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Huxley's bulldog: The battles of E. Ray Lankester (1846-1929)

1999; Wiley; Volume: 257; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/(sici)1097-0185(19990615)257

1097-0185

Richard Milner,

Evolution and Science Education

Charles Darwin is remembered as a reclusive revolutionary who shook the world from his quiet hilltop in the Kentish countryside. When it came to debating bishops, or lecturing on the new evolutionary biology, Darwin preferred to send his “bulldog” and “General Agent” Thomas Henry Huxley into the fray. Polemicist, surgeon (“too busy doing science” to ever practice medicine), zoologist, comparative anatomist, educator, and essayist, the bombastic Huxley enjoyed fighting for the new ideas. Huxley also struggled to establish scientific education and the democratization of colleges dominated by classical scholarship, theology, and class privilege. Huxley's protege, in turn, became England's most influential biologist. His name, all but forgotten today, was Edwin Ray Lankester (Fig. 1). (British naturalist John Ray was his namesake.) He, too, was a zoologist, comparative anatomist, essayist, and educator—and for a decade (1898–1908) served as director of London's Natural History Museum. This year marks the 70th anniversary of his death. E. Ray Lankester, in a 1920 photograph. Courtesy of the Natural History Magazine.29 Lankester seemed destined for a career in biology. His father, Edwin Lankester, was well-known as a crusading public health doctor and founder of the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, which the son later edited. Darwin and Huxley had been his father's friends, and were Ray's heroes since childhood. Huxley had been especially close to the family ever since he and Lankester senior had taught together at the Royal School of Mines.3 Ray remembered being carried across a rocky beach by Huxley,4 and recalled Darwin telling how he once rode a giant tortoise like a pony.23 He was inspired by his father's other distinguished acquaintances, including the anatomist Sir Richard Owen, the botanist Sir Joseph Hooker, the marine biologist Philip Gosse, and the geologists Edward Forbes and Sir Charles Lyell,23 but it was on Huxley that young Ray decided to pattern his life (Fig. 2).26 From his teens onward, he was a dedicated evolutionist. While still a university student, he won praise from Darwin, who wrote that he would “some day become our first star in Natural History.”1 As it turned out, the outspoken and cantankerous Lankester's star would flicker erratically, but it could shine with undeniable brilliance. A young Thomas Henry Huxley draws a gorilla skull for his comparative anatomy students. Photograph courtesy of Michael Huxley. In his prime, Lankester was a large, corpulent, bearlike man. A charismatic, well-dressed lecturer, he projected confidence, power, and good humor. In 1871, soon after he returned from his studies in Germany and Italy, Huxley hired Lankester to be his demonstrator in comparative anatomy at the Royal School of Mines in South Kensington, London. Huxley's classes there set the standard for all future biology lab courses in Western universities. Lankester adopted not only Huxley's teaching techniques, but his evangelical zeal for spreading the gospel of science and evolutionary biology (Fig. 3). As Huxley put it: “Lankester...is helping me as Demonstrator in a course of instruction in Biology which I am giving to Schoolmasters—with a view of converting them into scientific missionaries to convert the Christian Heathen of these islands to the true faith.”5 Caricature of E. Ray Lankester published by Vanity Fair on June 12, 1905, when he was director of the British Museum (Natural History). The cartoon's legend states, “His religion is the worship of all sorts of winged and finny freaks.” According to his biographer, Joe Lester, Lankester “remained Huxley's most faithful disciple, carrying out not only the biological, but also what may be called the socio-political testament of his master.”24 Yet “Darwin's bulldog” thought Ray should be kept on a short leash. Lankester's pugnacity towards the entrenched academic establishment “distressed even the combative Huxley, whose letters are long invocations to his pupil to ‘simmer down.’ ”25 [Most people cannot imagine the effort of] trying to come to a comprehension of the meanest worm or weed—of its structure, its habits, its relation to the great scheme of nature...To describe its appearance with accuracy [requires] far more patience, perseverance and self-denial than they have easily at command;...preconceived notions interfere with their forming a truthful comprehension of objective fact. There is not one person in fifty whose habits of mind are sufficiently accurate to enable him to give a truthful description of the exterior of a rose!6 It is astonishing how many good observers it requires to dissect and draw and record over and over again the structure of an animal, before an approximately correct account is obtained.14 —E. Ray Lankester He was aware, however, that trying to teach anatomy with an evolutionary perspective is no easy task. “At present students learn the anatomy of a mussel,” Lankester observed, “and never think of it as representing