The Battling Botanist: Daniel Trembly MacDougal, Mutation Theory, and the Rise of Experimental Evolutionary Biology in America, 1900-1912 Author(s): Sharon E. Kingsland Source: Isis, Vol. 82, No. 3 (Sep., 1991), pp. 479-509 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/233227 Accessed: 19-05-2017 16:27 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/233227?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. 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]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms The History of Science Society, The University of Chicago Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Isis This content downloaded from 128.128.250.98 on Fri, 19 May 2017 16:27:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Battling Botanist Daniel Trembly MacDougal, Mutation Theory, and the Rise of Experimental Evolutionary Biology in America, 1900-1912 By Sharon E. Kingsland* T HE EARLY YEARS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY saw the waxing and waning of an important controversy in American biology: whether ev- olutionary biology should be above all an experimental science. From 1902 to about 1910 debate centered on the theoretical and experimental work of Hugo de Vries, professor of botany at the University of Amsterdam. This article examines the controversy with the aim of combinirig synthesis and revision in the history of evolutionary biology. This episode illuminates a number of themes that have been addressed recently by historians: the division of biology into warring groups of naturalists and experimentalists; the agricultural origins of genetics in Amer- ica; the origins of an engineering approach to biology in Jacques Loeb's radically experimental program; the "struggle for authority" between geneticists and other biologists in the field of heredity in America; and the anti-Darwinian climate in evolutionary theory at the turn of the century and the eventual resolution of these conflicts in the synthetic theory of evolution that emerged in the 1930s.' The story unfolded here, while bringing together these themes, will at the same time recast some of the arguments advanced in the literature. My first goal is to investigate how de Vries's mutation theory gave the exper- imental biologist scientific authority in a particular institutional and national con- text. Elaboration of this context requires a sharper focus than the existing liter- ature on the reception of the mutation theory provides.2 I shall discuss the use of * History of Science Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218. I am grateful to Paul Romney and Mary P. Winsor for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES 86-08377). 1 Garland E. Allen, "Naturalists and Experimentalists: The Genotype and the Phenotype," Studies in History of Biology, 1979, 3:179-209; Barbara A. Kimmelman, "A Progressive Era Discipline: Genetics at American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, 1900-1920" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. Pennsylvania, 1987); Philip J. Pauly, Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987); Jan Sapp, Beyond the Gene: Cytoplasmic Inheritance and the Struggle for Authority in Genetics (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987); Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Balti- more/London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983); and William B. Provine, The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics (Chicago/London: Univ. Chicago Press, 1971). 2 For a broader survey of opinions for and against the mutation theory see Garland E. Allen, "Hugo ISIS, 1991, 82: 479-509 479 This content downloaded from 128.128.250.98 on Fri, 19 May 2017 16:27:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 480 SHARON E. KINGSLAND the mutation theory from the perspective of a botanist working at a privately funded research laboratory, the Carnegie Institution of Washington's laboratory for plant physiology near Tucson, Arizona. Daniel Trembly MacDougal (1865- 1958) was a physiological ecologist who has been accorded a minor role in histo- ries of evolutionary biology. However, he was an eminent botanist, a vigorous agitator for the cause of experimentalism, and among the first to begin experi- ments in 1902 to validate de Vries's theory. MacDougal's campaign for the mu- tation theory highlights the agricultural context of botanical research and the entrepreneurial climate in which experimental programs evolved.3 Drawing upon Barbara Kimmelman's work in the history of agricultural genetics and extending her arguments to the sphere of evolutionary biology, I show how MacDougal worked to redefine the natural historian as engineer of life. In certain respects MacDougal's career has a parallel in the experimental, engineering approach of Jacques Loeb, which suggests a broader context in which we can place Philip Pauly's thesis about Loeb as begetter of a modern engineering approach to biol- ogy. This context is important for understanding the broad methodological conflict between American naturalists and experimentalists in the early twentieth cen- tury. The literature dealing with this conflict has had to respond to Garland Allen's initial description of this division as a "dichotomy," a term that suggested a binary classification of biologists into two sharply defined populations. At- tempts to probe this notion of a dichotomy have yielded a better grasp of the shifting definitions of natural history and experimentalism in this period, but anal- ysis tends to reach an impasse in debate over whether scientific change was revolutionary or evolutionary, or whether the dichotomy really existed.4 Freder- ick Churchill has suggested making a closer analysis of the institutional and na- tional context of this controversy as a way around this impasse. This article follows up his recommendation by setting one part of the dispute in the context of the professionalization of American botany, with special attention to the rise of new laboratories created by the Carnegie Institution shortly after its founding in December 1901.5 In following the intricate course of this controversy it is important to recognize that debates in evolutionary biology were conducted on three levels and for three de Vries and the Reception of the 'Mutation Theory,'" Journal of the History of Biology, 1969, 2:55-87. 3 For a discussion of professionalization in this period with more emphasis on the emergence of ecology as a new discipline see Joel B. Hagen, "Organism and Environment: Frederic Clements's Vision of a Unified Physiological Ecology," in The American Development of Biology, ed. Ronald Rainger, Keith R. Benson, and Jane Maienschein (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 257-277. ' See the symposium entitled "American Morphology at the Turn of the Century," J. Hist. Biol., 1981, 14:83-191; and Joel B. Hagen, "Experimentalists and Naturalists in Twentieth-Century Botany: Experimental Taxonomy, 1920-1950," J. Hist. Biol., 1984, 17:249-270. 5 Frederick B. Churchill, "In Search of the New Biology: An Epilogue," J. Hist. Biol., 1981, 14:177-191. A case study comparing two ecological programs that makes different use of Churchill's comments to refine the notion of a dichotomy is by Stephen Bocking, "Stephen Forbes, Jacob Reighard, and the Emergence of Aquatic Ecology in the Great Lakes Region," J. Hist. Biol., 1990, 23:461-498. This content downloaded from 128.128.250.98 on Fri, 19 May 2017 16:27:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE BATTLING BOTANIST 481 audiences: scientists, patrons of science, and the general public. Therefore fig- ures of authority included individuals who, while not scientists, had the respect of patrons and the public. Here I show how both naturalists and experimentalists capitalized on the reputation of Luther Burbank, a private breeder, to advance their claims for authority in evolutionary biology. Their use of Burbank in this way must also be seen in the light of the Carnegie Institution's attempts to secure a place for itself as a patron of scientific research. MacDougal's fight to win recognition for experimental evidence in evolution- ary biology not only alienated naturalists, but also had negative repercussions on other experimentalists, some of whom were engaged in parallel struggles for au- thority. MacDougal's aggressiveness, which made experimentalists appear intol- erant of other approaches, prompted certain experimental zoologists to make conciliatory gestures toward biologists not engaged in experimental work. I illus- trate the relationship between overtly competitive and cooperative strategies by linking the controversy over the mutation theory, led by MacDougal, to biolo- gists' response to Wilhelm Johannsen's polemical address in support of Men- delism, given to an American audience in 1910. This connection enables me to refine Jan Sapp's analysis of how geneticists introduced terms such as genotype as part of a strategy designed to define the field of heredity in their favor.6 Sapp used Johannsen's address to highlight the aggressiveness with which geneticists tried to exclude all contending approaches to the study of heredity. I modify his analysis by showing that American geneticists, especially those in the Johannsen "school," actually considered the strategic value of dropping the word genotype altogether in 1912 because it had become too controversial.