Fathers of Biology, and of Children

Describing an often overlooked characteristic of 19th-century biologists, Joseph Kastner writes:  "Naturalists who never laid eyes on each other became intimate friends by virtue of the long and faithful letters they wrote to each other, year in and year out...."  Early British biologists' use of correspondence for research accelerated after the 1840 creation of the Penny Post within England, which set a fixed rate for a letter regardless of the distance it had to travel.  No biologist took greater advantage of the postal service for gathering scientific data than Charles Darwin, who penned over 14,000 letters.  But there is more than science in those early biologists' letters. There are also matters of the heart.

from Hooker's
Himalayan Journals

Appreciating the poignancy of some letters requires knowing about the state of 19th-century medicine.  Because there were virtually no vaccinations nor oral or injected antibiotics, a child was twenty-five times more likely to die before reaching early adolescence than is a child in Britain today.  Despite 19th-century biologists' accelerating knowledge about the natural world, they were not exempt from that statistic.

After the death of Darwin's beloved daughter Annie at the age of ten, the botanist Joseph Hooker, who helped Darwin study plant species, offered his condolences to Darwin.  Several years later, only an hour after Hooker's daughter died, Hooker was writing to Darwin to tell of his own grief.  Darwin wrote back at once.

Thomas Henry Huxley
   

The leading British advocate for Darwin's theory of evolution for natural selection, Thomas Henry Huxley, also lost a child.  After Huxley's son Noel died at the age of three, Darwin drew upon his own experience of grief with Annie to reassure Huxley that grief could soften with time, writing, "I was indeed grieved to receive your news this morning....  I know well how intolerable is the bitterness of such grief.  Yet believe me, that time, and time alone, acts wonderfully....  I cannot think of one child without tears rising in my eyes; but the grief is become tenderer and I can even call up the smile of our lost darling...."

statue of
Jean Henri Fabre

Such personal expressions of grief and condolence, sometimes traveling in envelopes as part of scientific study, also crossed the English Channel.  The most difficult of emotions were sometimes even revealed in the pages of scientific books.  The eminent French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre closed his first volume on insects with a dedication to the memory of his own son, who had died when Fabre was working on the book. Charles Darwin, despite scientific disagreements,  wrote a cordial letter to Fabre, saying,  "Permit me to add, that when I read the last sentence in your book, I sympathised deeply with you."

I am struck by the tenderness and cordiality of these condolences mingled among the scientific facts.  I cannot begin to comprehend all the research of these early naturalists. But I can hope that some of my emails and "snail-mail" notes might express a similar warmth.

~~~

How do you think we today might make our correspondence spiritually supportive?

(The Kastner quote is from A Species of Eternity by Joseph Kastner, © 1977,

and is taken from The Naturalist's Path by Cathy Johnson, © 1991.  p. ix.)

(The Darwin quotes are taken from Annie's Box by Randal Keynes, © 2001.  pp. 221 & 285.)

Are Libraries Natural?

In the U.S. and many high-tech nations today, we possess so many gadgets that we are inclined to think of an "invention" as being an electronic device or a piece of machinery.  What intrigues me are those human inventions that cannot be shipped to our homes in a delivery truck, not even a very large one.  Such as the invention of church-state separation.  And national parks open to the public (a U.S. first).  Among such non-shippable great inventions, I would list free public libraries.

Of course, any person's private collection of books is sometimes referred to as their "library." But we more often employ that word for a large, shared collection of books, particularly one in a building dedicated to that purpose.  Following that meaning of the word, we can identify libraries even in the ancient world.  Such as the fabled Library of Alexandria, which existed in Egypt from the 3rd century B.C.E through most of the 4th century C.E.  But that research library existed for only an intellectual elite who could read, and they could not take its scrolls home.

Library building in Peterborough,
New Hampshire built in 1893

The truly free, publicly-funded  library as we know it today was an invention of people of the United States.  It depended upon a prior intangible invention:  the idea of a democratic, educated public.  Probably the oldest free public library of the kind we know today (rather than being a subscription library) was opened in 1833 in Peterborough, New Hampshire.  Only sixteen years later, that state legislated funding for such public libraries. Other states followed suit in setting up libraries, including the Boston library in 1848 (thus allowing for jokes about books being "banned in Boston").

With the rapid rise of the Internet, many have predicted the demise of libraries.  With people now being able to read and download electronic books to their computers at home, what use is there for physical library-buildings with all those antiquated hard-copy books -- or so it has been asked.

Anyone who has recently visited libraries in a large city, however, may have observed how libraries have changed with the Internet, finding new ways to serve people.  I have seen librarians coach people, many of whom do not have Internet connections at home, in how to research on the computers set up in libraries.  Invisible wifi signals now fill the air along with the faint scent of paper books.  (One library I have been in even boasts that its wifi signal can, for convenience, be picked up in the parking lot.)  And the 2008 recession increased library use as people who had lost jobs or homes relied upon libraries for job-research or for an air-conditioned respite from the weather.

Traveling burro-library in Colombia

Almost paralleling that ancient Library of Alexandria, which included a museum and a research center teaching dissection, some of our contemporary libraries have rotating museum-like displays, as well as rooms for classes on such things as computer programs or English as a second language. (Sorry, no classes on dissection.) And those displays and classes are not just for the elite.  Maybe in that sense libraries are not "natural,"  but they are evolving, and are far from being extinct.

