A ‘late developer’ argument, common to Psychology and Economic History, can be used to explain cultural innovation. It argues that the 19th century theory of natural selection arose in England and not Germany because of – and not in spite of – England’s scientific backwardness. Measured in terms of institutions, communities, and ideas, the relative retardation of English science was precisely what enabled it to adopt German advances in novel ways

Finkelstein, Gabriel

English

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‘Early’ versus ‘Late’In 1852, Alexander Gerschenkron published an essay en-titled ‘Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective’1.Gerschenkron argued that Germany had industrializedfaster, and indeed further, than England precisely because ithad lagged behind its western neighbour in economic de-velopment. Just as in a family, where younger siblings watchand learn from the experience of the older, younger nationswatch and learn from the experience of the nations gone be-fore them. In this way they mature faster, since they avoidthe inefficiencies of their predecessors and adopt only themost productive ideas, institutions, and industries. Latebloomers, according to Gerschenkron, bloom better. More recently Frank Sulloway has used a version ofthis argument to account for the varying pace of scientificinnovation. Drawing from a variety of historical and psy-chological data, Sulloway has contended that latter-bornscientists are more receptive to new ideas than their first-born colleagues2. Younger siblings learn to take more risksbecause it is the only way they can compete with theirolder, bigger and smarter brothers and sisters. Habitslearned in childhood persist later in life, the consequencebeing that latter-borns more readily recognize and acceptscientific advance. Late bloomers, according to Sulloway,bloom better.Is there really an advantage to backwardness? To answerthe question one would certainly need to address the majorweakness in Gerschenkron’s and Sulloway’s arguments,namely that they naturalize the development that theywish to explain – whether in nations or in persons – andthen explain it by saying that it is natural. Suppose Gerschenkron and Sulloway are right. Wheredoes that get us? At the very least, it gets us to an expla-nation of why the theory of natural selection developed inEngland and not in Germany. I suggest that England ben-efited from a kind of scientific backwardness. My conten-tion is that it was this backwardness that enabled Darwinto supersede his colleagues on the Continent.English amateurs, German professionalsScientific backwardness can be defined in terms of institutions, communities and ideas. In the 19th centuryEngland lagged in each category. The deficit was clearestwith respect to institutions. As a student, Darwin had hispick of three English universities: Oxford, Cambridgeand University College, London, and of these, only thelast did not have the air of a seminary. Half the studentsat Oxford and Cambridge trained for the clergy. Many of the professors had taken vows of celibacy as or-dained ministers of the Anglican Church. Hardly anychairs were allocated to scientific subjects; scientificdegrees were not awarded until the 1870s. Those who didmanage to educate themselves in science found it dif-ficult to pursue as a profession. A few positions existedat asylums, hospitals, museums, and societies, but theywere hard to find without patronage, and they did not payvery well3. Huxley worked as a ship’s surgeon beforesupporting himself with lectures and reviews. Wallacestarted out a railway surveyor and schoolteacher; his de-cision to explore the Amazon was motivated in large partby the prospect of selling his collections back home.Darwin did not need money, but he did need something todo, and even though he suffered horribly from sea-sickness, he seriously considered signing on for a secondextended ocean voyage after his five years aboard theBeagle4. The landscape of scholarly institutions in Germanycould not have looked more different. Nearly everyscientist worked in a university; those who did not taughtin secondary schools, military academies, teachinghospitals and art institutes. Some scientists ran their own laboratories, like Liebig in Giessen or Purkinje in Breslau, but these facilities also served to trainresearchers. The net effect of this degree of institutionalization wasto create a very strong sense of community. For example,the