In the second chapter of Genesis we read that “out of the ground the LORD God
formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to
the man [Adam] to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called
every living creature, that was its name” (Gen. 2.19 RSV). Jewish and Christian
theologians have traditionally interpreted this oft-quoted passage to mean
that God thereby gave man (still without a wife, but shortly to have one) dominion
over nature. Humans thereafter legitimately possessed the right to control
the natural world and to exploit it for their own use. Those concerned with
the origins of the current environmental degradation view that dominion with
considerable ambivalence, and some cite this alleged transfer of authority as a
root cause of the attitudes responsible for our long history of mismanagement
of global resources.
Less controversial, but equally significant, the Genesis story also reflects the
long-standing importance of naming and characterizing things found in nature.
That one of Adam’s first tasks consisted of naming animals should not
surprise us. We all possess a curiosity about the natural objects on Earth—animals,
plants, minerals—and for good reason; they are a source of food, medicine,
clothing, shelter, and entertainment. Anthropologists, who study different
cultures of the world, find that all peoples name and categorize the objects
in their environment. And most, if not all, cultures share commonsense ways
of conceptualizing the natural world. The simple notion that living things that
fly constitute a natural group, for example, is shared by second-graders in Colorado
and village elders in southeast Asia.
Naming and categorizing has concerned humans since ancient times, as the
Hebrew texts attest. Whether for the most basic requirements of communal
life or for the most sophisticated scientific exchanges, we have wanted to communicate
information that we have gained about the world. Starting in the
eighteenth century, however, a particular approach to this activity emerged as
a scientific discipline in Europe and has continued to the present day, the modern
tradition of natural history. What distinguishes natural history from the
“folk biology” of earlier studies is the attempt of naturalists to group animals,
plants, and minerals according to shared underlying features and to use rational,
systematic methods to bring order to the otherwise overwhelming variation
found in nature. Although bats are living animals and fly, naturalists do
not consider them “birds” because bats share certain characteristics with other
mammals. Nor do naturalists consider a simple alphabetical list of animals a
viable option for classifying them, given the enormous number of known animals
(750,000 insects alone). Instead, naturalists have been working since the
1700s to document the natural world, systematically naming and organizing
the myriad forms found there, as they attempted to discern an underlying order.
Although individuals before the eighteenth century pursued similar goals,
no large-scale, sustained, and organized effort had existed until then.
In the discipline of natural history, researchers systematically study natural
objects (animals, plants, minerals)—naming, describing, classifying, and uncovering
their overall order. They do this because such work is an essential first
step before other, more complex analyses can be undertaken. We cannot start
discussing a wetland, or the interactions within it, until we know something
about what is there. Nor can we intelligently talk about the effect of an event
on a particular environment until we have a sense of the specific kinds of organisms
that inhabit it. Natural history does more, however, than just construct
catalogs and field guides, important as these are. It explores broader issues:
How do all the pieces fit together? What interactions can we discover?
What changes? What responsibilities does our knowledge confer upon us?
This book traces the fascinating story of the study of the natural world that
began in the eighteenth century and has since captured the interest of an everwidening
circle of enthusiasts. Eighteenth-century society lavished attention on
natural history. The second most frequently owned item in private libraries in
France at that time was the naturalist Buffon’s monumental 36-volume encyclopedia
of animals. Cultured gentlemen and ladies normally owned collections
of stuffed birds and of shells, with the size of their “cabinet” (as these collections
were called) often reflecting their wealth, taste, and level of refinement.
Interest in natural history, however, extended beyond what was merely
fashionable. Beginning in the 1700s and extending well into the 1800s, major
European powers engaged in a worldwide scramble to identify natural products
of economic importance. Prime ministers believed that the fate of empires
rested on identifying, cultivating, and transporting specific plants, such
as tea shrubs and rubber trees. Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark across
the North American continent in part to survey the economic potential of the
natural products in the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase.
While imperial rivalries sent soldiers and explorers to steaming jungles
and exotic highlands, a different but equally ferocious contest took place in
the western badlands of America. The quest for dramatic fossil skeletons, particularly
dinosaurs, captivated a generation of naturalists in the United States.
