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Vignettes from the History of Plant Morphology
By Richard L. Hauke
Copyright 1996
II. EDMUND SINNOTT AND AGNES ARBER: PARALLEL LIVES?
The Zeitgeist has been invoked to explain the occurrence
of multiple discovery in science (Simonton 1979). This is the theory that
the general state of science at a given time makes it inevitable that certain
ideas will emerge. Examples of multiple discovery are seen throughout science,
including botany (Troyer 1992).
One example I wish to explore involves not a simple scientific discovery
but rather an extended development of a way of thought. Agnes
Arber, after a lifetime of scientific work and the writing of numerous
articles and books, which established her as an eminent plant morphologist,
turned to metaphysics and mysticism. Edmund Sinnott, after a lifetime of
scientific work and the writing of numerous articles and books, which established
him as an eminent plant morphologist, turned to metaphysics and mysticism.
Neither, as far as I have seen, indicated influence from the other in this
metamorphosis.
Edmund Ware Sinnott was born 5 February 1888 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
His family moved to Milwaukee but soon returned to Massachusetts and he
entered Harvard, his father's alma mater, receiving his A.B. in 1908, his
A.M. in 1910, and his Ph.D. in 1913 under E. C. Jeffrey. He went to Australia
with the plant morphologist Arthur J. Eames, 1910-1911. He became instructor
at Harvard, 1913-1915, and worked with I. W. Bailey, the distinguished anatomist.
In 1915 he moved to the University of Connecticut at Storrs (then Connecticut
Agricultural College) where he remained until 1928, becoming Professor of
Botany and Genetics. While there he married and had three children.
In 1928 he moved to Barnard College as Chairman of the Botany Department,
and in 1939 to Columbia University as Professor of Botany. In 1940 he was
appointed Sterling Professor of Botany and Chairman of the Botany Department
at Yale University. In 1950 he was named Dean of the Graduate School there.
From 1945 to 1956 he was also Director of the Sheffield Scientific School.
He retired in 1956, and died 6 January 1968.
During his active scientific life, Sinnott wrote more than ninety scientific
articles and several textbooks: Botany, Principles and Problems (1923,
eventually reaching a sixth edition in 1963), Principles of Genetics
(1925, reaching a third edition in 1934), Laboratory Manual for Elementary
Botany (1927), and Plant Morphogenesis (1960).
Interested in science education and in the role of science in life, he wrote
articles such as: "Plant classification in elementary botanical texts"
(1924); "The place of botany in a liberal education" (1935); "Buildings,
equipment, and textbooks used for teachers of biology in secondary schools:
data from a questionnaire" (1941); and "Science and the education
of free men" (1944).
After World War II, he devoted less of his time to original research and
more to writing about science in society: "The biological basis of
democracy" (1945); "Plants and the material basis of civilization"
(1945); "Science needs the humanities" (1947); "Science and
the whole man" (1948); "Man and energy" (1949).
He was also interested in art, photography, and architecture, which culminated
in his book Meeting House and Church in Early New England (1963).
By 1950, when he wrote Cell and Psyche: The Biology of Purpose, Sinnott
was recognized as an eminent plant morphologist. He had held the presidencies
of the Torrey Botanical Club (1931-1934), Botanical Society of America (1937),
American Society of Naturalists (1945), and the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (1948), and had been made a member of the National
Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.
For many years he was Consulting Editor for McGraw-Hill Publications in
agricultural and botanical sciences. He had published extensively on the
relationship between genetics, cell division, cell enlargement, cell differentiation,
and morphogenesis, particularly of cucurbit fruits. His early work had been
much concerned with the evolution of angiosperms.
Sinnott, in Cell and Psyche, clearly stated his purpose: "The
position which I propose to defend--the thesis I am nailing to the cathedral
door--is briefly this: that biological organization (concerned with organic
development and physiological activity) and psychical activity (concerned
with behavior and thus leading to mind) are fundamentally the same thing
[emphasis his]" (1950: 47). He described an evolutionary progression
from growth control, to development of instinct, to more complex mental
activities of higher mammals, to the enormously rich and varied life of
the mind and spirit of man. Sinnott said: "Body and mind are simply
two aspects of the same biological phenomenon" (1950: 76) and considered
even such things as human values to be winnowed out by selection and to
favor survival.
He attacked the problem of organism as a sum of parts, processes, and history
with an integrated wholeness. Matter enters and leaves, but the fundamental
organization remains unaltered. Living matter pulls itself together into
integrated and organized self-regulating systems.
Sinnott asked what was man's nature, place, and significance in the universe.
