history

This is one doofy story:

Remains of rotten fish entrails have helped establish the precise dating of Pompeii's destruction, according to Italian researchers who have analyzed the town's last batch of garum, a pungent, fish-based seasoning.

OK, so far so good. But wait a minute! We have a perfectly good historical date from Pliny the Younger! August 24, 79 AD. There's not any chance that some kind of radiometric date is going to improve on that. So what's the deal?

Doubts about the date of the eruption emerged a couple of years ago when archaeologists discovered a coin which seemed to refer to the 15th imperiatorial acclamation of Titus, believed to have occurred on Sept. 7, 79 A.D.

OK, so the coin supposedly was later than the eruption, even though it was in the site. But wouldn't the simple explanation be that they struck the coins in advance of the event? Well, I guess there's also this:

"Unfortunately, that coin can't be taken as a dating evidence, since it is hardly readable. I myself agree with Ciarallo's dating of the eruption, even though I think that a bit of mystery remains. However, it is not so important whether the eruption occurred in August or in October," Teresa Giove, a coin expert at Naples' Archaeological Museum, told Discovery News.

So where does the fish sauce fit in?

"Pompeii's last batch of garum [fish sauce] was made with bougues, a fish that was cheap and easy to find on the market in those summer months. Still today, people living in this region make a modern version of garum, called "colatura di alici" or anchovy juice, in July when this fish abounds on the markets," Ciarallo said.

The eruption froze the sauce right at the moment when the fish was left to macerate. No batches of finished garum were found, since the liquid evaporated in the heat from the eruption.

"Since bogues abounded in July and early August and ancient Roman recipes recommend leaving the fish to macerate for no longer than a month, we can say that the eruption occurred in late August-early September, a date which is totally compatible with Pliny's account," Ciarallo said.

OK, so they don't keep the sauce macerating for more than a month. And September 7 is...less than a month after early August. Uhh...what was the story here? Why were we doubting Pliny again? I mean, I admire the knowledge that goes into this, and it's pretty cool to analyze ancient fish sauce, but this story just wasted my time!

Until this summer, I had only a vague idea of who Nikolai Vavilov was. I knew he had been Dobzhansky's mentor, and that like all Russian biologists, he had suffered at the hands of Lysenko. Otherwise, I had heard of Vavilov only in connection to an obscure quote from the introduction of Maynard Smith's Evolution and the Theory of Games:

Suppose for example, that only two kinds of wings could ever develop -- rectangular and triangular. Natural selection would probably favor the former in vultures and the latter in falcons. But if one asked 'Why are birds' wings the shapes they are?', the answer would have to be couched primarily in terms of developmental constraints. If, on the other hand, almost any shape of wing can develop, then the actual shape, down to its finest details, may be explicable in selective terms.

Biologists differ about which of these pictures is nearer the truth. My own position is intermediate. Clearly, not all variations are equally likely for a given species. This fact was well understood by Darwin, and was familiar to me when I was an undergraduate under the term 'Vavilov's law of homologous variation' (Maynard Smith 1982:7).

Well, so much the more for mystery. A historical footnote to be remembered in an argument with Stephen Jay Gould. So I filed it in the back of my mind, since this kind of developmental constraint hypothesis has become more and more important in human evolution during the past few years. It turns out that the traits that differentiate some hominid species are in many cases the same traits that have the most variation within species.

Anyway, it was enough to get my interest when Peter Pringle's new book, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, showed up in the local bookstore.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Russell Jacoby bemoans progress (paywall). He thinks that colleges aren't teaching people to revere the right nineteenth-century intellectuals:

The divorce between informed opinion and academic wisdom could not be more pointed. If educated individuals were asked to name leading historical thinkers in psychology, philosophy, and economics, surely Freud, Hegel, and Marx would figure high on the list. Yet they have vanished from their home disciplines. How can this be?

In the case of Freud and Marx, because they were wrong. They built grand theories on a foundation of unobserved entities that don't exist. If you think they are still relevant to modern psychology and economics, your opinion isn't very ``informed.''

