A Whirlwind Tour from Aristotle to CRISPR in 381 Pages
Book Review: A History of Biology by Michel Morange
When Michel Morange set out to write a general history of biology, he wrestled with a problem faced by all historians of science: how to describe the investigations of past thinkers — who had their own terms, concepts and assumptions — without implying that they share our modern view of the world, with our current understanding of those concepts.
Among today’s historians of science, a widespread “empiricist” approach is to get immersed into the worldview of the historical figures — and to avoid any direct comparisons with modern views or wider issues. But Morange instead wanted to “[lean] on the present to look at the past,” and this led him to an innovative solution, which he uses to good effect in A History of Biology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), recently translated from the French (Une histoire de la biologie, Éditions de Seuil, 2016). Molecular biologist and historian of science Michel Morange is currently Professor Emeritus at the Institut d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques at the University of Paris.
Morange’s book is organized in an unusual way for a history of science. The chapters are organized chronologically, but each chapter is divided into three sections. The first and largest section — “The Facts” — lays out the sequence of scientific discoveries. This is followed by two sections — “Historical Overview” and “Contemporary Relevance” — which revisit the material and examine how the scientific developments relate to larger historical trends and to present-day biological knowledge. These sections contain many insightful observations.
In the book’s preface, Morange warns against the search for “pioneers” as found in much early and popular history of science, since such “pioneers” are usually given more historical importance than they deserve. A good example is Anaximander, the sixth-century BC Ionian, who is occasionally put forth as the originator of a theory of evolution:
When Anaximander… described the appearance of life and the formation of the first human beings as fish, did he anticipate our modern-day view of the evolution of the living world? Clearly not, as there are large discrepancies between the scenario he was describing and the account that is widely accepted today. The first discrepancy is the amount of time needed … The second and no doubt more important difference is that the transformations described by Anaximander are commonplace in Greek mythology, as indeed they are in the mythologies of various peoples. Developing ideas on the evolution of living forms first required rejecting these fanciful notions. And evolutionary changes would make sense only in the context of our understanding of the stability of living species.1
Morange then notes a different kind of danger; this involves the way many of today’s historians of science neglect the actual science:
Many recent works in the history of science… are disappointing for scientifically minded readers… They describe the social and cultural context in which scientific knowledge develops very well, better than older works, but often have nothing to say about the substance that makes up this knowledge or the theories and models that scientists are working on… Often, reading [these works] reveals that the authors themselves do not have a solid grasp of the subject matter and, more worryingly, do not perceive this lack of knowledge to be an impediment…2
This neglect of the logic of science fits into the widespread view among historians and sociologists that science is fundamentally about power struggles rather than a search for objective truth. Fortunately, Morange keeps his primary focus on science as a process of discovery about the nature of reality.
Morange’s account begins with the Hippocratic medicine of ancient Greece, then quickly turns to Aristotle — “the father of biology” —who performed systematic investigations on plants, animals, and especially marine organisms. The culmination of ancient Greek biology was the physiology of Galen; based on his careful observations, dissections and experiments, Galen’s physiology was one of final causes, integrated with his Stoic belief in a benevolent deity.
The story then shifts briefly to the Islamic world, then to middle-ages Europe, and then to the Renaissance with Vesalius’ 1543 publication of On the Structure of the Human Body, which founded the modern study of anatomy.
The seventeenth century — the central period of the Scientific Revolution — was the time of significant observation and experimentation in both animal and plant physiology. The recently-invented microscope was directed at living things, and investigators were amazed by the details they discovered — such the great complexity of insects, and the “cells” in a piece of cork. William Harvey presented his theory of the circulation of the blood and a few decades later Marcello Malpighi used his microscope to confirm the existence of capillaries, validating Harvey’s theory.
During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a popular idea was that of a “vital principle” behind the animation of living things — sometimes referred to as “vitalism.” This was the time that the nature of breathing — previously a mystery — was finally discovered to involve the intake of oxygen and the release of carbon dioxide. This was also a time of classification and comparison, making use of the accumulated body of observations of living things around the known world.
In the nineteenth century the growth of biological research started to explode, leading to discoveries in embryology, cell biology, microbiology, physiology, evolution, heredity, and ecology.
Then in the twentieth century, work in all of these areas continued to accelerate. The central achievement of the first half of this century was the “evolutionary synthesis” which integrated earlier work on natural selection with population genetics and other means of evolution such as genetic drift. After the 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA, the center of gravity of research shifted to the molecular biology of DNA, RNA, and proteins. The book’s final chapter covers more recent developments, including work in gene sequencing, neuroscience, and synthetic biology.
Along the way, Morange repeatedly touches on broader themes; these include the role of experimentation in biology, two types of explanation by analogy (mechanisms and fermentation), and the rise and fall of “vitalism” as a meaningful concept. Other themes include the influence of Naturphilosophie on the biology of nineteenth-century Germany, and the difficulty of establishing a coherent theory of the cell as the fundamental structural unit of life.
The book contains no illustrations, but this not a real problem, given the ease of an internet search to find any needed explanatory figures. Occasionally the litany of biologist names becomes overwhelming, and some subjects are treated too briefly. However, Morange provides an extensive bibliography with references for further reading.
Overall, Morange’s A History of Biology provides a very readable and informative historical overview of the development of biology over its long history. It should be highly valuable for biologists and anyone else with an interest in the subject.
Michel Morange, A History of Biology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), p. 15
Ibid., p. xix