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History of zoology through 1859

Thehistory of zoologybeforeCharles Darwin's 1859 theory ofevolutiontraces the organized study of theanimal kingdomfromancienttomoderntimes. Although the concept ofzoologyas a single coherent field arose much later, systematic study of zoology is seen in the works ofAristotleandGalenin the ancientGreco-Roman world.This work was developed in the Middle Ages byIslamic medicineand scholarship, and in turn their work was extended by European scholars such asAlbertus Magnus.

During the EuropeanRenaissanceand early modern period, zoological thought was revolutionized in Europe by a renewed interest inempiricismand the discovery of many novel organisms. Prominent in this movement were the anatomistVesaliusand the physiologistWilliam Harvey,who used experimentation and careful observation, and naturalists such asCarl LinnaeusandBuffonwho began toclassify the diversity of lifeand thefossil record,as well as the development and behavior of organisms.Microscopyrevealed the previously unknown world of microorganisms, laying the groundwork forcell theory.The growing importance ofnatural theology,partly a response to the rise ofmechanical philosophy,encouraged the growth of natural history (although it entrenched theargument from design).

Over the 18th and 19th centuries, zoology became increasingly professionalscientific disciplines.Explorer-naturalists such asAlexander von Humboldtinvestigated the interaction between organisms and their environment, and the ways this relationship depends on geography—laying the foundations forbiogeography,ecologyandethology.Naturalists began to rejectessentialismand consider the importance ofextinctionand themutability of species.Cell theoryprovided a new perspective on the fundamental basis of life. These developments, as well as the results fromembryologyandpaleontology,were synthesized inCharles Darwin's theory ofevolutionbynatural selection.In 1859, Darwin placed the theory of organic evolution on a new footing, by his discovery of a process by which organic evolution can occur, and provided observational evidence that it had done so.

Pre-scientific zoology

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An ancient Egyptian plows his fields with a pair of oxen, used as beasts of burden and a source of food.

Theearliest humansmust have had and passed on knowledge aboutanimalsto increase their chances of survival. This may have included unsystematic knowledge of human and animal anatomy and aspects of animal behavior (such as migration patterns). People learnt more about animals with theNeolithic Revolutionabout 10,000 years ago. Humansdomesticatedanimals as people becamepastoralistsand then farmers instead ofhunter-gatherersin civilisations such as those ofancient Egypt.[1]

Ancient eastern cultures

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The ancient cultures ofMesopotamia,theIndian subcontinent,andChina,among others, produced renowned surgeons and students of the natural sciences such asSusrutaandZhang Zhongjing,reflecting independent sophisticated systems of natural philosophy. Taoist philosophers, such asZhuangziin the 4th century BC, expressed ideas related toevolution,such as denying the fixity of biological species and speculating that species had developed differing attributes in response to differing environments.[2]The ancient IndianAyurvedatradition independently developed the concept of three humours, resembling that of thefour humoursofancient Greek medicine,though the Ayurvedic system included further complications, such as the body being composed offive elementsand seven basictissues.Ayurvedic writers also classified living things into four categories based on the method of birth (from the womb, eggs, heat & moisture, and seeds) and explained the conception of afetusin detail. They also made considerable advances in the field ofsurgery,often without the use of humandissectionor animalvivisection.[3]One of the earliest Ayurvedic treatises was theSushruta Samhita,attributed to Sushruta in the 6th century BC. It was also an earlymateria medica,describing 700 medicinal plants, 64 preparations from mineral sources, and 57 preparations based on animal sources.[4]However, the roots of modern zoology are usually traced back to theseculartradition ofancient Greek philosophy.[5]

Ancient Greek traditions

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Thepre-Socratic philosophersasked many questions about life but produced little systematic knowledge of specifically zoological interest—though the attempts of theatomiststo explain life in purely physical terms would recur periodically through the history of zoology. However, the medical theories ofHippocratesand his followers, especiallyhumorism,had a lasting impact.[6]

Aristotelian zoology

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Aristotle

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Aristotle reported correctly thatelectric rayswere able to stun their prey.
Main article:Aristotle's biology

The philosopherAristotlecreatedthe science of biology,basing its theory on both hismetaphysicalprinciples and on observation. He proposed theories for the processes of metabolism, temperature regulation, information processing, embryonic development and inheritance. He made detailed observations of nature, especially the habits andattributesofanimalsin the sea atLesbos.He classified 540 animal species, and dissected at least 50.[7][8][9]

