An introduction to a biology and other papers,

Front matter

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Contents

An InrropvucTion to a Brotocy . ; ; ;

APPENDIX TO AN INTRODUCTION TO a BIoLoGy:

1, MENDELIAN PRACTICE IN THE LIGHT OF Berason’s BroLtoay é : . ‘

Preface

ARTHUR DUKINFIELD DaRBISHIRE, son of Samuel Dukinfield Darbishire, M.D. Oxon., was born in 1879, and educated at Magdalen College School and at Balliol College, Oxford. He worked under Professor Weldon for the Honour School of Zoology, and was placed in the Second Class in 1901. In October of the same year he was appointed Demonstrator in Comparative Anatomy at the University. His interest in the problems of heredity was already beginning to absorb him.

At the instigation of Professor Weldon, the leader of the Biometric school at Oxford, he began a series of breeding experiments with mice, the results of which were published in Biometrika.t He had a profound admiration for Professor Weldon, and was, not unnaturally, influenced at this time by his hostile attitude towards the Mendelian School. But when he moved to Manchester, where he filled the post of Demonstrator in Zoology at the University from 1902 to 1905, he began to think out on his own lines the problems raised by the Mendelian discovery. Continuing his experiments with mice, he set himself to examine the truth of

1“ On the result of crossing Japanese Waltzing Mice with European Albino Races.”? Biometrika. Vol. IJ., No. 1, Nov. 1902 ; Second Report,

Vol. II., No. 2, Feb. 1903; Third Report, Vol. I1., Part III., June, 1903; Final Summary, Vol. I1I:, No. 1, Jan. 1904.

viii Preface the position from which he had started upon them. He had begun as a pupil of the Biometric school with a strong bias against the Mendelian theory. He now worked his way, through difficulty and depression, to a point from which he saw that the contradiction between the two theories was only apparent and was really due to a difference in the point of view from which each party approached the same facts. He defined his position, and cut himself adrift from both schools in his contribution to the debate on heredity at the meeting of the British Association at Cambridge in 1904,’ and in - two papers contributed to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, ‘“On the Supposed Antagonism of Mendelian to Biometric Theories of Heredity ”’ (1905) and “ On the Difference between Physiological and Statistical Laws of Heredity ” (1906).2

He maintained this independent and critical attitude all his life, and upon no man’s work, whether of description or interpretation, did he keep a closer critical watch than upon his own. ““One’s attitude as an investigator,” he wrote, “should be one of continual, unceasing and active distrust of oneself.” His later experiments with mice, peas, fowls and rabbits were designed to test the Mendelian hypothesis with absolutely no prejudgment of the case. After thirteen years of patient investigation he could write in February, 1915, “I consider the Mendelian principles to be still sub judice ; and they are so attractive by reason of their simplicity that they need to be under a very

1 Vide infra, p. 162. * Vide infra, pp. 144 and 167.

Preface es stern judge.”’ His book, “ Breeding and the Mendelian Discovery,” published in 1911, is a clear Summary of his work and thought on the problems he had himself investigated. From 1905 to 1911 he held the post of Senior Demonstrator and Lecturer in Zoology at the Royal College of Science. It was at this period that he came in contact with Samuel Butler, first through ‘ Erewhon,” then through “Life and Habit,” and his conception of evolution underwent a profound change. In his lectures thenceforward he traced the growth of the theory from the Greek philosophers through Buffon and Lamarck up to Darwin, and the philosophical bearings of the theory became for him its paramount interest.

In 1911 he accepted the newly created post of Lecturer in Genetics at the University of Edinburgh. The University Experimental Farm at Fairslacks under the Pentland hills gave him a new field for his investigations in heredity. His friendly association with Professor Cossar Ewart helped to make this post the happiest he had held. He had already become deeply interested by Bergson’s thought when Bergson himself came to Edinburgh to give the Gifford lectures in the summer of 1914. He met and talked with Bergson, had the pleasure of introducing him to Butler’s theories, and the rare experience of talking about his own speculations to a thinker who saw their drift and value.

