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Aplheus Hyatt |
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| b. Washington, D.C., 5 April 1838; d. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 15 January
1902 Hyatt studied at Yale and Harvard and was a student of Agassiz. Worked for the Peabody Academy of Science, Salem, Massachusetts (1867-1870). Was the founder and first editor of the American Naturalist (1867-1870), member of the Boston Society of Natural History since 1870 and later curator (1881-1902) at that institution. He was also Professor of zoology and paleontology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1870-1888), Instructor in zoology and paleontology at Boston University (1877-1902), and Assistant curator (usually as volunteer) at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (1886-1902). Together with Cope, he was the most prominent American neo-Lamarckian. He advocated a theory of 'racial senility' a sort of extension of the analogy of ontogeny with phylogeny. The latter was the basis of all orthogenetic (or evolutionarily directional) theories in the United States (Ruse 1996). Hyatt visited Mammoth Cave in September 1859, much earlier that his contemporary colleagues, and collected seven specimens of T. subterraneus that Putnam later studied (Bocking 1988). Hyatt’s ideas can be summarized as follows: (1) just as the individual eventually declines into old age and senescence, so also the group declines into old age and senescence; (2) before extinction, there is degeneration of species; (3) change is a function of the speeding (‘acceleration’) or slowing (‘retardation’) of development which, in turn, is propelled by use and disuse (Hyatt’s ‘Law of Acceleration,’ is a direct descendant of Haeckel’s ‘Principle of Recapitulation’); (4) degeneration is therefore a virtually inevitable outcome of the evolutionary process, since any organism tends to collapse into old age, and it is a matter of time before this decay is delayed in development until adulthood (for a summary of Hyatt’s ideas see Brooks 1909). Thus, Hyatt worked within a progressionist framework, the American version of the German Naturphilosophie. Philosophically speaking this was one of the greatest influences of Aggasiz on his students: although the Swiss-born naturalist was a creationists, the evolutionary views of his students like Packard and Putnam expressed views more in tune with the transcendentalism of the Naturphilosophie than with any form of Darwinism, even its earlier natural theological version. As it has been very well argued by Ruse and others, by the late nineteenth century, discussions on evolution in general languished largely because of the lack of any scientific evidence that could add to the already crowded field of speculation and non-empirical argument. As Bateson (1922:1412) put it: 'Morphology having been explored in its minutest corners, we turned elsewhere’ (Bateson 1922: 1412). Since evolutionary morphology had stalled falling to the status of a second-rate science, many morphologists went into the kind of science routinely practiced in museums. That was the case of Lankester who moved from being a professor at Oxford to Director of the British Museum of Natural History (Ruse 1996: 239). Thus, this era of cave fauna research in the United States closed in the 1870s, within a conceptual framework of Bauplane, homologies, and parallelisms between embryonic and phylogenetic development; natural selection was largely ignored when not directly criticized. |
 From then on cave fauna with all of its unusual characteristics (at least for those that were blind and depigmented) provided 'the evidence' that neo-Lamarckian were looking for, i.e., proof that the environment, not genetics, were the direct and simple causal explanation for evolutionary change. After all, neither Mendel's papers had been rediscovered, nor Darwin's own stance of the Third edition of his Origins leaning toward neo-Lamarckisn explanations had been changed. Researchers of cave fauna such as Packard attributed more evolutionary importance to the direct effect of the environment than to anything else. Cave research therefore helped to establish that the changing environment could be responsible for the underlying progressive trends in evolution that Packard saw in his work in embryology. From then on cave fauna with all of its unusual characteristics (at least for those that were blind and depigmented) provided 'the evidence' that neo-Lamarckian were looking for, i.e., proof that the environment, not genetics, were the direct and simple causal explanation for evolutionary change. After all, neither Mendel's papers had been rediscovered, nor Darwin's own stance of the Third edition of his Origins leaning toward neo-Lamarckisn explanations had been changed. Researchers of cave fauna such as Packard attributed more evolutionary importance to the direct effect of the environment than to anything else. Cave research therefore helped to establish that the changing environment could be responsible for the underlying progressive trends in evolution that Packard saw in his work in embryology.
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