He goes on for an entire column this way. I see it as a surprising sign of hope that the academic fashions of the 1970's have given way.

On the subject of Hegel, I have to point you to Brian Leiter's take: "Please, Oh Please, Could You Publish Something about Philosophy by Someone Who Knows Something (even a little!) about the Subject?" in which he shows just how un-neglected Hegel has been.

Leiter ends with a note relevant to my current featured topic, blogging about your field:

For obvious reasons, intellectual tourists like Mr. Jacoby and Mr. Romano will regularly volunteer their amateurish musings about philosophy to [the Chronicle], since they aren't going to appear in any forum in which the editors know something about the subject.  That makes it even more imperative for philosophers to present their work and their discipline to a non-specialist audience.

Elizabeth Pennisi, reporting from the Evolution meetings, has turned in an article about how biologists are using the 19th century plant records of Henry David Thoreau to study how flowering times have changed in 150 years:

Many studies have looked at how global warming may cause shifts in where plants grow, but very few have examined how specific traits, such as flowering time, are affected. The necessary long-term records rarely exist. But for 6 years, Thoreau tracked the life histories of more than 400 plant species in a 67-square-kilometer area. Another researcher covered the same ground at Walden Pond and its surrounds circa 1900. Then from 2004 to 2007, Boston University (BU) conservation biologist Richard Primack and his student Abraham Miller-Rushing regularly visited the area to make similar observations of about 350 species and to check how the abundances of these plants had changed through time.

Their data, published in February in Ecology, revealed that many flowers were blossoming a week earlier than in Thoreau's time. They noted also that about half of the species studied had decreased in number, with 20% having disappeared entirely.

The emphasis of the article is climate change.

I want to point out something else: scientific writing of the 1800's (and I would add the 1700's to this) is still broadly relevant today. Thoreau is often taught in high school, in a relatively uninteresting manner. I think we should work to integrate the literature and science portions of the curriculum. Sure, there's a place for Oscar Wilde, but time spent on Dickens, or even Shakespeare, might profitably be given to Darwin. Think of Darwin's work as a letter-writer, for instance: a selection of letters and some passages from Voyage of the Beagle may not surpass Jane Austen, but they may give a fuller perspective of the history and life of the period, outside the confines of parlor society. Emerson and Thoreau are standards in American literature surveys, but why not change the emphasis to the mid-to-late-19th-century awareness of the environment, dump Emerson, put in some of Thoreau's lesser-known work, and add in John Muir?

Kids are not going to read too much, so change the reading list to things that will integrate different fields of study. That certainly would add more to the comprehension of literature, and would appeal to many kids who will never be reached by Henry James or Charlotte Bronté.

UPDATE (2008/07/06): A reader writes:

I am neither an English major nor an artist, but I can hear thousands of both grinding their teeth should they read the above. Most canonical American literature was a reaction to the onslaught of mechanization. To cull the reading list to only those parts relevant to today's science would amount to a sort of gag rule. It would replace a merely cultural hegemony with a technical one. Your examples of whom to shun (James, Bronte) are not even American in their subjects. Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman need to be taught for the ways they subvert the American technical-capitalist program, not for their celebration of it. Sure, teach Darwin and Thoreau (and Humboldt and Agassiz and Marsh and Leopold etc.) as literate natural history. In the science class. English teaching needs its own reform but the answer is not to shrink it to technics.

Scientists mostly thought E. O. Wilson's *Consilience* was a fair-minded overture to expanded liberal thought. Most humanities types thought it self-serving, adaptive, and illiberal. By this I mean, I think, that some things can be so piously liberal that they come out sounding illiberal.

I think the writer is only partly right about the subversion of the technical-capitalist program. I would observe that high school literature selections are mainly devoted to two themes: (a) reinforce the resistance to racism/bigotry, and (b) illustrate the dangers of peer pressure/conformism/classism. Hence, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter/The Crucible, 1984/Animal Farm, Romeo and Juliet, The Great Gatsby, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Brave New World, The Outsiders, Lord of the Flies.

