Bringing History to Science and Science to History
Martin Rudwick Wins Sarton Medal
As a young man, Martin Rudwick’s move from paleontology into the history of science was simple – he moved 200 meters down the street and around the corner. He brought his scientific luggage with him, and the fusion of the two has not only influenced the field but also a generation of students, both of science and of history of science. Rudwick – whose approach to history is deeply influenced by the hands-on experience of his first career – was awarded the 2007 Sarton Medal at the History of Science Society Conference held in Arlington, Virginia.
Science and history were both favorite subjects of the teenage Rudwick, but the 1940s British education system forced the 14 year old to choose between the two – he chose science. It was, he says, an agonizing decision. At Cambridge University, Rudwick continued with science, studying paleontology for his Ph.D., which was when his turn to history began. “I found myself confronting fundamental problems in paleontology, which led me in a historical direction under the influence of reading Form and Function by E. S. Russell (1916). That led me to Cuvier. I felt he had something that I – as a 20th-century paleontologist – could learn from about reconstructing the mode of life of extinct invertebrates, of brachiopods. I was imagining how these extinct animals had lived – and the relation between their way of life and their preserved structure – in order to reconstruct a complete evolutionary history of the ways of life of these now rather obscure shellfish.”
Too speculative, other scientists told Rudwick, since anyone’s guess is as good as any other’s. “I said ‘no’—if you analyze the preserved structure of the animal you can make intelligent inferences about its way of life, and you can say that some inferences are much more likely to be correct than others. It’s not just speculative. It did involve a new way of thinking about the subject, but not completely new since Cuvier had done it (though on vertebrate fossils). I also had to confront hostility and opposition from paleontologists who could not think that anything good could come from someone pre-Darwin, especially an anti-evolutionist whom I was using for evolutionary purposes.”
Using Cuvier for modern scientific purposes led to a curiosity about the man which then led to history of science in general. “I became more and more interested in what made Cuvier tick and how he had been such a good scientist, even though he hadn’t believed in evolution.” At the same time, Gerd Buchdahl, head of the fledgling History and Philosophy of Science unit at Cambridge University, heard of Rudwick’s unorthodox historical interests and recruited him. While still maintaining his position in the geology department at Cambridge, Rudwick gave a series of lectures to HPS and geology students on the history of paleontology. This series turned into Rudwick’s first historical book, The Meaning of Fossils (1972). “In that book and most of my subsequent books I’ve tried to write both for historians and for scientists. I feel very strongly that this is what we should be doing.” The Cambridge arrangement at the time made Rudwick’s dual approach easier as many of the HPS students were majoring in science. In effect, Rudwick was teaching trainee scientists how to think historically and philosophically about science.
Other people had also heard of Rudwick’s interest in the history of geology and paleontology. At roughly the same time as the lecture series, an elderly woman living in an English village was searching for someone to assess manuscript papers she had inherited. The papers came from George Greenough, one of the founders and first president of the Geological Society in London, the world’s first private scientific society devoted to earth sciences. “Greenough was a young and wealthy man and he devoted his life to promoting geology. This woman had inherited a large chunk of his papers and wanted someone to sort through them and advise her. I was still earning my living as a geologist, but I took it on and that provided archival material never looked at before—a wonderful opportunity for me to have the first look at a very rich archive. This man had been a recipient of scientific letters from all the geologists who were of any importance and these letters provided material for several of my earliest published articles in history of science.” This archival material also provided the crucial raw material for Rudwick’s second historical book, The Great Devonian Controversy (1985).
Rudwick was welcomed into the history of science fold. At the time, the field was so small that only one or two fairly elderly geologists were publishing articles on history of geology. But it also forced a choice, similar to the one the 14-year old Rudwick had faced. Making the choice even more difficult was that Rudwick had already made a name for himself in science. Colleagues persuaded Rudwick to apply to a faculty opening in HPS at Cambridge in 1967, even though he thought his chances slim. To his surprise, and the surprise of many others, he got the appointment. “My scientific colleagues were surprised and shocked; they regarded me as a promising young paleontologist deserting the ship to go into history. With one or two exceptions they were an unenlightened lot who thought history was something you did in your dotage when your brain was going to pieces.” The current generation of geologists and paleontologists are much more understanding, says Rudwick, who was recently president of History of the Earth Sciences Society, a group weighted towards geologists interested in history.
Certain aspects of science came with Rudwick, such as the visual emphasis to his work. As a paleontologist, words and images went together; in history of science, imagery had little place in the text-focused field of the day. Isis’ first-ever image on its front cover was an illustration from Rudwick’s article on geological caricature, published in that mid-1970s issue. Another science-influenced habit is that of doing historical geological fieldwork. Most historians of geology go into the field to see what the historical actors saw and then try to understand that in modern terms, says Rudwick, who views that approach as analogous to a presentist interpretation of textual sources. “I try and treat what one sees in the field as a primary source which you need not interpret in presentist ways, rather as a means of understanding why geologists came to the theoretical conclusions they came to in light of what they actually saw. Geology hasn’t changed so much, even with a modern overlay of superhighways or urbanization you can usually – with a little imagination – experience much the same phenomena of rock exposure and mountains as the historical actors.” Recently, as part of the bicentennial conference for the Geological Society, Rudwick took a group of geologists hiking around the Isle of Wight, each carrying a copy of a field report by the Society’s first paid employee, Thomas Webster. “It is to reconstruct the mind steps, as it were, of one particular early geologist,” say Rudwick.
Some historians accused him of Whiggishness. Such historians said that researchers will inevitably interpret what they see in modern terms. Rudwick disagrees: “I say one can suspend knowledge of our modern understanding in the same way one can with texts. It’s possible to analyze Harvey’s circulation of the blood without saying ‘he got this wrong, he got this right.’ In the same way one can go into the field and have much the same retinal impressions and see the same things as the historical actors. It requires an act of historical imagination.”
Currently, Rudwick is seeing through the press the sequel to Bursting the Limits of Time (2005); titled Worlds before Adam, it will be out in June this year. He plans to take things more easily in future. “I’ve been retired for getting on 10 years; retired in the sense that my income is labeled pension rather than salary, but I’ve been busy.” During a career of research and teaching in Britain, the Netherlands, the United States, Israel, France and then the United States again, Rudwick directed the graduate program in history of science at Princeton University and helped set up the interdisciplinary graduate Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. He chose to retire back to England, near Cambridge, where the HPS department has given him an honorary position. He would like to go back to some of his 1960s paleontological research and treat it as a historical study. “From my own experience, if you want to think deeply enough about your science it is helpful to have a historical perspective.”
Michal Meyer