Archetype

Taxonomy’s rightful place in history

A talk given last February 13 by paleontologist Niles Eldredge in Lisbon perfectly exemplified the general opinion regarding how little role Taxonomy played in the development of the modern Theory of Evolution. Already in a hurry after spending too much time talking about Darwin’s childhood, he reached a slide showing some barnacles and said “oh, by the way, Darwin spend some time on the taxonomy of barnacles, but this didn’t have any relevance to the development of his theory”, next slide. That was it. Taxonomy is but an unnecessary extra slide in the history of evolutionary biology. To be fair to Eldredge, his talk entitled “Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life” was not an specialized talk but rather was meant for the general public of all ages wondering what was all the excitement about Darwin this year.

In a paper published today in the journal Taxon, historian Mary P. Winsor asserts that, in telling the history of the Theory of Evolution, Taxonomy has been unfairly left out. Most of the history written about Darwin, and still often repeated, is that he had his theory of natural selection ready when he wrote his Sketch of 1842, and after that he just sat down on it for almost two decades before publishing the Origin of Species in 1859 after receiving a wake-up letter from Alfred R. Wallace. However many historians have now argued that those sixteen odd years were crucial in shaping Darwin’s theory and that, rather than been in isolation during those years, he actively sought the latest scientific achievements in natural history in an attempt to formulate a refined theory capable of synthesis¹. For many 1800′s naturalists, transmutationists or not, the taxonomic arrangement of groups within groups was such an achievement that provided evidence that organism were truly related to one another. One obstacle in appreciating this simple reading of history is that, for us twentieth-first-century-evolutionists, it is hard to imagine how can someone think of organism as truly related to each other if not phylogenetically.

Winsor ask the reader to see the conceptual relationship between taxonomy and Darwin in an analogous (homologous?) way to the relationship between the work of Copernicus and that of Newton. Darwin, like Newton, set himself the task of providing a causal explanation, a process, capable of explaining the patterns in Nature. And in the same way that the accepted work of Copernicus on planetary motions provided the patterns to be explained by Newton, so for Darwin the accepted patterns crying for explanation, the tree of life alluded in the title of Eldredge’s talk, came from Taxonomy. Darwin’s theory of evolution had to be able to explain the occurrence of groups within groups, it had to be able to account for divergent evolution.

Presented in this clear way, the importance of taxonomy seems so straightforward and unproblematic that one may ask why wasn’t this accepted before? Winsor points to the by-now usual suspect: the essentialism story. This is the view first articulated by Ernst Mayr and followed by many since that maintains that taxonomists before Darwin were victims of a severe case of typological thinking, believing each species has an essence, and thus committing them to fixity of species. After Darwin, the story goes, everyone just got smarter². Winsor work in the last few years has shown that this is a distorted view of history.

Winsor’s paper is a nice addition to a body of growing literature by historians and philosophers reexamining the natural sciences made in the 1800′s and bringing taxonomy, morphology and embryology to their rightful places in history.

Addendum: Read more about Mary P. Winsor’s paper on Evolving Thoughts, including Darwin’s consideration of the then popular Quinarian system.

References and notes

Winsor, Mary P. (2009). Taxonomy was the foundation of Darwin’s evolution Taxon, 58 (1), 43-49

Tags: Charles Darwin, Mary P. Winsor, Taxonomy, Typological thinking

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