Aristotle, and nearly all Western scholars after him until the 18th century, believed that creatures were arranged in a graded scale of perfection rising from plants on up to humans: thescala naturaeorGreat Chain of Being.[10]

Hellenistic zoology

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A few scholars in theHellenistic periodunder thePtolemies—particularlyHerophilus of ChalcedonandErasistratus of Chios—amended Aristotle's physiological work, even performing experimental dissections and vivisections.[11]Claudius Galenbecame the most important authority on medicine and anatomy. Though a few ancientatomistssuch asLucretiuschallenged theteleologicalAristotelian viewpoint that all aspects of life are the result of design or purpose, teleology (and after the rise ofChristianity,natural theology) remained central to biological thought until the 18th and 19th centuries.[12]

Medieval and Islamic zoology

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Frederick II'sinfluentialDe arte venandiexplored birdmorphology.

The decline of theRoman Empireled to the disappearance or destruction of much knowledge, though physicians still incorporated many aspects of the Aristotelian tradition into training and practice. InByzantiumand theIslamicworld, many of Aristotle's works were translated intoArabicand commented upon by scholars such asAvicennaandAverroes.[13]

MedievalMuslim physicians,scientistsandphilosophersmade significant contributions to zoological knowledge between the 8th and 13th centuries during theIslamic Golden Age.The Arab scholaral-Jahiz(781–869) described the idea of afood chain,[14]and was an early adherent ofenvironmental determinism.[15]

During theHigh Middle Ages,a few European scholars such asHildegard of Bingen,Albertus MagnusandFrederick IIexpanded the natural history canon. Magnus'sDe animalibus libri XXVIwas one of the most extensive studies of zoological observation published before modern times.[16][17]

Renaissance and early modern

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From anatomy to systematic taxonomy

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Conrad Gesner(1516–1565). HisHistoriae animaliumis considered the beginning of modern zoology.
See also:Scientific Revolution

TheRenaissancewas the age of collectors and travellers, when many of the stories were actually demonstrated as true when the living or preserved specimens were brought to Europe. Verification by collecting of things, instead of the accumulation of anecdotes, then became more common, and scholars developed a new faculty of careful observation.[18]The Renaissance brought expanded interest in both empirical natural history and physiology. In 1543,Andreas Vesaliusinaugurated the modern era of Western medicine with his seminalhuman anatomytreatiseDe humani corporis fabrica,which was based on dissection of corpses. Vesalius was the first in a series of anatomists who gradually replacedscholasticismwithempiricismin physiology and medicine, relying on first-hand experience rather than authority and abstract reasoning.Bestiaries—a genre that combines both the natural and figurative knowledge of animals—also became more sophisticated.Conrad Gessner's great zoological work,Historiae animalium,appeared in four volumes, 1551–1558, at Zürich, a fifth being issued in 1587. His works were the starting-point of modern zoology. Other major works were produced byWilliam Turner,Pierre Belon,Guillaume Rondelet,andUlisse Aldrovandi.[19]Artists such asAlbrecht DürerandLeonardo da Vinci,often working with naturalists, were also interested in the bodies of animals and humans, studying physiology in detail and contributing to the growth of anatomical knowledge.[20]

In the 17th century, the enthusiasts of the new sciences, the investigators of nature by means of observation and experiment, banded themselves into academies or societies for mutual support and discourse. The first founded of surviving European academies, theAcademia Naturae Curiosorum(1651) especially confined itself to the description and illustration of the structure of plants and animals; eleven years later (1662) theRoyal Society of Londonwas incorporated byroyal charter,having existed without a name or fixed organisation for seventeen years previously (from 1645). A little later theAcademy of SciencesofPariswas established byLouis XIV,[18]later still theRoyal Society of Sciences in Uppsalawas founded. Systematizing, naming and classifying dominated zoology throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.Carl Linnaeuspublished a basictaxonomyfor the natural world in 1735 (variations of which have been in use ever since), and in the 1750s introducedscientific namesfor all his species.[21]While Linnaeus conceived of species as unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy, the other great naturalist of the 18th century,Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon,treated species as artificial categories and living forms as malleable—even suggesting the possibility ofcommon descent.Though he was writing in an era before evolution was recognized, Buffon is a key figure in thehistory of evolutionary thought;his "transformist" theory would influence the evolutionary theories of bothJean-Baptiste LamarckandCharles Darwin.[22]

