What Does It Mean to Be a Naturalist at the End of the Twentieth Century? Author(S): Peter R
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The University of Chicago What Does It Mean to Be a Naturalist at the End of the Twentieth Century? Author(s): Peter R. Grant Source: The American Naturalist, Vol. 155, No. 1 (January 2000), pp. 1-12 Published by: The University of Chicago Press for The American Society of Naturalists Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/303304 . Accessed: 26/02/2015 12:48 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press, The American Society of Naturalists, The University of Chicago are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Naturalist. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Thu, 26 Feb 2015 12:48:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions vol. 155, no. 1 the american naturalist january 2000 What Does It Mean to Be a Naturalist at the End of the Twentieth Century?* Peter R. Grant² Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton published last year (1998), as the best source for answering University, Princeton, New Jersey 08540-1003 my question about our modern identity. The contrast be- tween the sets of volumes provides a measure of the pro- Submitted July 13, 1999; Accepted August 31, 1999 fessional distance we have traveled in 100 years. I shall then consider some aspects of our future and how we Keywords: evolution, ecology, extinctions, models, syntheses, future. might expect to change yet further. This essay is a triptych of the naturalist: past, present, and future; history, mo- dernity, and prophecy. The ®rst two panels are clear; the When I was asked to stand for nomination as president third is, of course, blurred and impressionistic, while being of this society, I asked what the president was expected to at the same time the most enticing. do. ªNothing, absolutely nothing,º came the answer, quickly followed by ªYou are very well quali®ed!º This was wrong on both counts. A major duty of the president is The Naturalist at the End of the Nineteenth Century to deliver an address to the society, ªon your own work,º The roots of the modern naturalist go back deeply into I was told, ªor anything else.º I have chosen the ªanything natural history, that branch of the natural sciences orig- elseº option. Under this licence I will share some thoughts inating in exploration and discovery that was practiced for about what it means to be a naturalist these days. I have centuries by natural philosophers, from before Aristotle to picked this theme because we are approaching a new cen- Alexander von Humboldt and beyond. In recent times tury as well as a new millennium (see Gould 1997, if in natural history has been de®ned ecologically by Bates doubt about when they begin), and this is a ®ne time for ([1950] 1990, p. 241) as ªbiological investigation at the taking stock of ourselves as well as for thinking about level of the individual organism: the study of the relations where science and society in general are heading. of organisms among themselves and with the physical en- So, what does it mean to be a naturalist? ªDis-moi ce vironment, and of their organization into populations and que tu manges: je te dirai ce que tu esº (Brillat-Savarin communities.º In 1899 the journal was subtitled ªAn Il- 1826, p. viii, Aphorisme IV), or, in the modern idiom, we lustrated Magazine of Natural History.º Being a magazine, are what we eat (Gabaccia 1998). If so, then as the Amer- it had editorials, much as Science and Nature do today, as ican Society of Naturalists, we are what we publish, because well as scienti®c news (scienti®c expeditions, recent ap- that is what we consume as readers. In this essay I shall pointments, and resignations and deaths, both here and take a look at our roots to see where we have come from abroad), and reviews of recent literature in separate sec- by ®rst returning to the original statement of the goals of tions devoted to General Biology, Botany, Zoology, Pe- the society and then by examining the contents of volume trography, Geology, Geography, Paleontology, and An- 33 of The American Naturalist, published 100 years ago. I thropology. Its main articles were chie¯y zoological and will then give the same attention to volumes 151 and 152, botanical, though occasionally anthropological or geolog- ical. It was truly, as stated, ªA monthly journal devoted * This article is based on the presidential address delivered to the American to the natural sciences in their widest sense.º (The Linnean Society of Naturalists at a joint meeting with the Society for the Study of Evolution and the Society of Systematic Biologists, June 24, 1999, at the Society of London had, and still has, a similar goal.) University of WisconsinÐMadison. Intended for verbal presentation, the text Every issue of The American Naturalist carries the logo has been only slightly changed for publication. ªDevoted to the Conceptual Uni®cation of the Biological ² E-mail: [email protected]. Sciences.º In 1898 this was explained in an editorial to Am. Nat. 2000. Vol. 155, pp. 1±12. q 2000 by The University of Chicago. mean the journal should counteract the tendency for nat- 0003-0147/2000/15501-0001$03.00. All rights reserved. uralists to become too specialized and to do so by pub- This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Thu, 26 Feb 2015 12:48:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 2 The American Naturalist lishing articles on a wide variety of subjects, even at the N 2 40 T=50 1 , risk of being thought of as ªa miscellaneous lot of articles 4 which, for one reason or another, have failed to ®nd space in the journals of the special sciences to which they rightly belongº (Bigelow 1898, p. 49). The unifying theme, Big- where T is temperature in degrees Fahrenheit and N is the elow suggested, might be ªthe earth and its inhabitants as number of chirps per minute given by a tree cricket, Oe- a unit. Then the problem would be to describe the various canthus niveus (Edes 1899, p. 937). parts of this unit and to explain their relations to one Naturalists did not use statistical methods of analysis another ) may it not be legitimate to adopt it as the ®nal because such methods were not deemed to be necessary purpose of a journal which is intended to represent the or even within the naturalists' powers to grasp and use. great body of naturalists in this country?º (Bigelow 1898, Contemporary attitudes are revealed in the review of books p. 51). on statistics. Thus wrote one reviewer: ªTo solve some of In fact, uni®cation of the biological sciences was the equations, logarithms, trigonometric functions and achieved by putting everything of biological interest and gamma functions have to be employed, and it is too much some more between two covers. That is, it was a collection to hope that a large proportion of naturalists can use even rather than a synthesis. Little use was made of the Dar- these simple methods. ) Formulas are used very freely, winian paradigm as a framework for achieving unity. This which is no doubt an offense to someº (vol. 33, p. 522; is surprising in view of the importance of the Darwin- emphasis mine). The reviewer of a book on descriptive Wallace views of evolution to explorer-collector-naturalists statistics by Davenport (1899) wrote (vol. 33, p. 974), ªThe in the latter part of the century, such as Bates (1863), Belt gross methods already in vogue, being tolerably ef®cient (1874), and Wagner (1889). The 1899 volume (33) has for temporary and tentative purposes, will probably hold references to Charles Darwin on only nine pages. The ªold the ®eld for a while at least, so it will be in the remote Darwinian principle of direct bene®t [of a trait] to its future when, through the plotting of curves and the use possessorsº (Nutting 1899, p. 799) is referred to three of logarithmic tables, we shall see `by the use of quanti- times. For comparison, Wallace's (1871) Natural Selection tative method biology ) pass from the ®eld of speculative is discussed in only one article, in the context of adaptive sciences to that of the exact sciences.' (p. 39).º coloration of Orthoptera. And yet sophisticated statistical analysis of data of great By and large, the naturalists 100 years ago were not a potential interest to naturalists had already begun, in a society waiting for Mendel's laws to be rediscovered. To manner that made Mendelism desirable but not strictly varying degrees they were generalists (Mayr 1946), in- essential, and the results were also reviewed in this volume. quisitive yet skeptical, busy collecting facts about nature, Pearson's sixth Mathematical Contribution to the Theory describing them carefully, interpreting them cautiously, of Evolution was summarized succinctly and then inter- and cataloging them systematically, yet for the most part preted as follows: ªPearson concludes: Both fertility and falling short of the goal of ªscienti®c natural history, in fecundity are inherited, and probably in the manner pre- which,º according to Huxley (1940, p.