Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

FROM ADVENTISM TO BIOLOGY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHARLES OTIS WHITMAN PHILIP J. PAULY* Historians, looking back on a century of academic biology in the United States, are coming to recognize the importance of Charles Otis Whitman (1842-1910) in the early development of that science. While Louis Agassiz was a more famous public figure, and Thomas Hunt Morgan a greater discoverer, Whitman played the central role in establishing biology as a scientific subject. As founding director of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory (1888-1908), and organizer ofthe biology programs at Clark University (1889-1892) and the University of Chicago (1892-1910), he fostered and coordinated the work of an entire generation of practitioners in the full range of biological sciences, from bacteriology and embryology through physiology and ecology [1, 2]. Whitman, in addition, is being rediscovered as a major pioneer in ethology : his work on the evolutionary bases of the behavior of pigeons formed a crucial link between the ideas of Darwin and those of Konrad Lorenz [3]. Finally, he is now seen as one significant proponent of the view, dominant in American academic thinking at least until the 1940s, that (even allowing for natural selection) the history of life was essentially a progressive process culminating in man [4]. These recent studies of Whitman all address the acts of a fully mature scientist, a man who appeared suddenly on the academic scene in the late 1880s, when he was nearly fifty, with sophisticated and strongly held views on both the structure of science and the nature of life. We have little sense of C. O. Whitman's own development—an issue of particular relevance for an individual who was obsessed with developmental continuity in organisms, and who had passed through a long and The author expresses appreciation to Ruby Emery for generously sharing the results of her thorough investigations of the history of Woodstock and of the genealogies of its inhabitants; and to John C. Burnham, Paul Clemens, Frederick G. Hoyt, and Ronald L. Numbers for providing guidance through unfamiliar territories. *Department of History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903.© 1994 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/94/3703-0876$01.00 Perspectives in Biokgy and Medicine, 37, 3 ¦ Spring 1994 395 singular life history before attaining his important positions in science. Whitman's origins were quite extraordinary. He experienced—in fact, he embodied—the most intense form of conflict between religious and scientific commitments in the nineteenth century. He was born in 1842 in western Maine to a hastily married couple caught up in the millenial movement known as Millerism, or Adventism. His parents believed that Jesus would return to earth in glory in 1843, and they expected to take their infant son with them into Paradise. The Second Advent did not, however, occur as they had hoped; instead they saw in their child the slow and utterly ordinary process of natural development. Young Charles soon rejected his parents' continued expectation of imminent divine interruption into the quotidian. But what alternative vision of nature and history could he grasp? C. O. Whitman's effort to answer that question provides an exemplar of the cultural distance that a committed individual could traverse during this period in order to take up the study ofbiology. It also reemphasizes the fervor, tied to their evangelical experience, with which at least some late nineteenth century intellectuals embraced that science. The scholarly trend of the last two decades has been away from belief in a general nineteenth century conflict between "religion" and "science," and toward study of gradual shifts in the bases of values and the extent of reconciliation that occurred [5]. This recognition of continuity is salutary , but it does not eliminate the problem of understanding the many individuals and groups whose immediate experience of religious conflict —both within themselves and with their communities—deeply influenced their approach to science. Moreover, we can draw from Whitman 's background and early experiences some of the particular intellectual and organizational characteristics that he impressed upon biology. These include his strong commitment to lawfulness and continuity in individual and evolutionary development, and his concern to ensure that scientific practice would be...