Polly, P. D. 1999. Alpheus Hyatt. In: R. Springer (ed.), Encyclopedia of Paleontology. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, Chicago, pp. 591-592.

Alpheus Hyatt

Alpheus Hyatt. Born: Washington, DC, April 6, 1838. Entered Yale in 1856. Studied geology at Harvard from 1858 to 1862. Served in the Union Army for nine months during 1863. Afterwards, studied cephalopods at Harvard with Agassiz. Curator of the Essex Institute (Salem, Massachusetts) and of the Boston Society of Natural History from 1870. Held the chairs of Zoology and Paleontology at MIT from 1870 and the chair of biology at Boston University from 1877. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1875. Cofounder (along with E.D. Cope) of the American Society of Naturalists. Died January 15, 1902 on his way to a meeting of the Boston Society of Natural History. (Crosby, 1904; Jackson, 1913.)

Alpheus Hyatt—although a tenacious antagonist of Darwin’s idea that natural selection guided evolutionary change—devoted his career to documenting and describing the process of evolution. In 1866, only seven years after Darwin’s Origin, Hyatt presented a paper to the Boston Society of Natural History—an organization over which he would preside in another four years—in which he outlined some of the basic principles of what would become known as the American neo-Lamarckian movement. In the

paper “On the parallelism between the different stages of life in the individual and those in the entire group of the molluscous order Tetrabranchiata,” Hyatt argued that species and other biological groups have life histories that are analogous to those of individual organisms. Each group had a birth, growth period, adulthood, old age, and death. Hyatt was particularly interested in the concept of “racial senescence”, which was the decline and degeneration of a group. That, he argued, was the cause of extinction. For Hyatt, evolutionary change was driven not by competition and chance, as it was in the Darwinian view, but by the same principles of growth and aging that usher an individual through its life. It did not matter how fit and robust a species was in its youth; its natural fate was decline and extinction.

For Hyatt and his colleague Edward Drinker Cope—a vertebrate paleontologist—Darwin’s theory of natural selection could only explain the evolution of superficial features, like hair color, but not the origin of structural features like bones or teeth (Bowler, 1988, 1989). Instead, they advocated a complex theory of evolution centered around the principles of growth and development (Pfeifer, 1965; Dexter, 1979). Repeated actions, they argued, caused the concentration of an unknown growth force—Cope speculated that it might be electrical in nature—which resulted in the growth and perfection of the exercised structures. Over generations, new structures would arise and evolve in this manner. In contrast, disuse resulted in the atrophy and loss of features on an evolutionary time scale. These two processes were known respectively as acceleration and retardation (Cope, 1866; Gould, 1977; Richardson and Kane, 1988).

Hyatt spent his career popularizing his theoretical work, supporting it with paleontological studies of cephalopods and other mollusks. His papers included works on evolution, taxonomy, and development. Among the most famous of these—after his 1866 paper—was “Transformations of Planorbis at Steinheim, with remarks on the effects of gravity upon the forms of shells and animals.” In it, Hyatt used the small fossil snails found in the Miocene Steinheim meteor crater to argue that changes in general habits resulted in evolutionary transformations. Hyatt and Cope used The American Naturalist—which they jointly founded—as the primary outlet for their

scientific work and to showcase that of other neo-Lamarckian evolutionists.

Hyatt and Cope gained a great following in the United States during the 19th Century, included among them the geologists Clarence King and Joseph Le Conte, the zoologists Alpheus Packard, and Joel Allen, and the paleontologists William Dall and the young Henry Osborn. In America their influence was so pervasive that in 1907 (five years after Hyatt’s death) Vernon Kellogg was able to pronounce Darwin’s theory of natural selection dead (Kellogg, 1907; Bowler, 1988). But the Americans were misunderstood or ignored in Europe. In a letter to Hyatt in 1872, Charles Darwin wrote, “I confess that I have never been able to grasp fully what you wish to show” (in Darwin, 1903: 339). In the early 20th Century the influence of Hyatt and the neo-Lamarckians waned (Bowler, 1988, 1989). T. H. Morgan and his lab fruit-fly geneticists at Columbia University worked hard to demonstrate that characteristics that were acquired during the life of an individual were not passed on to the next generation. The new genetics was combined with population biology and studies of variability in the neo-Darwinian paradigm of the Modern Synthesis (Provine, 1971; Bowler, 1989). The death of Darwinism had been prematurely announced and, after the 1940’s, the neo-Lamarckians, including Hyatt, were largely forgotten.

REFERENCES Cope, E. D. 1866. On the Origin of Genera.

Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, pp. 272-273

Crosby, W. O. 1904. Memoir of Alpheus Hyatt. Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, 14: 504-512.

Darwin, F. 1903. More Letters of Charles Darwin: Vol. 1. John Murray, London.

Dexter, R. W. 1979. The impact of evolutionary theories of the Salem group of Agassiz Zoologists (Morse, Hyatt, Packard, Putnum). Essex Institute Historical Collections, 115: 144-171.

Gould, S. J. 1977. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Belknap Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Jackson, R. T. 1913. Alpheus Hyatt and his principles of research. The American Naturalist, 47: 195-205.

Kellogg, V. L. 1907. Darwinism Today: a Discussion of Present Day Scientific Criticism of the Darwinian Selection Theories. New York and London.

Pfeifer, E. J. 1965. The genesis of American Neo-Lamarckism. ISIS, 56: 156-167.

Provine, W. B. 1971. The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Richardson, R. C. and T. C. Kane. 1988. Orthogenesis and evolution in the 19th Century: the idea of progress in American Neo-Lamarckism. In

M. H. Nitecki (ed.), Evolutionary Progress, pp. 149-167. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

FURTHER READING ABOUT HYATT Bowler, P. J. 1988. The Non-Darwinian Revolution:

Reinterpreting a Historical Myth. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. 328 pp.

Bowler, P. J. 1989. Evolution: The History of an Idea (Revised Edition). University of California Press, Berkeley. 432 pp.

Crosby, W. O. 1904. Memoir of Alpheus Hyatt. Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, 14: 504-512.

Jackson, R. T. 1913. Alpheus Hyatt and his principles of research. The American Naturalist, 47: 195-205.

Winsor, M. P. 1991. Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Further Reading By Hyatt Hyatt, A. 1866. On the parallelism between the

different stages of life in the individual and those in the entire group of the molluscous order Tetrabranchiata. Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History, 1: 193-209.

Hyatt, A. 1871. On natural selection. Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History, 14: 146-148.

Hyatt, A. 1880. Transformations of Planorbis at Steinheim with remarks on the effects of gravity upon the forms of shells and animals. Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 29: 527-550.

Hyatt, A. 1884. The evolution of the Cephalopoda. Science, 3: 122-127, 145-149.

Hyatt, A. 1888. Values in classification of the stages of growth and decline with propositions for a new nomenclature. Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History, 28: 396-408.

Hyatt, A. 1893. Phylogeny of an acquired characteristic. American Naturalist, 27: 865-877.

Alpheus HyattREFERENCESFURTHER READING ABOUT HYATT