Lent Week 7: “What counts as endangered? Population biology, international conservation, and the redefinition of rarity”

Summary of the talk that Jon Agar (UCL) gave at Cabinet on the 3rd March

The Sixth Extinction – the global, human-caused mass extinction of animals and plants – is one of the greatest environmental crises of the modern world. What I addressed in this talk was the mobilisation of quantitative science in response to this crisis.

The listing of rare creatures is an old activity. However, in the 1960s the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) began compiling and publishing its Red Data Books of threatened species, starting with two volumes, Mammalia (mammals) and Aves (birds). I’ve described these ring-bound collections elsewhere as the ‘rarest important books of the twentieth century’ (ironically, about rarity), since, as far as I can tell, no pristine first editions exist.  The reason for this is simple: the books contained instructions for their own partial destruction: as new knowledge of the state of rarity was available, so old sheets of data were discarded.

Red Data Book Vol 1: Mammalia, 1966 (Photograph by Jon Agar)

Since the 1960s red data lists have proliferated – there are international and many national versions – and grown in influence. Inclusion in the list (or not) could be critical for the survival of a species. The criteria for inclusion however were largely qualitative, and rested on the judgement of experts. An ‘endangered’ mammal in the original volume, for example, was defined as one in ‘immediate danger of extinction: continued survival unlikely without the implementation of special protective measures’. But how immediate was immediate enough? How, precisely, unlikely was ‘unlikely’?

For a time these vagaries did not seem to matter. But in the late 1980s and 1990s these definitions were replaced, after much negotiation and fierce debate, by much more detailed, quantitative criteria that appealed to measures of probabilities drawn from conservation biology of populations.  These quantitative criteria are not only now used for determining the IUCN red data lists, but criteria modelled on them are also seen as relevant to the operation of CITES, the international agreement that restricts trade in endangered species. The criteria therefore are not only foundational for conservation but also shape how rare plants and animals enter the world economy. You can see examples of the new quantitative criteria here (IUCN) and, in partial, compromised form, here (CITES).

The criteria were largely the work of Georgina Mace, who is now Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems at UCL, but in 1989 was working at the Institute of Zoology in London. The Species Survival Commission of IUCN invited Mace to ‘undertake the important task of preparing a concept discussion document on the Red Data Book categories with a view to their reformulation’. Successive drafts of new categories were shown to a widening network of conservation biologists and practitioners. Russell Lande, a member of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, who had experience applying population viability analysis in the highly controversial case of the northern spotted owl (the conservation of which ran against logging interests), joined the project. The academic statement of the new approach, a paper authored by Mace and Lande, was published in Conservation Biology in 1991. The “Mace-Lande criteria” were then debated and tested under intense scrutiny as measures of level of extinction threat in global conservation governance.

Reading the responses to the new criteria, what is fascinating is the range of views revealed: the criteria were proposed as ‘objective’ but respondents take issue with the achievement, desirability or need for objectivity; some see the intensive population studies as the best way to secure conservation because robust statements about levels of threat could be made, while others saw them as expensive, perhaps only affordable by rich countries; others still disputed the approach because it might work well for mammals (especially the charismatic megafauna for which generous funds for research were available) but presented practical and even philosophical problems for insects or plants. Many saw the use of percentages as evidence of precision and as sound grounds for policy making; but others worried that talk of probabilities suggested uncertainties that the developers’ lawyers would exploit.

The debates over the criteria provide a superbly rich case study for following the advantages and disadvantages of appealing to numbers when attempting to solve major global problems. I am tracing these discussions at the primary source level, and the picture that is emerging is, I think, an important one. It is ongoing, and if you want to know more then please contact me at jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk.

Cabinet Trip 2014: Linnean Society

This gallery contains 36 photos.

The Cabinet had a tour of the Linnean Society in London on the 24th February 2014. We went into the vault where Linnaeus’s collections of books, manuscripts, plants, insects, shells, fish and other things are kept in climate-controlled conditions, and got a chance to see some of his specimens, his dissertation the Systema Naturae, and his […]

Lent Week 4: “Philology, Mythology and Geology in Colonial India”

Summary of the paper that Joydeep Sen, (University of Kent) gave at Cabinet on the 10th February

I am currently working with Dr Pratik Chakrabarti on a project entitled ‘An Antique Land: Geology, Philology and the Making of the Indian Subcontinent, 1830-1920’. The aim is to consider the relationship between science, culture and antiquity in India, through focusing on how geology contributed to the development of new theories regarding Indian and world heritage. This paper was based on the initial part of the research, elucidating how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philological studies of ancient mythology established critical methodological and interpretive frameworks for stratigraphy and palaeontology in colonial India. Moreover, I hoped that some of the themes and concepts explored would help to encourage critical reflection on the practice of ‘geomythology’ in modern-day historical and scientific scholarship.

