A given animal or plant appears to be contained, as it were, within a sphere of variation; one individual lies near one portion of the surface, another individual, of the same species, near another part of the surface; the average animal at the center.
Common experience, Jenkin affirms, supports his view. Artificial selection practiced by breeders proceeds rapidly at first but soon reaches frustrating limits. Jenkin writes of racehorses:
Hundreds of skillful men are yearly breeding thousands of racers. Wealth and honor await the man who can breed one horse to run one part in five thousand faster than his fellows. As a matter of experience, have our racers improved in speed by one part in a thousand during the last twenty generations?
Darwin, Jenkin claims, maintains an unwarranted faith in the power of simple time to overcome these barriers:
The difference between six years and six myriads, blending by a confused sense of immensity, leads men to say hastily that if six or sixty years can make a pouter out of a common pigeon, six myriads may change a pigeon to something like a thrush; but this seems no more accurate than to conclude that because we observe that a cannon-ball has traversed a mile in a minute, therefore in an hour it will be sixty miles off, and in the course of ages that it will reach the fixed stars.
Darwin might argue, Jenkin admits, that once a species reaches the limit of its glass sphere, time will eventually reconstitute this edge as a new center and produce a new sphere around the previously peripheral point. Jenkin also rejects this argument:
The average or original race…will [in Darwin’s view] spontaneously lose the tendency to relapse and acquire a tendency to vary outside the sphere. What is to produce this change? Time simply, apparently…. This seems rather like the idea that keeping a bar of iron hot or cold for a long time would leave it permanently hot or cold at the end of the period when the heating or cooling agent was withdrawn.
Jenkin’s second section, on types of variation, begins by admitting Darwin’s point that small-scale recurrent variations will not be destroyed by blending. But these are the very variations subject to strict limits by the previous argument about rigid spheres. What kind of variation might then induce the evolution of something substantially new? Single sports might seem promising, but these are the rare events that will be swamped by blending—and readers may now note the point that Jenkin himself wished to make with the only part of his argument that we remember. But perhaps some kinds of sports do not blend and do perpetuate their kind. Fine, Jenkin admits. Perhaps such creatures do occasionally arise and produce new species. But such a process is not Darwinian evolution, for Darwin insisted that natural selection acts as a creative force by gradually accumulating favorable variants. Indeed, would such a process be very different from what the vernacular calls “creation”?
The third part argues that even if Darwin could find (which he can’t) some way to accumulate small-scale recurrent variations into something new, geology does not supply enough time for such a slow process. Here Jenkin relied on the false arguments of his dearest friend, Lord Kelvin, about the earth’s relatively young age (see Essay 8, on Kelvin, in The Flamingo’s Smile).
The last section presents a powerful (and I think entirely correct) argument about the difficulty of inferring historical pathways from current situations. Jenkin contends that nearly any current situation can arise via several historical routes; thus the situation by itself cannot specify the pathway. Jenkin points out that Darwin bases much of his argument upon the lack of definite boundaries in nature—the intergradation of species into species, or geographic region into region. Darwin’s continuationism predicts just such an absence of boundaries since species are gradually and imperceptibly changed into their descendants, while a creator should leave gaps between his incarnated objects. But Jenkin argues that many natural items come as continua, yet clearly do not arise by a process of historical transformation. Arguing, as he does throughout, by metaphor and analogy, Jenkin writes:
Legal difficulties furnish another illustration. Does a particular case fall within a particular statute? Is it ruled by this or that precedent? The number of statutes or groups is limited; the number of possible combinations of events almost unlimited.
Taken as an entirety, Jenkin’s argument possesses a kind of relentless logic. The critique of Darwin’s extrapolationism serves as its unifying theme. Part one argues that small-scale variation cannot extend beyond fixed limits. Part two claims that no style of variation can make something substantially new in a Darwinian world. Part three proposes that even if Darwin could find a way, geology does not permit enough time. Finally, part four holds that we cannot infer historical transformations from the admitted continua of nature.
