Nathaniel Rich offers an excellent and thought-provoking review of The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf, a biography of Darwin’s inspiration and, arguably, the inventor of our modern world Alexander von Humboldt:
Humboldt’s most consequential findings, however, derived from his conception of the world as a single unified organism. “Everything,” he said, “is interaction and reciprocal.” It seems commonplace today to speak of “the web of life,” but the concept was Humboldt’s invention. Into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thinkers like René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Carl Linnaeus were still echoing Aristotle’s view that “nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man.”
Particularly heterodox was the implication that the decline of one species might have cascading effects on others. The possibility that animal life might not be inexhaustible had been proposed by the German anatomist J.F. Blumenbach (who taught Humboldt at the University of Göttingen), but was not widely accepted. “Such is the œconomy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct,” declared Thomas Jefferson in 1784, an opinion shared by most naturalists. Convinced to the end of his life that mastodons still existed in North America, most likely in the “unexplored and undisturbed” regions of the continent, Jefferson urged Lewis and Clark to look for them during their expedition.
Humboldt traveled so far, saw so much, and observed so closely that he began to notice similarities across continents. Rhododendron-like plants on the mountains near Caracas reminded him of alpine trees in the Swiss Alps; a sea of cacti, seen from the distance, recalled the grasses in the marshes of northern Europe; a moss in the Andes resembled a species he had found growing in German forests.
This comparative approach allowed him to take staggering intellectual leaps. He looked beyond the characteristics of organisms and tried to determine the structures underlying nature, leading him to formulate the idea of ecosystems. He was the first to understand that climate emerged from the “perpetual interrelationship” between land, ocean, wind, elevation, and organic life. He introduced the idea of classifying plants by climate zones instead of taxonomy, taking into account altitude, temperature, and other conditions related to location. He invented isotherms, the lines used on maps to connect regions with the same average temperature and atmospheric pressure. The similarity of the coastal plants in Africa and South America led him to postulate an “ancient” connection between the continents, anticipating plate tectonic theory by more than a century. He also studied how different systems interacted with one another. Nobody before Humboldt, for instance, had been able to explain how forests, by releasing oxygen, storing water, and providing shade, have a cooling effect on climate.
Read the whole review here, or click here to buy the book. And any readers in the northwest: please post here if you’ve stumbled on any of Jefferson’s mastodons.
For a short explainer on Alexander Von Humboldt, dubbed the most influential scientist you may never have heard of, you may be interested in this: https://theconversation.com/the-most-influential-scientist-you-may-never-have-heard-of-35285
… I suppose it might be a minor quibble, or the curse of my own pedantry, but I don’t see Humboldt as the inventor of our modern world nor, perhaps, even the author of our modern world view. If any one scientist can lay claim to authorship of our world, good and bad, it is (another German) Fritz Haber whose work extracting nitrogen and making ammonia from the atmosphere enabled countless numbers of people to survive, where otherwise they would not, by enabling a truly fantastic leap in agricultural productivity and whose work on weapons and explosives also lead to orders of magnitude more lethality and horror in war. That’s our world. Industrial agriculture and industrial horror. It might have been better, or it might have been worse, without Haber, but it sure would be different than it is now.
I suggest the view of Humboldt as the ‘inventor’ of nature (what a wretched phraseology) might be an entirely aspirational attempt to refute the world we have in favor of the world we want.
Humboldts chief contribution, more so than the breadth and depth of actual inquiry and observation, was to influence other, perhaps better, scientists. Darwin, for example, was a particular acolyte whose work surpasses in scope and rigor that of Humboldt. Don’t get me wrong, Humboldt should indeed be lauded as a thinker well ahead of this time and a trailblazer, perhaps even a trailblazer par excellence…. I do not mean to diminish Humboldt. I do mean to diminish the skewed perspective regarding Humboldt held by the authors (both of the book and of the magazine piece) I just don’t really want to read a book about him that makes sensationalist claims to authorship of our modern world when that’s just not the case. It suggests the author doesn’t’ get nuance.
It’s hard to rank a scientist above Darwin, whose work was truly foundational when it comes to pure science. But someone like Humboldt helped open up whole new fields of inquiry at a time when a gentleman’s education meant Latin, Greek, maybe a law degree and a lot of riding and dueling.
Thanks for the post, Bob. Will have to check this book out.