The Signature of All Things

The Enlightenment is the common term to denote the intellectual movement in 17th- and 18th-century Europe that celebrated reason, knowledge, and human experience, but it owes its origins to the artistic and cultural achievements of the Renaissance that began in 14th-century Italy, the Protestant Reformation that began in the German states in the 16th century, and the philosophy of humanism that emerged from the work of thinkers like Galileo, Copernicus, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton. In contrast to what was depicted as the intellectually darker Middle Ages, Enlightenment thinkers favored reason and curiosity over religious dogma and pursued an understanding of the natural world through the application of rigorous, systematic thought. At the same time, the European Age of Exploration expanded the world known to Western philosophers, further pushing the boundaries of knowledge.

In accordance with the conventions of the ancient Greeks, the exploration of natural phenomena up through the 18th century fell under the catch-all term of “natural philosophy,” which included the varied fields of chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology, zoology, and astronomy. Scientific methods based on observation and experimentation gradually yielded more detailed knowledge that required specialized approaches and systematic organization, and societies devoted to various fields of study continued to differentiate and establish their own models for inquiry, critique, and training.

The Latin word scientia, meaning knowledge or expertise, had been in use for centuries, but the word scientist, at first denoting a person who is devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, was coined in 1834 by the Reverend William Whewell (an English priest, natural philosopher, and polymath). Thus, what first began as fields of interest were subsequently elevated to the status of professional disciplines.

The invention of the microscope spurred the field of botany forward in the 17th century, and taxonomy (the study and classification of living organisms) was developed throughout the 18th and 19th centuries as explorers leaving European ports discovered new species abroad. In 1758, a Swedish botanist named Carl Linnaeus put forth a system for classifying organisms, which was widely adopted. By organizing natural organisms according to kingdom, class, order, genus, and species, Linnaeus established a set of hierarchical relationships between living things that hinted at relationships and change over time. By separating humans or Homo sapiens into four subspecies based on regional affiliations and ethnic features—European, Native American, African, and Asian—Linnaeus formalized a contemporary belief about human racial differentiation that has since been discredited. In Chapter 7 of The Signature of All Things, Prudence rebukes this idea and questions a visiting scholar who believes sub-Saharan Africans to be a different species from white Europeans because they have darker skin and curly hair (98-101).

Women were excluded or marginalized in most fields of science, though there have always been remarkable exceptions. Botany was one of those exceptions, for it was commonly believed that unlike other scientific pursuits, it would not tax the intellects of women too greatly. Embodying this view in the novel, a visiting professor at White Acre states that botany is “the only scientific work that is suited to the female sex, on account of its absence of cruelty, or mathematical rigor” (95). In an attempt to avoid criticism from others in her field merely for being a female, Alma makes it a point to sign her early papers as A. Whittaker. Influential female botanists included Agnes Block (1629-1704); Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717); Jeanne Baret (1740-1807), who disguised herself as a man to sail on her plant-gathering expedition around the world; and Anna Atkins (1799-1871), an English botanist and photographer who studied algae.

The question of why and how organisms change and evolve had been a topic of philosophical speculation since the 6th century BCE in the writing of Anaximander of Miletus. The idea was debated through the 18th century and addressed by philosophers including the physician Erasmus Darwin, grandfather to Charles. Early in the 19th century, French naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Monet, the Chevalier de Lamarck, proposed a theory that characteristics acquired by an organism during its lifetime could be transmitted to offspring. In the novel, Alma thinks through and discards a form of Lamarckism in Chapter 18 when she wonders why men who shave do not have sons without beards (293). Charles Darwin was the first to propose a mechanism for evolution that he could substantiate with convincing proof. Natural selection—called “survival of the fittest”—determined which offspring of a reproductive process survived. Those who lived long enough to reproduce passed on their qualities and characteristics, a process that better fit their offspring for survival and reproduction of their own.

Darwin’s ideas sparked enormous debate and strenuous resistance from those invested in the idea that a deity had created the world in accordance with certain divine specifications and intentions. Darwin is now considered an intellectual revolutionary who sparked a new era of human thought, one no less far-reaching than the Copernican revolution that had unseated the Earth from the center of the universe.