The paper focused on the interaction of philology and geology in India as evinced in the careers of Francis Wilford (1761?-1822), H.T. Colebrooke (1765-1837) and Hugh Falconer (1808-1865). Through their scholarly interventions, we saw the multifarious  influence of Indian mythology, and with that, a remarkable series of paradigmatic shifts associable with the emerging discipline of Indian geology.

Wilford was not a geologist himself, but his significance to Orientalist scholarship was in pioneering the approach of invoking mythology to support intellectual enquiries into ‘man and nature’. While he considered Indian mythology to be lacking in historical credibility, and replete with absurdities, he nonetheless believed that some of its hidden meanings could help him to construct a ‘Hindu geography’. Moreover, though some of his spurious claims about Indian and global antiquity were ultimately discredited, his approach of mythology-focused philological enquiry seemed to remain a strong influence on geologists seeking to understand Indian rocks and fossils on a supposedly rational footing.

The relevance of mythology to palaeontology in colonial India was apparent in the European discovery of shaligrams. While scholars initially turned to philological studies of mythology in order to understand the place of these stones in the religious culture of India, Colebrooke recognised shaligrams as both Vaishnava representations of Vishnu and fossil ammonites. As sacred artefacts were thus ‘translated’ into scientific ones, they started to feature in the reconstruction of the geological timescale, though in the process, mythological references were gradually discarded.

With Falconer’s famous work on the Siwalik fossils, we saw a quite dramatic reassertion of the influence of mythology-focused philological enquiry on Indian geology. Falconer ultimately proposed a new theory regarding the geological formation of India, explaining the formation of the Siwalik hills and Himalayan mountains, and he notably gave his fossils appellations drawn from Indian mythology. Yet as significant as this was his implication that Indian mythological traditions could be of substantive use in elucidating facts about those fossils.

One of Falconer’s most important artefacts was his (re)constructed Colossochelys atlas, the great tortoise, and in 1844, he famously suggested that a clue to the circumstances of the giant tortoise’s extinction lay in the ‘cosmogonic speculations of almost all Eastern nations’, in which ‘the infant world [was] placed on the back of an elephant, which was sustained on a huge tortoise’.

‘Elephant Victorious over the Tortoise’ by Professor Edward Forbes in Falconer’s notebook.

Though Falconer conflated a number of different Indian mythological references to a tortoise, this was, in part at least, a reference to the Kurma avatar of Puranic tradition. Moreover, Falconer’s intervention, in contrast to the likes of Wilford, was significant in taking such allusions as authentically historical as opposed to just mythological, and that too despite their supposed exaggerations. His important contention – often missed in historical study of Falconer – was that traditions about Kurma in texts like the Puranas were not allegorical, but rather a description of a creature actually seen by the authors of the scriptures.

While Falconer’s suggestion that the giant tortoise was coexistent with man was later disproved, it is not impossible to imagine proponents of modern-day geomythology claiming that the authors of the Puranas had at least seen fossilised forms of the extinct creature; and so, our historical exploration raises questions about this fascinating but controversial area of study in modern-day historical and scientific scholarship

For scholars who insist that ancient civilisations were familiar with the observation and collection of fossils, ‘geomythology’ has indeed become a key concept. In short, geomythologists argue that several myths or legends encode real geological phenomena, and through decoding them (like some of our historical characters, though ostensibly with greater sensitivity), they aim to ‘convert mythology back into history’. The insistence that (modern) geological knowledge has in fact existed in several (pre-modern) cultures for centuries has been applied to the context of India. For example, there are claims that ancient scriptures foreshadow the geological truths belatedly uncovered by modern science, with the focus often on the supposed evolutionary significance of Vishnu’s incarnations such as Kurma.

But such approaches surely need to be problematised. There is no doubt that history as a discipline, and by extension the sciences, need to think more carefully about what exactly ‘myths’ are, rather than condescendingly treating them as ahistorical or pure cultural fiction. Yet while geomythologists seem convinced that they can explain the geology supposedly encoded in myths, thereby elucidating historical processes, they are arguably complacent in their own assumption of continuity in ways of knowing. The key, rather, is surely to explore mythological traditions according to their own texture. Moreover, we have to leave room for changing scientific interpretation, rather than making ancient literature conform to whatever is at present scientific consensus.

