TY - JOUR
AU - Ragan, Mark, A.
AB - Why are images and evolutionary teachings so closely entwined? Julia Voss, Executive Editor of the visual arts section of the daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, poses this question near the beginning of Darwin's Pictures, originally published in German as Darwins Bilder (Voss 2007) and now elegantly rendered into English by Lori Lantz. Illustration has, of course, been part not only of evolutionary teachings but more broadly of argument in the sciences and, before that, in natural history and natural philosophy (Heninger 1977, Murdoch 1984, Ragan 2009). Images graced bestiaries and herbals while, more to the point here, Belon (1555) famously counterpoised a human skeleton with that of a bird. The 289 woodcuts in Agricola's De re metallica (Agricola 1556) went far beyond the adjoining text in explicating the history and application of mining technology. John Gould, to whom Darwin entrusted his collection of Galápagos finch skins, set up lithography on a scale befitting those years of industrial revolution. The argument Voss builds in her book is, however, deeper and more subtle: that Darwin “thought with his eyes.” He sketched (poorly, by his own estimation), amassed an extensive collection of engravings and photographs, commissioned woodcuts (78 for Descent of Man) and was meticulous in guiding their production for his books. But more than this, according to Voss, Darwin uniquely used visualizations “to formulate his theories in the first place.” Indeed, she argues, his evolutionary theory was so integrally linked with particular modes of visual representation that sometimes his text supports the pictures, not vice versa. Visual media can depict processes that are occluded from direct observation (geological strata, embryological series) or take place on spatial and/or temporal scales beyond individual experience (dispersal and change of species). Voss vividly situates us in 1830s imperial London, as an overwhelming flood of specimens from overseas was stretching the Linnean system to its breaking-point, and naturalists turned to visual representation in hopes of restoring order to nature. She brilliantly shows how Darwin's early tree sketches synthesized Martin Barry's visual representations of structural unity in animal development (which in turn were based on von Baer's embryology) with the paleontological diagrams of Agassiz, although Voss unfortunately credits neither Hutton nor Sedgwick for opening up deep geological time. Voss sets out her argument in four lengthy but eminently readable chapters, each focusing on an image, or set of images, which (literally) illustrate four aspects of Darwin's relationship with visual information: the Galápagos finches (Journal of Researches second edition, 1845), his evolutionary tree (Origin of Species, 1859), stages in the evolution of the pheasant wing (Descent of Man, 1871), and a laughing macaque (Expression of Emotions, 1872). Of course, these works are successive stages in the evolution of Darwin's theory, and Voss brings this out to some extent; but this is not a book about Darwin's theory per se, but rather about his pictures as argument, as “icons of evolution.” Voss situates the figure of 4 Galápagos fiches, showing variation in the size and shape of their heads and beaks, in the “visual discipline of ornithology” as it then existed. She argues that this figure is the only time prior to Origin (1859) where Darwin offered a hint into his thoughts about evolution, albeit one “not addressed to the reader but to the viewer.” This figure is ordered to show gradation from the finch with the largest and heaviest beak to the one with the smallest and most delicate. Others had built, and would build, montages showing deviation from an ideal type; but by arranging the variants as he did, Darwin intentionally implied that form had evolved across time. Unlike Chambers, who had argued in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) that the Galápagos Islands were frozen in a primitive (reptile- and mammal-free) stage of the development of life, Darwin presented evolution in progress. Voss reminds us how this iconic figure came about: “[l]iving birds became stuffed specimens, which became species types, which became sketches, which became drawings, which finally became lithographs.” Remarkably, Darwin never again returned in detail to his (now eponymous) finches. The second icon, Darwin's famous tree from Origin of Species, “combined three disciplines like a collage: Barry's branching diagram tool on overgrown proportions as it met Strickland's taxonomic maps and was then planted deep in the geologic substrata.” Unlike earlier symmetrical geometric figures and quinarian cycles, Darwin's tree visualized disorder. Strickland (1841) had counseled that systematists must approach the diversity of new body types as would a cartographer surveying an unknown and (so far as we can initially tell) irregular landscape: The “true method” is to represent this as a geographical map. Voss pursues these themes of mathematical purity (e.g., the Quinarian systems of Macleay and Swainson, based on subgroups of five) and map-making into interesting issues of visual formalism and metaphor, although, in my opinion, at