~~~

In what tangible or intangible ways have you benefited from libraries?

(The photo of the burro-library is by Acción Visual/Diana Arias,

 and is used under a  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Cotton: A Soft but Prickly Story

My hunch would be that I experienced cotton even before my very first memory.  Probably as an infant, I experienced the soft touch of sterilized cotton, or the careful cleaning of my ears with a cotton swab.  I can make that assumption because those items were regular residents in our medicine cabinet.  By the time I was taught the song about Peter Cottontail, I had the basis for knowing what a cottony tail would be like.  I now know, however, that there is a lot of rough, impure history behind that white substance.

Just to begin with, cotton (from plants of the genus Gossypium) is never that pure in the natural world.  Although humans' use of it dates back maybe 7,000 years, the cottony material begins as seedy fibers packed within a seed capsule called a "boll."  Both picking cotton from the plants and extracting seeds from the cotton-fiber are laborious tasks.

Despite that challenge, a cotton industry flourished in India from 2000 to 1000 B.C.E., having gotten its roots in the Indus Valley of northern India and eastern Pakistan. Ancient people of Egypt and China also harvested and converted the plant's cotton into clothes. Late medieval Germans, who could only imagine the plants that cotton came from, named it baumwolle, or "tree wool."  (Fancifully, some people imagined that in other countries lambs must grow on trees.)

It is when we follow the story of cotton into an English-speaking country, Britain, that the story at times becomes more painful.  By the 1800's, British colonialism had enforced policies on India that favored the new industrial looms in England.  As a result, the native cotton-weaving enterprise in India was undone, and the people of India were forced to buy more costly fabrics from the looms of colonial Britain -- even when the cotton was grown in India.  This is why Gandhi's encouraging the people of India to spin their own cotton thread at home was part of a political revolt.

"The Cotton Pickers"
by Winslow Homer

The U.S. was another source of cotton for the rapidly industrializing Britain, and the American side of the story is even more painful.  By 1790, slavery was actually on the decline in the U.S. because it was not economically sustainable.  But that changed with the invention of the cotton gin by the ingenious Eli Whitney in Savannah. The climate in the U.S. South allowed the cultivation of only a "green seed" variety of cotton, which demanded an inordinate amount of time for extracting the cotton fibers from the seeds.  With Whitney's machine, a person could extract in one hour what would have previously required several days.  Once the word about the invention was out, farmers planted green seed cotton in mass -- and an economic place for slave-labor was ensured.

