Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

David Dobbs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 4, 2005

Explores the century-long controversy over the orgins of coral reefs, a debate that split the world of nineteenth-century science, looking at the diverse roles of Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander, and Charles Darwin and reflecting on how the search for the truth shed new light on the formation of Earth and its natural wonders.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Few questions in 19th-century science aroused more controversy than the origin of coral reefs. Charles Darwin posited that the corals grew upon sinking land forms, a theory widely accepted despite its lack of empirical evidence. Enter Alexander Agassiz (1835–1910), son of the renowned naturalist Louis, whose earlier dispute with Darwin over evolution tarnished his reputation as a scientist. A meticulous researcher, Alexander disapproved of Darwin's "intuitive leaps"; he believed that proper science must work "through eyes-on observation and the tireless accumulation of reliable information." To this end, he spent the last 25 years of his life visiting every major reef formation on the planet. But though he gathered a wealth of evidence that seemed to refute Darwin, he never published his findings. By the 1950s, when technology enabled researchers to drill for deep coral samples, data proved that Darwin had guessed right after all. Dobbs (The Great Gulf, etc.) clearly sides with Agassiz in this story of clashing intellects and egos, arguing that Alexander's aversion to confrontation and his emphasis on methodology sprang from the embarrassment caused by his father's stubborn creationism, as well as from annoyance at Darwin's stoking of his own reputation. That Alexander's failure shows Darwin's theory to be all the more brilliant may be an unintended irony of this engrossing chapter in the history of modern science.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Charles Darwin's first scientific splash, a theory on the formation of coral atolls, is now accepted; but it had a rival in a theory advanced by naturalist Alexander Agassiz. Dobbs approaches this chapter in scientific history from a number of perspectives, including Alexander's personality as formed in the shadow of his father, Louis, one of the most famous naturalists of the Victorian era. On a more abstract level, Dobbs discusses the balance between induction and deduction in scientific reasoning. The biography is inherently more interesting, and Dobbs highlights the contrast between Alexander's introspection and his father's charisma and self-centeredness. By the 1870s, Louis Agassiz rigidly resisted Darwinism; Alexander accepted evolution but not, when he learned of data collected on the seminal expedition of the Challenger, Darwin's idea about atolls. Darwin contended they formed around subsiding mountains; Alexander maintained the coral accreted upward. Describing Agassiz's voyages to atolls, Dobbs skillfully relates a story that, if lacking a triumphant ending, yet depicts Agassiz's quiet drama in constructing a theory, wrong though it was. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (January 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375421610
• ISBN-13: 978-0375421617
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1.1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #918,810 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I write book, magazine articles, and a blog on science, medicine, and culture, contributing regularly to publications such as the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Scientific American, and Scientific American Mind where I'm a contributing editor.

Sometimes people ask I write about science and medicine. For a long time I replied that I found intriguing the puzzles that scientists and doctors face and try to solve. That certainly holds; there's no detective story more gripping than the effort to crack a tough scientific problem or save the life of a patient whose illness defies the usual measures.

Yet as I write more about these subjects, whether it be a 19th-century argument about coral reefs (Reef Madness), a 20th-century argument about how to count fish (The Great Gulf), brain surgery for depression, or the biology of fear, I increasingly appreciate what science and medicine can reveal about our culture. I don't want to call it "science criticism," as one talks about art or literary criticism, but I think that looking at science and medicine and how they are done and received can show us as much about our culture as can critiquing books, movies, music, or art.

The way we view mood and its disorders, for instance, whether as scientists or lay people, reveals much about how we think about how the mind works, about our sense of responsibility for one's actions, about how tightly or loosely our characters are dictated by our biology, and about how much power we have to change our own thoughts and actions. Likewise, whether we favor fighting malaria with expensive vaccine programs or cheap (but effective) mosquito netting says a lot about our values and our sense of what sort of solutions are most valuable. There, as elsewhere, we tend to favor the expensive tech fix rather than the simple.