So, this historical exploration of the relationship between philology, mythology and geology in colonial India hopefully enables us not only to understand something of the making of Indian geology, but also to question how we ourselves approach traditions at the interstices of what we understand as historical, semi-historical and non-historical. We might bear in mind some of these reflections as we continue to explore the history of geology and ‘fossil folklore’ in India and elsewhere.

Joydeep’s departmental page: http://www.kent.ac.uk/history/staff/profiles/sen.html

Lent Week 5: “Skeletons in the cabinet and the Grand Tour of anatomy”

Summary of the talk that Margaret Carlyle, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, gave at Cabinet on the 17th February 2014

Skeleton colour poster by Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty

Human skeletons achieved new currency in eighteenth-century anatomy, gaining value as curiosities and commodities, as well as pedagogical and research objects. This was on top of their traditional role as purveyors of human decay and mortality. My paper provides an overview of how the skeleton was transformed by the Grand Tour, while undertaking its own “circuit” from graveyard to natural history collection to classroom to anatomy atlas. I suggest that the skeleton emerged as a “boundary object” at the intersection of natural history and medicine and that this “boundary” status is representative of anatomy’s disciplinary development as a whole in this period.

Skeletons and other human remains were procured from hospitals, graveyards, the scaffold, and occasionally directly from the deathbed. The anatomist Joseph-Guichard Duverney was said to have illicitly obtained cadavers from the cemetery near his residence when hospital corpses failed to meet his demands. The re-location during the 1770s of urban graveyards like the Holy Innocents Cemetery to the city limits facilitated trade in human skeletons. Those remains not snatched up were laid to rest in a network of subterranean galleries underneath the southern gate of Paris, which serve as catacombs to this day.

A number of the skeletons carted out of cemeteries entered natural history cabinets, where they served as display items. These cabinets emerged as important destinations in the context of the Grand Tour, the Continental circuit typically undertaken by upper class British men to complete their education and prepare for their futures as cultured members of polite society. Particularly popular stops were the “Skeletons of Malefactors” displayed in the Anatomy Hall at the University of Leiden and the female wax figures known as Venuses found in Felice Fontana’s Florentine workshop.

Leiden Lecture Hall, “Skeletons of Malefactors,” 1610

Paris was also a formidable destination for travellers. Its most impressive, all-encompassing natural history collection could be found in the townhouse of the aristocrat Joseph Bonnier de la Mosson. His collection comprised cabinets of botanicals, exotic minerals and shells, and animals spread across inter-connecting rooms, which his visitors toured freely. This was with the exception of the “Anatomy Cabinet,” which De La Mosson hid behind the scenes in a back corridor. The novelty of skeletons clearly required special moral consideration – that is, observance of codes of modesty on top of good taste and scientific connoisseurship.

Armoire of specimens from Bonnier de la Mosson’s natural history cabinet, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris

Artificial and natural skeletons also populated the large scale natural history cabinets attached to scientific societies. In Paris alone, bone collections could be found at the Royal Academy of Surgery, the Royal Academy of Sciences, and the Alfort Veterinary School, where Honoré Fragonard’s grand “horserider” lured tourists. Human osteology was also an important teaching subject at the King’s Garden, where students crowded into a large lecture theatre to observe dissections on a corpse. By mid-century, student demands for interaction with fresh bones created a new market for hands-on anatomy in smaller scale settings. Enterprising anatomists like the remarkable anatomical wax modeller Mlle Biheron stepped in to meet the demand. She attracted visitors to her museum of artificial anatomies, which included the lifesize model of a pregnant woman. Tourists may have toured her back garden, where she stored the corpses she was dissecting and after which she fashioned her models.

Skeletons also enjoyed new iconographic status in the anatomical atlases in circulation, including William Cheselden’s Osteographia or the Anatomy of Bones (1733) and Bernhard Siegfried Albinus’s (1697-1770) Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani (1749). The lavish Traité d’Ostéologie that reached French audiences in 1759 was a translation of the Scottish anatomist Alexander Monro’s Anatomy of the Human Bones produced by Mme Thiroux d’Arconville. This atlas featured thirty two engravings of skeletons including representations of man, woman, and child.