I wouldn't change this part. Ultimately, these are good messages to instill in young citizens. Still, one wonders whether it really takes quite so many such examples to get the message across.

My question is whether English class should be devoid of nonfiction. There are few writers on the regular list whose works are not either fiction or poetry. Thoreau is one, and we can add Jonathan Edwards and the occasional addition of Ben Franklin's Autobiography or Frederick Douglass' Narrative. If the purpose of English requirement is to produce literate citizens, then I would argue that more quality nonfictional works should be included -- a change that I would consider an expansion rather than a shrinkage. I also think that would increase the inclusiveness of the reading list, which presently is a poor match for the interests of a large segment of students.

I agree with the writer entirely that the teaching of quality writing should extend to science (and I would add, history) classes. This will require a much more fundamental change in the curriculum, since the real hegemony is the textbook publishers. But I would like to add more integration across the curriculum in different subjects. Why can't schools collaborate across disciplines, for example a unit integrating nature observations, reading Aldo Leopold, and reviewing the history of conservation in the U.S.? Would that be worse than Steinbeck? Why not a history of the space program, some Arthur C. Clarke, and orbital motion? And considering the content of the existing English curriculum, why couldn't a biology class integrate by coordinating a unit on race with the history the abolition movement and Frederick Douglass' Narrative?

Yes, I know: it's not on the standardized tests. And my homeschooling readers are probably already doing it (I know of at least one who is).

But it seems to me that scientists should do something to further this kind of integrative learning -- and I am, after all, an anthropologist, so I attach great value to the integrative approach.

I like the idea of book reviews for really old books. It eliminates the risk that you'll get stuck writing a review of a really bad book, because, well, everybody already knows the bad ones. Of course, there's a risk that you're just writing a hagiogram about a book that everybody holds sacred.

Steve Jones' recent Wall Street Journal review of Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle is sort of like that. He emphasizes the book's strong points, especially when compared to the earthworm monograph and barnacle series:

"The Voyage of the Beagle," in contrast, sings. Its language is that of a young man intoxicated by the tropics ("To a person fond of natural history, such a day as this brings with it a deeper pleasure than he can ever hope to experience again") and careless of the risks ("Upon landing I found that I was to a certain degree a prisoner . . . a traveller has no protection beside his fire-arms"). The youthful Darwin was a master of unadorned English. He took with him more than geology textbooks: "Milton's Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton."

In this, Jones tactfully avoids the parts of the book that detail the backwardness of "dark-coloured natives." I think many of today's reviewers would have given the book a more critical treatment. In my thinking, the book gains by being an honest portrait of its time, clearly by an extraordinary thinker -- but one whose weaknesses are displayed as well as his strengths.

Jones does a bit of retrospective analysis that deepens the current interest, focusing on Darwin's description of St. Helena. By Darwin's time, it already was home to many introduced species, mainly from England. Now, the native flora and fauna are disappearing:

Now things on St. Helena have gotten worse. The island has 49 unique species of flowering plant, and 13 of fern, all found only there. At least seven have been driven out since the arrival of men five centuries ago, two survive only in cultivation, and many more are on the edge. The last St. Helena Olive died of mold in 1994, and of the ebony thickets only two small bushes remain. Its giant earwig (at three inches, the world's largest), giant ground beetle and St. Helena dragonfly, all common in Darwin's time, have not been seen for many years. The snail seen by Darwin is now reduced to a population of about 600. The St. Helena Petrel is extinct, and just one endemic winged creature, the Wire Bird, is left, and that too is threatened.

That's the magic of revisiting naturalists' works -- things really have changed. Being able to observe those changes puts us in the position of Hipparchus, who -- comparing notes with observers hundreds of years earlier -- noticed that Spica had moved relative to the equinox. Sometimes the long-scale comparison gives us insight into processes that are not obvious from year to year.