I don’t want to fall into a Whiggish pit and judge Jenkin by current standards (everything that has gone before in this essay adequately discharges, I hope, my dues to anti-Whiggery). But old arguments usually repay our close attention because we often stop discussing the fundamentals once an orthodoxy triumphs, and we need to consult the original debates in order to rediscover the largest issues—perhaps never really resolved but merely swept under a rug of concord. Much of Jenkin’s argument fails today, for few things last a century in science. He was clearly wrong about blending in part two and about time in part three. But I believe that he was right about continua in part four and that we are still plagued by a tendency to make an almost automatic inference about history when we fail to find clear boundaries.
The first argument about limits of variation has also risen again in current debates about evolutionary processes. I don’t accept Jenkin’s metaphor of the sphere, because small quantitative changes can accumulate to qualitative effects or leaps (contrary to Jenkin’s position), and because I accept Darwin’s argument that new spheres can be reconstituted about previously peripheral points.
But neither (probably) is a species the kind of almost equipotential sphere that strict Darwinians envisaged—unconstrained and capable of rolling anywhere that natural selection pushes. Constraints imposed by genetics and development have emerged as a central topic in contemporary evolutionary debate—and Fleeming Jenkin did present an insight worth considering.
In short, Darwin’s strictly extrapolationist vision may not describe large-scale evolution very well—small, local adaptations built in the refiner’s fire of Darwinian competition among organisms struggling for reproductive success may not, by extension, explain trends that persist for millions of years or relays of changing diversity that mass extinctions produce. Jenkin, who presented the most logical dissection of Darwin’s continuationist vision in 1867, does reach across a century to set us thinking, however superannuated his specific claims.
We may give the last word to Jenkin, via Robert Louis Stevenson. One day as a young man, Stevenson reports, Fleeming Jenkin argued bitterly with two young women about a pressing issue of Victorian hypermorality: Can a misdeed against moral codes ever be condoned, whatever the circumstances—stealing a knife to prevent a murder, for example? (Jenkin, to his credit, argued the affirmative.) As he left the house, his anger mellowed. He realized that even the most apparently peculiar belief deserves respect if argued honorably and if properly constructed upon a set of basic premises different from those usually cherished:
From such passages-at-arms, many retire mortified and ruffled; but Fleeming had no sooner left the house than he fell into delighted admiration of the spirit of his adversaries. From that it was but a step to ask himself “what truth was sticking in their heads” for even the falsest form of words (in Fleeming’s life-long opinion) reposed upon some truth.
Postscript
My parochialism and ignorance in the case of Fleeming Jenkin were even deeper than I had realized. Having corrected the most blatant omission of failing to recognize the importance of his mainline career in engineering, I discovered, after publishing this essay, that I had also missed a tangential foray equal in importance to Jenkin’s critique of Darwin. Several professors of e
conomics wrote to inform me that Jenkin had made cogent contributions to the “dismal science” as well.
Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., of Auburn University, stated:
Jenkin, an engineer by training, was the first English economist to draw and clearly understand supply and demand curves, the most familiar staple in all of economics. In two amazing essays, published in 1868 and 1870, Jenkin developed demand and supply theory, applied it to labor markets, and introduced an innovative combination of stock and flow concepts for analyzing market fluctuations.
Christopher Bell of Davidson College then sent me an article from Oxford Economics Papers (Volume 15, 1963) by A. D. Brownlie and M. F. Lloyd Prichard entitled “Professor Fleeming Jenkin, 1833–1885, Pioneer in Engineering and Political Economy.” This fascinating article cites the opinion of the great economist J. A. Schumpeter (1883–1950), who regarded Jenkin as “an economist of major importance, whose main papers…form an obvious stepping stone between J. S. Mill and Marshall.”
