The Best Quotation in the History of Everything: Why Intelligent Women Shouldn't Reproduce (Circa 1900)

[To all thems I owe 1) an email, 2) a theoretical justification for historicism or 3) an update on the state of the Valve's publishing enterprise . . . I apologize.  I will reconnect with y'all on the other side of this chapter.]

Those of you who don't keep close eye on my progress may be confused by my vehement assertion that the following quotation is the Best Quotation in the History of Everything: "I have sometimes been led to think that over brain-work tends not only to stunt the body and to contract the pelvis, but, by the law of evolution, to develop bigger headed offspring, or at least offspring with heads relatively disproportioned to the pelvis of the mother." 

"That's sorta awesome Scott," y'all say, "But, um, why?"

Because Silas Weir Mitchell wrote it.  For months now I've been digging through vast pastures of Mitchell's prose in search of direct evidence of his Lamarckian tendencies.  Until yesterday I had found nothing.  Because I've read his prose and poetry and scientific disquisitions, I knew him to be a Lamarckian . . . only I couldn't prove it.  I had to rely on induction and forceful interpretation to establish his indebtedness to Lamarck.  I knew I had him pegged but couldn't be certain others wouldn't tilt their heads quizzically when they read my chapter.  Now I'm certain they won't.  When hiring committees read my writing sample they'll know I'm not peddling nonsense. 

I caught Mitchell red-handed.  He is a Lamarckian.  There is no other evolutionary model popular at the time which assumes that an increase in the intelligence of a mother 1)  increases the size of said mother's brain, which 2) increases the diameter of said mother's head, which 3) she passes on to her children, thereby 4) increasing the diameter of her baby's brain-pan and 5) the likelihood of a difficult birth. 

More succinctly:

I win. 

Now will somebody give me a cookie already?

Comments

[Jenny D]

Fun!

But....

I really don't know enough about Weir Mitchell or late nineteenth-century stuff to dispute your link, it sounds convincing. But as an eighteenth-century scholar I am always wanting to look back further into the past for things. This sense of the word 'evolution' would fit with the use of eighteenth-century naturalists in general (Buffon, say) rather than Lamarck in particular; so Lamarck starts to look more like a fulcrum or conduit of eighteenth-century knowledge to nineteenth-century writers than as an originator. There is a thing you must read if you have not already, it's a bit difficult to get hold of but essential reading (it is one of my favorite things I've read in the last few years; I'm writing a book on the idea of 'breeding,' so you can see how it relates): Conway Zirkle is the author, the title of the piece--it's one of those book-length
monograph thingies published in a periodical--is The Early History of the Idea of the Inheritance of Acquired Characters and of Pangenesis, Transactions of the Amer. Philos. Soc., Vol.XXXV, No.2. 1946. (And Peter Bowler has written a number of essays about evolution as a term and concept, but I am sure you have those already.)

[Adam Roberts]

On a related matter: you're clearly looking at Lamarckism because you're looking at a late C19th writer. But I've sometimes wondered whether we refer more generally to 'Lamarckism' when we're feeling indulgent about the notion of inheritability of acquired traits, and 'Lysenkoism' when we're feeling hostile and superior. Isn't it the case that there's a fairly respectable broad-brush approach to cultural evolution that is proud to wear the label 'Lamarckian'?

[laura]

Just a procedural question...If you have read through reams & reams of this writer and only found this one remark that fits your profile, isn't that kind of a slender peg?

Also, in my experience and observation, too much brainwork leads to a definite expansion of the pelvic region (that region construed as including arse.)

[N. Pepperell]

It can be extremely frustrating, the process of trying to nail down something that seems intuitively clear, to an audience that doesn't share the same intuition...

I don't agree that it is necessarily a methodological problem, when you can find only one quotation that states your conclusion very plainly - this one quotation won't be your only evidence, but will be the kind of evidence that will be uniquely convincing to a certain kind of very literalist reader...