Yesterday I ran across a piece by Tim Radford from earlier this year in the Guardian, titled, "The book that changed the world." It's a short article about the reception of Darwin's Origin of Species, an "instant bestseller":

Origin was the book of the year - perhaps the book of the century - but it faced some stiff competition in 1859. Alfred Lord Tennyson printed the first Idylls of the King, his long cycle of Arthurian poems. John Stuart Mill wrote his mighty work On Liberty. Samuel Smiles delivered Self Help, a classic in a genre that has kept publishing houses alive ever since. George Eliot published Adam Bede and Charles Dickens produced A Tale of Two Cities.

It was the best of times and the worst of times for Charles Darwin.

The tidbits of historical context make it interesting to read, although there may not be much new for people who are familiar with Darwin's contemporaries and their reviews of the Origin.

One cruel review was published anonymously - by convention reviews were then unsigned - but the Darwin camp quickly identified the hand of Richard Owen, the titan of palaeontology. "Some of my relations say it cannot possibly be Owen's article, because the reviewer speaks so very highly of prof Owen. Poor, dear simple folk!" Darwin mused wryly afterwards, but he was hurt by attacks from scholars he had once respected.

The sad part of this story is that nobody cares about the identity of the other guy:

The mystery surrounding the skulls began in 1826, 21 years after [Friedrich] Schiller died in Weimar, when the local mayor had 23 skulls retrieved from a mass grave in which the poet was buried. Many eminent people at that time were buried in mass graves.

The mayor identified the largest skull as Schiller's and it was brought to the home of his contemporary Goethe, who wrote a poem about it, according to German scholar Albrecht Schoene.

In 1911, another skull was disinterred from the mass grave which researchers claimed was the real one. A long debate amongst academics, historians, medics and anthropologists about the identity of the skulls ensued.

So, naturally, they're digging up his relatives and plan to sample their DNA for a match.

I suppose it's a real advance when we go beyond testing live people who are purporting to be long-dead celebrities, against the live relatives, and move on to testing dead skeletons that people purport to be celebrities against dead relatives. How long can it be before we establish a catalog of dead celebrities' DNA profiles?

I'm just doing some background reading about the body size of pygmies (for both obvious and not-so-obvious reasons) and I thought it worth making a note of this quote, from last year's paper by Andrea Migliano, Lucio Vinicius, and Marta Lahr:

Finally, the data presented here show that pygmy body size evolved through earlier cessation of growth, being therefore the result of changes in late rather than early stages of growth. This explains why brain growth, which is completed years before the onset of adolescence (28), is not affected in human pygmies (29). Therefore, if Homo floresiensis is a dwarfed form of Homo erectus, as proposed in ref. 29, the evolution of small body size on Flores could be understood as the life history consequence of ecological conditions in islands, such as increased extrinsic mortality rate and reduced resource availability (30); however, its small brain size and low encephalisation require the postulation of different adaptive mechanisms affecting earlier stages of development.

That's the concluding paragraph of what is a very nicely-done study of mortality and fertility in pygmy populations. It came out the during the acceleration press flurry in December, so I wasn't able to write it up at the time. It's certainly worth doing so, though.

The paper proposes that pygmy human populations are small because of a life history tradeoff. A "tradeoff" is the idea that a phenotypic change in either direction may have advantages and disadvantages, and selection may arrive at different optima in different populations.

In the case of life history and body size, both growing longer (and larger) and maturing faster (and smaller) have possible payoffs. Growing longer may have a fertility payoff, as larger size facilitates larger infants and shorter birth intervals. But maturing faster has a direct payoff of shortening the generation length -- all other things equal, an individual improves her fitness by reproducing younger.

So either younger or older maturation may enhance fitness, in some circumstances. Which will work in any given population depends on other factors -- in particular, the mortality pattern. If individuals have a high risk of death in early adulthood, delaying reproduction will be a bad strategy. In short, individuals should reproduce at 16 (or earlier) if there is a fair chance they will be dead by 25 or 30.