Before theAge of Exploration,naturalists had little idea of the sheer scale of biological diversity. The discovery and description of new species and the collection of specimens became a passion of scientific gentlemen and a lucrative enterprise for entrepreneurs; many naturalists traveled the globe in search of scientific knowledge and adventure.[23]

Table of the Animal Kingdom ( "Regnum Animale" ) from the 1st edition of Linnaeus'Systema Naturae(1735)

Extending the work of Vesalius into experiments on still living bodies (of both humans and animals),William Harveyinvestigated the roles of blood, veins and arteries. Harvey'sDe motu cordisin 1628 was the beginning of the end for Galenic theory, and alongsideSantorio Santorio's studies of metabolism, it served as an influential model of quantitative approaches to physiology.[24]

Impact of the microscope

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In the early 17th century, the micro-world of zoology was just beginning to open up. A few lensmakers and natural philosophers had been creating crudemicroscopessince the late 16th century, andRobert Hookepublished the seminalMicrographiabased on observations with his own compound microscope in 1665. But it was not untilAntony van Leeuwenhoek's dramatic improvements in lensmaking beginning in the 1670s—ultimately producing up to 200-fold magnification with a single lens—that scholars discoveredspermatozoa,bacteria,infusoriaand the sheer strangeness and diversity of microscopic life. Similar investigations byJan Swammerdamled to new interest inentomologyand built the basic techniques of microscopic dissection andstaining.[25]

Debate over theflood described in the Biblecatalyzed the development ofpaleontology;in 1669Nicholas Stenopublished an essay on how the remains of living organisms could be trapped in layers of sediment and mineralized to producefossils.Although Steno's ideas about fossilization were well known and much debated among natural philosophers, an organic origin for all fossils would not be accepted by all naturalists until the end of the 18th century due to philosophical and theological debate about issues such as the age of the earth andextinction.[26]

18th century microscopes from theMusée des Arts et Métiers,Paris

Advances inmicroscopyalso had a profound impact on biological thinking. In the early 19th century, a number of biologists pointed to the central importance of thecell.In 1838 and 1839,SchleidenandSchwannbegan promoting the ideas that (1) the basic unit of organisms is the cell and (2) that individual cells have all the characteristics oflife,though they opposed the idea that (3) all cells come from the division of other cells. Thanks to the work ofRobert RemakandRudolf Virchow,however, by the 1860s most biologists accepted all three tenets of what came to be known ascell theory.[27]

In advance ofOn the Origin of Species

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Up through the 19th century, the scope of zoology was largely divided between physiology, which investigated questions of form and function, and natural history, which was concerned with the diversity of life and interactions among different forms of life and between life and non-life. By 1900, much of these domains overlapped, while natural history (and its counterpartnatural philosophy) had largely given way to more specialized scientific disciplines—cytology,bacteriology,morphology,embryology,geography,andgeology.Widespread travel by naturalists in the early-to-mid-19th century resulted in a wealth of new information about the diversity and distribution of living organisms. Of particular importance was the work ofAlexander von Humboldt,which analyzed the relationship between organisms and their environment (i.e., the domain ofnatural history) using the quantitative approaches ofnatural philosophy(i.e.,physicsandchemistry). Humboldt's work laid the foundations ofbiogeographyand inspired several generations of scientists.[28]

Charles Darwin's first sketch of an evolutionary tree from hisFirst Notebook on Transmutation of Species(1837)

The emerging discipline of geology also brought natural history and natural philosophy closer together;Georges Cuvierand others made great strides incomparative anatomyandpaleontologyin the late 1790s and early 19th century. In a series of lectures and papers that made detailed comparisons between living mammals andfossilremains Cuvier was able to establish that the fossils were remains of species that had becomeextinct—rather than being remains of species still alive elsewhere in the world, as had been widely believed.[29]Fossils discovered and described byGideon Mantell,William Buckland,Mary Anning,andRichard Owenamong others helped establish that there had been an 'age of reptiles' that had preceded even the prehistoric mammals. These discoveries captured the public imagination and focused attention on the history of life on earth.[30]

Charles Darwin,combining the biogeographical approach of Humboldt, the uniformitarian geology of Lyell,Thomas Malthus's writings on population growth, and his own morphological expertise, created a more successful evolutionary theory based onnatural selection;similar evidence ledAlfred Russel Wallaceto independently reach the same conclusions.[31]Charles Darwin's early interest in nature led him on afive-year voyageonHMSBeaglewhich established him as an eminentgeologistwhose observations and theories supportedCharles Lyell'suniformitarianideas, and publication of hisjournal of the voyagemade him famous as a popular author.[32]Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife andfossilshe collected on the voyage, Darwin investigated thetransmutation of speciesand conceived his theory of natural selection in 1838.[33]Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and his geological work had priority.[34]He was writing up his theory in 1858 whenAlfred Russel Wallacesent him an essay which described the same idea, prompting immediate joint publication ofboth of their theories.[35] Darwin'sOn the Origin of Species,published on 24 November 1859, a seminal work of scientific literature, was to be the foundation of evolutionary biology.

