An American Darwin?

It has now been some considerable time since I last wrote for this weblog, but I have recently made an exciting discovery which compels me to put pen to paper (or rather, phalanges to keyboard) once more under my anagrammatic nom de guerre. Thus far I have discussed this discovery only with individuals with whom I am personally acquainted, but I have decided that it will probably do no harm if I allow it a (slightly) more public airing.

While poring over some nineteenth-century works of science and pseudoscience (a thing I am surprisingly wont to do) I accidentally discovered a work by a now-forgotten American lawyer and phrenologist named James Stanley Grimes. Grimes, who born in Boston in 1807, published a book entitled Phreno-Geology in 1850. In this work Grimes proposes a theory of evolution by natural selection about nine years before the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species, thus making him (a) the first self-avowed American evolutionist and (b) one of only a handful of persons who conceived of evolution by natural selection before the Origin came out in 1859. Grimes appears to have reached his conclusions primarily through the study of geology, paleontology, embryology, and neuroanatomy. Unlike Darwin, Grimes does not appear to have drawn on information from animal husbandry, or to have had recourse to the analogy between artificial and natural selection, in forming his theory of organic evolution.

With regard to the mechanism underlying evolution, Grimes's fundamental concept was that as geological and environmental conditions alter there may happen to appear within species a minority of individuals bearing "variations" or "idiosyncracies" (what we would now tend to call mutations) that permit them to adapt to new conditions and survive better than do other members of the same species, such that over time the accumulation of these variations in succeeding generations may constitute new species even as older species are driven to extinction. This is essentially the same mechanism that Darwin propounded in the Origin of Species. (In common with Darwin, Grimes does assign a role--though a far more limited one--to other evolutionary mechanisms, such as the inheritance of acquired characteristics; like Darwin, however, Grimes explicitly rejects the non-selection-based evolutionism of Lamarck and Robert Chambers.)

Given my academic training in the history of biology, I was able to recognize the extent to which Grimes anticipated Darwinian evolutionism, and I am now preparing a paper on Grimes that I hope to see published this year or next: 2009 will be the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species and the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth.

Because I am discussing Grimes and his theory in great detail in the paper I am now writing, it would be tiresome and redundant and premature to go too much more into the subject here; however, I will mention that Grimes was demonstrably a devout Christian, whose faith seems hardly to have waned over the course of his long life. This certainly distinguishes him as a co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection, since Darwin, A. R. Wallace, and other putative co-discoverers are generally regarded as having been agnostics or deists.

Grimes died in 1903, having protested several times after 1859 that he had published a theory of evolution by natural selection before Darwin. Neither Darwin nor any other scientist, it seems, was willing to investigate or acknowledge Grimes's claims. In 1958, Loren Eiseley, an historian of evolutionary biology, considered Grimes's Phreno-Geology and concluded, based (I can only assume) on a very cursory examination, that Grimes was not an evolutionist. This is clearly incorrect, since in that treatise Grimes unambiguously describes how species of animals, including Homo sapiens, evolved from one another over the slow course of geological ages; how humankind and apes likely have a common ancestor; how we all descend from creatures that were aquatic, and later semi-aquatic; how all human beings were probably once dark-skinned, and how lighter skin evolved as an adaptation to changing conditions; how the first animals must have evolved from plants; how the human nervous system is the product of evolutionary forces progressively augmenting the nervous systems of antecedent species; and so forth. Given these statements, and the failure of any historian before or after Grimes's death to bring his evolutionism properly to light, I believe a monograph on Grimes is now long overdue, and so I am eager to complete my own paper on Grimes and to see it published. Adieu.