Naturally, everyone would rather live longer. But assuming that people can't control when they die, the only way to insure their fitness is to reproduce earlier.

This hypothesis, presented by Migliano et al., is about the proximate mechanism of evolution. The authors seem content to rely on traditional hypotheses about locomotion, nutrition, and thermoregulation to explain the ultimate causes of small body size -- "ultimate" in the sense that these may be the environmental causes of high mortality:

If our hypothesis is correct, the causes of the extremely high mortality rates among human pygmies need to be explained. It is here that the traditional hypotheses explaining the small body size of pygmies may prove useful. Although the challenges posed by thermoregulation, locomotion in dense forests, exposure to tropical diseases, and poor nutrition do not account for the characteristics of all pygmy populations, as pointed out by Diamond (5), they may jointly or partially contribute to the similarly high mortality rates in unrelated pygmy populations. We argue that the small body size of African and Asian pygmy populations evolved independently as a case of evolutionary convergence, resulting from a life history tradeoff between the fertility benefits of larger body size and the costs of late growth cessation under the circumstance of significant young and adult mortality.

The demographic data presented in the paper are sobering -- particularly the low survivorship values for pygmy populations across late childhood and early adulthood. However, I wonder how much of the early adult mortality in the pygmy demographic data is attributable to new pathogens. These are certainly important today, but they would not have been during most the time that small body size was being selected in these groups. On the other hand, ancient endemic pathogens and parasites also may contribute to those mortality numbers, and these might well have occurred at higher intensities in forest peoples across their histories.

References:

De Souza R. 2006. Body size and growth: The significance of chronic malnutrition among the Casiguran Agta. Ann Hum Biol 33:604-619. doi:10.1080/03014460601062759

Migliano AB, Vinicius L, Lahr MM. 2007. Life history trade-offs explain the evolution of human pygmies. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 104:20216-20219. doi:10.1073/pnas.0708024105

T. Ryan Gregory (Genomicron) has been writing a long series of posts looking into the history of junk DNA. He's focusing on what research articles were saying about repetitive and noncoding elements like Alu, LINES, SINES, minisatellites and the rest -- both at the time they were discovered and since then.

The series arises from Gregory's irritation about the oft-heard claim that biologists are "discarding the long-held hypothesis that non-coding DNA has no function. For an example, here is the conclusion of a post about functional analysis of non-coding DNA in the 80's:

In other words, there was no real period in which noncoding DNA was dismissed by the scientific community, though there was a much-needed shift away from strictly adaptive interpretations in the 1980s. Some individual researchers ignored noncoding regions, but there is no gap in the literature other than limits on what could be done in a methodological capacity. The "new" view of noncoding DNA as potentially important has been proclaimed regularly for at least as long as the claimed period of neglect between 1980 and 1994.

One wonders just how long we will be told that we have long been neglecting noncoding DNA.

The contrary-to-evolutionists'-claims-junk-DNA-has-function idea is also a staple of intelligent design creationists. As Gregory points out in one of his comments, biologists seem to be "getting their information from textbooks rather from the primary literature." As long as they remain ignorant of the history, they will be susceptible to junk claims.

Too many scientists fail to realize that good literature review is just as important as good research design.

The series is called "Quotes of Interest." I really like the idea -- many posts, grouped together, presenting a shotgun view of the literature on a single question. I have a couple of topics that would benefit from this kind of treatment -- and it's a very bloggy way to write!

This Saturday (2/8/2008) is Darwin Day here at UW. My lab will be putting a display together at the Geology Museum in the afternoon -- you can find a full schedule and flyer at the UW Darwin Day website.

The real Darwin Day is February 12 (just like Lincoln!), and he was born in 1809 (just like Lincoln!). In honor of the occasion, Nature prints an essay by Kevin Padian reviewing Darwin's scientific legacy.