See also

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References

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  1. ^Magner,A History of the Life Sciences,pp 2–3
  2. ^Needham, Joseph;Ronan, Colin Alistair (1995).The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: An Abridgement of Joseph Needham's Original Text, Vol. 1.Cambridge University Press.p. 101.ISBN978-0-521-29286-3.
  3. ^Magner,A History of the Life Sciences,p. 6
  4. ^Girish Dwivedi, Shridhar Dwivedi (2007)."History of Medicine: Sushruta – the Clinician – Teacher par Excellence"(PDF).National Informatics Centre.Archived fromthe original(PDF)on 2008-10-10.Retrieved2008-10-08.{{cite journal}}:Cite journal requires|journal=(help)
  5. ^Magner,A History of the Life Sciences,pp 3–9
  6. ^Magner,A History of the Life Sciences,pp 9–27
  7. ^Mayr,The Growth of Biological Thought,pp 84–90, 135
  8. ^Mason,A History of the Sciences,pp 41–44
  9. ^Leroi, Armand Marie(2014).The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science.Bloomsbury. pp. 370–373.ISBN978-1-4088-3622-4.
  10. ^Mayr,The Growth of Biological Thought,pp 201–202; see also: Lovejoy,The Great Chain of Being
  11. ^Barnes,Hellenistic Philosophy and Science,p 383–384
  12. ^Annas,Classical Greek Philosophy,p 252
  13. ^Mayr,The Growth of Biological Thought,pp 91–94
  14. ^Frank N. Egerton, "A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 6: Arabic Language Science - Origins and Zoological",Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America,April 2002: 142–146 [143]
  15. ^Lawrence I. Conrad (1982), "Taun and Waba: Conceptions of Plague and Pestilence in Early Islam",Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient25(3), pp. 268–307 [278].
  16. ^Albertus Magnus. On Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica. The Review of Metaphysics | December 01, 2001 | Tkacz, Michael W.
  17. ^Mayr,The Growth of Biological Thought,pp 91–94: "As far as biology as a whole is concerned, it was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that the universities became centers of biological research."
  18. ^abOne or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain:Lankester, Edwin Ray(1911). "Zoology".InChisholm, Hugh(ed.).Encyclopædia Britannica.Vol. 28 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 1022–1039.See especially pp. 1022–1024.
  19. ^Mayr,The Growth of Biological Thought,pp 166–171
  20. ^Magner,A History of the Life Sciences,pp 80–83
  21. ^Mayr,The Growth of Biological Thought,chapter 4
  22. ^Mayr,The Growth of Biological Thought,chapter 7
  23. ^See Raby,Bright Paradise
  24. ^Magner,A History of the Life Sciences,pp 103–113
  25. ^Magner,A History of the Life Sciences,pp 133–144
  26. ^Rudwick,The Meaning of Fossils,pp 41–93
  27. ^Sapp,Genesis,chapter 7; Coleman,Biology in the Nineteenth Century,chapters 2
  28. ^Bowler,The Earth Encompassed,pp 204–211
  29. ^Rudwick,The Meaning of Fossils,pp 112–113
  30. ^Bowler,The Earth Encompassed,pp 211–220
  31. ^Mayr,The Growth of Biological Thought,chapter 10: "Darwin's evidence for evolution and common descent"; and chapter 11: "The causation of evolution: natural selection"; Larson,Evolution,chapter 3
  32. ^Desmond & Moore 1991,pp. 210, 284–285
  33. ^Desmond & Moore 1991,pp. 263–274
  34. ^van Wyhe, John (2007). "Mind the gap: did Darwin avoid publishing his theory for many years?".Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London.61(2): 177–207.doi:10.1098/rsnr.2006.0171.S2CID202574857.
  35. ^Beddall, B. G. (1968). "Wallace, Darwin, and the Theory of Natural Selection".Journal of the History of Biology.1(2): 261–323.doi:10.1007/BF00351923.S2CID81107747.

Sources

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