a large group, and don't care whether there are other things more or less like it than not.”10 But the study of selected types is not enough. “Morphology is essentially comparative. It becomes daily more obvious that the histology, morphology and physiology of the organism must be considered and treated without regard to the arbitrary separation of adult and embryonic conditions, and without the exclusiveness which the selection of types involves.”10 For years, Lankester wrote an entertaining weekly newspaper column about natural history topics and evolutionary themes. The articles were collected in a series of books, including Science from an Easy Chair (1909), Diversions of a Naturalist (1915), and Great and Small Things (1923).20 As director of the British Museum (Natural History), he helped to establish a dynamic Darwinian tradition in an institution formerly devoted to classification. Lankester's book Extinct Animals (1905)18 became the standard popular introduction to dinosaurs and ancient animals. Intended for young readers, it was used by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as the source for prehistoric creatures in his classic adventure novel, The Lost World (1912), the forerunner of all dinosaur tales. Among Doyle's illustrations are some of Lankester's dinosaur reconstructions, with members of fictional Professor Challenger's expedition drawn into the pictures. In Doyle's novel, Challenger refers to “an excellent monograph by my gifted friend Ray Lankester.”2 Lankester was also influential in the development of prehistoric archeology, coining many of the terms still used to describe stone tools.30 Lankester did more than teach and popularize evolution: some historians of science credit him with helping to rescue the idea of natural selection from the limbo into which it had fallen in the early decades of the 20th century. Although evolution, or descent with modification, had been adopted by British biologists, they balked at accepting natural selection as its chief mechanism. Field naturalists Alfred Russel Wallace, Sir Joseph Hooker and Henry Walter Bates wrote brilliantly on natural selection, but not one experimental biologist in England had taken up the topic.26 Lankester became interested in the German August Weismann's theory that inheritance was carried by a “germ plasm” that could not be directly modified by behavior or environment. When the opportunity arose, Lankester invited Weismann to Oxford, where he gave lectures about his genetic experiments. In Ernst Mayr's view, Lankester's role in promoting Weismann among English scientists was “of decisive importance for subsequent developments in Britain.”26 In attempting to combine non-Lamarckian inheritance with natural selection, Lankester's Oxford group—which eventually included E. S. Goodrich, Julian Huxley, G. de Beer, and E. B. Ford—laid the foundations for the modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution. According to Mayr, no one was pursuing these ideas at Cambridge or at University College, London, until years later, when R. A. Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane began to publish.26 But evolution, to Lankester, was not necessarily synonymous with progress. Indeed, he believed that evolution could just as easily lead in the opposite direction, to decadence and degeneration. “Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained,” he wrote, “seem to lead as a rule to degeneration; just as an active healthy man sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune.” Lankester did more than teach and popularize evolution. Lankester rescued the idea of natural selection from the limbo into which it had fallen in the early decades of the 20th century. Fearing that England was becoming bloated by colonial wealth, he wrote: “Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. The habit of parasitism clearly acts upon animal organization in this way. Let the parasitic life once be secured, and away go legs, jaws, eyes, and ears; the active, highly-gifted crab, insect, or annelid may become a mere sac, absorbing nourishment and laying eggs.”11 Apprehensive about the complacency of Victorian England, he warned his fellow members of the “English race” against allowing themselves to be overtaken in the struggle for existence through sheer laziness, which could lead to physical and moral degeneration.12,15 Unlike Huxley, Lankester was a doctrinaire materialist who thought science would ultimately explain everything about nature and human nature. With massive government support, it could banish ignorance, replace religion, and provide the foundation for a prosperous, moral, and just society. Only through obeying the laws of science, he wrote, could England hope to save her people from “degradation” and “degeneration.”16 Huxley was much less sanguine. In his view, scientific materialism was only a useful working assumption, not an overriding explanatory principle. In 1878, he warned that what we arbitrarily label as “mind” and “matter” “are only two out of infinite varieties of existence which we are not competent to conceive—in the midst of which ... we might be set down, with no more notion of what was about us, than the worm in a flower-pot, on a London balcony has of the life of the great