species applying to all classes of the animal kingdom. … It matters only … that we should distinctly state the limits we assign to these categories in some way readily understood; and this the individuals or groups of individuals belonging to the different categories will supply.

In other words, it should not cripple us to realize that species are arbitrary categories of our thought rather than fixed expressions of God’s; we need only have good working definitions that let us use fully classify what we find in the wild.

It’s a utilitarian, almost obvious idea, but a necessary one in response to the realization that the world does not exist in objectively real categories. A dog is not a dog; it’s a creature matching our ideas about dogness. In recognizing this, Alexander moved from the knowable world of Cuvier and Newton, in which nature and its laws could be cleanly known, to the murkier world of Darwin, in which you must employ, constantly revising, what you recognize are simply the best working definitions and ideas at hand. He had moved, in short, from eighteenth-century essentialism to twentieth-century pragmatism, and thus to the beginning of modernism, with all its doubts and uncertainties.