The Great Physiologist of Heidelberg

Natural History, July, 1999 by Stephen Jay Gould

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   I take the liberty of presenting to the Royal Society a paper on a subject
   which appears to me to be of great importance in the natural history,
   anatomy, and physiology of Man; interesting also in a political and
   legislative point of view. Celebrated naturalists ... look upon the Negroes
   as a race inferior to the European in organisation and intellectual powers,
   having much resemblance with the Monkey.... Were it proved to be correct,
   the Negro would occupy a different situation in society flora that which
   has been so lately given him by the noble British Government.

In short, Tiedemann wrote his paper in English to honor and commemorate the abolition of the slave trade in Great Britain. The process had been long and tortuous (also torturous). Under the vigorous prodding of such passionate abolitionists as William Wilberforce (whose son, Bishop Samuel "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce, became an equally passionate anti-Darwinian--for what goes `round admirably can come `round ridiculously, and history often repeats itself according to Marx's motto "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce"), Britain had abolished the West Indian slave trade in 1807 but had not freed those already enslaved. Full manumission, with complete abolition, did not occur until 1833--a great event in human history that Tiedemann chose to celebrate in the most useful manner he could devise in his role as a professional scientist: by writing a technical article to promote a true argument that, he hoped, would do some moral good as well.

I cited Tiedemann's opening paragraph to praise his wise mixture of factual information and moral concern and to resolve the puzzle of his composition in a foreign tongue. I can only end with his closing paragraph, an even more forceful statement of the moral theme and a testimony to a most admirable man, whom history has forgotten but who did his portion of good with the tools that his values, his intellectual gifts, and his sense of purpose had provided:

   The principal result of my researches on the brain of the Negro is, that
   neither anatomy nor physiology can justify our placing them beneath the
   Europeans in a moral or intellectual point of view. How is it possible,
   then, to deny that the Ethiopian race is capable of civilisation? This is
   just as false as it would have been in the time of Julius Caesar to have
   considered the Germans, Britons, Helvetians, and Batavians incapable of
   civilisation. The slave trade was the proximate and remote reason of the
   innumerable evils which retarded the civilisation of the African tribes.
   Great Britain has achieved a noble and splendid act of national justice in
   abolishing the slave trade. The chain which bound Africa to the dust, and
   prevented the success of every effort that was made to raise her, is
   broken.

Stephen Jay Gould teaches biology, geology, anti the history of science at Harvard University: He is also the Frederick P. Rose Honorary Curator in Invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History.

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