Ordering Life: Karl Jordan and the Naturalist Tradition

7. The Ruin of War and the Synthesis of Biology

SEVEN The Ruin of War and the Synthesis of Biology The turbulent first decades of the twentieth century raised fundamental questions for entomologists. If the old scientific and social infrastructure of the taxonomic wing of the naturalist tradition was to be abandoned, could the tradition adapt? Could the tradition be reformed to fit new concepts of science, and could new justifications successfully garner support amid new priorities? Could reforms actually be implemented in this rapidly changing century, in which so much of the original context of the naturalist tradition was being either recklessly destroyed or conscientiously abandoned? Jordan and his fellow entomologists alternatively waxed optimistic and pessimistic on these questions. Some saw enormous opportunity in the rise of applied entomology, while others grew wary of justifying work on insects solely on economic grounds. But whether anxious or optimistic, Jordan and his friends worked hard to adjust the tradition to new techniques and justifications, even as they built on the infrastructure established in another age. Jordan’s congresses , now meeting every three or four years, provided one place to canvass the various answers posed, although by the end of the decade at least one congress member wondered whether, given the expansion in both the diversity and number of papers, the congress could indeed act as the “International Parliament for Entomology.”1 As entomologists tried to get their bearings in the interwar period, they were met with ambiguous signals as to how much of the old world could survive. In going on an expedition to South-West Africa (modern-day Namibia), Jordan safely traveled the infrastructure of European empire to inventory the animals and plants of far-off regions, even as calls for the end of imperial rule grew louder. As he hiked the Alps to study subspecies of fleas, researchers breeding Drosophila flies in laboratories linked geographical variation directly to changes in chromosomes. As he worked to secure the future of the Tring Museum as a center of scientific research following Walter Rothschild’s death in 1937, 230 ordering life Victor Rothschild (Charles’s son and heir to the title) campaigned for a strongly reductionist, experimentalist biology firmly focused on applied science. Finally , even as the evolution synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s vindicated Jordan’s methods of systematics, the research programs thus established—and another world war—highlighted the enormous challenges taxonomists would face in maintaining and reforming the tradition. the edges of empire By the time entomologists convened in Paris for the fifth International Congress of Entomology in 1932, talk about an international institute aimed at dealing with the organizational challenges facing the varied “nation” of entomologists had ended abruptly. A brief notice appeared in the congress proceedings that, given current economic circumstances, the committee organized to develop the institute would be dissolved.2 Intent on solving taxonomists’ troubles from some angle, the ever-persistent Walther Horn delivered a paper entitled “Thoughts about Entomological Systematics, Mathematics, Genetics, Phylogeny and Metaphysics” to the Paris congress. He urged increased cooperation between “modern, scientific biology ,” which emphasized mathematics and experiment, and his own tradition, comparative, morphological, descriptive, and historical entomology. In marked contrast to Auguste Lameere’s opening address of 1910, Horn directed his fellow “descriptive” entomologists to read the experimental work of Sturtevant, Goldschmidt, Fischer, Lenz, and Standfuss. But like Jordan, Horn expressed ambivalence toward claims that all science must be mathematical or experimental . While he acknowledged the draw of mathematics as exact, he warned that such efforts belied the complexity that every entomologist knew plagued neat conclusions. Naturalists often emphasized the extraordinary complexity of the living world, but Horn also had something to say about mathematicians’ ignorance regarding the complexity of actually doing natural history. Suppose, he suggested, a taxonomist tells the mathematician of his constant struggle to describe the endless species of insects. Eager to help, the mathematician at once asks how many types of insects have been described and how many remain unnamed? The systematist replies that perhaps two million species and about two million races exist, of which about one million have been described. The mathematicians proceeds: Can one assume that it requires about thirty minutes to identify a particular form, and that there are about two hundred working entomological the ruin of war and the synthesis of biology 231 systematists in the world? The systematist agrees to these assumptions. Satis fied, the mathematician sits down and calculates. Assuming...