"The theme of my argument has been that a continuous progression exists
from the biological goals operative in the development and behavior of a
living organism to the psychological facts of desire and purpose. What reason
is there to exclude from this progression these highest of desires, these
most exalted of aspirations?" (1950: 96).
The struggle for existence would not seem to favor unselfishness or love
of neighbor. "The true cause, I believe, of man's upward climb, is
his persistent yearning for those values which to him seem higher and more
satisfying and to which he instinctively aspires" (1950: 99). These
emotions must be anchored in the chemistry of protoplasm, the physiology
of the nervous system.
Sinnott realized that his attempt to bring together problems of mind and
body, purpose, value, freedom, and soul, "and of the place of man's
spirit in the universe by postulating for all of them a common basis in
the fact of biological organization" (1950: 103) will be rejected by
materialists, psychologists, and men of faith. "Most biologists will
not approve of mixing their science so thoroughly with philosophy, of complicating
the discussion of organization and regulation by introducing overtones of
psychology and metaphysics" [emphasis mine] (1950: 103).
Sinnott ended his book: "The study of life--regulatory, purposeful,
ascending--begins with protoplasm in the laboratory, but it can lead us
out from thence to high adventure and to 'thoughts beyond the reaches of
our souls.' In form of leaf and limb and in the beautiful coordination of
their powers we see the first steps in that great progression which has
long been marching upward from the first bit of living stuff toward some
dim final goal, as yet but dreamed of, which the poet sings:
"One God, one law, one element
And one far off divine event
To which the whole creation moves" (1950: 111).
He thought that this presented "as clear a picture as the scientist
can draw of God Himself and our relation to Him?" (Ibid).
Thus in a book of only 111 pages, Sinnott traversed the same road as Arber
had done in three books, from morphology to metaphysics to mysticism. Cell
and Psyche was essentially a publication of the McNair Lectures which
Sinnott had delivered at the University of North Carolina on 25 October
1949. The McNair Lectures were founded through a bequest from Rev. John
Calvin McNair, whose will stated their object "shall be to show the
mutual bearing of science and theology upon each other, and to prove the
existence and attributes, as far as may be, of God from nature" (Sinnott
1950: frontispiece).
Sinnott was probably chosen to give the McNair Lectures because he was a
scientist and a member of "one of the evangelic denominations of Christians"
as called for in the will. He had been an officer of the Congregational
Church (Sinnott Archives, boxes 10, 11). Within the previous five years,
he had published an essay (1944) that religious faith is an outcome of science
and the search for truth, and had given the centennial address of the Sheffield
Scientific School, emphasizing its importance in educating people in both
science and the arts and humanities. "Then only can he come to understand
the many-sided universe in which he dwells. It is a universe, and as the
man of science illuminates one side of it, a poet's insight can reveal the
other. We need to listen well to what they both can tell us" (1948).
He had written an outline for and a draft of chapters one, two, and part
of three of a book The Pattern of Life, which he submitted to Whittlesey
House in competition for their Fellowship Award (Sinnott Archives, box 24,
folder 356, letter, 28 November 1945). The book was never written, but some
of the contents, as outlined, did appear in his later books Matter, Mind
and Man; Plant Morphogenesis; and The Bridge of Life.
The ideas introduced in Cell and Psyche were expanded upon in a series
of books: Two Roads to Truth (1953); The Biology of the Spirit
(1955); Life and Mind (1956); Matter, Mind, and Man (1957)
and The Bridge of Life: From Matter to Spirit (1966).
Sinnott struggled to be a respected scientist who was also a believing Christian.
In a letter to Lambert Davis of the University of North Carolina Press (Sinnott
Archives, box 9, folder 161, 10 November 1949), he objected to being called
a neo-vitalist because "I must therefore be careful to maintain my
scientific--my 'union card' so to speak--standing and not label myself with
a word which is definitely in disrepute among modern scientists."
And in a letter to J. D. Rhine of Duke University, who made parapsychology
the object of scientific study (Sinnott Archives, folder 228, box 14, 3
June 1948), he said he had long been concerned with the control of organic
development and "years ago, as a graduate student, I wrote a paper
speculating on the possibility that these organizing factors were of the
same sort of stuff as consciousness is made."
He was, at least since 1933, personally involved in the Congregational Church
affairs (Sinnott Archives, box 1, folder 11, letter to John Ben Butler,
Jr., 28 November 1933).
Upon reading Cell and Psyche, I was struck by the similarity of the
ideas expressed there to those of The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard was a paleontologist and a Jesuit priest who
argued that evolution began at the inorganic level, geogenesis, progressed
through the origin of living material, biogenesis, to animal behavior,
psychogenesis, and finally to the mind of man, noogenesis.
