“There are lots of mentally limited people who are incapable of understanding the significance of taxonomy. But I am quite sure that the enormous importance of knowing the order of nature will sooner or later be recognized by all biologists.”
Eugen Smirnov, letter to Andrei Semyonov-Tian-Shansky, 17 December 1937*
*St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (hereafter SPB ARAS), collection (fond or f.) 722, inventory (opis’ or op.) 2, file (delo or d.) 908, page (list or l.) 34.
Abstract
The progress towards mathematization or, in a broader context, towards an increased “objectivity” is one of the main trends in the development of biological systematics in the past century. It is commonplace to start the history of numerical taxonomy with the works of R. R. Sokal and P. H. A. Sneath that in the 1960s laid the foundations of this school of taxonomy. In this article, I discuss the earliest research program in this field, developed in the 1920s by the Russian entomologist and biometrician Eugen (Evgeniy Sergeevich) Smirnov. The theoretical and methodological grounds of this program are considered based on the published works of Smirnov as well as some archival sources. The influence of Smirnov’s evolutionary (mechano-Lamarckian) convictions on the development of this project of “exact systematics” is analyzed as well as the author’s attempts to establish a novel concept of “mathematical essentialism” in animal taxonomy. The probable causes of the failure of Smirnov’s project are viewed from both externalist and internalist perspectives, including the opposition to the use of quantitative methods in biology by some of the Lysenkoist ideologists in the USSR. A brief comparison of Smirnov’s research program with that developed 40 years later by Sokal and Sneath is provided.
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Notes
Or, as Bailey defined it, “the personal naming and re-naming of specimens, without the addition of new knowledge or the expression of new meanings” (1917, p. 624).
For discussion of some problems of so-called statistical phylogenetics, see Ronquist et al. (2021).
Of course, not the only one. Some practitioners argued that the systematists should pay more attention to experimental work and field observations to connect studied organisms “with either function or environment” (Bailey 1917, p. 623), which would make taxonomy more “modern” and not so openly descriptive. The experimental approach to systematics was in those days best manifested in the works of the Swedish evolutionary botanist Göte Turesson. See, for example, Turesson (1922).
As I will try to show below, Smirnov’s research program implemented at least several of elements listed by Sneath (for example, character choice, grouping organisms, classification procedure).
The opposition between mechanical Lamarckism (mechano-Lamarckism) and psycho-Lamarckism was actively discussed by Russian biologists of the first half of the twentieth century (Vucinich 1988). These terms were invented by Nusbaum (1910) and gained some popularity after Ludwig Plate used them in the fourth edition of his Selektionsprinzip (Plate 1913). The psycho-Lamarckian school argued that the driving force of biological evolution is an internal power or will of all organisms to develop and improve. This interpretation of Lamarckism is closer to the original thoughts of the French evolutionist (see, for example, Puzanov 1970).
His younger colleague, Yuliy Vermel, was even more emotional. During the discussion of Smirnov’s speech, he said: “I positively believe that all nature is screaming about Lamarckism, and one has to be blind so as not to see it” (Smirnov 1928, p. 206).
The results of these experiments have been discussed in recent literature, critically by Blyakher (1971) and rather sympathetically by Shatalkin (2009). Smirnov started the experimental work aimed at the confirmation of mechano-Lamarkism in the 1920s; see, for example, Smirnov and Zhelokhovtsev (1926).
Wilhelm Windelband used these terms for the first time in his 1894 Rectorial address at the University of Strassburg (see Windelband 1980 for the English translation). The word nomothetic is derived from the Greek νόµος, meaning “law.”
See Merz (1904) and the quotation from his book given above.
In another publication, Smirnov defined “the chief task of systematics” as “the study of the relationships between the [taxonomic] characters or their correlations” (1924a, p. 8).
Compare it to the genealogical definition proposed by one of Smirnov’s contemporaries: a genus is “a group of species originating either directly from one species, or from such different species that themselves descended from one ancestor and did not lose vestiges of their origin” (Kharuzin 1929, p. 91).
This seemingly clear picture is a simplification. Smirnov (1923) noted that there may be genera within a family, belonging to neither higher cluster and characterized by the author as “transitional” genera linking two congregations.