On the issue others have raised about whether this quotation reflects a reference to Lamarck specifically, or to some broader tradition or other author: if I'm understanding correctly, your main strategic intent is to demonstrate that the source isn't Darwin - that the vision of evolution invoked isn't Darwinian? But you can defend your own thesis better than I can... ;-P

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Jenny, I've read Zirkle's Evolution, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene, but not "The Early History," which has just shot to the top of my reading list. And yes, I worship at the feet of Peter Bowler, who books (along with Bannister's Social Darwinism) subtend my complaint against Hofstadter. As for whether we're talking about general theories of inheritance or Lamarckism proper, in my chapter I trace Lamarckian's American lineage through Spencer--who, contra his explicit statements, I establish was 100% Lamarckian--and into American biology and social sciences. Thus Mitchell, a neurologist by trade, understands social evolution in Lamarckian terms, even though his novels attempt to refute Spencerian logic. So in this sense, the tradition I'm identifying is explicitly Lamarckian, despite this being what Gould called a "period of maximal diversity in evolutionary theory." (I'm paraphrasing from memory there, in case I've butchered it.) In other chapters I focus on different strains of evolutionary theory and their influence on other authors. I only say this because it may seem as if I'm saying all evolutionary thought at the time was Lamarckian and Mitchell typifies this; I'm not. He typifies one, Lamarckian strain; others abound.

Adam, I don't mean to condemn Mitchell for his Lamarckism, only point out that that's what it is. Hofstadter convinced generations of scholars that Darwinism dominated the late C19th intellectual scene; nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact--and if I've mentioned this before, I apologize--in 1908 Vernon Kellogg, of Stanford, wrote the rear-guard Darwinism Today in order to stave off what seemed to be Darwin's elimination from scientific debate. Darwin had to be recuperated from, among others, the neo-Darwinians who thought him quaint and unserious. That said, I don't think I'm attacking Lysenkoism here, 1) because it wasn't around at the close of C19th and 2) because, as you note, there are many social movements which considered a quasi-Lamarckian idea of heritability the key to social reform. Pace the period's typical misnomering, it's sometimes refered to as "reform Darwinism." You can see hints of this in Looking Backward and a hundred other utopian novels which imagine the improvement in the quality of parents' lives will have a direct impact on the quality of their childrens' bodies. (How's that for a broad brush?)

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Laura, one of the problems with Mitchell is that as a neurologist he dealt with biology instead of biological theory, and as a fiction writer he tended toward pre-Darwinian periods (the Revolutionary and Civil Wars), so he rarely ventures to discuss the general import of evolutionary theory. What I'm doing in this chapter is attempting to tease from his work his theories of social and biological evolution and discuss the ways in which they're intertwined. As I mentioned to Jenny and Adam, there's a quasi-Lamarckian tendency, acquired through Spencer, to much fin de siècle American thought; and while Mitchell never name-drops Lamarck or Spencer, he also, to my mind significantly, never name-drops Darwin. He was remarkably un-self-conscious of the evolutionary underpinnings of both his profession (medicine) and his hobby (fiction). But he was the most popular American writer of the late C19th and early C20th, and thus someone who has to be reckoned with if the goal of one's project is to understand the influence of evolutionary theory on popular American culture and literature. But I really haven't answered your question, have I?

The short answer would be that because he makes no specific claims about evolutionary theory, I'm forced to work my way, inductively, through his thought; the product of months of inductive work convinced me that he's fundamentally a Lamarckian thinker; thus the single quotation validating those months of work proves--to myself as much as anyone else--I'm a competent inductivist (or at the very least, a lucky one).

N.P., you've hit the nail on the head: I needed some piece of evidence to prove to the literalists--including the one who keeps me tossing and turning night after night, whispering endlessly about how I'm making all this up--that, well, that I'm not making this all up. And yes, you've captured the revisionist brunt of what is, in the end, a dissertation-cum-corrective; I want to demonstrate that the most popular thinkers of the period weren't Darwinians but strangle amalgams of evolutionary thought which, while sometimes inflected with Darwinian concepts, actually belonged to a much older and incoherent tradition.