In a time of great industrial strife, and considerable opposition to trade unionism, Jenkin used his quantitative analysis of supply and demand to defend, as practical and necessary, the rights of workers to form associations for collective bargaining. He wrote that “the total abolition of trade unions is out of the question as impolitic, undeserved, and impossible…[But] we must insist that the great power granted to the bodies of workmen shall be administered under stringent regulations.”
Jenkin, scarcely a radical in politics, favored no massive redistribution of wealth, but only some minor tinkering for greater satisfaction and productivity of workers. He wrote: “Great inequality is necessary and desirable (observations seem to show that trade will extend faster with large profits and small wages than with small profits and large wages).” For, basically, Jenkin held firm to the ideals of the laissez-faire system so strongly identified with the intellectual history of his nation, particularly with Adam Smith in his own home city of Edinburgh. Jenkin wrote:
We cannot deny that each man, acting rationally for his own advantage, will conduce to the good of all; and if the motive be not the highest, it is one which at least can always be counted on.
Yet Jenkin tempered the harshness of pure laissez-faire with a realization that the central argument, practically applied by people in power, almost always acted as a rationale for unfairness toward workers. He wrote:
They [laborers] think it monstrous that one of two parties to a bargain should be told to shut his eyes and open his hands and take the wages fixed by Political Economy, which allegorical personage looks very like an employer on pay day.
A wonderful irony pervades all these themes, one that only an evolutionary biologist could fully identify and appreciate. Brownlie and Lloyd Prichard point out that Jenkin’s economic writings were consigned to oblivion, largely because the two great opinion makers of later nineteenth-century English economics, Jevons and Marshall, “treated him shabbily to say the least.” (Both Jevons and Marshall sensed that the “amateur” Jenkin had anticipated some of the “original” work that served as a basis of their own reputations. They therefore sought to disparage and discredit, and then to ignore, this gifted thinker, who did only limited work in economics and did not really threaten their turf, or even their prestige, in any large sense—an act, all too characteristic, alas, of conventional academic ungenerosity.)
Now, the irony: Jenkin was, basically, a proponent of the laissez-faire school. Darwin, as I have often argued in these essays, established his central theory of natural selection by importing the structure of Adam Smith’s economic arguments into nature (with organisms struggling for individual reproductive success as the analogue of “each man, acting rationally for his own advantage” in Jenkin’s quotation—and with organic progress and balance of nature arising as a result, just as “the good of all” supposedly emerges from concatenated selfishness in Adam Smith’s system). How ironic then that Jenkin was belittled and disparaged for truly original work in the parent discipline of economics—but, thanks to Darwin’s greater geniality and sense of fairness, honored and acknowledged for similarly cogent contributions to a field that had so benefited, just a little before (in 1859 when Darwin published the Origin), from generous consideration of economic theories.
24 | The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier
GALILEO AND LAVOISIER have more in common than their brilliance. Both men are focal points in a cardinal legend about the life of intellectuals—the conflict of lonely and revolutionary genius with state power. Both stories are apocryphal, however inspiring. Yet they only exaggerate, or encapsulate in the epitome of a bon mot, an essential theme in the history of thinking and its impact upon society.
Galileo, on his knees before the Inquisition, abjures his heretical belief that the earth revolves around a central sun. Yet, as he rises, brave Galileo, faithful to the highest truth of factuality, addresses a stage whisper to the world: eppur se muove—nevertheless, it does move. Lavoisier, before the revolutionary tribunal during the Reign of Terror in 1794, accepts the inevitable verdict of death, but asks for a week or two to finish some experiments. Coffinhal, the young judge who has sealed his doom, denies his request, stating, La république n’a pas besoin de savants (the Republic does not need scientists).
Coffinhal said no such thing, although the sentiments are not inconsistent with emotions unleashed in those frightening and all too frequent political episodes so well characterized by Marc Antony in his lamentation over Caesar: “O judgment! thou are fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason.” Lavoisier, who had been under arrest for months, was engaged in no experiments at the time. Moreover, as we shall see, the charges leading to his execution bore no relationship to his scientific work.