Throughout his life, Smirnov continued to search for a mathematical method for correctly identifying congregations. The “taxonomic analysis” developed by him in the 1960s (see above) was his last step towards this goal. In this paper, I do not discuss in detail the statistical foundations of Smirnov’s research program, focusing instead on its conceptual content. For the purpose of this study, it is enough to say that, in his publications of the 1920-1930s, Smirnov used several algorithms of univariate statistics, including the standard analysis of variation (arithmetical means, skewness, kurtosity, etc.), correlation, and regression analysis.
Concerning this point, I wish to mention such prominent Soviet theorists as Beklemishev (1925, 1994) and Lyubishchev (1923), who agreed that the natural system must be built upon the “laws of form,” not on common ancestry. Lyubishchev (1923) formulated it, “don’t base [your] systems on Darwin with Spencer” (see Vinarski 2020b for details). Of course, this was not exclusive to Russian theoretical thought; debates on taxonomy and phylogeny also took place in other countries (Winsor 1995). For instance, Borgmeier (1953, p. 53) insisted that “systematics is a pure science of relation, unconcerned with time, space, or cause” (the word relation in this context has nothing to do with genealogical relationships). Huxley (1874) was, perhaps, one of the first authors to protest against the mixing up of taxonomy and phylogenetics.
“The totality of life conditions that exist now and existed earlier is what determines the composition and boundaries of taxonomic categories” (Smirnov, 1923, p. 360).
The use of embryological information in phylogenetic analyses does not contradict it because all comparisons among particular embryos were also based on their similarity. See Beklemishev’s treatise Methodology of Systematics (Beklemishev 1994, pp. 94–98) for the arguments of the impossibility of morphology- and embryology-based phylogenetic reconstructions. This book is based on an unfinished manuscript written by Beklemishev around 1928; many of the ideas discussed by the author are congenial to Smirnov’s views (Vinarski 2020b).
Of course, Smirnov (1923) recognized that paleontologists, who have the opportunity to trace how some forms transform into others, are in a better position than specialists working with living organisms. However, it was the paleontological literature that he sought (and found) evidence for his thesis on the polyphyletic origin of animal taxa.
In the post-Darwinian taxonomy. Before Darwin, the opposition between “pattern” and “process” did not exist, and all classifications were based solely on a “pattern” (i.e. general similarity).
Letter from Smirnov to Semyonov-Tian-Shansky, 25 January 1924. SPB ARAS, f. 722, op. 2, d. 908, p. 5.
Letter from Smirnov to Semyonov-Tian-Shansky, October 1924. SPB ARAS, f. 722, op. 2, d. 908, pp. 9–10.
For example, Whewell’s (1847) definition: “A Type is an example of any class, for instance, a species of a genus, which is considered as eminently possessing the characters of the class. All the species which have a greater affinity with this type-species than with any others, form the genus, and are ranged about it, deviating from it in various directions and different degrees” (Whewell 1847, pp. 494–495, quoted in Winsor (2003).
The author explained the necessity of the ideal, not material, type in such words: “no one animal can be used as a norm of comparison because no separate unit making part of a whole can serve as a specimen of this whole” (Smirnov 1925, p. 29).
Heincke, like Smirnov, adhered to neo-Lamarckian views and treated the geographical races of herrings as the ”expression of the local conditions of life” (Smirnov 1925). He insisted that the “transformation of old forms into new ones occurs due to the direct influence of changed environmental conditions” (Heincke 1898; quoted in Lukin 1940). See Sinclair and Solemdal (1988) for a detailed overview of Heincke’s work.
Smirnov defined this equation as “a function of normal distribution of correlated values” (1924b, p. 82).
From the standpoint of a practical taxonomist, this approach has some evident weaknesses. Let us accept that the type of a genus is defined as a sum total of the means of all species included in it. In this case, the discovery of new species belonging to the genus will alter the values of the means, and thus the type is prone to steady changes.
See Smirnov and Zhelokhovtsev (1926). The authors attempted to induce some morphological changes in a laboratory culture of the blue blowfly by rearing some individuals under a strong food shortage. Since these changes were quantitative, Smirnov (1926) could consider the results of this experiment as an elementary example of “evolution” (that is, the displacement of quantitative characteristics of the racial type).
