Great institutions often have strange beginnings. When the English
chemist James Smithson died in Genoa in 1829, he left a considerable fortune
to his nephew, adding only that, ‘In the case of the death of my said nephew
without leaving a child or children he may have had under the age of 20
years, I then bequeath my whole property . . . to the United States of America
to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an
Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.’ Smithson
was the illegitimate son of an aristocrat. By this single act he ensures,
as he put it, that ‘My name shall live in the memory of man when the titles
of the Northumberlands and the Percys are extinct and forgotten.’

Smithson’s nephew died childless in 1835, and in the same year the US
charge d’affaires in London notified Secretary of State Martin Van Buren
of his country’s good fortune. After years of wrangling in Congress, the
bequest was eventually accepted. In 1838, $500 000 dollars was converted
into gold sovereigns, packed into boxes, and shipped across the Atlantic.
Further delays ensued, and some of the legacy was lost in financial speculation.
But Congress finally passed a Bill of Incorporation of the Smithsonian Institution
in 1846, and a few weeks later the physicist Joseph Henry was chosen as
its first secretary.

Today, the Smithsonian Institution is world famous as the administrative
headquarters of a great complex of museums embracing subjects as diverse
as natural history, ethnology, American history and the conquest of space.
But this is not what the Smithsonian’s first secretary appears to have had
in mind at all. Henry interpreted the terms of Smithson’s bequest to mean
that above all the Smithsonian should undertake scientific research. With
this in mind, he consistently refused to take financial responsibility
for what he regarded as mere adjunct functions such as library and museum
collections. It was not Henry but his successor, Spencer Fullerton Baird,
who was chiefly responsible for making the Smithsonian Institution what
it is today.

Baird was a Pennsylvannian naturalist. While still a student at Dickinson
College, he started collecting birds in company with his older brother William.
(His journal entry for 31 December 1842, reveals: ‘During this past year
I walked about 2100 miles in one pair of laced boots, half-soled three times.
Shot about 650 birds, of which 75 wild ducks, 5 crows, 6 hawks, 3 owls.’)
In the 1840s, Baird established his reputation as a serious naturalist,
and in 1850 Henry might, perhaps, have realised that this move held some
significance for the future of the institution: for the young Baird arrived
in Washington with two freight cars of natural history specimens, including
500 species of North American birds, 250 species of European birds, reptiles,
fishes and assorted fossil vertebrates.

Good curators are a special breed, and Baird was one of the best. During
his years as assistant secretary, he displayed not only enormous energy
but also great diplomatic skill in building up the Smithsonian’s collections.
Working under the close direction of a man who did not want to run a museum,
he cultivated what E. F. Rivinus and E. M. Youssef call ‘a collection of
collectors’, a national network of naturalists who undertook to send Baird
the results of their collecting endeavours around the world. Soon, Baird’s
personal collections were dwarfed by huge numbers of skins, skeletons, fossils
and ethnographic materials, many of them new to science. What could Henry
do but accept them?

Finally, in 1878, Henry died and Baird was chosen to succeed him. Funds
for research were immediately more than halved, while those for collection
and exploration were more than doubled. The Smithsonian’s role as a leading
international museum was secured.

Baird is not a well-known figure in the history of science. This book
reveals some of the reasons why he has languished in obscurity since his
death in 1887. Though passionately committed to natural history, Baird did
not engage willingly in any of the larger debates that made this subject
of more than purely curatorial interest in the 19th century. He was disinclined
to theorise in his own subject area, he did not willingly express views
on topics other than the ones over which he had immediate responsibility,
and he did not like public speaking. Even his personal journals, kept faithfully
throughout his life, are singularly uninformative about his private thoughts
and feelings.

People like this make pretty difficult subjects for biographers, and
Rivinus and Youssef deserve congratulation for making the best of their
somewhat limited material.