In the past century and a half, Darwin's ideas have inspired powerful images and insights in science, humanities and the arts. Meanwhile, countless commentators ignorant of his meaning have borrowed his eloquence to plump their own chickens -- from capitalism to 'evolutionary psychology'. Darwin has been invoked as the demon responsible for a variety of perceived heartless ills of society, including atheism, Nazism, communism, abortion, homosexuality, stem-cell research, same-sex marriage, and the abridgement of all our natural freedoms. One can scarcely imagine the horror that Darwin would feel at the misunderstanding, misappropriation and vilification of his ideas in the 125 years since his death.

The essay is a list of "big ideas" from Darwin, along with some of their later developments. Natural selection, monogenism, genealogical classification, the action of imperceptible forces over long periods of time ("deep time"), biogeography, sexual selection, coevolutionary relationships, gradualism, and natural economy all merit entries, along with a few others.

I particularly liked this passage describing Darwin's conception of coevolution:

One of Darwin's lesser-known books is On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing (1862). It encapsulates the concept that species of very different origins have evolved mutual ecological relations through time that have come to affect critical aspects of their morphologies. An African orchid was discovered that had a corolla nearly a foot long. Darwin inferred that there must be a moth with a tongue long enough to extract its pollen. When the moth sub-species was eventually discovered, it was given the name praedicta. Today we can identify groups of plants and their insect predators, vertebrates and their parasites, lichens composed of an alga and a fungus, and many other associations that can only reasonably be explained by co-evolution through diversification over millions of years (Padian 2008:633).

Padian includes about the amount of unwarranted hagiography you might expect. Darwin's being "less emphatic than Wallace about the pre-eminence of natural selection among other mechanisms of evolutionary change" seems good, until you reflect on the "other mechanisms" in the running -- mainly Lamarckism. And maybe Darwin didn't share Malthus' "bleak view" of the poor, but he certainly displayed a bleak view of Australian and South American native peoples in Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin should be forgiven the prejudices of the age, but it ill serves us to whitewash them.

Darwin's Origin ends famously with a passage that evokes poetic interpretation. Padian ends his essay with a quote from Thomas Hardy, one of the literary figures he describes as a recipient of Darwin's influence:

As Hardy put it: "Let me enjoy the earth no less / Because the all-enacting Might / That fashioned forth its loveliness / Had other aims than my delight." This child of the Enlightenment was well aware of more ancient world views, and humbled by what the new investigations of the cosmos revealed. Humans are animals, one species of many on the planet, bound by common ancestry to all other species, part of an ages-old dance of reproduction, accommodation, survival and alteration.

The first time, I read that last word as "alliteration." I guess it's my inner English major coming out...

References:

Padian K. 2008. Darwin's enduring legacy. Nature 451:632-634. doi:10.1038/451632a

A letter to the editors of Nature by Jasmina Muzinic notes the new translation of Darwin's works into Croatian:

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man have at last been translated into Croatian, thanks to the work of the renowned science and theology translator Josip Balabanic. Other European countries -- including Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia and Sweden -- had access to Darwin's works in their mother tongue during his lifetime. But it was not until this year that Croatian students of biology could read them in their own language.

Cool.

The Beagle Project Blog lists me as one of the top ten senders of traffic to their site, which reports on the efforts to replicate the original voyage:

We aim to celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday by building a sailing replica of HMS Beagle and recreating the Voyage of the Beagle with an international crew of researchers, aspiring scientists and science communicators. The voyage will apply the techniques of 21st century science to Darwin's journey, inspiring a new generation of scientists and promoting the public understanding of evolution and wider science.

So, I thought I would post to send them a little more!

Norwegian scientists are digging her up for DNA testing:

SLAGEN, Norway - Archaeologists exhumed the body of a Viking queen on Monday, hoping to solve a riddle about whether a woman buried with her 1,200 years ago was a servant killed to be a companion into the afterlife.

As a less gruesome alternative, the two women in the grass-covered Oseberg mound in south Norway might be a royal mother and daughter who died of the same disease and were buried together in 834.