In hot weather, I enjoy the cool comfort of cotton shirts.  I am not that comfortable with some of the history behind the fiber in my shirt.  Hopefully, we humans will do better by each other in the future.  After all, the cotton plant offers us lots of good possibilities even beyond textiles: Material from that genus of plants provides salad oil, soap, stems for paper-making, and maybe even a drug for preventing HIV.

~~~

What thoughts or memories has this story of cotton evoked in you?

(Both the photo of Gandhi and the painting by Homer are in the Public Domain

because their copyrights have expired.)

Being and Becoming

Personally, I've never been hard-nosed about New Year's resolutions.  Although the first of the year does allow me an opportunity to reflect a bit more about my weaknesses and my abilities, I have always had a hard time carrying with me a fixed list of goals throughout an entire year. Even if I could write down a "to-become" list that would remain workable through the course of 12 months, I would probably forget where I put that piece of paper before the year was over.

Part of the difficulty is that it is impossible to predict what circumstances will arise in the months ahead.  True, I can resolve to head into each day with a certain re-fortified spirit toward life, but I cannot always know what challenges I am going to have to respond to.  The late 20th-century poet Wendell Berry wrote about the contingencies of even a single day's outing that...

"The chances change and make a new way."

It can be scary thinking about this unpredictability of life. Fortunately, we have been at this process of becoming since the day we were born.  We have a lot of practice with it because becoming is built into our biological nature.  As the neurobiologist Steven Rose explains, "Every living creature is in constant flux, always at the same time both being and becoming.... [A] newborn infant has a suckling reflex; within a matter of months the developing infant begins to chew her food.... The paradox of development is that a baby has to be at the same time a competent suckler and to transform herself into a competent chewer.  To be, therefore, and to become...."

Faith-traditions place markers along the road of life to support us in our development:  Such as baptism, first Bible, and Bar Mitzvah.  Our faith-traditions also encourage us onward by reminding us that the ultimate Source of Life is also the very Ground of our Being that remains beneath us, supporting us even as we sometimes stumble.

Interestingly, the idea that even God cannot predict exactly what will be and what will be demanded in our engagement with the Divine is expressed in a pivotal story in the Christian Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible). In Exodus 3:12-14, Moses, after being given a challenging long-term assignment by God, is promised by God, "I will be with you."  Nevertheless, Moses tries to gain more control over the situation by requesting to be told God's name.  Moses wants more control over the future than even God can promise.  And so, God provides to Moses the open-ended enigmatic reply, "I AM WHO I AM."  Translators sometimes add a footnote to this verse in order to express that God will be with Moses in both "being" and "becoming" -- just like that baby who both suckles and chews.  Such footnotes explain that what God has said could also be translated as "I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE," or even "I WILL BECOME WHAT I WILL BECOME."

So too can our understanding of the Divine grow with us as we grow -- in both our being and our becoming.

~~~

Has your life ever taken an unpredicted path in a way that turned out to be fulfilling?

(The Berry line is from his poem "Traveling at Home," © 1988.)

(The Rose quote is from his chapter in Alas, Poor Darwin, ed. by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, © 2000. p. 310.)

Not “Dead to the World”

Sleep.  It's a funny phenomenon -- funny in the sense of peculiar, as well as being an opportunity for levity on sitcoms.  Yet sleep is also an earnest matter.  It even links our lives on the evolutionary tree with other animals.

We humans get introduced quite early in life to sleep's being more than meets the eye.  More than one parent has had to deal with a young child's having nightmares. It is probably clearer to the parent how the disruptive dreams connect with some anxiety in the child's waking life.  In other instances, the child's nightmare can be marked by that strange other-worldly feeling we can be struck by upon remembering a dream on awaking.  One mother I know was told at breakfast by her pre-schooler that he had been chased by a giraffe. Fortunately, the mother, rather than reprimanding the child for lying, explained to her child that he had simply had a scary dream.

The phenomenon of sleep can also be scary to a child viewing it from the outside:  I remember as a child entering my mother's bedroom when she was napping so soundly that my mind almost became overtaken by the fear that she was dead.  The similarity between deep sleep and death adds another layer to the peculiarity of dreams, as well as providing material for literary pens.  In a time before modern medicine's ability to measure brain waves, Edgar Allan Poe took advantage of the frightening thought that a person might be declared dead when the person was just asleep.  Poe's story "The Premature Burial" is a gripping tale.

As we journey through life, learning about the world we live in, we also discover that many other animals sleep, and mammals clearly dream.  Those fishes in my childhood aquarium, sometimes hovering motionless, were probably sleeping (I was told), even though they had no eyelids to close to let me know they were sleeping.  It was easier to recognize that our pet dog was dreaming when, lying on its side, its legs began running, no doubt chasing something rather than being chased.

Contemporary scientists have been able to verify that dreaming can be a means for processing the preceding day's activities, even enhancing learning.  For example, a sleeping rat's brain undergoes the same activity it did when the rat was exploring a new maze the day before.

Despite sleep being essential to many animals' lives (and even to plants, in a way), the wisdom of our faith-traditions has adopted sleep as a symbol of something we should not be doing -- at least when we're awake!  The Buddha's title in Sanskrit indicates that he is for Buddhists the model of "the Awakened One."  As Christmas approaches, many Christians sing hymns containing reminders to stay alert, to "keep watch" like shepherds protecting their sheep.

However, remembering that marvelous ability of babies to sometimes sleep soundly amid hubbub, we can also wish all babies in the world the gift of being able to "sleep in heavenly peace."

~~~

Do you have a wish for the world about sleep or about watchfulness?

(The quoted hymn-line is from John Freeman Young's

 1863 translation of "Stille Nacht" ["Silent Night"], 1818 lyrics by Joseph Mohr.)

(The photograph of the artwork of the deer was made by Joachim Lutz, 

and is used under under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.)