first professional organization of any kind in Germanyfounded on a national basis was Oken’s Society of GermanNaturalists and Physicians. And I mean of any kind –before there was a national army, before there was anational political party, German scientists had a sense ofthemselves as German5. The strength of professional ties extended into sociallives as well. Steven Turner has recently remarked that in76 Endeavour Vol. 24(2) 2000 0160-9327/00/$ – see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0160-9327(00)01290-4 Why Darwin was English Gabriel Finkelstein A ‘late developer’ argument, common to Psychology and Economic History, can be used to explain culturalinnovation. It argues that the 19th century theory of natural selection arose in England and not Germanybecause of – and not in spite of – England’s scientific backwardness. Measured in terms of institutions,communities, and ideas, the relative retardation of English science was precisely what enabled it to adoptGerman advances in novel ways.  Gabriel Finkelstein Teaches History of Science and European History at the Universityof Colorado at Denver. He is currently completing a biographyof the physiologist and essayist Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896) and is planning a book on German scientific exploration.His research concerns the role of science in 19th-century Germansociety. gfinkels@carbon.cudenver.eduGerman universities ‘one in two natural scientists… wasrelated to another professor, the father of one in thirteenwas himself a professor, and (in confirmation of everyGerman academic stereotype) one in six married thedaughter of a professor’6. Scientists in England were far less organized. TheBritish Association for the Advancement of Science wasfounded in 1831, nine years after Oken’s organization.Other professional societies were either local or ex-clusive. Most scientists met and exchanged ideas throughan informal network of friends, acquaintances, andstrangers7. Darwin was absolutely typical in this respect(Figure 1). As James Secord has shown, he spent a gooddeal of time slumming with pigeon breeders8. Darwin wasthe son of one of the richest men in England. ImagineAlexander von Humboldt, in every way Darwin’s equal inexperience, eloquence, erudition, daring and status,telling his patron, the Prussian King Friedrich WilhelmIV, that he had spent the previous day in the company ofpigeon breeders. It is simply unimaginable. Amateurism had nearly vanished from German sci-ence. Humboldt approached natural history with anarsenal of sophisticated instruments. The brightest youngbiologists took note of his example. The rise of the ex-perimental life sciences at mid-century – a develop-ment often cited as proof of German superiority in highereducation – can be read almost entirely in terms of atransference of Humboldtian methods from the field tothe laboratory9. Devices like the achromatic microscope,the galvanometer, the kymograph, the ophthalmoscopeand the respiration chamber helped create new teachingpositions in embryology, histology and physiology. Thesedisciplines, in turn, trained generations of researchers to master ever more powerful and specialised tech-niques. Compare the situation in England. Emil du Bois-Reymond assessed it simply: ‘Physiology does not existthere’10. His views echoed others. Henry Bence Jonescomplained: ‘We shall slowly work up to you; unless yougo off too fast. It is easier to follow than to lead’11. Joneswas right. The fact was that the English were only be-ginning to discover innovations common in Germany a generation earlier. This patternof delayed transmission, whereGermany originated ideas andEngland received them, could beseen in new theories of cell, em-bryo, respiration, digestion, blood,muscle and nerve12. England’srelative decline showed most innatural history, because here theeffects of wealth – in this instance,extensive colonies and a large navy– should have conferred plainadvantage. Joseph Banks exploredthe South Seas with Captain Cook,transformed Kew Gardens into acentre of botanical research, andpresided over the Royal Society for42 years, but the naturalist whoseinspiration Darwin acknowledgedwas Alexander von Humboldt13. Similarly between 1846and 1847, Richard Owen delivered a series of lectures on natural history at the Hunterian Museum in London.The most important topic that he touched on was thetheory of the vertebrate archetype. Carl Gustav Carus hadexpounded the same theory in Germany