Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz
(1807-1873)
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was born in Motier, Switzerland on May 28, 1807. Born the son of a Protestant pastor, Louis Agassiz was raised in a religious environment but clearly possessed a deep interest in natural history and science. “I spent most of the time I could spare…in hunting the neighboring woods and meadows for birds, insects, and land and fresh water shells” (Lurie 9). Throughout his childhood and adolescence, his curiosities about nature and its origins drove him to become a prominent figure in natural history, zoology, and ichthyology.
Louis Agassiz commenced his education in natural history at the universities of Zurich, Heidelberg, and Munich (Lurie x). After Munich came his study with role model Georges Cuvier in Paris. Shortly after, Cuvier was struck ill and died leaving Agassiz with access to much of his work and materials. It was from Cuvier that Agassiz gained many of the early precepts that would affect his standpoint regarding evolution. Cuvier had been in opposition to Lamarck’s 1809 publication of Philosophie Zoologique, influencing Agassiz’s views of permanence of type (Loewenberg 688).
Becoming a professor at Neuchâtel in 1832, and later at Harvard in 1846, Agassiz held a notable reputation as a scientist, teacher, and natural historian. Throughout his work at Harvard, he performed a great amount of research in efforts to construct the largest chronology of fishes known in North America. In 1850, he reported on the fishes of Lake Superior, laying the foundation for the approach to natural history at the time (Jackson 511). In addition, he made large contributions to the Museum of Comparative Zoology and later helped to establis...
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... spot in the pantheon of the America’s most influential scientists…” (Jackson 550).
WORKS CITED
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Loewenberg, Bert J. "The Reaction of American Scientists to Darwinism." American Historical Review. 38 (1933): 687-701.
Lurie, Edward. Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.
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... The “Doubting Darwin”. Newsweek.com - "The New York Times" 07 Feb 2005. 44. eLibrary.
Biology & Philosophy 24.1 (2009): 35-50. Academic Search Complete. Web. The Web. The Web. 15 Mar. 2014.
Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea. London: University of California Press, 1989.
The 1920’s were a time of change. New ideas were becoming more readily experimented with and even accepted by large portions of the population. Some of these included jazz music and the fight against the alcoholic prohibition. The radical idea I will focus on in this paper, however, is Evolution. It is a theory that had been around for over half a century before the 20’s but had only more recently caught on in the US. It contradicted the Christian theory of Divine Creation as described in the Bible. This caused many religious fundamentalists to fight against it. They took their battle to the law books, and they were challenged by pro-evolution modernists in the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925.
The “Roaring Twenties” was a time period known for its innovation. Skirts got shorter, teens got bolder, and Prohibition was in full swing. These changes also gave way to a time period full of religious conflict. “In [religious] minds, Prohibition had always been about more than alcohol. It represented an effort to defend traditional American values against the growing influence of an urban, cosmopolitan culture” (Gillon 152). Charles Darwin had published his book, The Evolution of Species, in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, detailing the evolution of man from ape-like creatures. When A Civic Biology, a biology textbook containing information on evolution, was published in 1914, teachers around the country began using it in their courses. By the twenties, these books had sparked all sorts of new ideas regarding the origin of man as well as opposition due to the creature from which he claimed we evolved and to the disagr...
Darwin's theory of Evolution have been known by the world for many centuries. Even so, not all scientists supp...
Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), born in Switzerland, was a naturalist. (Gould, 74) In 1840’s, Agassiz migrated to America and became a professor at Harvard. (Gould, 75) Agassiz was an extremely successful man in the science world. (Gould, 75) As a matter of fact, he raised money to support his buildings, collections, and publications. (Gould, 75)
One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis or Modern Evolutionary Thought. Ernst Mayr. Harvard University Press, 1993.
One of the most visible critics of science today, and the progenitor of the anti-science sentiment is the religious community, specifically the conservative Christians. One can hardly read the newspaper without reading of one religious figurehead or another preaching on the "fallacy of science," pushing their own brand of "truth" on whoever would hear them. As Bishop writes "It is discouraging to think than more than a century after the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859), and seventy years after the Scopes trial dramatized the issue, the same battles must still be fought."(256) And the loudest rallying cries to these battles can be heard issuing from the throats of the ranks of zealots and their hordes of followers.
Biological evolution is descent with modification. Theories of evolution have their roots in early Greek and Roman culture. Before seventh century B.C.E., people believed that supernatural forces were responsible for life. Philosophers Plato and Aristotle argued against this doctrine. They used logic to explain the origins of life. It was commonly accepted that the earth was only a few thousand years old, species were immutable, and that life is arranged linearly. In the seventh century, naturalist John Ray used the term “species” as the basic unit of classification. In the eighteenth century, Carolus Linnaeus created a hierarchical classification system for organizing species based on resemblance using phylogenetic trees. In 1809, French theorist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published his theory of inheritance of acquired traits. In 1830, Charles Lyell introduced uniformitarianism as the mechanism for evolution; the theory that states that geologic change is relatively constant. In the mid-nineteenth century, Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin both individually conceived natural selection as the mechanism for evolution. Darwin received credit for the theory of natural selection because he published his book, On the Origin of Species, before Wallace. In 1865, Gregor Mendel is the founder of modern genetics through his work with pea plant crosses. To this day, the work of Mendel and Darwin are widely accepted.
Biologists study living organisms, such as plants and animals. One famous biologist who has helped with scientific advancements we learn about today is Carolus Linnaeus. Carolus Linnaeus was a botanist, zoologist, and taxonomist primarily known for inventing binomial nomenclature (McCarthy). He is also one of the founders of ecology and helped find the relationship between living organisms and their environment (“Carolus 2”). This paper encompasses all aspects of Linnaeus’s life, including his personal life, education, his invention of binomial nomenclature, and other awards/accomplishments.
Darwin, Charles. From The Origin of Species. New York: P.F. Collier and Son Corporation, 1937. 71-86; 497-506.
Cooper, Lawrence, Cary Murphy. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Chicago: Taylor & Francis, 1996
In the 1860's On the Origin of Species and Essays and Reviews became widely circulated. These works led to a q...
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm., and J. M. Child. The Early Mathematical Manuscripts of Leibniz. Mineola, NY: Dover Publ., 2005.