some cost of historical accuracy. Not all the geometric figures had been, even in principle, symmetrical or even balanced (Ragan 2009 and references therein); the expectation of order in nature was broader than British natural theology; and long before, in 1751, Linnaeus had written of plant families showing “affinities on either side, like territories in a geographical map.” (Speaking of which, we might link Wallace's 1855 “…we have only fragments of this vast system” [of nature], quoted by Voss, to this same Linnaean aphorism “the fragments of the natural method are to be diligently sought out.”) Although Darwin's iconic tree is the only one rendered visually in the Origin, Voss calls our attention to a second picture in this work, painted only in words (although presented visually later in Descent of Man): of a human embryo as “a sort of picture, preserved by nature, of the former and less modified condition of the species.” Voss argues that these words are not metaphor but describe actual images known to Darwin. He thus combined previously distinct pictorial forms—embryological and evolutionary—to create a “double portrait.” The third icon comprises five pictures depicting markings on the wing of the argus pheasant. These woodcuts show variation in a particular ornament, the ocellus, on the wings of adult specimens in the British Museum. Variation was of course well known within innumerable plant and animal species and had been accommodated in classificatory systems since Ray and before; the very concept of type, after all, presupposes variation, although prior to Darwin this was seen as imperfection. Here, though, Darwin not only illustrates variation but also intentionally arranges the variants so they do not march inevitably from simple to complex: Indeed, their order of presentation is “turbulent, as if something unexpected could happen with each turn of the page.” Thus, for Voss, this series makes the case for imperfection and small gradations of variation better than Darwin could in words: “[i]t is not the image that complements the text, but rather the text that complements the image.” No one could know the order in which the plumage actually evolved, and Voss depicts Darwin as wrestling “in vain to capture the illustrations in words.” Via another picture—the only one in his oeuvre that even hints at selection—Darwin makes the point that plumage in the male bird is for display to female birds not to humans. He thus upends Paley's argument from the perfection of creation. Voss concludes that “[a]fter Darwin, nothing in nature could have been created without change: no organism and no organ was perfect. All living things existed in constant flux, never arriving at a state of perfection or completeness.” The fourth and final visual icon is the laughing macaque. In Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin identifies a series of traits, mostly of a positive nature, that we humans share with higher animals, particularly primates. Voss entertainingly contrasts Darwin's approach with the then-prevalent depiction of gorillas as monsters, arguing that for Darwin our animal relationship was, emotions-wise, (mostly) positive. In animals, as in ourselves, facial expressions and gestures offer windows into the emotions and themselves arise from habit and nervous impulses. Darwin amassed a large collection of photographs and pictures showing these expressions. Voss leads us on a fascinating tour of Darwin's discovery of photography as a medium, involving the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (from whom the Darwin family rented a vacation home on the Isle of Wight in 1868) and the photographic artist Oscar Gustav Rejlander. These were the early years of photography and earlier still for scientific as distinct from portrait photography. Whereas Agassiz, Huxley, and others argued that for scientific aims, the subject should be depersonalized, Darwin's illustrations were intended to personalize his subjects, sometimes even (as Voss argues) to heighten this personalization, for example, by editing-out laboratory apparatus and the research assistant's hands. Further, Darwin presented human and animal photos separately, not side-by-side, breaking from a tradition that might be traced to Belon (1555). In the end, depersonalization prevailed, making Darwin an exception, not a pioneer, in scientific photography. Voss has thus elaborately set up our introduction to the laughing macaque. In quick succession, she points out that the macaque bares its teeth not as a ferocious monster but rather demonstrating its “kinship to mankind”; that its depiction in bust portrait was a conventional way to show individual humans; and that it presents a “small cheerful countenance” rather than large fearsome gorilla face. The link from man to animal is via a laugh not a snarl or attempted dismemberment. And whereas Haeckel infamously linked humans and apes via Africans and Australians, “Darwin's visual argument rested instead on the observation that the English resembled their pets.” Kinship dignifies the animals rather than degrading humans. What do Darwin's pictures not show? Remarkably, apart from the embryo in Descent, his earlier works do not show humans. Woodcuts and photographs of Europeans