nearly 20 yearsearlier14. This may seem a small point of history, butCharles Darwin attended Owen’s lectures that season, andCarus’ theory helped shape Darwin’s ideas on descent15. It is clear that institutionally, socially and intellectually,German science led the way. How did the English evercatch up? The answer appears a para-dox, but only at first sight, for infact, the strengths of German sciencealso proved to be its weaknesses.Mature or moribund?Consider institutions. German uni-versities had undergone a series of reforms in the wake of theNapoleonic wars that made themthe model of higher educationthroughout the world. If the abilityto attract foreign students can betaken as a measure of academicexcellence, then Germany outper-formed all other nations well intothis century. With the exception ofthe French, everybody came toGermany to study. Endeavour Vol. 24(2) 2000 77Figure 2 Hermann Helmholtz, like Darwin,was essentially an amateur in the field ofwork he became famous for.Figure 1 Darwin was keenly interested in German scientific developments. © Wellcome Library, London.German educational reforms succeeded because theywere thorough, and usually instituted against the wishes ofthe faculty, as the older, traditional faculties were oftenperceived – rightly or wrongly – as the heart of the problem.It took progressive, dynamic, even dictatorial administratorsto get things changed. And that very dynamism, such as thedynamism of Altenstein or Althoff, left a problematic legacy.Once a new professor was appointed, that was that. Every-one who came later had to wait for him to retire. This wasnot so bad at the beginning of the century, when many newfaculty were hired. But by the middle of the century theaverage delay between junior and senior lecturer had grownto 11 years, and by the end of the century, it had reached 16. The effect of this hierarchy was to freeze existing currentsof research. Unless their supervisors were extremely tol-erant, like Carl Ludwig in Leipzig or Felix Hoppe-Seylerin Strassburg, researchers avoided anything that could beconstrued as insubordination. Ludimar Hermann once hadthe temerity to claim that there was no such thing as a rest-ing current in nerves and muscles. Emil du Bois-Reymondsimply kicked him out of the laboratory. For a whileHermann lived and experimented in the back of his parents’print shop. Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig performedtheir famous experiment, which involved the electricalstimulation of the cerebral cortex, on a dressing table inHitzig’s apartment in Berlin; they later claimed that therehad been no room in the Physiological Institute. Professionalization leads to solidarity and esteem, andthere were few citizens more solid or esteemed in the 19thcentury than German professors. Jules Laforgue reportedseeing portraits of Mommsen, Virchow, Helmholtz and duBois-Reymond hanging for sale in Berlin shop windows,the professors to one side, the Royal Family16 to the other.The problem with celebrity is that it isolates. In 1906, theEnglish neurologist Charles Sherrington published hisIntegrated Action of the Nervous System, a path-breakingwork that combined anatomical, experimental, and clini-cal findings. Why hadn’t this synthesis appeared inGermany, previously the leader in the field? I suspect thatit has something to do with the stratification of Germanresearch. No professor of physiology in Germany wasgoing to examine patients. It just wasn’t done. Medicinewasn’t science; it was Handwerk. Which brings us, finally, to Darwin’s Theory. Naturalselection, as I see it, spun together three separate strandsof 19th-century thought: biogeography, Naturphilosophieand political economy. Only one other scientific theory ofthe time could compare in power and profundity, and thatwas the theory of the conservation of energy. What maynot be apparent is that the two German originators of thistheory, Robert Mayer and Hermann Helmholtz (Figure 2),trained in medicine17. When it came to physics, they wereamateurs. Perhaps there is an advantage to backwardnessafter all. Notes and references 1 Gerschenkron, A. (1966) Economic backwardness ineconomic perspective, in Economic Backwardness inHistorical Perspective: A Book of Essays, pp. 5–30, HarvardUniversity Press. The essay expands on an idea first statedin 1943 in Gerschenkron, A. (1989) Bread and Democracyin Germany, Cornell University Press. For support ofGerschenkron’s thesis, which emphasizes investmentbanking, see