Biodiversity and Evolution

Philippe Grandcolas, Marie-Christine Maurel

• Publisher: ISTE Press - Elsevier
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781785482779
• eBook ISBN: 9780081025673
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Biodiversity and Evolution includes chapters devoted to the evolution and biodiversity of organisms at the molecular level, based on the study of natural collections from the Museum of Natural History. The book starts with an epistemological and historical introduction and ends with a critical overview of the Anthropocene epoch.- Explores the study of natural collections of the Museum of Natural History- Examines evolution and biodiversity at the molecular level- Features an introduction focusing on epistemology and history- Provides a critical overview

1

From Richard Owen to Charles Darwin: Understanding the Origin of Life’s Diversity

Claudine Cohen

Abstract

Where does the immense diversity of living beings surrounding us come from? How can we understand its origin? For a long time, creationism was the sole response to these queries. During the Renaissance, collectors and “virtuosi” accumulated in their curiosity cabinets new animals, plants and fruits brought from distant countries by travelers and marveled at their extraordinary diversity, which was generally referred to as God’s creative power. By the end of the 17th Century, a whole multitude of unknown beings appeared under the newly invented microscope: these observations, experiments and questions fascinated the public. “We see with microscopes very small drops of rainwater, vinegar, or other liquors, full of little fish and serpents that we could not ever suspect to inhabit these...” explained Fontenelle to the Marquise of the Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes, Troisième soir]. The observation of infinitely diverse, small and complex living organisms led to theological conclusions: for Swammerdam, the metamorphoses of insects were proofs of God’s perfection and of the uniformity of laws in the universe. Réaumur found in his entomological observations an ever renewed occasion to admiredivine providence. These observations of nature, of its marvelous perfection and infinite wealth opened, with Abbé Pluche in France and William Paley in England, the way to “natural theology”, which viewed nature’s wonders as the effect of God’s design and pervaded natural history well into the 19th Century.

Keywords

Ancestors; Archetype; Diversity of vertebrates; Naturphilosophie; Origin of Life's Diversity; Unity and diversity

1.1 Introduction

Where does the immense diversity of living beings surrounding us come from? How can we understand its origin? For a long time, creationism was the sole response to these queries. During the Renaissance, collectors and “virtuosi” accumulated in their curiosity cabinets new animals, plants and fruits brought from distant countries by travelers and marveled at their extraordinary diversity, which was generally referred to as God’s creative power. By the end of the 17th Century, a whole multitude of unknown beings appeared under the newly invented microscope: these observations, experiments and questions fascinated the public [MOR 11]. “We see with microscopes very small drops of rainwater, vinegar, or other liquors, full of little fish and serpents that we could not ever suspect to inhabit these…” explained Fontenelle to the Marquise of the Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes [FON 86, Troisième soir]. The observation of infinitely diverse, small and complex living organisms led to theological conclusions: for Swammerdam, the metamorphoses of insects were proofs of God’s perfection and of the uniformity of laws in the universe [SWA 82]. Réaumur found in his entomological observations an ever renewed occasion to admire divine providence [REA 42]. These observations of nature, of its marvelous perfection and infinite wealth opened, with Abbé Pluche [PLU 32] in France and William Paley [PAL 02] in England, the way to “natural theology”, which viewed nature’s wonders as the effect of God’s design and pervaded natural history well into the 19th Century.

On the other hand, nature revealed an order that could be rationally and systematically described. Beyond traditional Aristotelian taxonomic schemes and classifications inspired by Renaissance “correspondences” [FOU 66], novel classificatory modes attempted to define natural classes of living beings by describing their external features [DAU 26]. During the first decades of the 18th Century, Linnaeus developed his method to build a systematized classification of the living world, first focusing on plants, then on animals and humans [LIN 53, LIN 58]; this new classificatory system could make the diversity of living beings understood, named and organized. Linnaeus’ rational classification of the living world also embodied a theological vision of Creation [VEU 08]. This comprehensive view of the living world was associated with the idea of a hierarchic structure of the natural world, systematized by the Leibnizian representation of the “Great Chain of Being” [LOV 34]: for most 18th Century naturalists, this concept of a “series” generally did not reflect, however, a temporal succession of changes but a continuum of resemblances [DAU 26, BAR 88a]. Charles Bonnet’s palingénésie described the order of the living world as a hierarchical and fixed scale with humans at its top [BON 45]. In the successive volumes of his Histoire naturelle, Buffon described the diversity of animals and their adaptations to different “climates” [BUF 88a]: he did admit the possible transformations of living beings, conceived as a “degeneration” under the effect of the environment [BUF 66, 311sq]. Without abandoning a creationist framework, he offered in his last work, Epochs of Nature [BUF 88b], a historical vision of nature, and described its successive ages as a series of seven “epochs” culminating in the appearance of Humans, who were created to dominate nature and make it thrive.