At the opening of the war in July, 1914, he was in America, lecturing to the Graduate School of Agriculture at the University of Missouri, Columbia,

Missouri. As a result of his lectures the University * x Preface immediately offered him a Research Professorship at Columbia. He was also offered the Professorship of Zoology at the new University of Vancouver. But he could not reconcile himself to leave England after the outbreak of war. Owing to physical delicacy he was at first pronounced unfit for the Army, and he trained himself for munitions work at the Heriot Watt Engineering College. But he found difficulty in getting suitable employment, and in Jyply, 1915, he tried his luck at a recruiting office and was enrolled as a private in the 14th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He devoted himself to his duties as a soldier with the same zest and the same meticulous attention to detail that marked his work in other spheres, and he won the love and admiration of his comrades. On Christmas Day, in camp at Gailes, he was taken suddenly ill with cerebral meningitis, and he died next morning. Three days after his death he was gazetted Second Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery.

As a man of science he was perhaps unusual in combining a devotion to pure research (he would have laughed at the phrase, but all his colleagues applied it to him) with a freely speculative interest in his subject. He carried on his investigations with an untiring patience, watchful in self-criticism, recording his results with the greatest care and thoroughness, and persistently postponing interpretation until he had gathered more results, According to his principle, he maintained an absolutely dispassionate attitude as scientific investigator. Those who knew him only in other spheres would not easily

Preface xi believe that he could be dispassionate about anything. His interest in the philosophical basis “of his subject was balanced by a close and intimate knowledge of its practical side. He hated and suspected all mutual exclusions, sharp antagonisms, supposed contradictions. Theory and practice were to him as closely connected as good with bad or science with art. He believed there was no such thing as the purely philosophical or purely scientific or purely practical sphere in his subject. He had a passion for gardening and for farming ; he liked to be at work in the soil with the hoe or dung-fork, or amongst the animals on a farm. His thorough knowledge of horticultural processes, which contributed so much to the success of his scientific experiments, was due to his own experience in all the arts of the practical gardener. Digging was an art which he carried to perfection after years of practice.

His delight in doing things as well as they could be done gave him unusual powers as a teacher. He took an unconcealed pride in his skill in dissection and in elaborate draughtsmanship. In the laboratory he was always working and learning, and his idea of teaching was not to give information (he often refused it), but to show people how to find out things for themselves: ‘As a lecturer his best qualification was his absorbing interest in the things he had to say. His mind was never more clear, alert, and alive than when he talked to intelligent listeners. He had the instincts of an actor and a good deal of the art; and he could get in touch ' with his audience at once.

xii Preface

The three greatest influences over his mind and thought were Beethoven, Samuel Butler, and Bergson. They had in common two things that he could not do without: humour, and the sense that the source of life is spirit. Their influence was the quickening influence of one personality on another, and they were a constant stimulus to him in his later speculations, which became increasingly metaphysical in character. He chafed against the orthodoxy of science, and his cherished desire was to make a contribution towards biology in the strict — meaning of the term. The whole field of life should be its sphere, he thought; its basis should be philosophical and its method dispassionately critical ; and finally, the spirit in which the biologist approaches his subject should be the same spirit of intense interest combined with humility, with which a lover of music hears a symphony of Beethoven, or a lover of life meets one of the transcendent experiences of life itself.

In character he was essentially childlike ;. generous to a fault, with no arrogance, no malice and no meanness. He had a genius for absurdity, and he used it, as he used his other gifts, with the delight of a child and the skill and thoroughness of an artist. He never made enemies, and he had an infinite capacity for making friends. The men who helped him with his experiments, his laboratory assistants, his gardener, the farmer at Fairslacks were all to him fellow-workers and friends, to whom he delighted to express his gratitude, and with whom he shared, as far as he could, his jests, his interests, and his ideas.

Preface Xili

All who knew him will keep in memory a personality alive and young to a rare degree, fulfilling itself in a passion for music, much laughter, a perfectly disinterested love of truth, a delight in producing delight in others, and the keenest possible interest in life itself whichever way it led him.

During the spring and early summer of 1915 my brother was at work upon a book for publication by Messrs. Cassell in the autumn. In May he writes to M. Bergson, “I am hard at work on my book about evolution. I think I am going to call it ‘ An Introduction to Biology ’—Biology as I think it ought to be, not Biology as itis. For the problem of evolution is merely a department of the problem of life, it appears to me. I am convinced that the theory of natural selection is in no sense an explanation of evolution.”

The plan of the book is sketched in a prospectus written for the Publishers in June, 1915.

“This book is addressed to all those who are curious about the meaning of life, and is an attempt to put before them the essence of the current mechanistic explanation of the organism and materialistic explanation of the universe, in order that they may examine for themselves these accepted scientific explanations of life. The author does not pretend to set forth a series of conclusions led up to by the stages of a logical argument which follow inevitably and relentlessly from¥one another, and xiv Preface which compel the reader to reach those conclusions and no other. The reader is not offered a set of irrefragable laws which he must believe, but certain preliminary considerations which, in the opinion of the author, effect a clearing of the ground upon which the foundations of a biology may some day be laid.

