Are Naturalists Old-Fashioned?

Abstract

Naturalists study nature. This occupation, or avocation, is certainly very old. In the broadest sense, the study of nature started with the dawn of human consciousness and self-awareness, from a million to two million years ago. Man became human when he became able to transcend himself, to see himself as it were from a distance, as an object among other objects of nature. He then not only explored his environment (which animals also do), but began to accumulate and to transmit his knowledge to others and to be aware of his knowledge. Aristotle accomplished a feat which is beyond human powers at present; he summarized all or most knowledge accumulated in the Greek world, the Oikumene. As knowledge grew it began to differentiate; those who were gathering or transmitting knowledge had to specialize. During the second half of the eighteenth century there appeared the 44 volumes of the Histoire Naturelle, written, edited, or sponsored by Buffon. This natural history included what we now call biology, anthropology, geology, a great deal of geography, cosmology, and philosophy. About a century after Buffon and a century before our day, the first volumes of The American Naturalist contained articles chiefly on biology, but also a sprinkling of geology and anthropology. In these early volumes, the theory of evolution proposed less than a decade earlier by Darwin and by Wallace was discussed, but not accepted with confidence or enthusiasm (e.g., the article of Newberry, 1867). It took several decades for the naturalists generally to realize that evolution gives meaning and cohesion to the mass of facts which they were so successfully bringing to light. The outstanding need was to ascertain beyond reasonable doubt that the world of life has, in fact, evolved and is evolving. It was further desirable to trace at least approximately the paths which the evolution of the animal and the plant kingdoms actually followed during the history of the earth, in other words to establish the phylogeny of the living world. Systematics, animal and plant geography, comparative morphology of living and fossil forms, and comparative embryology furnished the bulk of the evidence which served to test, and to verify beyond reasonable doubt, the validity of the evolutionary hypothesis. These disciplines were in the mainstream of biological research during the later part of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Another current was gathering force in biology at the same time, but largely independently from evolutionary studies. This was physiology, the study of how organisms operate. Being most closely related to the art of healing, to medicine, the physiology of man and of higher vertebrates was