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The shadow of “the Eclipse of Darwinism”: the problem of evolutionary mechanisms in Republican China, 1910s–1930s

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Abstract

How did Chinese scientific intellectuals react to the dispute over evolutionary mechanisms during the period of the “eclipse of Darwinism”? This is my focal question. To answer it, I survey the attitudes of three groups of people toward the debate in the early decades of the twentieth century: Chinese paleontologists and their general embrace of the anti-Darwinian position, a group of non-specialists (or semi-specialists) and their assertion of a “revival of Lamarckism,” and the American-trained Chinese biologists and their typical agnostic stance toward the antagonism between Darwinism and the mutation theory. Different concerns or motivations underlay these three different stances. There were also interesting attempts by biologists like Chen Zhen to exploit some recreational breeding traditions like goldfish breeding peculiar to China to participate in the dispute more directly.

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The research is primarily based on archives from two large online Chinese databases of periodicals and newspapers: “Dacheng laojiu qikan quanwen shuju ku”(Dacheng Full-text Database of Old Periodicals, http://www.dachengdata.com/) and “Quanguo baokan suoyin” (Chinese Indexes of Newspapers and Periodicals, http://www.cnbksy.com/).

Notes

  1. For general information about Grabau’s life in China and his speeches, see Sun (2016); for the content of these speeches, see Diqiu yu qi shengwu de jinhua (Evolution of the Earth and Its Inhabitants) (Grabau 1924), which was the Chinese transcript of Grabau’s speeches published as a book.

  2. There was pertinent discussion no later than 1913. See Yu (1913).

  3. Vague expressions and awkward wording are not rare in the Chinese transcript of the lectures (Grabau 1924).

  4. See the first chapter of Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (Huxley 1942).

  5. “neo-Lamarckism” was coined in the 1890s as a response to neo-Darwinism, but its connotation is not materially different from Lamarckism (see Bowler 1992, p.59); thus, I treat these two terms as interchangeable here, as Bowler and many other historians have done.

  6. Broadly speaking, orthogenesis claims that variations are directional, instead of being stochastic. For a detailed intellectual history of orthogenesis, see Levit and Olsson (2006).

  7. Or “the mutation theory.” However, “mutation” was an ambiguous term, for its meaning changed in history. Hugo de Vries first used it to refer to those discontinuous variations (“saltations” or leaps) of biological traits. But in the 1920s, it was appropriated by geneticists like Thomas H. Morgan to denote all spontaneous modifications of a gene. In terms of phenotypes, “mutation” in the new sense could signify both minute changes and saltations. (Bowler 1992, p.7, pp.197–198).

  8. For a more detailed survey of non-Darwinian, “alternative evolutionary theories,” see Levit et al. (2008).

  9. For example, Alexej Nikolajevich Sewertzoff (1866–1936), an evolutionary morphologist who had a major influence in Russia, worked within a Darwinian framework (Levit et al. 2004).

  10. Admittedly, in the years when Lysenkoism— as a form of neo-Lamarckism— politically dominated the Soviet Union, biologists who dismissed the doctrine as unacceptable suffered much. Nevertheless, Russian biologists like Ivan I. Schmalhausen (1884–1963) and Nicolei V. Timofeeff-Ressovsky made important contributions to the “evolutionary synthesis” later (see Levit et al. 2006; Levit and Hoßfeld 2009).

  11. Even worse, the most influential historiography of evolutionary synthesis is an Anglo-American one: it underestimates the contributions made by Russian and especially German biologists (Reif et al. 2000).

  12. Here “scientific intellectuals” refer to those Chinese intellectuals who had a good knowledge of science (especially biology), in contradistinction to the general literati.

  13. Indeed, most of the Chinese scientific intellectuals’ discussions of the problem examined here took place between the 1910s and the 1930s.

  14. Chen Zhen (陈桢, 1894–1957).

  15. Zhou Jianren (周建人, 1888–1984).

  16. Books like Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A factor in Evolution were translated into Chinese and became highly influential in China for some time.

  17. Here an “objectivist” means one who places a strong emphasis on justification and who refrains from advocating conjectures.

  18. This claim may not be accurate, for the university was still named “Nanjing Higher Normal College” in 1921. According to Luo and Wang (2005), there were some departments of natural history or biology before 1921 at other Chinese colleges. However, it is true that the first battery of biology departments in China were established circa 1920. For instance, the department of biology at Peking University did not exist until 1924 (Xue 2008).

  19. Wu Xianwen (伍献文, 1900–1985).

  20. Ding Wenjiang (丁文江, 1887–1936) was a leading founder of geology in China. Ding was also an important organizer of science in China. For example, he served as the secretary-general of Academia Sinica from 1934 until his accidental decease.

  21. Li (李泽厚, 1930- 2021) was a well-known philosopher in China.

  22. For the importance of evolutionary ideas, especially Social Darwinism, in China in the decades around 1900, cf. Pusey (1983), Yang (2013a), and so forth.

  23. This is not unusual. The case in Western academia was similar. As Bowler (2013, p.220) has noted, “discussions of the evolutionary mechanism, including the many challenges to the plausibility of natural selection, were conducted in the pages of general periodicals and books” in Britain at the time.