Female skeleton in Mme Thiroux d’Arconville, Traité d’Ostéologie (translation of Anatomy of the Human Bones, 1759), Vol.2

The skeleton provided a foundation for enquiry into human anatomy in a period of disciplinary ferment. The commodification of models like skeletons into inventive formats contributed to the growing prestige of natural history collectors and anatomists. The skeleton proved equally important to the “sciences of man” and the emerging subdisciplines of craniometry and pelvimetry, which blended quantitative and qualitative assessments of discreet aspects of skeletons. The skeleton was mysterious, arousing, and morally compromising, but it was an increasingly familiar object open to scrutiny and study by tourists and anatomists alike. By the end of the eighteenth century, the skeleton had made its way into the cabinet of scientific knowledge, and it was there to stay.

 

“Horserider” écorché by Honoré Fragonard, Ecole Vétérinaire d’Alfort, Paris

Feature article: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/skeletons-in-the-cupboard-of-medical-science

 

Lent Week 3: “The elephant in the room: historians and scientists working together”

Summary of the talk that Anna Marie Roos (University of Lincoln) gave on 3rd February 2014

The understanding of Earth’s biodiversity depends critically on the accurate identification and nomenclature of species. Whenever a new species is discovered, under the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, it is given a scientific name using binomial nomenclature and a “type” specimen is preserved, usually in a museum or research collection, so that other researchers can refer to it for physical details about the species. The type specimen is considered to be the representative for the entire species, exemplifying the defining features of that particular species. However, many species were described centuries ago, and in a surprising number of cases their nomenclature or type material remain unclear or inconsistent.

An elephant. Woodcut after C. Gessner.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

A prime example is provided by Elephas maximus, or the Asian elephant, one of the most well-known mammalian species. In 1758, Linneaus gave this name to the creature in his definitive work, the 10th edition of the Systema Naturae. In his description, Linneaus cited several “syntypes” or examples of elephant specimens in Europe, and he did not make any distinction between Asian or African Elephants. For him, an elephant was an elephant. He simply did not see enough live specimens to distinguish between the two.

A remarkable specimen referred to by Linnaeus is the well-preserved,  near-complete, body of an elephant foetus in a spirit jar, held today at the Swedish Museum of Natural History (NRM) in Stockholm. This specimen was initially owned by the Dutch West India Company, and later became part of Albertus Seba’s natural history collection. Linnaeus acquired the specimen after convincing King Adolf Frederick of Sweden to purchase it for his personal collection: “I am pleased that the little elephant has arrived. If he costs a lot, he was worth it. Certainly, he is as rare as a diamond,” (May 18, 1753).

The taxonomist subsequently described the fetus in his Systema Naturae  as Elephas maximus, and it eventually became the type specimen for the Asian elephant. But when the specimen was transferred to the Swedish Natural History Museum in the early 1800s, the curators began to suspect the baby was actually an African elephant, as it had large ears and domed head. In the early 2000s, Anthea Gentry, a mammal curator at the London Natural History Museum (NHM) thought much the same thing.

Although the animal’s DNA proved too degraded to yield conclusive evidence, Tom Gilbert and his colleague Enrico Cappellini at the University of Copenhagen turned to the elephant’s proteins, which were more stable.  Specifically, they used morphological, ancient DNA (aDNA), and high-throughput ancient proteomic analyses to demonstrate that this fetus is actually an African elephant, genus Loxodonta, NOT an Asian elephant.

An elephant walking. Photogravure after Eadweard Muybridge,
Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Once they realised that the current type specimen for the Asian elephant was fallacious, the scientists had to search for a different and more appropriate one. Rules issued by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the arbiter of all animal species, state that a new type specimen should first be drawn from any other examples listed in Systema Naturae or seen by Linnaeus. On of the candidates was a description of an elephant skeleton by 17th-century botanist John Ray that Linneaus cited.  This is where I came in; I had previously worked with a biologist to identify when a particular specimen of Aldabra Tortoise was first mentioned (it turned out the reference was in the writings of the 17th-century naturalist James Petiver, and the subsequent solution to the nomenclature dispute involved was reported by the Wall Street Journal).  Using my archival analysis of 17th-century botanist John Ray’s travel accounts and letters, we confirmed that an additional specimen, mentioned in a description by Ray (1693) and subsequently cited by Linnaeus, has been preserved as an almost complete skeleton at the Natural History Museum of the University of Florence.

