A CELEBRATION OF THE HISTORY, CULTURE, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF RECHERCHE BAY
CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research Auditorium Hobart, Tasmania
26–28 February 2007

Voyaging through strange seas of thought
Sir Guy Green, AC, KBE, CVO

Sir Guy Green was born in Tasmania. He graduated from the University of Tasmania and practiced as a barrister and solicitor. Offices he has held include Deputy National Chairman of The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, Chancellor of the University of Tasmania, Chancellor of St John Ambulance Australia, National President of the Order of Australia Association, Chief Justice of Tasmania, Governor of Tasmania and Administrator of the Commonwealth of Australia. Current appointments include Honorary Professor in the Antarctic Ecosystems and Climate Cooperative Research Centre, Chairman of Trustees of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Chairman of Ten Days on the Island, member of the boards of the Menzies Foundation and the Menzies Research Institute and Honorary Antarctic Ambassador for Tasmania. He has a wide range of interests and has spoken or published in a variety of fields including law, Antarctica, history, and science/technology.

I am delighted to have been asked to be a part of this symposium and to speak to you tonight.

I think Tasmania is an especially appropriate venue for this symposium quite apart from the fact that Recherche Bay happens to be located here. Starting in 1829 Tasmania founded the first three learned societies in Australia the last being the Royal Society of Tasmania - the first Royal Society to be established anywhere in the world outside the United Kingdom. Given that heritage I think Tasmania is an especially appropriate venue for the holding of this high quality Symposium by the peak organization for the four Australian learned academies.

This evening I would like to say something about the scientific and philosophical ideas which were influential when 18th Century explorers came to this island and suggest that in a number of respects those ideas and the story of the explorers’ endeavors are still relevant today.

Of course when they came to Recherche Bay those explorers did not know that this was an island - it was not until 1798 that the famous voyage by Bass and Flinders demonstrated that in fact the land mass of Australia was an island separate from Tasmania. But apart from lacking that particular piece of information they came to know quite a lot about this part of the world and were instrumental in clearing away some of the clouds of mythology which surrounded the great south land shown on the fanciful maps of this part of the world which were still being used as late as the beginning of that century.

The 18th century has been described as the golden age of scientific exploration. Many expeditions were organized and explorers traveled the globe finding new lands, conducting surveys, collecting data of great scientific interest and discovering a large number of new species of flora and animals. But on these voyages it was not only places and things which were being discovered. As they were traveling through those strange antipodean regions those explorers, to adapt Wordsworth’s lines, were journeying through strange seas of thought as much as they were traveling through a physical environment.

In particular these voyages made a significant contribution to the 18th Century intellectual revolution known as the Enlightenment.

The word revolution is often misused but its application to the historic scientific and philosophical developments which occurred in the 18th Century is entirely appropriate. To appreciate just how much of a revolution the Enlightenment was we need to remember how very differently knowledge was regarded then compared with our perception of it today.

For us the methodology of observation, measurement, analysis and experiment is a routine way of creating knowledge. But before the Enlightenment knowledge was viewed quite differently: the principal sources of knowledge then were not observation and experiment but analyses of biblical texts and the classical learning of ancient Greece and Rome.

The advent of the Enlightenment fundamentally changed that perception of knowledge and the scientific explorers of the 18th Century played a major role in bringing that about especially in the life sciences.

Well into the 18th Century it was widely accepted that all living things in the world came into existence at the moment of creation and had remained unchanged ever since. That belief had both biblical and classical origins. It was derived from the biblical account of the Creation and the Flood; but it was also in accordance with Aristotle’s concept of the natural world comprising a great continuous chain of being from rocks up to humans. But it was difficult to reconcile these biblical and classical concepts with the discoveries made by the 18th century explorers. To begin with the sheer number and diversity of plants and animals they discovered which had never been seen or reported before seemed incompatible with the idea that they had all been in existence since creation. Then there was the problem of dispersal; if all these species originated at one point on the earth how did they manage to cross the oceans and the continents and end up at extreme ends of the earth like the bottom of New Holland?

By raising these and other questions about the bible and classical texts as the primary sources of knowledge about the natural world the scientific explorers of the 18th century made a significant contribution to the enlightenment and to the emergence of modern science. But there were also three other developments in 18th Century science and scientific exploration which I want to highlight and suggest are still relevant today.