It resulted in a competition for bones in the 1800s that rivaled battles fought
among the Fifth Avenue “robber barons” over coal, iron ore, and oil. The public
found the Jurassic treasures fascinating. To illustrate the point one need
only consider that, by the early twentieth century, more people visited natural
history museums to see these prehistoric remains than attended football
games.
Natural history also provided the scene for competition among ideas. Conflict
between religious and secular views has often fixed on interpretations of
nature. Society on both sides of the Atlantic, for example, argued bitterly over
the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution. For some the theory threatened
to undermine accepted religion; for others it opened up the possibility of
revitalizing what they took to be a declining and outmoded set of religious
opinions. As in the searing debates over slavery, families literally fragmented
because of conflicting positions on evolution. Respectable men hurled insults
at one another at nineteenth-century scientific meetings (on one occasion the
intensity of the discourse caused a woman to faint).
The story of natural history does not end with the heyday of museum attendance
early in this century or with the breakup of colonial empires. Problems
in today’s world drive current research in natural history. Much of the impetus
for earlier natural history arose from European exploration of exotic
regions of the globe. Recent development, primarily to stimulate economic
growth, has destroyed many of the sites, such as the coastal forests of Brazil,
that formerly lured naturalists from the comforts of home and drew them to
dangerous expeditions (from which many did not return alive). Naturalists
worldwide fear that the pace of development threatens irreparable damage to
these formerly pristine locales and to the associated rich diversity of animal and
plant life on much of the planet. Exploitation of tropical rain forests destroys
about 76,000 square miles per year—roughly the size of the entire country of
Costa Rica. Naturalists such as E. O. Wilson, who are deeply concerned about
the issue, point out that the problem is compounded by our lack of knowledge.
We are wiping out unknown species, and consequently we have no idea
of the potential value of what is now gone forever. Scientists, politicians, and
economists differ significantly on what actions should be taken to arrest the
loss of biodiversity. At international meetings, however, they do agree that, as
gargantuan as the task may appear, a first step would be to complete a basic in-
ventory of Earth’s species. The environmental, economic, political, and social
well-being of humans may depend upon the success of such initiatives.
In spite of natural history’s close tie to the pressing ecological and environmental
issues of today, science writers and other commentators in this
“high-tech” age occasionally treat the subject primarily as a beginning stage in
the investigation of the natural world; being a naturalist means merely to name
and describe things found in nature. They patronizingly treat natural history
as old-fashioned; a pastime that conjures up images of men in knickers carrying
butterfly nets or Victorian ladies with plant presses. Research into the history
of the discipline however, quickly dispels such a simplistic caricature. To
be sure, naming, describing, and classifying continues to be a basic activity that
serves as a foundation for the study of nature. The quest for insight into the
order of nature, however, leads naturalists beyond classification to the creation
of general theories that explain the living world. Those naturalists who focus
on the order of nature inquire about the ecological relationships among
organisms and also among organisms and their surrounding environments.
They ask fundamental questions of evolution, about how change actually occurs
over short and long periods of time. Many naturalists are drawn, consequently,
to deeper philosophical and ethical issues: What is the extent of our
ability to understand nature? And, understanding nature, will we be able to
preserve it? Naturalists question the meaning of the order they discover and
ponder our moral responsibility for it.
So, does natural history mean mere butterfly and flower collecting? Only
in the sense that Alfred Tennyson referred to when he wrote, in “Flower in the
crannied wall”:
Flower in the crannied wall
I pluck you out of crannies
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
In the eighteenth century Buffon and the Swedish botanist Linnaeus, along
with a number of other students of nature, established a coherent tradition of
natural history. We trace that tradition to see how it expanded and interacted
with other traditions in the life sciences, examining some of its major achievements
and considering its present state in the world of science. We note the
extent to which it reflected the culture of the times and to what degree it had
its own history. In exploring these topics we also examine the institutions in
which naturalists performed their research and the source of their funding. We
see how natural history has yielded the major unifying theory of the life sciences,
uncovered some of the deepest insights into nature, led to concern for
the environment, and attracted public interest for more than two and a half
centuries.
Fascination with nature led some naturalists to relinquish the comforts of
home for the hardships and danger of fieldwork; it drove others to spend days,
evenings, nights examining data. Indeed, this tradition has inspired, enlightened,
and delighted its practitioners and their audience.
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