““The term Biology is used by the author to signify the interpretation rather than the mere description of life. The Biology, therefore, in the interpretative sense, put before the reader is not a nearly complete fabric the main constructional lines of which have been laid down once and for all, and the completion of which will consist in the filling in of detail; but a tentative indication of the direction in which some approximation to an understanding of life may be sought.

‘‘The main constructive thesis of the book is the idea, which we owe to Samuel Butler, that the details of the process of evolution can be studied most minutely in man, in whose extra-corporeal organs, his weapons, implements, and machinery, evolution is proceeding with great rapidity.

“This study of the evolution of human detachable implements leads on to M. Bergson’s thesis that the human intelligence owes its essential traits to the fact that it was developed part passu with the acquisition by man of his control over matter. Upon this conception of the human intelligence rests the main critical thesis of the book, which is the attempt to show that natural selection was acceptable as an explanation of evolution, because it was an explanation in terms of matter, and

Preface Xv because it involved the idea that the organism is

no more than a machine.”

The book was to consist of four long chapters, the contents of which were to be as follows :

J.—The failure of modern interpretative Biology. ©

II.—The utilitarian origin of the human intelligence.

III.—The consequent acceptability to many minds of a mechanistic theory of the organism and of a materialistic theory of evolution.

IV.—Some suggestions as to the direction in which an understanding of life may be sought.

When he joined the Army two _ chapters were written, the first revised, the third begun. The fourth chapter, which was to have been the constructive part of the book, is entirely unwritten. In his pocket-book he sketches the plan of the four chapters characteristically in the form of a Beethoven symphony :

CHAPTER I.—lst Movement.

Amongst his papers the only direct indications I can trace of the contents of the final chapter are xvi Preface in a note to Professor Dendy, and a letter to Mr. Charles Douglas. :

The first, dated June 17, 1915, is a request for a Table at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Plymouth for August. “I wish,” he writes, “to make’ one or two drawings and some observations on the habits of Carcinus maenas for the purpose of my new book appearing in the autumn.”

I imagine that he intended to support his general belief in the part obscurely played in evolution by the will and intelligence of living things, with records drawn from a close and intimate study of the habits of a particular animal.

The second is a description of a paper which he sent to Mr. Douglas, March 10, 1915, with a view to its publication in the “ Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society.” ‘The greater part of it,” he writes, “‘is a lecture which I gave to a combined meeting of the Scientific and Agricultural Societies in the University of Aberdeen. It contains in crude form ideas which I hope to express better in about two chapters of a book I hope to have ready by September.”

The extract in question is printed (vide infra, p. 90) in an Appendix immediately after the unfinished fragment of “‘ An Introduction to a Biology,” and I have added to it some notes of a lecture delivered in June, 1915, which illustrate in a technical way one important point raised in the extract. I had also intended to include in this Appendix a letter to M. Bergson, and a reply from him of December, 1912, which touch upon the intended subject-matter of the book. My brother’s letter is

Preface xvii not to be found, but M. Bergson has most kindly allowed me to print his reply, which suggests its contents.

For the rest, to attempt even an outline of the concluding chapter which my brother left unwritten would be manifestly useless. I have thought that the best thing I could do was to gather together those of his papers, whether published or unpublished, which throw light on his thought and explain his point of view. In the Collection of Notes and Extracts (vide p. 104) I have put first in order those notes which were made whilst the book was in progress and which have a direct bearing upon it. The scientific papers are arranged chronologically. As a record of his thought the whole is in one way absurdly incomplete. For except under compulsion he wrote little. He did his thinking in his head, and his papers and lectures, especially in recent years, were given ex tempore, often without any notes at all. He was always loath to set down conclusions, for his mind was alive and growing, and conclusions were after all, perhaps, what he never hoped to reach. For all its incompleteness, then, this book may give in some degree a true picture of bis mind.

I wish to thank the following for their courtesy in allowing me to reprint papers of my brother’s: The Editor of Nature, the Editor of The English Review, the publisher of Science Progress, the Editor of The Tumes Literary Supplement, the Council of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, the Committee of the Manchester University Biological Society, the Editor of the Manchester Unwerstty

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Magazine, the Directors of the Highland and Agricultural Society, The President and Council of the Royal Horticultural Society.