finally appear in Expression of Emotions, although Darwin was suspicious of the new medium of photography, and as an abolitionist drew the line at ethnographic photos as he “knew that he would not be able to control [their] reception.” With one modest exception (of the argus pheasant), he does not depict instances of selection, struggle, or survival of the fittest. Voss allows that Darwin's texts focus on individual struggle against the environment, which might be difficult to illustrate, rather than against individuals of the same or other species; but he instead chose to illustrate variation. For each visual icon, Voss discusses the path from sketch (or photograph) to publication, introducing us generically (and sometimes personally) to field collectors, draftsmen, illustrators, photographers, and to Darwin's publisher John Murray, who seems always to have complained about the cost. In some cases, Voss follows the trail of these images into popular and commercial culture, where some “took on a life of their own.” The 79 black-and-white illustrations in Voss' octavo edition are well chosen but, for a book devoted to visual depiction, are often too small—certainly too small to do justice to Audubon's golden eagle but sometimes too small even for legibility. A further 16 color plates present a total of 18 illustrations selected from among these 79, all of which are exactly the same size as the black-and-white version (save one, which is smaller) and several of which are in effect dichromatic (black line on grayish-blue or tan background). Plate 5 could have been rotated 90 degrees to make the lettering legible; but at the end of the day, the octavo format fails the subject (as did the original German paperback edition). For the English language version, some textual material has been slightly reordered, and some endnotes updated. The index is reasonably comprehensive, although the illustrator Bocourt (pp. 229 and 233) somehow fails to have won an entry. Voss offers much of interest in passing. We discover that Bewick's History of British Birds (1797) revolutionized the book market by inexpensively combining woodcuts and text on a single page. Via a fascinating excursion into the origins of pet-keeping in the UK, the RSPCA, animal shelters, animal-protection laws, and the rising demand for illustrations of animals, we better appreciate the connection between Darwin's choice of pictures—the babies, little girl, and household pets in Emotions, for example—and developing bourgeois taste. We learn that Darwin originally planned 4 diagrams in his “Big Species Book” but, under pressure to publish before Wallace, included only the now-iconic tree; one of the other 3 figures is reproduced here. Voss is adept with word-pictures as in her description of John Gould and his wife Elizabeth. We discover that Darwin dined on the rare bird later named (by John Gould) Rhea darwinii, that he initially misclassified 3 of the Galápagos finches as a blackbird, a warbler, and a wren, and that he failed to record the island on which each finch was collected. Darwin not only “thought with his eyes,” but mobilized field collection, specimen preparation, sketches, and technologies (woodcuts, lithography, and photography) to construct his pictures and therewith his argument. Embedded in text that remains a delight to read a century and a half later and presented nonconfrontationally to a broad and potentially sceptical readership, these elegant subtle pictures revolutionized science and much beyond. Two centuries on, there is much here for scientists and intellectuals—not least today's champions of evolution—to learn from. References Agricola G . , De re metallica libri XII , 1556 Basel (Switzerland) Froben Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Belon P . , L'Histoire de la nature des oyseaux, avec leurs descriptions, & naïfs portraicts retirez du naturel: escrite en sept livres , 1555 Paris Guillaume Cauellat Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Heninger SK Jr. . , The cosmographical glass: Renaissance diagrams of the universe , 1977 San Marino, (CA) The Huntington Library Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Murdoch JE . , Antiquity and the middle ages , 1984 Volume 1 of Cohen I.B. (General Editor) Album of science. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Ragan MA . Trees and networks before and after Darwin , Biology Direct , 2009 , vol. 4 pg. 43 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS PubMed WorldCat Strickland H . On the true method of discovering the natural system , Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist. , 1841 , vol. 6 (pg. 184 - 194 ) Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Voss J . Darwins bilder , Ansichten der evolutionstheorie 1837–1874 , 2007 Frankfurt (Germany) Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Society of Systematic Biologists. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Darwin's Pictures: Views of Evolutionary Theory, 1837-1874
JF - Systematic Biology
DO - 10.1093/sysbio/syr001
DA - 2011-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/darwin-s-pictures-views-of-evolutionary-theory-1837-1874-Ak0s6BeD5J
SP - 388
EP - 390
VL - 60
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -