No Se Nada highlights (and RPM picks it up) a picture of a statue of Louis Agassiz head-first in the ground after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. All very well. The piece goes on to say:
In response, David Starr Jordon [sic] - Stanford first president, a renowned scientist in his own right, and a frequent sparring partner of Agassiz's on the Darwin/evolution question said, "I always knew he was very fine in the abstract, but he's no good in the concrete."
Unfortunately, David Starr Jordan did not say this. It was a certain "Dr Argyll" who expressed a preference for Agassiz in the abstract over the concrete; see Gould, S.J. (1995) "The Celestial Mechanic and the Earthly Naturalist", pp. 24 - 37 in Dinosaur in a Haystack. New York: Harmony.
I've written on Agassiz's anti-evolutionism in the past. Here (PDF, 128k) is the introduction I wrote to a reprint of Agassiz's Essay On Classification, the last great work of American scientific anti-evolutionism. The full reference for my essay is, "Introduction" in Agassiz on Evolution, Volume 1: Essay on Classification, edited and introduced by JM Lynch. Bristol: Thoemmes Press.
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I have to brag that I own a 1962 copy of the Essay. I cannot brag that I have read it, though. It's on a long waiting list...
Agassiz is often misunderstood, I think. The Essay is pure gradism, of course, but he wasn't the curmudgeonly opponent of evolution some think. He was, I believe, an honest enough observer who shared with many others of his time a preference for abstract realities being the object of classification into which concrete object shad to be fitted. There's a rather cute anecdote about one of his students, Stimpson, who, when finding intermediate forms of a mollusk he could not decide to place in one species or another, "... after he had studied it for a long time, put his heel upon it and grind[ing] it to powder, remarking, "That's the proper way to serve a damned transitional form."
John,
Nice anecdote!
I have a soft spot for anti-evolutionists such as Agassiz or Mivart. They seem so less, how shall I say, duplicitous that our current bunch.
John and John - thanks, you both make the point I was getting at my original post. I appreciate Agassiz's approach, that he was actually out in the field working, and that his main arguement was "I can't square my understanding of the science with this theory."
(And I fixed my missspel of Jordan's name, JL....thanks for catching it.)