Or consider memory. One of my richest reading pleasures was reading Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, a splendid meditation on (among other things) solitude, loneliness, society, and the unique world that memory creates for each of us. I've rarely read anything so deeply immersive or so revealing about how our minds work. Yet my appreciation of Proust, and of memory, is only magnified by learning about the science of memory. We learn -- we memorize and recall -- via a gorgeous cascade of synaptic and genetic interaction that can sear into our minds the sound of a clarinet or the lovely swing of Ken Griffey -- or recall, in a flood of remembrance, the lights, voices, and very air that surrounded us years ago when we sipped a certain tea whose scent, now unexpectedly countered, takes us rushing back. The science behind such memories is as rich and informative about who we are as is the phenomenology -- the feel of it -- described so beautifully by Proust.

Thus my transformation from literature major to a writer who writes about science. I don't think "science writer"quite a fair label actually; like "southern novelist," it implies limits and a parochialism that may not hold. Good writing about science, like good writing about baseball, pig farming, politics, or art, is about just about everything.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Atoll times, August 12, 2005

By 

Charles Miller (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral (Hardcover)

This book is fascinating on many fronts. First, it is a quite readable and informative biography of Louis Agassiz and his son Alexander. Second, it is an account of one of the longest-running controversies in the history of science. And, finally, it gives great insights to the current debate in the US over the teaching of "intelligent design."

Louis Agassiz was considered one of the world's greatest scientists (or natural philosophers as they were called at the time), and, after his migration to the United States from his native Switzerland, was viewed as America's greatest naturalist. He was a shrewd self-promoter who parlayed his explanation of glaciation and ice ages, and his encyclopedic knowledge of animal taxonomy, into a position of power and influence. However, he was a follower of Cuvier, and believed that species were created immutably by God. The fossil record was explained by a series of catastrophic annihilations (floods, ice ages) followed by divine creation of completely new species. Needless to say, he did not accept the theory of the origin of species by natural selection as propounded by Darwin. He and Darwin's followers engaged in heated, personal exchanges and attacks. In the end, however, Agassiz was nearly destroyed by the ensuing controversy, and his reputation and influence suffered severely.

Alexander, on the other hand was more mild-mannered and consciously avoided being drawn into his father's fights. He was a widely respected naturalist and an expert on marine zoology, and privately accepted the truth of evolution. He had his own disagreement with Darwin, however, over Darwin's widely-accepted theory of the formation of coral reefs. While not nearly as destructive as his father's evolution dispute, the disagreement involved much publishing, many attacks, and the accumulation of reams of data supporting each side. The fact that this controversy was not settled authoritatively until core samples were taken on Eniwetok atoll before the nuclear tests of the 1950's, long after the protagonists were dead and buried, makes for an almost mystery novel-like tale.

At times, the book reads like today's newspaper accounts of groups trying promote the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in our children's classrooms. Even though this debate was seemingly settled nearly 150 years ago, some ideas die hard.

This is quite an enjoyable read.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How to be a good naturalist, July 25, 2008

By 

Charles S. Fisher (Woodacre, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral (Hardcover)

This is a very good book about Louis and Alexander Agassiz. The former a brilliant young, narcissistic naturalist whose expository skills catapulted him to scientific prominence but he met his comeuppance by arrogantly misusing his assistants and then fighting the theory of evolution with faulty data. He self-destructively discredits his earlier real contributions. He is a tragic figure. He wanted nature to speak for itself rather than theories, but was committed to a creative god making order. The picture of Darwin that the book gives is much less useful repeating in incomplete ways what is in other much better histories.

The great contribution of the book is the laying out of the bio's of Louis and Alexander and sketching, almost as a scientific mystery unfolding a step at a time, the contesting ideas of how coral reefs form. Darwin's theory of subsistence dominates despite mounting evidence to the contrary. And then Alexander never publishes his comprehensive refutation of the theory for reasons that are never known. The book ends with the irony that when drill holes are made for the atomic test in the Pacific in the 1960s it turns out that what was taken to be sandstone underlayment of reefs thrust up like the sandstones of Dover, are really old reef detritus and hence, along with plate tectonics atolls are really piled up reef growth on top of subsistent subterranean mountains. So, in the end Darwin was correct although not because of anything other than having made an appealing guess, i.e. he had no evidence.

