Legend for Academic Pedigree of Conrad Waddington
Legend for J. D. Watson Pedigree
Legend for Intellectual Pedigree of August Weismann
Legend for Intellectual Pedigree of Jan Witkowski
Legend for Sewall Wright Pedigree
References and Recommended Reading
Preface
I wrote this book so other scientists can construct their own intellectual pedigrees. This makes it a manual and I show that there is no one way to display such a pedigree. This gives the reader lots of choices about the information desired for display as well as the aesthetics of how such a pedigree will look. There are presently several phrases in use for this type of construction: intellectual pedigree, academic pedigree, mentoring pedigree (or fly tree, neurotree, etc.) and all seem reasonable to me. They convey an interest in that process by which knowledge is passed across generations through a variety of ways, the most intimate being a oneon-one relationship between an academic sponsor and a student.
Academics earning a PhD in a scientific research field are usually not trained to become effective teachers. In the life sciences the closest most graduate students come to that experience is their year or years spent as a teaching assistant (often designated by initials alone, “being a TA”). Most freshly minted PhDs learn from their errors or copy the habits of teachers they admired. Most become competent or excel at teaching, but they are cautioned not to overdo their enthusiasm for teaching because that will leave little time for research. The teaching usually at issue is the lecture course especially large courses for undergraduates. While communicating scientific ideas and information is essential for good teaching, there is another aspect that is rarely discussed. Good teachers are good mentors. Mentors are more likely to be associated with one-on-one encounters and nothing has a greater impact in a scientist’s training than the mentoring of a graduate sponsor for a dissertation research project. I knew that my mentor, Hermann Muller, spent many hours with me going over my research plans, meticulously editing my write-ups for projects and publishable papers, and encouraging me. He was also demanding in his expectations but never in the sense that I felt I was being exploited. In fact, he made sure his name did not appear on papers that I had conceived and carried out.
I began looking at mentoring relations of scientists by constructing my own intellectual pedigree. I used Sturtevant’s 1965 efforts as a guide. But Sturtevant did not provide information on the forerunners of Morgan’s legacy. Over the years I read biographical accounts of those in my pedigree and was surprised that I could push this mentoring sequence to notable icons of science like Newton, Darwin, or Galileo. This book reveals a lot of interesting findings and answers some basic questions. How did this mentoring system arise? How did it move from one country to another? How did fields shift in a lineage from mathematics or physics to biology? For those interested in the history, sociology, or philosophy of science, this approach to mentoring is new and what it might lead to is largely unknown. I hope readers will prepare their own intellectual pedigrees and place these on websites. I know little about attempts, if they exist, for intellectual pedigrees in major parts of the world — Chinese, Japanese, Indian, African, Middle East, and Latin American. I used primarily geneticists and traced their mentoring past as far as I could go. While there will be overlaps if this study were done for evolutionists, embryologists, cell biologists, biochemists, and microbiologists, I expect some differences would emerge by field. I included all the geneticists featured in Krishna Dronamraju’s book, A Century of Geneticists: Mutation to Medicine (2018).
Most of the reading for this I accomplished at home in Bloomington, Indiana. I also used the Wells Library and the Lilly Library at Indiana University for finding information I could not get on the web. I thank Abraham Krikorian and Krishna Dronamraju for their many helpful suggestions.
I thank my daughter Christina Carlson for help preparing the circular diagrams. I thank for helpful suggestions from Krishna Dronamraju, Abraham Krikorian, Shari Cohn, Caitlin Carlson Jones, and many students who supplied information on their careers. For the 36 illustrations in this manual, see the Afterword for information on their sources. All, unless noted otherwise, are from the web and are in public domain because they were published before 1989 in United States publications, or before 1923 (international).
Elof Axel Carlson
Bloomington, Indiana
Emeritus Distinguished Teaching Professor, Stony Brook
University, New York, and
Visiting Scholar and Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study,
Indiana University
1What are Intellectual Pedigrees?
Intellectual pedigrees are attempts to trace back the influence of scholars on one another, especially through a process of mentoring. Mentors can be teachers or colleagues at a university. They can be family members or grade schoolteachers. Sometimes they can be authors of books or articles that are read during formative years. In my own academic pedigree, I single out one high school teacher and my PhD dissertation advisor as the most influential in my career. I could identify perhaps a dozen with strong influence but not as imposing as these two — Morris Gabriel Cohen and Hermann Joseph Muller. I applied the same logic to my predecessors.
I begin with the intellectual pedigree of my mentor, Hermann Joseph Muller. Next to myself, he is the scientist about whose life I have the most knowledge. Not only did his mentoring span my graduate years 1953–1958, I had the pleasure of writing his biography — Genes, Radiation, and Society: The Life and Work of H. J. Muller. In this intellectual pedigree, I will work back in time to the earliest known of Muller’s intellectual predecessors. In each instance I have tried to give a brief one paragraph summing up of an intellectual ancestor or descendent and a portrait, if one were available. This approach connects Muller to a network of scholars most of whom I could not have predicted. Unlike a human genetics pedigree with multiple generations producing progeny, the intellectual pedigree differs in important ways. The chain of mentoring is not always linear. Some scientists have more than one mentor. This leads to a branching of the intellectual pedigree. Usually the mentor is at the college level. For most of these scientists that experience was in the process of getting an MD or PhD degree.
In the Middle Ages there were four divisions of the University — all took the seven liberal arts for the BA degree. The liberal arts were first described by Plato in The Republic but while there were Greek and Roman academies for learning, there were no universities.1 Plato introduced the liberal arts as the knowledge and thinking required for philosopher-kings in his ideal republic. They were tools for interpreting the “the true, the good, and the beautiful” in his era. Instead of a university with classes, the Greek scholars preferred