He believed that this upward evolution would ultimately result in a convergence
and unification of man with God. He distinguished the lithosphere (or earth),
the biosphere (or layer of life on earth), and the noosphere (or thought
layer superimposed on the biosphere).
Julian Huxley, in his introduction, wrote "In The Phenomenon of
Man he has effected a three fold synthesis of the material and physical
world with the world of mind and spirit; of the past with the future; and
of variety with unity, the many with the one." This book was published
in French in 1955 and in English in 1959, although it had been written earlier.[1] Teilhard died in 1955. Although their ideas were so similar, there
is no indication that Sinnott or Teilhard were aware of each other.
I read J. C. Smuts' Holism and Evolution (1926) immediately after
reading Sinnott's Cell and Psyche and underwent a deja-vu experience.
Smuts had written: "Among the great gaps in knowledge, those which
separate the phenomena of matter, life, and mind still remain unbridged.
. . . What is more, they actually intermingle and co-exist in the human,
which is compounded of matter, life, and mind. . . . Not only do they actually
co exist and mingle in the human, they appear to be genetically related
and to give rise to each other in a definite series in the stages of Evolution;
life appearing to arise in or from matter, and mind in or from life. . .
. Hence arise the three series in the real world: physical, biological,
and psychical or mental" (1926: 2 3).
Jan Christian Smuts, more widely known as a statesman than as a scientist
or philosopher, was born in South Africa in 1870, graduated from Cambridge
University with Highest Honors in Law, fought in the Boer War against the
British, and was instrumental in creation of the Union of South Africa (1910).
He served in the cabinet of South Africa from 1910 to 1919, and became Prime
Minister (1919 to 1924). His party lost the election and he retired from
politics in 1924. His book Holism and Evolution was published in
1926. He was back in the cabinet from 1933 to 1939 and served as Prime Minister
from 1939 to 1948. His party lost the 1948 election to the Nationalists
(who introduced apartheid to the Union of South Africa) and he died in 1950.
Sinnott was well aware of Smuts' book. He listed it among the suggested
readings at the end of Cell and Psyche, and quoted from it in Matter,
Mind, and Man, and in The Bridge of Life. Published the same
year as Sinnott's Cell and Psyche and containing similar ideas, was
Arber's The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form. Whereas Sinnott's book
was centered around evolution, however, Arber's book was accused of anti-evolutionary
bias (Tansley 1951).
Despite their both being eminent plant morphologists during the first half
of the twentieth century, Edmund Sinnott and Agnes Arber did not, apparently,
interact. There is no correspondence between them in either's archives.
There is no reference in either's post-1950 books to the work of the other.
Agnes Arber's daughter, Muriel (letter to the author) does not remember
her mother ever speaking of Edmund Sinnott.
We know that Edmund Sinnott did read The Natural Philosophy of Plant
Form because there is in his archive a copy of a review he wrote of
that book, but no indication of its having been submitted for publication.
In it he said "the present reviewer would prefer to look for a more
scientific and somewhat less philosophical analysis of the problems of morphology
than is offered in Mrs. Arber's volume" (Sinnott Archives, folder 228,
box 14).
In studying plant morphogenesis, both Edmund Sinnott and Agnes Arber came
to realize that the organism is not simply a machine made of so many parts
put together in a particular way. Rather, organisms in their development
seem to be goal directed, growing toward some immanent wholeness, for which
Sinnott used the term organicism, as opposed to mechanism or vitalism. Both
realized that it was necessary to avoid teleology (in the sense of an external
goal director) and vitalism (in the sense of an elan vital infused from
outside), but each went beyond the physico chemical world of the traditional
natural scientist into the metaphysical and spiritual realm in attempting
to explain the inner-directedness that the organism expresses in its development
from zygote to maturity.
Is this an example of Zeitgeist? It might be more accurate to think
of it as an example of convergent evolution. Sinnott was not only a scientist
but also an active Christian and a proponent of evolution. One of his earliest
papers was "The evolution of the filicinean leaf trace" (1911).
Due to the antipathy of many Christians toward the theory of evolution,
he may have long felt a need to reconcile science and religion. His book
Cell and Psyche would fill that need.
Agnes Arber, unlike Sinnott, was areligious. Also, whereas he had been a
college professor and administrator, concerned with education, she had avoided
teaching and throughout her career was a solitary worker. She would have
been able to spend more time and energy than he could in contemplation,
in thinking about "why," searching in her mind for an understanding
of the natural world.
Arber and Sinnott started out from different places in the second decade
of the twentieth century but ended up close together by the beginning of
the fifth decade.
______________
[1] The preface is dated Paris: March 1947. His writings were apparently
suppressed by the Jesuit Order.