IT am exceedingly grateful to Professor Curtis, Professor Reed, and Miss M. L. Keene, of the University of Missouri, for their generous help in placing at my disposal their notes of my brother’s lectures delivered at Columbia in 1914.

Professor J. A. Thomson, of Aberdeen, has had the kindness to read the proofs of the first part of the book, and I have greatly benefited by his knowledge and insight in a number of corrections.

I owe a special debt to my friend Mr. A. D. Lindsay, of Balliol College, Oxford, for his help and advice throughout the preparation of the book.

HELEN DARBISHIRE.

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Chapter I

* You who speculate on the nature of things, I praise you not for knowing the processes which nature ordinarily effects of herself, but rejoice if so be that you know the issue of such things as your mind conceives.”—LEONARDO DA VINCI.

§ 1. Man is the best starting-point for the study of life.—§ 2. Scientific investigation is the human activity, the critical study of which is the most urgent.—§ 3. Scientific investigation consists of description and interpretation.—§ 4, Interpretation. Biological Laws: the urgency of locating them.—§ 5. Words: the necessity of keeping a sharp eye on the wanderings of their meanings.—§ 6. A glance at our present interpretation of life from the historical quarter.—§ 7. On the fitting of theory to the facts of life.

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HE function of biology, if we adopt the literal, etymological meaning of the word, is to describe and interpret the essential manifestations of life, and to extract from these interpretations a conception, or theory, of life. But the word “biology ”’ has come to be used in certain very much restricted senses, of which it will suffice to mention two. In its commonest signification it merely serves aS a convenient common term for the subject matter of both botany and zoology. Another common meaning of it is the study of the B I habits of a particular animal or plant. With regard to this latter meaning of the word, let it be noted that it applies to the behaviour of any animal except man himself. With regard to the former, the most common meaning of the word, the reader may object that biology, dealing as it does with the comparative anatomy, development, evolution, and many other aspects of animals and plants, so far from dealing with a restricted set of phenomena, ranges over the whole field. There are no other living things than animals and plants; the study of animals and plants is the province of biology ; therefore biology covers the whole field of life.

The answer to this argument is that the biologist in his efforts to survey the whole field has forgotten one animal, himself. In this way he has committed himself by long habit to the study of those living things of which his knowledge must perforce be external, and has shut himself off from the study of the one living thing which he could know intimately. He has preferred to “cover the whole field’ rather than to dig in the spot where, in my belief, the return for cultivation would have been greatest. The course taken by the biologist may be illustrated by the difference between a recent and an early meaning of the verb “to manure.” In one of its original, literal, and etymological significations it meant to work the soil with the | hand (that is to say, with the spade, which is an extended, detachable part of the hand); but the meaning gradually shifted outwards from the process itself to the fertilising effect which the process had upon the soil; and thence it spread to the other means (besides working with the hand) by which this effect could be produced, namely, the spreading of dung over, and its subsequent incorporation with, the soil. The biologist has chosen to “‘cover the field” rather than to dig in that little plot, the study of-himself. He has preferred extension to depth, and in so doing he has followed the line of least resistance. Anyone can spread dung; it takes a man five years to learn to dig well. Man’s attention is so accustomed to look outwards, that it is very difficult for him to turn it inwards upon himself. And so the fertile plot has been very much neglected.

A variety of circumstances has conspired to exaggerate this extensive character of biological knowledge to such a pitch that in his anxiety to leave none of the field uncovered the biologist has become careless as to whether the covering is thick enough to be of any use. In choosing subjects for investigation he has set more store on the novelty of the result than on the question whether his results will bring us closer to an understanding of life. And the result of this aiming at the target of novelty has often been that he has hit the bull’seye of triviality.

This desire for novelty has become so great that there is a danger of the convention growing up that a particular animal or problem is one man’s preserve, to trespass upon which shall be a breach of scientific etiquette. And, as it is, the fact that somebody has worked out the development of a particular animal is regarded as an argument agaist the selection of that animal as a subject of embryological research ; but the truth is, surely, that this fact should be an argument for such a selection. For in studying again a development which had recently been studied, the investigator would be throwing light upon two problems instead of only one: upon the meaning of the changes of form undergone by the animal in its development; and upon the trustworthiness of the human intelligence as an investigating mechanism ; and probably more light upon the second than upon the first. For if the investigator made a point of looking neither at the description made by the previous investigator of the development, nor at his interpretation of the facts of which this description was a record until after he had completed his own description and interpretation, he would obtain results which would be interesting both to the embryologist and to the philosopher. The solitary confinement in their own studies and laboratories, and the complete isolation of biological workers all over the world, would doubtless be a hindrance to progress in biological inquiry, at any rate on its applied side; but it is very doubtful whether the opposite extreme, the perfect means of inter-communication now available, is not an equally serious obstacle to such progress.1 For it ensures the spreading thin rather than the digging deep.