"We will do DNA tests to try to find out. I don't know of any Viking skeletons that have been analyzed as we plan to do," Egil Mikkelsen, director of Oslo's Museum of Cultural History, told Reuters at the graveside.

Well, it's a pretty trivial question for genetics. Here's a more interesting one: Assuming it's not her daughter, which woman is more genetically similar to living Norwegians? They may be digging up kings and queens all over Europe to answer that one...

If you knock, leave them an offering:

The archaeologists placed a Norwegian 20-crown coin - dated 2007 and with a picture of the prow of the Oseberg ship on one side - in the sarcophagus to show any future generations when the grave had been disturbed.

Admit it: if you were digging up a ninth-century grave and found a coin from 1653, it would freak you out! Maybe future archaeologists will just assume this is one of those early twenty-first century "natural" burials.

I read this post by Grant McCracken some months ago, and I wanted to remind myself of it on September 1. So here it is:

You can't imagine soldiers (prisoners?) coming here and knocking down thousands upon thousands of grave stones. And what if you did imagine it?  You'd be trapped and you couldn't ever get back. You would have tipped into their insanity or your own.

OK, that makes the relevance of the date obvious, but there's a poignant story there about an ambiguous headstone that deserves reading.

What an interesting book review by Abigail Zuber, of a new book about Charles Lindbergh's medical collaboration with famous surgeon Alexis Carrel. Lindbergh designed pumps to keep organs alive outside the body:

And that thyroid gland was more than just preserved: still dutifully producing thyroid hormone, it seemed eerily alive. It lasted only a few weeks, but it was soon replaced by a row of other pump-maintained organs, including a cat's ovary that continued to ovulate on the pump. Small wonder the newspapers of the time went wild: "One Step Nearer to Immortality," one headline read.

Crazy. Then, the two directed their energies toward eugenics:

The scientific success only fueled Lindbergh and Carrel's philosophic zeal: if immortality was indeed on the horizon, it certainly should not be for everyone. In his 1935 best seller "Man, the Unknown," Carrel urgently argued for the creation of biologic classes, with the weak and sick at one end, and the strong and fit (long might they live, propagate and receive new organs as needed) at the other. The sorting was to be accomplished by a council of scientific experts much like himself.

The book is called The Immortalists, by David Friedman.

Alfred Crosby gives a short quote from chapter 19 of Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, and I found it interesting enough to look for the full context. Voyage is online free at several places. Because it's online I don't have ready page numbers for the quotes below, they are all from chapter 19.

The passage is part of Darwin's description of Australia, which he finds "in all respects there was a close resemblance to England: perhaps the alehouses here were more numerous." Then he takes up the subject of the aboriginals:

The number of aborigines is rapidly decreasing. In my whole ride, with the exception of some boys brought up by Englishmen, I saw only one other party. This decrease, no doubt, must be partly owing to the introduction of spirits, to European diseases (even the milder ones of which, such as the measles, [1] prove very destructive), and to the gradual extinction of the wild animals. It is said that numbers of their children invariably perish in very early infancy from the effects of their wandering life; and as the difficulty of procuring food increases, so must their wandering habits increase; and hence the population, without any apparent deaths from famine, is repressed in a manner extremely sudden compared to what happens in civilized countries, where the father, though in adding to his labour he may injure himself, does not destroy his offspring.

Besides the several evident causes of destruction, there appears to be some more mysterious agency generally at work. Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we find the same result.

The last passage (from "Wherever" to "result") was quoted by Crosby. I think the preceding paragraph gives important context to Darwin's thinking on the matter; he had the main elements (which would probably have been common knowledge), although his attribution of juvenile mortality to a "wandering life" probably would be more correctly directed toward disease as well.

But that doesn't give the after context, either. Here's what follows in the same paragraph:

Nor is it the white man alone that thus acts the destroyer; the Polynesian of Malay extraction has in parts of the East Indian archipelago, thus driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals -- the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying that they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children. Every one has heard of the inexplicable reduction of the population in the beautiful and healthy island of Tahiti since the date of Captain Cook's voyages: although in that case we might have expected that it would have been increased; for infanticide, which formerly prevailed to so extraordinary a degree, has ceased; profligacy has greatly diminished, and the murderous wars become less frequent.