[N. Pepperell]

It's funny, the ghosts that haunt dissertation writing. For me, it's not usually the fear that I'm making something up that isn't there (although that has happened from time to time).

My recurrent problem is that, after the initial excitement of finally piecing something together, I tend to become really paranoid that I've just "discovered" something that *everyone already knows*, but no one is writing about, because they think it's all terribly obvious and only a very dull person wouldn't see it immediately... ;-P

[Adam Roberts]

Yes, obviously there can be no Lysenko in your reading of the C19th. I was musing more generally ... something along the lines of Lamarck being a chevalier and us all having a soft spot for him; and Lysenko being the son of a peasant (and looking stern and scary in photographs) and us all despising him. Although the two men were arguing more or less the same thing.

"Darwin had to be recuperated from, among others, the neo-Darwinians who thought him quaint and unserious ..."

He's done pretty well for himself, hasn't he, old Darwin. I mean he did get the mechanism of genetic transmission plain wrong, after all; a lot of his data was sketchy, and a lot of his theorising speculative. Not that I'm knocking him; a giant of the age. But hardly error free.

Mind you, he's more icon than scientist. A few years back the UK treasury changed the design of the ten pound note: it used to have Charles Dickens on it, now it's got Darwin on it. One of my nineteenth-century students came to see me in tears at hearing this news. [I assume, perhaps erroneously, that this sort of thing is commoner in the States; it shocked me more than a little in London town]. 'What's wrong?' I asked. 'They're replacing Dickens with Darwin,' she said. 'That wicked man ...' She then gave me a copy of a booklet privately printed by her Dad, a minister in a small Proetstant sect, comprehensively disproving Darwinism and the whole concept of evolution.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

N.P., I frequently have that problem too. In fact, when I started this project, Walter Benn Michaels off-handedly noted that a former student of his, Lynn Wardley, had written a dissertation on a similar topic. That's a link to an abstract of, I believe, a chapter from it. As you can see, there wasn't as much overlap as I initially despaired, a pattern which has obtained subsequent times I've run across "similar" works. I think the only people who have to worry about duplicating other people's works are those who ride the wave of some critical trend. I've heard tell of scholars in the '70s who raced to produce the first deconstructive account of Jane Austen or Charles Dickens--the late, inimitable Homer Brown had hundreds of similar tales dating from his days at Columbia--but I don't see such scholarly "runs" that often anymore.

Then again, I don't keep tabs on the bleeding edge of theory anymore, so there may still be a rush to be the first person to produce an X of Y.

Re-reading your comment, however, I see you're actually talking about a much more fundamental insecurity, and one I initially shared: How is it no one's noticed that there's no such beast as social Darwinism? I would ask myself three or four times an hour. I would convince myself that everyone already knows it, that it's merely assumptive at this point; but then I would console myself by re-reading the relevant seminal works and working my way down to the most insignificant until I was satisfied that not only has no one noticed it, no one is even asking the questions necessary to call attention to it. That's the key, I think: if they're not asking the questions that would yield the answers your endeavors yielded, you're in the money (figuratively speaking, of course).

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

This is the fourth or fifth occasion you've commented while I responded to someone else. Keep it up and I'll start calling you "Adam-in-the-Meantime." Anyway:

I mean he did get the mechanism of genetic transmission plain wrong, after all; a lot of his data was sketchy, and a lot of his theorising speculative. Not that I'm knocking him; a giant of the age. But hardly error free.

Certainly true, but his theorizing was necessarily speculative, since it'd be more than 50 yrs. before someone would graft Mendel onto natural selection. The defense I have in mind is more of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution, as opposed to various other teleological speculations, all of which involved of necessity non-Darwinian precepts. Even a lot of "Darwinian" thought incorporated one or another teleological agency into its account of evolution at the time; Kellogg defended, then, not Darwinism as a whole so much as the idea of evolution as process sans processor.