By mid-19th Century, Darwin radically broke away from natural theology and the idea of Creation. He proposed revisiting the question of the origin of living beings and their transformations over geological times in materialistic terms. Individual variations, natural selection and adaptation were the main mechanisms at work in this evolutionary process. For Darwin, the extant diversity of the living world, including Mankind, was thus the result of a continuous descent of beings he figured as a tree-like scheme, whose divergent branches were rooted in a common ancestor [DAR 72]. Among the multiple empirical and theoretical sources fueling the “long argument” of Darwin’s Origin of Species, we will highlight here the importance of morphology and of the notion of form, which was developed in natural sciences since the turn of the 19th Century, and led many naturalists to consider life’s diversity within a new conceptual framework. Transcendental morphology, which first appeared in Germany and then developed in the whole of Europe, in fact played a crucial part in the emergence of 19th-Century evolutionary thinking. It is this legacy that I will consider here, focusing particularly on the works of British anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen, although Owen was an opponent to Darwin’s evolutionism [DES 82, DES 89, RUP 94]. I will argue that they were in fact essential to the triggering in England of the emergence of a new way of looking at the diversity of living beings and its origin.

1.1.1 The legacy of German Naturphilosophie

By the end of the 18th Century, German Naturphilosophie laid the foundations for a philosophical, scientific and literary approach to nature and its beings, partly fostered by Kantian philosophy [LEN 81, SLO 92]. At the time of the emergence of comparative anatomy [BAL 79], embryology [GOU 77] and paleontology [LAU 87, COH 11], transcendental morphology relied on the notion of a universal order, the validity of which is not only metaphysical, but also physical. It also implied the idea of a progressive change in nature: the whole nature is in motion, and a trend directed from the lowest to the highest, from chaos to Mankind, is its main character. Man, the greatest being on Earth, is also inextricably connected to all the objects of nature; he embodies the goal towards which everything aims.

Naturphilosophie asserts both and, at the same time, the infinite diversity of nature and its unity, which transcends the vision of the eye and can only be perceived by the mind. It proposes the notion of a morphological model, an ideal matrix accounting for the variability of all living beings [BAL 79, LEN 81, COH 00]. The immense number of living species can be subsumed under one or more ideal types, which provide and reveal the secret logic behind the multiplicity of living forms. From the last decades of the 18th Century onwards, a whole generation of German anatomists, such as Lorenz Oken [OKE 07], Johann Friedrich Meckel [MEC 08], Karl-Friedrich Kielmeyer [KIE 93] and Karl Gustav Carus [CAR 28], but also literary authors, such as Friedrich von Schelling [VON 88] and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, played a decisive role in forging and spreading these concepts.

Goethe himself tried his hand at anatomical observations and speculations. In his Versuch über die Gestalt der Thiere [GOE 90], he made the hypothesis of a “fundamental type” representing the skeletal scheme of all vertebrates. Just as all the organs of a plant can be considered as modifications of the leaf [GOE 90], the different parts of the vertebrate skeleton can be represented as metamorphosed vertebrae. Moreover, Goethe brought to light in the human skull a structure which is common to all vertebrates, the “intermaxillary bone”, thus providing evidence of morphological unity between all vertebrates, including humans [GOE 90]. These observations and ideas were widely influential in German natural sciences and were extensively used, for example in Oken’s work On the Meaning of Skull Bones [OKE 07] and later in the anatomic work of the physician and painter Karl Gustav Carus [CAR 35].

The notion of a single anatomical model informing the whole diversity of living beings was also present in the work of embryologists Kielmeyer and Meckel, who saw in the successive developmental stages of the embryo a summary of the adult forms of inferior animals. In this way, ontogenetic development could provide a key to the hierarchy of living beings. Embryologist Karl Ernst Von Baer later developed a di...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Introduction
• 1: From Richard Owen to Charles Darwin: Understanding the Origin of Life’s Diversity
• 2: Life Engineering in an Evolutionary World
• 3: The View of Systematics on Biodiversity
• 4: Which Model(s) Explain Biodiversity?
• 5: Analysis of Microbial Diversity: Regarding the (Paradoxical) Difficulty of Seeing Big in Metagenomics
• 6: Genetic Code Degeneracy and Amino Acid Frequency in Proteomes
• 7: Telomeres and Telomerases: Structural Diversity for the Same Role
• 8: Globalization and Infectious Diseases
• 9: Why are Morpho Blue?
• 10: Biodiversity in Natural History Collections: a Source of Data for the Study of Evolution
• 11: Mice and Men: an Evolutionary History of Lassa Fever
• 12: Evolutionary History of Moles in Western Europe: One Mole May Hide Another!
• 13: The Conoidea and Their Toxins: Evolution of a Hyper-Diversified Group
• 14: The Anthropocene: a Geological or Societal Subject?
• List of Authors
• Index