He finishes this section with some discussion of the mechanism of disease spreading by ship -- even when no symptoms were found among the crew. This idea, which Darwin attributes to Williams' Narrative of Missionary Enterprise, has become important to explain certain New World epidemics as well as those in Polynesia.

This is a great quote for Crosby to have used because it shows that many educated people were aware that disease had decimated (and was still decimating) indigenous peoples, even as historians ignored disease as a factor in their narratives of New World conquest and colonization.

But then Darwin goes straight on: for him, disease susceptibility in aboriginal peoples is not mere happenstance, but a symptom of European superiority!

Still, that's nothing compared to the final line of the chapter:

Farewell, Australia! you are a rising child, and doubtless some day will reign a great princess in the South: but you are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect. I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.

A second Darwin passage quoted by Crosby (1994) is from the Descent of Man, where Darwin wrote once more about the population growth in European colonies:

The remarkable success of the English as colonists over other European nations, which is well illustrated by comparing the progress of the Canadians of English and French extraction, has been ascribed to their "daring and persistent energy;" but who can say how the English gained their energy. There is apparently much truth in the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection; the more energetic, restless, and courageous men from all parts of Europe having emigrated during the last ten or twelve generations to that great country, and having there succeeded best.²⁷ Looking to the distant future, I do not think that the Rev. Mr. Zincke takes an exaggerated view when he says:²⁸ "All other series of events — as that which resulted in the culture of mind in Greece, and that which resulted in the empire of Rome — only appear to have purpose and value when viewed in connection with, or rather as subsidiary to .... the great stream of Anglo-Saxon emigration to the west."

Obscure as is the problem of the advance of civilisation, we can at least see that a nation which produced during a lengthened period the greatest number of highly intellectual, energetic, brave, patriotic, and benevolent men, would generally prevail over less favoured nations (Darwin 1871:179-180).

This serves as introduction to a section about the means by which natural selection led to the origin of mankind from animals, and civilized societies from barbarous ones. Darwin describes a kind of race-level or nation-level selection, using his "struggle for existence" metaphor. Then he returns to the topic of the Fuegans, upon whom he had spent such consideration in Voyage of the Beagle, to suggest they had been "compelled by other conquering hordes to settle in their inhospitable country, and they may have become in conseqeunce somewhat more degraded."

This raises a question for Darwin: if people can become "degraded" as a consequence of inhabiting an "inhospitable" place, perhaps it is possible that all of the "barbarous" peoples have suffered this fate sometime in the past, explaining their current states?

He spends only a couple of paragraphs on this question, with a brief statement that "civilized" peoples carry customs that link them to barbarous peoples, referring the reader to Tylor for details. I find this interesting as a reminder that Darwin operated in parallel with the beginnings of real ethnology. The section concludes with this remark, which concerns what a cladist would call the "character polarity" of civilization:

[T]here can hardly be a doubt that the inhabitants of these many countries, which include nearly the whole civilised world, were once in a barbarous condition. To believe that man was aboriginally civilised and then suffered utter degradation in so many regions, is to take a pitiably low view of human nature. It is apparently a truer and more cheerful view that progress has been much more general than retrogression; that man has risen, though by slow and interrupted steps, from a lowly condition to the highest standard as yet attained by him in knowledge, morals, and religion (Darwin 1871:183-184).

It is one of Crosby's themes that disease itself was a factor driving formerly vibrant indigenous societies into a state of collapse just prior to European colonization. The seeds of that hypothesis are there in facts that Darwin (and others) knew, but they had very different interpretations.

References:

Crosby AW. 1994. Germs, Seeds and Animals: Studies in Ecological History. M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY.

Darwin C. 1860. The Voyage of the Beagle. Revised edition. Online free text.

Darwin C. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Vol. 1. John Murray, London.