city.” Some scientists, he complained, “talk as if ... [accepting] matter as the ‘substance’ of all things cleared up all the mysteries of existence. In point of fact, it leaves them exactly where they were.”8 In 1876, while still a student, Lankester gained international attention when he prosecuted the celebrated American medium Henry Slade. During the height of the Spiritualist movement, the dreamy, mustachioed psychic convinced many gullible Londoners that he could communicate with their dead relatives. Sitters would ask questions, and Slade importuned the departed “spirits” to write their answers on a small slate held under the table. Lankester and a friend attended a seance and ambushed Slade by snatching a slate from his hands in the darkened room.9 As Lankester expected, it contained “spirit-writing” even before he had asked a question. The young biologist then hauled Slade into police court (Fig. 4) and prosecuted him as a “common rogue”—the first time a scientist had formally charged a psychic for conducting fraudulent experiments.27 Young Lankester holds up the slates on which the professional “spirit-medium” Henry Slade (extreme left) caused mysterious chalked messages to appear. The evolutionary biologist's prosecution of Slade in 1876 was the first time a scientist had charged a psychic with criminal fraud. Illustration courtesy of author's collection. By so doing, Lankester knew that he would please Darwin and Huxley. At Darwin's request, Huxley had attended seances attempting to catch mediums in fraud. Darwin detested them, for a pair of notorious spiritualist swindlers had recently tried to infiltrate his own family. The great naturalist sent Lankester 10 pounds towards the cost of prosecuting Slade, “as a public benefit.”17 Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, was the star witness for the defense. A leading and sincere Spiritualist, he testified to Slade's integrity as an “inquirer after truth.” Thus, Britain's two leading naturalists, Darwin and Wallace, took opposing sides when the supernatural went on trial.28 The result was anticlimactic; Slade was convicted but freed on a technicality, and then fled the country. “The spirit medium is a curious and unsavoury specimen of natural history, and if you wish to study him, you must take him unawares, as you would any other vermin.... To do this one must assume the garb of a believer ... [then introduce] a light, a blow from a fist or a firm grasp of the hand.... I have done my share of the skunk-hunting; let others follow.”13 Few scientists were prepared to appreciate how “much more difficult [it is] to make such observations and interpretations in a room full of people, stirred by the expectation of the marvelous, than in the calm seclusion of a laboratory [a reference to Crookes] or the solitude of a tropical forest [a reference to Wallace].” “And one who has not tried it cannot imagine the strain of the mind involved in sitting for an hour or two in a dark room, on the watch for the dodges of a wary ‘medium.’ A man may be an excellent naturalist or chemist; and yet make a very poor detective.”7 In the end, although he considered himself immune to cooked-up “evidence” of the supernatural, Ray Lankester was vulnerable when the subject was human evolution. In 1911, Lankester joined his bamboozled colleagues who considered the fraudulent Piltdown fossils to be those of “the earliest Englishman.” The famous stained and filed orangutan jaw, he came to believe, was “the most startling and significant fossil bone that has ever been brought to light.”21 And he had no doubt that the flints found nearby were chipped and shaped by prehistoric man (Fig. 5). Sir Arthur Keith, center, measures the Piltdown cranium in this famous image of British scientists painted in 1915 by John Cooke. Charles Dawson, the probable hoaxer, stands behind Keith, partially blocking the hanging portrait of Charles Darwin. E. Ray Lankester, one of the supporters of the “ape-man's” authenticity, sits at the extreme right. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History. Lankester's belief in his own carefully cultivated scientific objectivity had led him to scorn those who accepted shoddy evidence if it supported their beliefs in spirit communication. When his own cherished hopes and beliefs about human origins were at issue, however, the lifelong skeptic embraced a crude fake. Forty years later, new testing methods revealed that the relic was a forgery, but Ray Lankester never knew that he, the nemesis of hoaxers, had finally been had. Mr. Milner is a senior editor of Natural History Magazine at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City. An anthropologist and historian of science, he did his graduate work at UCLA and at the University of California, Berkeley. His special interests include the development of evolutionary theory, the history of natural history, and the lives of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. He is presently working on the third revised edition of his Encyclopedia of Evolution: Humanity's Search for its Origins, which first appeared in 1990. He has also authored a short biography, Charles Darwin: Evolution of a Naturalist (Facts on File, 1993), and is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London.