But if Coffinhal’s chilling remark is apocryphal, the second most famous quotation surrounding the death of Lavoisier is accurate and well attested. The great mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange, upon hearing the news about his friend’s execution, remarked bitterly: “It took them only an instant to cut off that head, but France may not produce another like it in a century.”
DISCOURS
D’OUVERTURE ET DE CLÔTURE
D U
COURS DE ZOOLOGIE
Donné dans le Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, l’an IX de la République,
PAR LE CEN LACEPÈDE,
Membre du Séuat et de l’Institut national de France; I’un des Professeurs du Muséum d’Histoire naturelle; membre de l’Instuitut national de la République Cisalpine; de la société d’Arragon; de celle des Curieux de la Nature, de Berlin; de sociétés d’Histoire naturelle, des Pharnaciens, Philotechuique, Philomatique, et des Observateurs de l’homme, de Paris; de celle d’Agriculture d’Agen; de la seciété des Sciences et Arts de Montauban, du Lycée d’Alençon, etc.
A PARIS,
CHEZ PLASSAN, IMPRIMEUR-LIBRAIRE
L’AN IX DE LA REPUBLIQUE
Title page for Lacépède’s opening and closing addresses for the zoology course at the Natural History Museum in 1801–1802—but identified only as “year 9 of the Republic.”
The French revolution had been born in hope and expansiveness. At the height of enthusiasm for new beginnings, the revolutionary government suppressed the old calendar, and started time all over again, with Year I beginning on September 22, 1792, al the founding of the French republic. The months would no longer bear names of Roman gods or emperors, but would record the natural passage of seasons—as in brumaire (foggy), ventose (windy), germinal (budding), and to replace parts of July and August, originally named for two despotic caesars, thermidor. Measures would be rationalized, decimalized, and based on earthly physics, with the meter defined as one ten-millionth of a quarter meridian from pole to equator. The metric system is our enduring legacy of this revolutionary spirit, and Lavoisier himself played a guiding role in devising the new weights and measures.
But initial optimism soon unraveled under the realities of internal dissension and external pressu
re. Governments tumbled one after the other, and Dr. Guillotin’s machine, invented to make execution more humane, became a symbol of terror by sheer frequency of public use. Louis XVI was beheaded in January 1793 (Year I of the republic). Power shifted from the Girondins to the Montagnards, as the Terror reached its height and the war with Austria and Prussia continued. Finally, as so often happens, the architect of the terror, Robespierre himself, paid his visit to Dr. Guillotin’s device, and the cycle played itself out. A few years later, in 1804, Napoleon was crowned as emperor, and the First Republic ended. Poor Lavoisier had been caught in the midst of the cycle, dying for his former role as tax collector on May 8, 1794, less than three months before the fall of Robespierre on July 27 (9 Thermidor, Year II).
Old ideals often persist in vestigial forms of address and writing, long after their disappearance in practice. I was reminded of this phenomenon when I acquired, a few months ago, a copy of the opening and closing addresses for the course in zoology at the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle of Paris for 1801–1802. The democratic fervor of the revolution had faded, and Napoleon had already staged his coup d’état of 18 Brumaire (November 9, 1799), emerging as emperor de facto, although not crowned until 1804. Nonetheless, the author of these addresses, who would soon resume his full name Bernard-Germain-Etienne de la Ville-sur-Illon, comte de Lacépède, is identified on the title page only as Cen Lacépède (for citoyen, or “citizen”—the democratic form adopted by the revolution to abolish all distinctions of address). The long list of honors and memberships, printed in small type below Lacépède’s name, is almost a parody on the ancient forms; for instead of the old affiliations that always included “member of the royal academy of this or that” and “counsellor to the king or count of here or there,” Lacépède’s titles are rigorously egalitarian—including “one of the professors at the museum of natural history,” and member of the society of pharmacists of Paris, and of agriculture of Agen. As for the year of publication, we have to know the history detailed above—for the publisher’s date is given, at the bottom, only as “I’an IX de la République.”