In the same years, another Russian biometrician, Terentjev (1931), studied the correlation between taxonomic characters and developed a new method of the study of variation, called “the method of correlative plejades” by its inventor (see also Terentiev 1961). Remarkably, in the early 1920s, Terentjev was affiliated with the Zoological Museum of the Moscow State University where Smirnov worked. Possibly, the two biometricians communicated with each other and discussed some methodological questions of quantitative taxonomy.
See Sokal (1962) for a critical reappraisal of this work.
To be clear, I am using the word failure in its most plain and everyday sense, not as a historical concept. I wish only to designate the fact that Smirnov’s research program has had no direct successors both within and beyond the USSR but instead, it became so forgotten that Sokal and Sneath could pretend to be viewed as the true founders of numerical taxonomy (compare Sneath 1995).
Indeed, before 1917 the university curricula in Russia did not include statistical training for biologists. At Moscow University, the course of biometry was initiated by Sergei S. Chetverikov in 1919 (Babkov 1985). Around the same time, a similar course was started by Yury Filipchenko in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) (Bogolyubov 2002). The lack of mathematical education among biologists was not a specifically Russian phenomenon. G. G. Simpson, one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the last century, in the mid-1930s, “was convinced that [American] paleontologists knew nothing about statistics” (Anne Roe (Simpson’s wife), quoted in Tamborini 2019).
Here is a confession of a malacologist who was studying terrestrial snails: “Compared with the mammalian skeleton and the insect exoskeleton, the snail body is a blob of unformed protoplasm, capable of infinite individual distortion. Partly this reflects my own aversion to complicated mathematical procedures” (Solem 1978, p. 73). On the other hand, snail shells, solid and easily measurable, have become a favorite object for biometrical studies since the early years of this discipline.
Smirnov’s ideas converged, in this respect, with those of Leo S. Berg, the leading Soviet anti-Darwinist of that epoch and author of the concept of nomogenesis, an evolutionary theory rival to Darwin’s (Berg 1926). Berg was convinced that polyphyly is the main, if not the only, way of evolutionary formation of new taxa.
In his unpublished treatise De Principiis Systematicae Dissertatio (despite the Latin title it is written in Russian), Kuzin wrote that “the systematics of the future is not an extremely mathematized systematics, as some of my friends want to see it. On the contrary, it is entirely biological, i.e., completely freed from the methods and concepts of the science of inanimate nature” (SPB ARAS, f. 1077, op. 1, d. 2, p. 141). The precise date of this text is unknown; I suggest that it was completed in the 1950s after Kuzin returned from political exile in Kazakhstan.
Though both Alpatov and Terentjev shared Smirnov’s enthusiasm in the field of biometrics, they did not follow his statistical methodology, preferring instead to find their own way in the field of qualitative systematics.
Compare this with Mayr’s statement that «[q]uantification is important in many fields of biology, but not to the exclusion of all qualitative aspects» (1982, p. 55). Much earlier, Liberty Bailey, a systematic botanist, doubted “the adequacy of some of the biometrical computations” and stressed that “vegetation-factors rather than measurement-factors may be strongly emphasized” (1917, p. 625).
Another possible reason was that several of Lysenko’s opponents actively used statistical tests to refute the results of experiments made by Michurinists.
Contrast it with the theory of phylogenetic systematics as it was developed by the 1990s: natural system is only a representation of ”relationships of common descent using a system of names,” and all that it should contain is ”information about phylogeny, that is, about common descent” (de Quieroz and Gauthier 1992, p. 451). The principle of common descent is postulated as the only basis for taxonomic conventions.
See Stuessy (2013) on the inability of phenetics to work out a comprehensive classification of angiosperms and other higher taxa of plants (for example, monocots).
Willi Hennig, the founder of modern phylogenetic taxonomy, strongly opposed the priority for morphology over phylogeny, claimed not only by Smirnov and Beklemishev, but also by the much more influential school of German ideal morphologists (Hull 1988).
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Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to the library staff of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Science (St. Petersburg) for their steady help in my work with old biological literature, which is still not completely available even from the largest of online libraries. I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their remarks that helped him to improve the initial text of the manuscript.
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Vinarski, M.V. Pattern Without Process: Eugen Smirnov and the Earliest Project of Numerical Taxonomy (1923–1938). J Hist Biol 55, 559–583 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-022-09688-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-022-09688-3