As well as being known as the Enlightenment the 18th Century is also characterized as the age of classification. In part the impetus for this was pragmatic: some system had to be devised to record and order the huge numbers of new species of flora and animals which were being discovered by the explorers. But it also had deeper roots which were both religious and secular. Biblical and classical ideas and Enlightenment thinking all shared the belief that we live in an ordered world. A coherent system describing and classifying everything in a given domain could be seen as a way of revealing either God’s design or the secular concept of the natural order. Some 50 systems of labeling and classifying living things especially flora were devised. But the system which eventually prevailed was that of Carl Linnaeus.

Linnaeus was not noted for being especially modest about his achievements. “Rarely has a man been more comfortable with his own greatness” Bill Bryson observes, “He spent much of his leisure time penning long and flattering portraits of himself, declaring that there had never 'been a greater botanist or zoologist', and that his system of classification was 'the greatest achievement in the realm of science'.

Although he was not quite as great a contributor to science as he thought he was there is no doubt that Linnaeus’s work has been highly influential n the history of science. He can be regarded as the father of the science of taxonomy, his binomial method of ordering and classifying species is used to this day and as we shall see his system indirectly contributed to one of the greatest advances ever made in the life sciences. Linnaeus was also personally influential in the world of scientific exploration: from 1745 to 1792 19 of his students sailed on international voyages of exploration and applied his system to the new species they discovered.

Incidentally it was entirely consistent with Linnaeus’ view of himself that he did not refer to them as his students but his disciples. The second major development which characterized the 18th century was the emergence of what has been called the mechanical philosophy. Newton’s success in explaining a number of major phenomena by a simple set of laws gave rise to the idea that mechanical principles could offer an explanation for all phenomena. The spectacularly successful technological developments of the Industrial revolution which coincided with and interacted with the Enlightenment reinforced the mechanical philosophy. But as so often happens with revolutionary ideas the mechanical philosophy was taken to extreme lengths and applied to quite inappropriate domains. Biological processes, the behavior of human beings, the organization of society, economics, what we would call sociology and even the course of history were all, it was said, subject to deterministic mechanical forces the universal laws of which would enable us to understand everything. A cognate development was the misguided attempt to apply the Linnaean system of classification to quite inappropriate phenomena such as rocks and human diseases.

The third aspect of the 18th century age of scientific exploration which I would like to highlight is the purposes for which the voyages were undertaken.

Virtually all the scientific voyages of that era had a diverse set of overlapping objectives. While the object of some included the acquisition of new territories one object which was common to them all was gaining new knowledge: geographic, hydrographic, cartographic, botanical, zoological, what we would call anthropological, astronomical or technical , as for example when Cook was charged with testing a new compass on one of his voyages.

The motivation for acquiring this new knowledge was mixed. Botany was pursued in order to discover new species which might have medical or culinary uses, as part of the assessment of the resources of newly discovered lands, for the purpose of establishing gardens of transplanted species in the new lands or to satisfy the huge demand for exotic flora and the highly profitable trade in them which sprang up in the 18th century.

Sometimes scientific exploration was in part undertaken to build national prestige. The observation of the transit of Venus was of great scientific interest as confirming the heliocentric view of the Solar System and providing a means of accurately measuring the distance between the earth and the sun. But when the Royal Society lobbied the British Government for funding for an expedition to observe the phenomenon it did not support its submission on scientific grounds but argued that as the French had already organized several expeditions for the purpose national honor required that Britain send one of its own. Of course the Royal Society recognized its scientific value but their approach was probably motivated by the belief that a hard headed government might not have been persuaded by purely scientific arguments. Indeed when James Cook arrived in Rio de Janeiro on his way to observing the transit of Venus the Governor refused to believe that the King of England would be so foolish as to waste money on such a useless blue sky venture and concluded that Cook and his ships were smugglers or spies. But despite these mixed motives and purposes, for a great deal of the time the scientific explorers were engaged in the gaining of knowledge for its own sake.

Those three aspects of 18th century science and scientific exploration are still relevant today.

