The current widespread belief that taxonomic methods used before Darwin were essentialist is ill-founded. The essentialist method developed by followers of Plato and Aristotle required definitions to state properties that are always present. Polythetic groups do not obey that requirement, whatever may have been the ontological beliefs of the taxonomist recognizing such groups. Two distinct methods of forming higher taxa, by chaining and by examplar, were widely used in the period between Linnaeus and Darwin, and both generated polythetic groups. Philosopher (...) William Whewell congratulated pre-Darwinian taxonomists for not adhering to the rigid ideal of definition used in the mathematical sciences. What he called the method of types is here called the method of exemplars because typology has been equated with essentialism, whereas the use of a type species as the reference point or prototype for a higher category was a practice inconsistent with essentialism. The story that the essentialism of philosophers dominated the development of systematics may prove to be a myth. (shrink)

Phillip Sloan has thoroughly documented the importance of Darwin's general invertebrate research program in the period from 1826 to 1836 and demonstrated how it had an impact on his conversion to transformism. Although Darwin later spent eight years of his life investigating barnacles, this period has received less treatment in studies of Darwin and the development of his thought. The most prominent question for the barnacle period that has been attended to is why Darwin "delayed" in publishing his theory of (...) evolution. A related but distinct question concerns the variety of earlier events and influences that led Darwin to the study of "Cirripedia" in 1846, apart from its role in the trajectory that led to "On the Origin of Species ". In this paper I focus on four specific episodes prior to 1846 that inform a picture of why Darwin had an antecedent interest in barnacles: the orientation to collecting strange and curious invertebrate organisms, as well as the strong affinities of Darwin's invertebrate collecting on the Beagle voyage with the work of John Vaughan Thompson; the critical role of marine invertebrate fossils in Darwin's geological reasoning aboard the Beagle and exemplified in his "Geological Observations of South America;" the strange absence of a "Zoology of the Beagle" volume on invertebrates and Darwin's original intent to publish some of the descriptions himself; and the noteworthy presence of barnacles in Darwin's transformation theorizing between 1837 and 1839. There is a wealth of support for the thesis that Darwin had a strong interest in cirripedes prior to the formal barnacle research, blunting arguments that it was psychological aversion or a feeling of inferiority about his taxonomic abilities that drove Darwin to the cirripedes. (shrink)

During the 1840s and the 1850s botanist Joseph Hooker developed distinct notions about the proper characteristics of a professional man of science. While he never articulated these ideas publicly as a coherent agenda, he did share his opinions openly in letters to family and colleagues; this private communication gives essential insight into his and his X-Club colleagues' public activities. The core aspiration of Hooker's professionalization was to consolidate men of science into a dutiful and centralized community dedicated to national well-being. (...) The nation in turn owed the scientific community for its ministration. When the government bestowed funds and status on men of science it was rewarding science -- not purchasing it. His proposed reforms were piecemeal, immediate, and above all practical. He harbored no taste for vast millenarian transformation, and rested his conception of scientific professionalism upon a respectable High Victorian foundation of patronage and pillars of duty, reciprocity, intimacy, and inequality. The process of professionalization he envisioned was as much shrewd compromise between existing interests as a vindication of principle. His power and prestige from the mid-1850s onward gave him considerable ability to carry out his reform program, although his general success did occasion some undesired consequences for the status of natural-history pursuits. (shrink)

Ever since Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published, the received view has been that Darwin literally thought of species as not extra-mentally real. In 1969 Michael Ghiselin upset the received view by interpreting Darwin to mean that species taxa are indeed real but not the species category. In 1985 John Beatty took Ghiselin's thesis a step further by providing a strategy theory to explain why Darwin would say one thing (his repeated nominalistic definition of species) and do (...) another (hold that species taxa are real). In the present paper I attempt to take this line of interpretation to a new level. Guided by the principle of charity, I provide and analyze a considerable amount of evidence from Darwin's mature writings (both private and published) to show that (contra Ghiselin and Beatty) Darwin did not simply accept the species delimitations of his fellow naturalists but actually employed, repeatedly and consistently, a species concept in a thoroughly modern sense, albeit with an implicit definition, a concept uniquely his own and fully in accord with his theory of evolution by natural selection. This implicit concept and definition is carefully reconstructed in the present paper. A new strategy theory is then provided to account for why Darwin would define species (both taxa and category) nominalistically on the one hand but delimit species realistically on the other. (shrink)

At the centre of nineteenth-century imperial authority sat the British Museum, which set the standard for discourse about natural history. This paper examines the meaning of those standards, exploring their important but little-understood role in ending the nineteenth-century species debate. The post-Reform Bill political assault on the authority of the British Museum is examined in the light of the ‘species problem’, and a surprising solution by John Edward Gray, keeper of the natural history collection, is seen as both a mediation (...) and a closure of disputes over the meaning of species and the competence of naturalists. Gray's strategic solution – revealed in his copious notes on the parliamentary commissions investigating the affairs of the BM – embodied competence in institutional discourse and set the stage for the supposed ‘cynical’ definition of species later adopted in Darwin's Origin of Species, namely that species are merely what competent naturalists say they are. (shrink)