  24. Hence, for more information about Chinese paleontology and its cultural context in early decades of the twentieth century, see Yu (2017).

  25. Weng Wenhao (翁文灏, 1889–1971).

  26. According to Yu (2017) and Sepkoski (2009, p.18), whose viewpoint is quoted and accepted by Yu, the majority of working Western paleontologists preferred an “agnostic position”; namely, “their work did not attempt to make any comment or contribution to [the] theory” (of the mechanism of evolution). Contrariwise, Reif (1986) provides a quite different picture of how paleontologists in German-speaking countries had engaged with the issue between 1859 and the acceptance of the synthetic theory: they were not silent, and they had diverse views. Specifically, among the six groups—traditionalists, early Darwinians, pluralists, neo-Lamarckians, orthogeneticists, and typostrophists— into which Reif has classified these paleontologists, only one embraced a Darwinian framework. Levit and Hoßfeld (2013) confirm that German paleontologists’ general resistance to Darwinism lasted into the second half of the twentieth century. For example, Otto Heinrich Schindewolf, an influential paleontologist in postwar Germany, advocated a saltationist theory (Reif 1993).

  27. The term “influence of environment” here does not include natural selection; rather, according to Weng, it includes two sub-classes: (1) organisms being active in acquiring characters as responses to the environment, like Lamarck’s idea of “use and disuse” has indicated; (2) organisms being passively informed by the environment, like the case in the theory advanced by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

  28. Yang Zhongjian (杨钟健, 1897–1979).

  29. Their names in Chinese are Sun Yunzhu (孙云铸, 1895–1979), Tian Qisui (田奇, 1899–1975), Zhao Yazeng (赵亚曾, 1899–1929), Yu Jianzhang (俞建章,1898–1980). Zhao was murdered by bandits on his journey to conduct fieldwork.

  30. Li Zhichang (李之常, 1900–1969).

  31. In 1921, Chen Jianshan (陈兼善, 1898–1988) was a young graduate majoring in natural history at Peking Advanced Normal College. He would study in France (1931–1934) and become a zoologist and ichthyologist in later years.

  32. Here the term “neo-Darwinian” may not imply that Ding was a full-blood neo-Darwinian; rather, it may merely show Ding’s attitude toward the inheritability of acquired characters.

  33. Li Shunqing (李顺卿, 1894–1972).

  34. Zhang Mengwen (张孟闻, 1903–1993).

  35. Liu Xian (刘咸, 1901–1987).

  36. Lu Xun(鲁迅, 1881–1936).

  37. Zhou Jianren (周建人, 1888–1984). Schneider (2003, p.44) makes a mistake when he remarks that Zhou studied in Japan as a youth and went on for a degree from the agriculture school of Tokyo Imperial University. As the youngest son in his family, Zhou remained at home to take care of his mother and never went to Japan as his two brothers had done.

  38. Their names in Chinese are Junshi (均式), Wu Zhenzi (吴振兹), and Yunxiang(恽襄).

  39. For an intriguing case of such kind of negotiation and even conflicts involved in such negotiation, see Fan (2014).

  40. Zhu Xi (朱洗, 1900–1962).

  41. Tan Xihong (谭熙鸿, 1891–1956).

  42. For example, Chen Ziying (陈子英, 1896–1966), a geneticist, argued in 1935 in an article entitled Experimental Work On Biological Evolution that the attempts to answer the question of the evolutionary mechanism before the twentieth century were mainly speculations and the only reliable way was to turn to experiments, as his contemporary biologists, especially geneticists had done at that time. For Chinese intellectuals’ recognition of the role of scientific experiments at that age, see also (Fan 2014).

  43. Pan Guangdan (潘光旦, 1899–1967) was a sociologist and ethnologist.

  44. In this debate, Pan’s main opponents were Zhou Jianren, Sun Benwen (孙本文), and Ru Song (如松). Sun was a sociologist. Ru Song was a pseudo name of Ye Qing (叶青), whose original name was Ren Zhuoxuan (任卓宣, 1896–1990). As an ideologist, Ye was a communist and a member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) at the beginning, yet later he left CPC and turned to its enemy, Kuo Min Tang. For further information about this debate (and other ones) and the condition of Eugenics in China, cf. Sihn (2010).

  45. Later Zhou gradually established a close relationship with the Communist Party of China. After 1949, he became a high-ranking official in People’s Republic of China (1949-).

  46. His name in Chinese is 王启汾.

  47. The issue of eugenics was not the only reason. In fact, for example, Zhou Jianren had started asserting the revival of Lamarckism (in the years around 1920) even before he grew skeptical about eugenics and got involved in the dispute (in the last five years of the 1920s). Yet the dispute may partially explain why he continued to disseminate the same idea in the years around 1930.

  48. Their names in Chinese are Qian Chongshu (钱崇澍, 1883–1965), Hu Xiansu(胡先骕, 1894–1968), Qian Tianhe (钱天鹤, 1893–1972), and Cai Bao (蔡堡, 1897–1986).