Baird was a man who knew what he wanted and was good at getting it.
What he wanted was a fine complex of American museums in the nation’s capital
containing world-class collections. Those who visit and enjoy any one of
the Smithsonian’s museums in Washington today have reason to be grateful
to him.

John Durant is an assistant director at London’s Science Museum.

For Freud, of course, everything hinged on the dynamic interplay between
the unconscious and conscious minds. Skinner did not believe in a mind of
any sort (in this sense, even calling him a psychologist is rather misleading).
Instead, he followed his mentor J. B. Watson in trying to base his subject
exclusively on the observation of behaviour.

Skinner’s extreme ‘behaviourism’ denied a place to all intangible and
invisible causes in the determination of what people do. In this way, hopes,
fears, beliefs, doubts, feelings and thoughts – indeed, the entire world
of mental life – were excluded from any place in the explanation of human
conduct.

In place of all these things, Skinner put simple laws of learning. People,
he believed, tended to repeat those actions for which they had previously
been rewarded, and to avoid those actions for which they had been punished.
In this and similar ways, behaviour was driven by accumulated experience.
Even speech, which he termed ‘verbal behaviour’, was the result of the conditioning
of speakers by their environment (including, of course, the human environment
of other speakers).

The remarkable idea that what people say can be explained without reference
to what they think is only one example of how by treating people as elaborate
stimulus-L response machines Skinner developed a truly radical account of
human nature. For him, notions such as responsibility and freedom were mere
illusions, disguising from people their utter dependence upon their environment.
This in turn, he believed, was a barrier to the creation of a truly happy
society, where all human conduct would be scientifically regulated according
to behaviourist principles for the benefit of all.

Skinner set out his view of the ideal society in the utopia of Walden
Two (1948). In this novel of a perfect world, child care and education are
designed to mould all citizens to the perfect shape. For in Walden Two,
creating the right environmental stimuli was enough to eliminate all unpleasant
aspects of human behaviour from future generations. The result is a textureless
society combining, as the philosopher Leslie Stevenson once wrote, ‘the
culture-vulture atmosphere of an adult education summer school with the
political system of Plato’s Republic (for there is a wise designer of the
community who has arranged every thing on ‘correct’ behavourist principles
from the start!)’.

There is no doubt that Skinner’s painstaking experimental work with
rats and pigeons at Harvard University made a lasting contribution to our
understanding of learning. However, his larger ambitions to construct a
behaviourist philosophy of human nature and society met with much less success.
For one thing, most psychologists soon came to see that internal processes
could not be simply ignored in the explanation of human behaviour. Take
a simple example.

A person steps into a lift, and then steps on the toes of another passenger.
What happens next depends very much on whether the other passenger thinks
this is an accident or an intentional insult. In either case, the behaviour
and the painful stimulus to the foot are the same; only the internal, motivational
states of the actor (and, hence, the meaning of the action) are different.

In this simple situation, we can’t really hope to understand either
the forebearance or the fury of the passenger without reference to what
he or she thinks is in the mind of the offending person. But, of course,
all such references are outlawed by Skinner’s behaviourist principles.

A doctrine that cannot explain simple encounters in lifts is unlikely
to have much success in explaining most of the rest of human life, and for
this very good reason the camp of pure Skinnerian psychologists is now extremely
small.

Equally, it is not difficult to see why Skinner’s social and political
ideas are also out of favour. For it is all very well positing a utopia
in which scientific management of the environmental yields general harmony,
until one asks: Who is managing whom? And to what end? Despite Skinner’s
genuinely democratic beliefs, it is hard not to see a totalitarian tendency
in his fondness for substituting the ideas of freedom and responsibility
with those of control and management.

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an evangelist for his science. Although
he never established a major tradition of applied psychology to rival that
of FreudianL psychoanalysis, there is little doubt about the fact that he
would have liked to have done so.