The book ends with a Popperian criteria for science, falsification, which the author takes to have been the razor of what is truly scientific which could have been used to parse through the contesting claims. Darwin's theory was not falsifiable and Alexander made observational mistakes based of his theoretical commitments despite his claim of letting nature speak. But the book is really an example of a more complex scientific process where there is a great mix of scientific authority, i.e. the Darwinians' assumption that the master must be right and much anomalous data, like were the lagoons formed by dissolving coral and contesting claims for the role of erosion. With the understanding of ice ages, it became clearer that reefs rose out of the water as water levels changed, so there was relative subsiding. Earlier anti-Darwinians rejected subsistence because there was no evidence for it. The author says that science always works by imaginative (hypothesis) leaps and then the winnowing of evidence. Yes and no. Certainly as with Kepler and other instances, the vast accumulations of inductive evidence lays the foundation for many explanations. And like reefs, the evidence over time can preclude clear explanations even though explanations are offered. Feyerabend's or Rorty a la Kuhn's picture of science, as a combination of verification, falsification, inductions, etc is much better that either pure Kuhn or Popper.
Charlie Fisher, author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Development of Scientific Methodology in the 19th Century, September 27, 2005

By 

rms (Albuquerque, NM USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral (Hardcover)

_Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral_, David Dobbs

One gets the impression that the author didn't have enough material to fill a book adhering strictly to the title topic, and so padded it with fully 150 pages of material on Louis Agassiz's (Alexander's father) life and work.

No matter, the result is a fascinating study of the change in scientific methodology over the course of the 19th century, using the specific controversy over formation of coral reefs to illustrate opposing conceptions of what it means to "conduct science". What constitutes a scientific theory, and what is the acceptable way to formulate one? Is it necessary to gather a mountain of evidence until an explanatory theory emerges -- as Baconian inductivists would hold -- or is it ok to make a speculative deduction based on a handful of facts, and challenge others to disprove it?

Alexander was very much in the inductivist camp, having observed the downfall of his bombastic father and thereby moved to the opposite conservative pole, in his later years visited more coral reefs than any man before or since in his attempt to falsify Darwin's coral formation theory. He knew that Darwin had been proved spectacularly wrong at Glen Roy by his father, and saw that his coral reef theory was based on circular reasoning: coral reefs were to be attributed to widespread subsidence (which was only a speculative occurrence), while the proof of subsidence was....coral reefs. As a confirmed plodder, I found myself rooting for Alexander, that he would be proved triumphant over his brilliant competitor after so many years of hard work.

Darwin on the other hand (the author argues) was much more in the mold of today's scientists in his approach. More willing to make leaps of the imagination in formulating an hypothesis, to "tell a story", and "focus on dynamic natural processes of change rather than fixed descriptions of static things", before following it up with detailed experimentation and data gathering. Glen Roy taught him "a vital lesson: Productive observation actually rises from sound theory -- not the opposite, as Louis would assert". But his coral reef theory belonged to his early years as well, and was vulnerable to criticism of being too speculative by conservative scientists with Alexander's cast of mind.

The coral reef debate also included aspects familiar to those following the current breuhaha over Intelligent Design. Proponents of Murray's alternative reef theory argued aggressively that those championing Darwin's coral reef theory were "atheistic churchmen and closet idealists, pseudoempiricists who would adore a theory because....they worshipped not thoughts of God but those of man -- and particularly of the man named Darwin." Sound familiar?

Anyway, not to drag on too much, this is a very enjoyable and informative choice for the popular science reader. Islands, island formation and island ecology, are all wonderful topics in themselves, and this book provides insight into those topics, while opening a window onto how science itself works, and how men of science have struggled to define their profession; not at all an easy task when the seemingly contradictory requirements of imagination and rigorous adherence to -- often spotty and incomplete -- fact are called for. Highly recommended.