  49. Their names in Chinese are Chen Zhen (陈桢, 1894–1957), Chen Ziying (陈子英, 1896–1966), Li Ruqi (李汝祺, 1895–1991), Fan Qianzhong (范谦衷, 1901–1993), and Tan Jiazhen (谈家桢, 1909–2008).

  50. Or as Chen (1922, p.18) summarized, “the non-inheritability of acquired characters is almost a general belief (among biologists) now.”

  51. Their silence before the public did not necessarily imply that they had no personal preferences. Hu (1915, 1916) once translated and published an excerpt of Kellogg’s Darwinism To-day, in which Kellogg defended the importance of natural selection. Perhaps Hu, as well as many other Chinese biologists, was sympathetic to the basic points of Darwinism. Yet, we are not sure of that. Of course, As far as I know, none of these American-trained biologists had ever explicitly denied the importance of natural selection.

  52. By 1946, Li Ruqi had already begun to introduce the ideas of Modern Synthesis—stochastic, minute variations plus natural selection—to his Chinese compatriots (Li 1946).

  53. Thus, these biologists in China made little contribution to the “evolutionary synthesis.”

  54. In a public letter to his colleagues, zoologist Zhang Zuoren (张作人, 1900–1991) admitted the temporal reasonableness of such a research focus, given the fact that “China was a large country and had a diversity of organisms, and our biological science has just begun to set off”; yet then he appealed to his colleagues for more attention to, and more advances in, all other branches of biology (research on the causes of speciation and evolution included) in future so that Chinese biology may still have some hope (Zhang 1936). Unfortunately, Chinese biology had no chance to develop in the 1930s and 1940s as Zhang had hoped.

  55. Like Bing, Ren Hongjun(任鸿隽, 1886–1961) was also a founder of Science Society of China. As a chemist who graduated from Cornell (B.S.) and Columbia University (MSc), he was also an important organizer of the scientific enterprise in China.

  56. In 1919, Mao Zishui(毛子水, 1893–1988) was still a student at Peking University. He would become a historian of science later.

  57. Zhu Kezhen (竺可桢, 1890–1974), a well-known meteorologist, obtained his Doctorate from Harvard University in 1918.

  58. Liang Qichao (梁启超, 1873–1929) was a very influential thinker in late Qing in China.

  59. Zhu Guangqian (朱光潜, 1897–1989) was a young graduate at the University of Hong Kong in 1922. He would become an influential aesthetician in China. Although Zhu was not a scientist, he seemed to have an acute sense of the discourses about “spirits of science” at the time.

  60. In this paper, I only introduce the part of Chen’s work pertinent to the problem of evolution. For a more complete and detailed study of Chen Zhen and his research work on goldfish, see Jiang (2016).

  61. Goldfish and chi-yu still belong to the same species.

  62. As the title has implied, the primary purpose of Chen’s original paper in English was to present a systematic delineation of the variations in goldfish. Thus, the brief discussion of evolution in the last section of the paper was mainly a “bonus,” or an appendix.

  63. Unless “neo-Darwinism” merely means denying the existence of the inheritance of acquired characters.

  64. After a brief review of the history and status quo of orchid breeding in China, Zhou concluded that sports of the orchid arguably could not persist in nature, for new sports were almost always found alone instead of existing in large numbers; the sports were fragile—these variants died easily even under the care of experienced fanciers. Thus, it is plausible that saltations in orchids merely emerge and quickly perish in natural conditions.

  65. The cultivation of Cymbidium in China at least dated from the late Tang Dynasty (the ninth century). See Zhou Jianzhong (2000).

  66. Indeed, when they intended to do some original research on this problem economically, it was natural for them to turn to familiar and easily accessible native organisms like goldfish and orchid, of which there had already been great reserves of variants. Another less interesting case is the ancient tradition of foot-binding among Chinese women. Just like the circumcision tradition of Jews, it served as an example of non-inheritable mutilations for some Chinese biologists to argue against the inheritance of acquired characters in their speeches. Yet, this was not a case of serious study.

  67. In 1922, Fei (费鸿年, 1900–1993) was an undergraduate majoring in zoology at Tokyo Imperial University. By the time of 1926, he had become a zoologist at Sun Yat-sen University. In his later years, he mainly studied marine biology, or to be specific, ichthyology. See Ding & Yang (1996).

  68. Guo (郭任远, 1898–1970) obtained his Doctorate from UC Berkeley in 1923. He also researched the embryology of mammals and birds.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Chen-Pang Yeang for his valuable guidance. The paper has also benefited much from Marga Vicedo’s incisive comments. I sincerely acknowledge the help from Peking University that has made it possible for me to get access to the two online databases on which the study is based. Many thanks to Marga Vicedo, Vincent Auffrey, and Adrian Yee for their help with language checking. I am also grateful for the financial support from China Scholarship Council.

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The study is funded by China Scholarship Council.

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    Zhixiang Cheng

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Cheng, Z. The shadow of “the Eclipse of Darwinism”: the problem of evolutionary mechanisms in Republican China, 1910s–1930s. Theory Biosci. 141, 349–364 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-022-00378-6

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