Today, such large ambitions are out of fashion. We are generally more
cautious about the proper limits of scientific expertise, and generally
more cynical about simple ‘cure-all’ solutions to human ills. Nevertheless,
Skinnerian psychology has left its mark on our culture; and it stands as
a monument to the heroic belief that heaven on Earth is attainable through
the appliance of science.

John Durant is assistant director of the Science Museum, London, and
visiting professor of public understanding of science, Imperial College,
London.

MENTION evolution in 19th century Britain and most people who know anything
about the subject will think of Charles Darwin: but this big book on the
subject manages practically to ignore the great man altogether. For almost
400 pages, Adrian Desmond analyses early-19th century evolutionary ideas
and their religious, social and political implications: but throughout,
Darwin and his immediate circle of colleagues and acquaintances are signally
absent.

The reason for this is perfectly simple. Darwin’s circle was a group
of mostly Oxbridge based gentlemen-naturalists: but Desmond has turned the
spot light onto the very different and much less well known world of Edinburgh-
and London-based anatomists and doctors. The gentlemen-naturalists interpre
ted nature in terms of divine design, and they looked to Georges Cuvier,
the French comparative anatomist, for appropriate scientific concepts. Desmond’s
not-so-gentlemanly medics, on the other hand, interpreted nature in terms
of spontaneous development; and they looked to Cuvier’s great rival, the
biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck for inspiration.

The central figure in Desmond’s story is Robert Grant (1793-1874). Grant
was a francophile Edinburgh medic who held the London University chair of
comparative anatomy for many years. He was an early convert to Lamarck’s
theories of the spontaneous generation and development of living organisms:
and he enthusiastically adopted the ‘philosophical anatomy’ of Geoffroy
St Hilaire, according to which all animals shared a common underlying form.
Desmond describes in great detail how Lamarck’s and St Hilaire’s ideas were
taken up in British medical schools in the 1820s and 1830s, where they provided
a radical alternative to the gentlemen-naturalists’ theological musings.

As his title suggests, Desmond is interested in the politics of these
new ideas. In the 1820s and 1830s, radicals put up a fierce challenge to
the vested interests of church and state, and called for a new, more just
economic and political system. The biology of Lamarck and St Hilaire came
to be identified with this challenge. It was secular, rather than theological;
progressive, rather than static; and environmentalist, rather than innatist.
Desmond argues that Lamarckism provided a natural legitima tion for democratic
selfdevelopment, for power stemming from the base and mandating ‘upwards’,
rather than for the aristocratic ideal of a ‘downward’ delegating authority.
For these reasons, and because radical medics seized upon it as a stick
with which to beat their political enemies, Lamarckism came to be seen as
a politically subversive doctrine.

At this point, Darwin comes back into the picture. Darwin met Grant
during his Edinburgh student days, and he heard him praise Lamarck’s biology.
Desmond argues that in the late 1830s (as his own evolutionary ideas were
maturing) Darwin knew full well how popular the idea of evolution was in
politically radical circles. This, he suggests, was the main reason why
Darwin worked in secret for almost 20 years. As a gentleman-naturalist,
he realised that he was sitting on political dynamite.

We are used to the idea of evolution, and we find it hard to see why
it should be regarded as politically inflammatory. By exploring a hinterland
of early-19th century radical medical men, Desmond helps us to see far more
clearly why Darwin had nightmares about his new theory in 1838.

Having read this book, my admiration for Desmond’s scholarship is tinged
with just one small but, I think, significant regret. Desmond is a fine
writer. His previous publications include two genuinely popular books, The
Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs and The Ape’s Reflexion, as well as a more scholarly
one, Archetypes and Ancestors. Unfortunately, The Politics of Evolution
is not only the most authoritative but also the least digestible of his
books to date. Is there really no way of making the detailed historical
analysis presented here more readable? Evolutionary biologists and general
readers will be fascinated by Desmond’s story; but they will need considerable
determination to see them through to the last chapter.

John Durant is assistant director of the Science Museum and Visiting
Professor of Public Understanding of Science, Imperial College, London.