I was musing more generally ... something along the lines of Lamarck being a chevalier and us all having a soft spot for him; and Lysenko being the son of a peasant (and looking stern and scary in photographs) and us all despising him. Although the two men were arguing more or less the same thing.

I must admit that most of what I know about Lysenkoism comes from Soyfer's Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science, which dealt more with the political implications of politicians dictating scientific policy--something we, as blessed denizens of the 21st Century, don't have to worry about anymore--so I'm not sure whether they were arguing the same thing. That said, I wouldn't map our affection quite like that; I'd say that I associate "good Lamarckians" with the "reform Darwinians," those who believed in an inclusive definition of "race uplift," and "bad Lamarckians" with eugenics proponents who believed in an exclusive definition of "race uplift," you know, like the Nazis. Sure, Lysenko stinks of Stalinism, but he wasn't a Nazi.

[Adam Kotsko]

[Attempted comment thread fork:] Scott, Are you saying Stalinism is better than Nazism?

[Laura]

But I really haven't answered your question, have I?

No you haven't. Doesn't matter.

[N. Pepperell]

I agree on the issue of needing the right questions - and, for the most part, manage to remain aware that no one seems to be reconstructing the peculiar set of cross-disciplinary meanderings that have yielded mine. Still, when it comes time to hand over a draft, I can't quite suppress the thought that *this* will be the draft that causes one of my advisors to go, "Oh - is *this* all you've been going on about?!"

Mind you, I've never had anyone come close to saying something like this - this fear is of a specifically irrational character. What actually happens is more along the lines of what you were worrying about in your original post - which is people being sceptical about whether what I'm talking about really exists. Strangely, though, this reaction doesn't particularly bother me, emotionally - my emotional response is reserved for the imaginary reactions I never get... ;-P

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Well, yes it does, since I tried and failed to. Let me try again: Lamarckian thought functioned below the level of explicit discourse, as an structural assumption, in Mitchell's work. In the body of the chapter, I demonstrate how it structures his thought on medicine and American national destiny, but I did so without an explicit statement to the effect of "I am a Lamarckian." He would never declare membership in that tradition; but he's a Lamarckian nonetheless, much like Spencer--who declares himself to be a Darwinian, but whose thought betrays his Lamarckian affiliations. Only it's more difficult to prove that in Mitchell's case, since he never lays out his philosophy the way Spencer did. One can look at the body of Spencer's work and see the contradiction between his Darwinian declarations and his social and political theory; that's impossible to do with Mitchell, sincen he never made them explicit, hence my being overjoyed to find that small sliver which verifies my inductive work.

(If that makes less sense than my first go at it, well, I've been in conferences the past seven hours. Pesky responsible students . . . )

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Adam, no dice. I'm not touching that with the ten-foot pole I use to avoid touching the debate about when a fetus becomes a person.

[Mary Ann]

What's up with the part that says:
"..over brain-work tends ...to contract the pelvis."

[kk]

politicians dictating scientific policy--something we, as blessed denizens of the 21st Century, don't have to worry about anymore...

Have you perchance read The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney? In case the name didn't tip you off, it is a bit one-sided; but a tu quoque rejoinder from detractors on the Right wouldn't allay anyone's concerns--it would just mean that the problem is even worse.

[Rodney Herring]

Scott, it may be worth knowing that Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden explores this phenomenon. Sagan plays off the theological explanation of the expansion of the human cranium: God punished Eve for original sin by enlarging the head, meaning a painful birthing experience; and an a propos punishment it was, since humans were so damn greedy for knowledge they disobeyed God's one, simple commandment! I think this is a point made by Augustine.

I owe this entire point to a friend, and he points out, further, that though Sagan doesn't take a specifically Lamarckian view of this process, as a good Darwinist, he argues that the cause of the expansion of the brain was early humans taking to eating flesh (though this last point may have been theorized since Sagan's death).