A Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral

Natural History, Sept, 1999 by Stephen Jay Gould

But the ninth and last mourner seems to fit about as well as that proverbial snowball in hell or that square peg trying to squeeze into a round hole: E. Ray Lankester (1847-1929), at that time already a prominent young British evolutionary biologist and a leading disciple of Darwin, but later to become--as Professor Sir E. Ray Lankester, K.C.B. (Knight Commander, Order of the Bath), M.A. (the "earned" degree of Oxford or Cambridge), D. Sc. (a later honorary degree as doctor of science), E R. S. (Fellow of the Royal Society, the leading honorary academy of British science)--just about the most celebrated, and the stuffiest, of conventional and socially prominent British scientists. Lankester moved up the academic ladder from exemplary beginnings to a finale of unmatched prominence, serving as professor of zoology at University College London, then as Fullerian professor of physiology at the Royal Institution, and finally as Linacre professor of comparative anatomy at Oxford University. Lankester then capped his career by serving as director (from 1898 to 1907) of the British Museum (Natural History), the most powerful and prestigious post in his field. Why, in heaven's name, was this exemplar of British respectability, this basically conservative scientist's scientist, hanging out with a group of old (and mostly German) communists at the funeral of a person described by Engels, in his graveside oration, as "the best hated and most calumniated man of his times"?

Even Engels seemed to sense the anomaly, for he ended his official report of the funeral, published in Der Sozialdemokrat of Zurich on March 22, 1883, by writing: "The natural sciences were represented by two celebrities of the first rank, the zoology Professor Ray Lankester and the chemistry Professor Schorlemmer, both members of the Royal Society of London." Yes, but Schorlemmer was a countryman, a lifelong associate, and a political ally. Lankester did not meet Marx until 1880 and could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called a political supporter or even a sympathizer (beyond a very general shared belief in human improvement through education and social progress). As I shall discuss in detail later in this essay, Marx first sought Lankester's advice in recommending a doctor for his ailing wife and daughter, and later for himself. This professional connection evidently developed into a firm friendship. But what could have drawn these maximally disparate people together?

We certainly cannot seek the primary cause for warm sympathy in any radical cast to Lankester's biological work that might have matched the tenor of Marx's efforts in political science. Lankester may rank as the best evolutionary morphologist in the first generation following Darwin's epochal discovery. T.H. Huxley became Lankester's guide and mentor, while Darwin certainly thought well of his research, writing to Lankester (then a young man of twenty-five) on April 15, 1872: "What grand work you did at Naples [at the marine research station]! I can clearly see that you will some day become our first star in Natural History." But Lankester's studies now read as little more than an exemplification and application of Darwin's insights to several specific groups of organisms--a "filling in" that often follows a great theoretical advance and that seems, in retrospect, not overly blessed with originality.