Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation (review)

James E. Strick. Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. xi + 283 pp. Ill. $45.00 (0-674-00292-X).

The spontaneous generation controversy of the 1860s and 1870s is often presented as one of the great experimental controversies in the history of science. That the names of Louis Pasteur and John Tyndall have conspicuous display in the scientific hall of fame, while their principal opponents Felix Pouchet and Henry Charlton Bastian, if known at all, are known as feeble experimenters at best, or at worst as willful proponents of error, is due in part to the outcome of that controversy: the rejection of so-called spontaneous generation. Many accounts presume the outcome and take their task as following the demonstration of the true. Even if living things sometimes did pop up in solutions long boiled in sealed flasks, surely their presence represented contamination by some extrahardy form of microbial commando; that such entities--heat-resistant spores--had yet to be isolated was no major obstacle: one could infer their presence as necessary to the effect. But one could equally plausibly hold that sterilization had really been achieved and that the emergent life was truly new, a product of heterogenesis (life from nonliving organic matter) or archeobiosis (life from inorganic matter). The controversy could not be settled by experiment alone; it depended also on what it meant for an experiment to "work": one might as well say that lack of growth showed an experimenter's failure to produce a difficult effect as that presence of growth showed sloppy technique and contamination.

James Strick offers an account of the English side of the debate. He views it in terms of the contemporary cultural politics of science and medicine, the rise and fall of ancillary concepts (e.g., cell and protoplasmic theories, theories of disease causation, and evoutionary theory), and the deteriorating personal relations between Bastian, on the one side, and his erstwhile patron Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall, on the other.

Quite why the partisans took the sides they did has never been clear. There was no strong doctrinal reason for the scientific "young guard" led by Huxley and Tyndall to have come out stridently against spontaneous generation. The ethos of scientific naturalism seemed to blur the distinction between living and nonliving; the Darwinian vista of organic change implied the emergence of life far in the past; uniformitarianism suggested that if then, why not now? Prior to 1875 Huxley himself had championed Bathybius Haeckeli as an example of a protoplasmic Urschleim that might be seen to occupy the boundary between living and nonliving. In creating space for respectable and professional science, however, Huxley and Tyndall hoped to avoid the taint of both the rabid materialism of radical science and the idealist morphology of Huxley's archrival Richard Owen. In different ways, each of those outlooks left conceptual room for the emergence of new life. By contrast, from Redi onward there was a ready-made heritage of the disproof of the superstition of spontaneous generation by sober experiment. Huxley and Tyndall chose that heritage.

Still, Bastian's main error was persistently to embarrass his betters. Before he attacked Tyndall's January 1870 "Dust and Disease" lecture in the letters columns of the Times, Bastian had been regarded by Huxley as one of the promising young research biologists. There he charged Tyndall with inferences beyond experimental warrant and conclusions that were simplistic in light of contemporary disease theory. Equally alarmed at Tyndall's imperiousness in matters of their dominion, the British medical press joined in. Strick shows the concerted marginalization of Bastian that followed. Despite widespread approbation of his book, The Beginnings of Life: Being Some Account of the Nature, Modes of Origin and Transformations of Lower Organisms (1872), his reputation as a distinguished neuroanatomist, and his...