Treibilcock, C. (1981) The Industrialisation ofthe Continental Powers, 1780–1914, Longman. Forcriticism, see Tilly, R. (1989) German industrialisation andGerschenkronian backwardness, Riv. Storia Econom., 6.2,139–1642 Sulloway, F.J. (1996) Born to Rebel: Birth Order, FamilyDynamics and Creative Lives, Pantheon3 Rupke, N.A. (1994) Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist,chap. 1, Yale University Press4 Sulloway, F.J. (1996) Born to Rebel, p. 115, Pantheon5 The Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Aerzte wasfounded in 1822. See Thomas, R.H. (1951) Liberalism,Nationalism and the German Intellectuals (1822–1847): AnAnalysis of the Academic and Scientific Conferences of thePeriod, W. Heffer6 Turner, R.S. (1999) Review of ‘Baumgarten, M. (1997)Professoren und Universitaeten im 19. Jahrhundert: ZurSozialgeschichte deutscher Geistes- undNaturwissenschaftler, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht’ in Am.Histor. Rev. 104.1, 266–2677 See Rupke, N.A. (1994) Richard Owen, chap. 1, YaleUniversity Press; Secord, J.A. (1986) Controversy inVictorian Geology: The Cambrian–Silurian Dispute,Princeton; Rudwick, M.J.S. (1985) The Great DevonianControversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge AmongGentleman Specialists, University of Chicago Press8 Secord, J.A. (1981) Nature’s fancy: Charles Darwin and thebreeding of pigeons, Isis 72.262, 162–1869 As du Bois-Reymond put it ‘Every industrious andambitious man of science … is Humboldt’s son; we are allhis family.’ Du Bois-Reymond, E. (1982) Two GreatScientists of the Nineteenth Century: Correspondence ofEmil du Bois-Reymond and Carl Ludwig, p. 41, JohnsHopkins University Press10 Du Bois-Reymond, E. (1982) Two Great Scientists of theNineteenth Century, p. 73, Johns Hopkins University Press.Compare with Geison, G.L. (1972) Social and institutionalfactors in the stagnancy of English physiology, 1840–1870,Bull. Hist. Med. 46, 30–5811 Henry Bence-Jones to Emil du Bois-Reymond (28 Dec.1852), Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbestitz, Haus 2,Handschriftenabteilung, SD 3k 1852 (4) Bl. 139–14112 See Jacyna, L.S. (1984) The Romantic programme and thereception of the cell theory in Britain, J. Hist. Biol. 17,13–48; Owen, R. (1992) The Hunterian Lectures inComparative Anatomy, May–June 1837 (Sloan, P.R., ed.)pp. 3–72, University of Chicago Press; Ospovat, D. (1981)The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History,Natural Theology and Natural Selection, 1838–1859,Cambridge University Press; Rehbock, P.F. (1983) ThePhilosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early NineteenthCentury British Biology, University of Wisconsin Press;Rehbock, P.F. (1990) Transcendental anatomy inRomanticism and the Sciences (Cunningham, A. andJardine, N., eds) pp. 144–160, Cambridge University Press;Rupke, N.A. (1994) Richard Owen, pp. 64, 179–183. DuBois-Reymond and Helmholtz both gave talks at the RoyalInstitution in the 1850s13 Gascoigne, J. (1994) Joseph Banks and the EnglishEnlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture,Cambridge University Press; Darwin, C. (1989) Voyage ofthe Beagle (Browne, J. and Neve, M. eds), Penguin;Browne, J. (1996) Charles Darwin: A Biography, Vol. 1,pp. 133–136, 176–177, 415–417, Pimlico14 See Rupke, N.A. (1994) Richard Owen, pp. 179–183, YaleUniversity Press15 Ospovat, D. (1981) The Development of Darwin’s Theory,p. 117, Cambridge University Press16 Laforgue, J. (1996) Berlin: The City and the Court (Smith,W.J., trans.), p. 166, Turtle Point17 See Caneva, K.L. (1993) Robert Mayer and theConservation of Energy, Princeton University Press;Tuchmann, A. (1993) Helmholtz and the German medicalcommunity in Hermann Helmholtz and the Foundations ofNineteenth Century Science (Cahan, D., ed.), pp 17–49,University of California Press78 Endeavour Vol. 24(2) 2000

Why Darwin was English

A "late developer" argument, common to Psychology and Economic History, can be used to explain cultural innovation. It argues that the 19th century theory of natural selection arose in England and not Germany because of – and not in spite of – England’s scientific backwardness. Measured in terms of institutions, communities, and ideas, the relative retardation of English science was precisely what enabled it to adopt German advances in novel ways

Gabriel Finkelstein

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Why Darwin was English

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