Consider the diversity of those who promoted or were prepared to fund voyages of scientific discovery. They included monarchs, Governments, philanthropic societies, individuals and learned societies such as the Royal Society, the French Academy of the Sciences and the Russian Imperial Academy. Consider too the intellectual breadth of the individuals and organizations concerned. For example the Royal Society encouraged the involvement of artists in its affairs while the Royal Academy of Art recruited mathematicians to enhance its intellectual breadth and Sir Joseph Banks counted amongst his closest friends literary and artistic figures such as Samuel Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Remember too the multidisciplinary backgrounds of the explorers and the diversity of the purposes for which the expeditions were undertaken. And finally remember that despite the rather general nature of what we would call their business plans, by one criterion or another most of these voyages were successful – profits were made, national pride was enhanced and above all the corpus of knowledge both of immediately practical application and of a more general nature was enlarged enormously.

In our age which is characterized by ever increasing specialization and the fragmentation of disciplines, limited sources of research funding, the persistence of the gulf between the two cultures identified by C.P.Snow, the increasing emphasis on economic returns on research investment and the largely false dichotomy which still exists between basic and applied research, we could well profit from reflecting on that history. However, having said that, I also acknowledge that the National Academies Forum and excellent cross disciplinary symposia like this provide strong and admirable counter examples.

The second development which still resonates today is the extremes to which the mechanical view of the world was taken in the 18th Century. The idea that mechanical principles can be applied to our understanding of the course of history has been reincarnated in modern times in the rise of historicism –most notably exemplified by Marxism – which claims to be able to account for past historical trends and predict future ones on the basis of a “science of history”. Happily the influence of Marxism has waned but despite their lack of rigour other forms of historicism are still influential.

The 18th century tendency to apply the mechanistic philosophy to inappropriate domains has a close modern analogue in the bizarre application by post modernist theorists of scientific conclusions to quite inappropriate disciplines. Examples include the application by post modernists of mathematical logic to political theory, Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity to sociological questions, non Euclidian geometry to a special space in which wars are said to be conducted and even the application of chaos theory to literary analysis. It is hard to believe that anyone can advance this sort of thing with a straight face but they are quite serious about it.

Finally I think it is instructive for us to reflect upon the role played by the emergence of the science of taxonomy in the 18th century.

Although the Linnaean system was not based on a coherent set of scientific principles it has made a considerable contribution to the development of science. It not only ordered and made data more accessible but by systemizing biology it gave rise to the life sciences as we know them today. And the branching tree of life suggested by the Linnaean system created a conceptual framework for the emergence of Darwin’s theory of natural selection - although of course that was not Linnaeus’ intention, he being strongly opposed to the idea of evolution.

We ought to remind ourselves of the contributions which taxonomy has made to science because there is a widespread failure on the part of funding agencies and scientists to appreciate its value. As the British biologist G.H.Godfrey recently commented in Nature: “(everywhere there is a) chronic lack of prestige and resources (devoted to taxonomy)”.

The neglect or undervaluing of taxonomy is partly the result of ignorance and intellectual snobbery among some scientists which can be found at even the highest levels. For example at the beginning of the 20th Century the great Lord Rutherford betrayed his ignorance of the deeper significance of taxonomy when he described it as a purely descriptive activity which had no more intellectual depth than stamp collecting and at the end of the century Luis Alvarez, a physicist of equal distinction, denigrated paleontologists using the same image. Attitudes like that betray a failure to appreciate the significant role which taxonomy has played and continues to play in the history of science.

Taxonomies are not only valuable as systems of organized information which facilitate the work of researchers: they can also be vehicles for the creation of knowledge in themselves.

Consider how that most wondrous of taxonomic systems the periodic table did not just classify the elements but predicted the existence and even described the properties of elements yet to be discovered. Take too the work of the ornithologist John Gould when he classified a collection of ordinary looking brown finches from the Galapagos Islands and identified nine new species by small differences in their beak sizes. That work led Charles Darwin to realize that populations of similar species which are isolated from each other may continue to evolve separately. That insight, which played a crucial role in the development of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, was a direct outcome of Gould’s taxonomic work.

Those three examples illustrate that although we have advanced immeasurably since then, the history of science and scientific exploration in the 18th century still has much which is interesting, inspiring and instructive for us today.