Having confirmed its identity as an Asian elephant through both morphological and ancient DNA analyses, we thus were able to designate this specimen as E. maximus, the definitive type example of this species.  Other evidence indicates that this elephant specimen may have been drawn and described by Rembrandt. Our paper (recently published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, the New York Times and the subject of articles in Nature News and Huffpost) is a case study of how historians of science and scientists can work together to make discoveries of relevance to both fields.  Our work also shows the importance of the study of material culture and art history to the history of science.

The new type specimen for the Asian Elephant. Credit: Natural History Museum, Florence.

Anna Marie has co-authored a paper related to this talk:

Cappelini, E. et al. (2014) Resolution of the type material of the Asian elephant, Elephas maximusLinnaeus, 1758 (Proboscidea, Elephantidae). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 170:1 pp.222-232.

Links:

Nature News: http://www.nature.com/news/linnaeus-s-asian-elephant-was-wrong-species-1.14063

New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/science/a-historical-elephants-new-identity.html?_r=0

Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/zoj.12084/abstract

Lent Week 1: “Citizen Cuvier: radical appropriations of Georges Cuvier’s law of correlation in Edinburgh and London, 1801–1837”

Summary of the paper that Gowan Dawson (University of Leicester) gave on 20th January 2014

Georges Cuvier, the most revered naturalist in Europe, has generally been viewed, amongst historians as much as some of his contemporaries, as a staunch conservative.  In particular, Cuvier’s scientific authority was used in Britain to prop-up a number of conservative causes including the natural theological argument from design.  But scholars who have studied Cuvier in his French context have increasingly questioned assumptions about his apparently intrinsic conservatism, with Dorinda Outram suggesting that Cuvier’s theological and political outlook was more accurately that of a “cosmopolitan liberal”, and Philippe Taquet emphasizing how his “principal rule to never go beyond the facts” induced Cuvier to maintain a scrupulous silence with regard to religion.

Historians examining what Martin Rudwick has called the “anglicized Cuvier” have been slow to take account of this more nuanced picture of the Gallic Cuvier, and as such it has not yet been recognized that his liberalism was widely acknowledged in early nineteenth century Britain.  My paper argues, for the first time as far as I am aware, that between 1801 and 1837 Cuvier’s purportedly conservative law of correlation was appropriated by Whig republicans like John Allen, materialist surgeons such as William Lawrence, and atheistic plebeian radicals including Richard Carlile and Eliza Sharples, who all saw it as supporting aspects of their own political agendas.

My paper locates these radical appropriations of Cuvier as part of a wider pattern which indicates the complexity of the affiliations between particular scientific theories, especially those imported from France, and the diverse religious and political orientations which characterized early-nineteenth-century Britain (some literalist interpreters of Scripture, for instance, seemed to advocate Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s transformism because it offered an explanation for how the herbivorous creatures on Noah’s ark might only subsequently have become carnivorous).  This is not, of course, to deny that by the mid-1830s Cuvier was indeed lionized as an icon of the conservative establishment by the influential gentlemen of science who controlled the elite forums of the nineteenth-century scientific community.  But it does suggest that, during the tumultuous preceding three decades, this was by no means inevitable.  The alignment of Cuvier with particular religious and ideological positions was, in other words, an accomplishment rather than a given.

Georges Cuvier

Gowan Dawson has co-authored a book rested to this paper, “Show Me the Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America” which is forthcoming.

Lent Term 2014

Seminars are held on Mondays at 1pm in Seminar Room 1. You are welcome to bring your lunch with you.

Organised by Natalie Lawrence.

20 Jan	Gowan Dawson (University of Leicester)  Citizen Cuvier: radical appropriations of Georges Cuvier’s law of correlation in Edinburgh and London, 1801–1837
27 Jan	Cassandra Gorman (English, Cambridge)  The atom as metaphor: responses to atomism in 17th-century English literature
3 Feb	Anna Marie Roos (University of Lincoln)  The elephant in the room: historians and scientists working together
10 Feb	Joydeep Sen (University of Kent)  Philology, mythology and geology in colonial India
17 Feb	Margaret Carlyle (HPS, Cambridge)  Skeletons in the cabinet and the Grand Tour of anatomy
24 Feb	Cabinet outing: Linnean Society
3 Mar	Jon Agar (UCL)  What counts as threatened? Population biology, objectivity and the sixth extinction
10 Mar	James Poskett (HPS, Cambridge)  National types: the transatlantic publication and reception of Crania Americana (1839)