It is not, of course, true that the biologist has entirely excluded man from his attention. He has studied him; but he has done so in the same detached, objective way in which he has studied the

1The probable cessation of communication between the countries now at war may effect a partial removal of this obstacle.

other animals. His knowledge of the form of man is derived from corpses; and he investigates his performances on the assumption that the human body is a machine. His attention has been confined to just those attributes of man which can be studied in the same way as those of non-human animals.

This detached, objective method is perhaps the way to establish a science of human physiology and anatomy which shall be useful in the practical science of medicine; but as long as the biologist persists in studying man in the same impersonal way as that in which he studies the other animals, so long will he shut out of his field of inquiry a whole set of vital phenomena. And the manifestations of life thus excluded from investigation are just those which, in my opinion, most deserve the close attention of the biologist at the present time.

The eye of the biologist has ever been turned outwards to the pageant of living things by which he is surrounded. He has forgotten that though he is a spectator, and probably the only spectator endowed with intelligent curiosity, he is also a performer in this pageant.

It is my belief that, so far from excluding from the sphere of inquiry those manifestations of life which can only be studied in man, we should give them a position in the full limelight of our interest. No biology can lay claim to completeness which leaves out of account such essential manifestations of life as human invention, self-expression through painting, poetry, or music, activities and aspirations which constitute the very life which each one of us leads. Surely the way to find out about life is to study life at work; or at play; at any rate, in action. There’is no other field at all comparable with that of human activities for such a study. It is only in human life that we can approach close to, and study minutely the very nature of, existence.

| § 2

But there is one human activity which stands out from the rest and demands the most severely critical study. This is the process of investigation itself, It seems to me that one of the most important branches of biology should be a critical study of the process of investigation. It is a perfectly legitimate branch, because this process is indubitably a manifestation of life. It is, moreover, a branch which requires the most careful attention, because if the process of investigation be unsound the results obtained by it will be worthless. Man’s theory of life, his biology, is the product of his imagination. Is it not high time, therefore, that he turned his eye inwards and pondered upon the relation between himself and the objects of his investigation? It takes two to make a science. There are two parties to the bargain: the mind of the investigator and the things investigated.

The attention of the investigator perpetually flows outwards, intent upon its object; it does not stop to look at itself; it is all taken up with its prey ; none of it is left over to be devoted to its source, the mind. The interests of the investigator do not lie within, but without. He has no misgivings as to the reality of the outside world or the soundness of his explanations of it, because he has no misgivings as to the efficacy of his perceptive and interpretative machinery. Things as he sees them are things as they are, because his perceptive machinery is infallible. The causes of things as he elucidates them are the true causes, because his interpretative machinery is flawless. That, at any rate, would appear to be the tacit assumption upon which he acts.

The reader may object that it is the business of a philosopher and not of the biologist to deal with the process of investigation. But if the philosopher to whom the work is given is not an active investigator, what can he know about investigation? The eye of the philosopher is turned inwards. His interests are within. He is interested in the outside world only as the material upon which his mind feeds, or as a mirror in which it can see itself.

It seems likely, therefore, that that most interesting region which intervenes between the mind and things will fall between two stools. The investigator is interested in the things around him: the philosopher in the mind within; but very few are interested in the relation or interaction between the two. Now the process of investigation is a reciprocal action which takes place between the two poles, mind and object, across the region which intervenes between them. This intervening region is apt to be neglected because men tend, according to the inborn direction of their minds,.to cluster around one pole or the other. It must, however, be admitted that there is more of the investigator in the philosopher than of the philosopher in the investigator. This is only natural, We shall see later on that it is the essential characteristic of the mind of man to extend its operation farther and farther outwards towards things. It is more likely, therefore, that the interest of the philosopher should extend outwards across the intervening region to-— wards things, than that the interest of the investigator should extend inwards, across it, to the mind. For both are men.

To the business of investigation there are, as I have said, two parties, and it is especially desirable that the investigator should have his attention drawn to the one in which he is least interested (if indeed he ever gave it a moment’s thought), namely, his own mind.