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How we learned to tell a starfish from a jellyfish,
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This review is from: Starfish, Jellyfish and the Order of Life: Issues of Nineteenth-Century Science (History of Science & Medicine) (Hardcover)
Every species of living thing can be traced back to the first living organism through a series of gradually transformed ancestors. As we go back in time, each of these ancestors turns out to be the common ancestor of a number of other species that can be classified together in a group. So it is the most natural thing in the world for us to think of a species as belonging to a group of species which in turn belongs to a larger group and so on until we reach a group so big that it contains all living things. As Mary P. Winsor points out this point of view makes sense to us because we accept the theory of evolution, a theory that was only fully developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is not surprising the most 18th century naturalists did not believe that there was any natural way to fit species into a hierarchical classification since they had little inkling of evolution.
It is a surprise, however, that naturalists beginning at the end of the 18th century through the 1850's did come to believe in the existence of such a hierarchy of taxonomic categories even though ideas about evolution were still rudimentary. How this happened is the subject of Ms. Winsor's book. She uses as a case study the history of how starfish and jellyfish came to be classified. I find this fascinating especially because people who were not able to do gene sequencing or even interpret the fossil record eventually arrived at classifications that are mostly still valid today. They did so by careful studies of morphologies and life cycles which Ms. Winsor documents often reproducing the striking original illustrations of these early 19th century investigators. The reader who is interested in how our modern systems of classification developed will find himself, as found myself, revelling in all this detail. Where this books is less explicit is in explaining the theoretical framework which led people who did not yet think in terms of evolution to realize that a heirarchy of taxonomic categories is a real feature of nature. I think the problem lies in the author's neglect of the structuralist tradition in biology which was not in fashion when the book was published in 1976. At that time most historians of the life sciences followed the early 20th century writer E. S. Russell who had analyzed the history of biology in the 19th century as a struggle between structuralist and functionalists. Acccrding to Russell, the functiionalists, led by Cuvier, had the more valid approach and the one that led to modern evolutionary theory. Since the 1970's, this view has been reappraised partly because Darwin's own thinking has been shown to owe something to the structuralists and chiefly because new discoveries about the genome have thrown a new and more favorable light on the thinking of structuralists like Goethe, Oken, Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire and Robert Owen. It was the structuralists, scientists get little attention or sympathy from Ms. Winsor, who largely developed the theoretical framework that underlay early research on clasification. Interested readers can find out about this chapter in history from Stephen Jay Gould's book, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.
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