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Series of forms, visual techniques, and quantitative devices: ordering the world between the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

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Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the variety and richness of the taxonomical practices between the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. During these decades, zoologists and paleontologists came up with different quantitative practices in order to classify their data in line with the new biological principles introduced by Charles Darwin. Specifically, I will investigate Florentino Ameghino’s mathematization of mammalian dentition and the quantitative practices and visualizations of several German-speaking paleontologists at the beginning of the twentieth century. In so doing, this paper will call attention to the visual and quantitative language of early twentieth-century systematics. My analysis will therefore contribute to a prehistory of the statistical frame of mind in biology, a study which has yet to be written in full. Second, my work highlights the productive intertwinement between biological practices and philosophical frameworks at the turn of the nineteenth century. Deeply rooted in Kantian bio-philosophy, several biologists sought to find rules in order to apply ordering principles to chaotic taxonomic information. This implies the necessity to investigate the neglected role of Kantian and Romantic bio-philosophy in the unfolding of twentieth-century biology.

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Notes

  1. See also Hacking (1990), Porter (1995) and Sepkoski and Tamborini (2018).

  2. Central to the statistical frame of mind adopted by biologists during the second half of the twentieth century is the idea that “the routine use of statistics, mediated by the computer could play both a heuristic and an analytical role in biological research” (Hagen 2003, p. 368). See also (Sokal 1969).

  3. On the relationship between Ameghino and Simpson see particularly (Novoa and Levine 2010; Podgorny 2005, 2018).

  4. Simpson spent 4 years in Patagonia studying Paleogene mammals. He extensively investigated and revised Ameghino’s work (Laporte 1987; Sereno 1982).

  5. Quantitative practices were also introduced in biogeography during at the of the eighteenth century. See for instance Ebach (2015). For the use quantitative in nineteenth-century natural history see footnote 20.

  6. As, for instance, Henry Shaler Williams (1947–1918) and Richard Swann Lull (1867–1957) did. See Lull (1917), Tamborini (2015b) and Williams (1895).

  7. On Ameghino see Caponi (2017, 2018), Novoa and Levine (2010) and Podgorny (2005, 2018).

  8. Translation in Levine and Novoa (2012, p. 201).

  9. Translation in Levine and Novoa (2012, pp. 201–202).

  10. On practice of displaying and ordering organisms in museums, see, for instance Kendig (2016), Rieppel L. (2012) and Tamborini and Vennen 2017).

  11. Translation in Levine and Novoa (2012, p. 202).

  12. Translation in Levine and Novoa (2012, p. 205).

  13. For instance, naturalist Richard Owen (1804–1892) published a monumental investigation of the teeth of mammal in his Odontography (1840–1845) (Owen 1845). On the relationship between Ameghenio and Owen see Podgorny (2018).

  14. Translation in Levine and Novoa (2012, p. 205).

  15. About transcendental Naturphilosophie see Huneman (2006), Rehbock (1990), Richards (2002), and Zammito (2017).

  16. See his 1889 lecture Visión y Realidad (Vision and Reality) translated in English in Levine and Novoa (2012).

  17. Translation in Levine and Novoa (2012, p. 212).

  18. Translation in Levine and Novoa (2012, p. 212).

  19. This was Ameghino’s main concern. He introduced these graphical visualizations so that his investigation was “understandable to everyone” (Ameghino 1884, p. 440).

  20. As Podgorny noted, “the so-called “mathematical classification” was a visual system for converting verbal descriptions into graphics, where the number of anatomical pieces and anatomical characters were transformed into formulas that reduced a page of words to a line of symbols” (Podgorny 2017, p. 32). On the practices of nineteenth-century data visualization, see for instance Archibald (2014), Hineline (1993), Rudwick (1967), Schäffner (1999) and Sepkoski and Tamborini (2018).

  21. See Esposito (2016) and Müller (2017).

  22. See the fifth footnote.

  23. See Waagen (1869).

  24. See for instance Davenport (1904, Goldschmidt (1911) and Johannensen (1909). On early twentieth-century statistics see for instance Coen (2007), Desrosières (1998), Hacking (1990) McOuat (2001) and (Porter 1986, 1995).

  25. Between the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the study of ontogeny was a common research topic among the biologists inspired by Kant and Romantic philosophy. See Esposito (2016).

  26. On this rich and fruitful tradition, see, for instance Ebach (2015), Fabrer (2000), Larson (1994), Müller-Wille (2017) and Sepkoski and Tamborini (2018).

  27. On the difference use of visualizations in natural history see, for example, Daston and Galison (2007), Nickelsen (2006), Sepkoski and Tamborini (2018) and Wittmann (2013).

  28. This position was also shared by Swiss zoologist and paleontologist Adolf Naef (1883–1939). See Rieppel O. 2012) and Rieppel (2016).

  29. This has deep implications for a possible encounter between a “true to nature” and a “mechanical” concept of objectivity at the beginning of the twentieth century. See Daston and Galison (2007) and Richards (2016).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank David Sepkoski, Maurizio Esposito, Michele Cardani, and the two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. Furthermore, I thank Joeri Witteveen and Catherine Kendig for inviting me to this special issue and for their great and inspiring feedback.

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    Marco Tamborini

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Tamborini, M. Series of forms, visual techniques, and quantitative devices: ordering the world between the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. HPLS 41, 49 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-019-0282-x

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