Romanticize your life science

In college, I took every class on Romantic literature offered me. I use this education every day, whether I’m writing about a molecule or weeping over the beauty of an autumn leaf.  

Reading The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf, I was reminded of the profound ways in which science influenced the Romantics. Some works, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, deal with science directly; others, like William Wordsworth’s sonnets from the River Duddon, used Humboldt’s writings as source material to speak more generally about nature. 

I was even more delighted to learn how literature—and one author, in particular—influenced science. 

Goethean science

In 1794, Humboldt spent a snowy winter Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe was already Germany’s most famous writer; Humboldt was years from becoming the world’s most famous scientist.

During a snowy winter and an ensuing friendship, Goethe influenced Humboldt in two important ways. The first was by sharing his poetic sensibility, which Humboldt would carry through in his writing henceforward.

The second was Goethe’s conception of nature: “his belief that—contrary to Descartes’s theory that animals were machines—a living organism consisted of parts that only function as a unified whole,” Wulf writes. “To put it simply, a machine could be dismantled and then assembled again, while the parts of a living organism worked only in relation to each other. In a mechanical system the parts shaped the whole while in an organic system the whole shaped the parts.”

Goethe didn’t offer just a pretty turn of phrase, although poets are good at that. What he offered was a way of understanding nature that diverged from what was popular at the time and calls to mind a systems-based understanding that emphasizes interrelationships. 

Goethe’s idea laid the groundwork for Humboldt to interpret the natural world “as a unified whole that is animated by interactive forces,” evident in his Naturgemälde—a map linking plants, altitude, and geology—and the volumes he wrote about his time exploring South and Central America. In turn, these volumes inspired a young Charles Darwin.

Evolution of thought

Darwin idolized Humboldt. He packed his volumes into his tiny cabin aboard the HMS Beagle and read them prodigiously, using them to guide his attention as he sailed around the world.

Darwin was also influenced by the poetry of Humboldt’s accounts, often recording near-identical phrasing. (So much so that his sister complained, “you had, probably from reading so much of Humboldt, got his phraseology,” and “the kind of flowery french expressions which he uses.”)

Seeing South America through Humboldt’s eyes, Wulf argues, enabled Darwin to grasp the connections that would one day form the basis of his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Poetry allows us to engage with the world in a way that transcends the literal. Beyond plain science, it seems fair to say Darwin owed his poetic sensibility to Humboldt—and thus, in a sense, to Goethe.

There are many mysteries left for us to discover. Perhaps we must be primed to receive them first through poetry. 

Reading, watching:

• This study in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface explores how misinformation originates in biological systems as well as strategies for controlling damage.

• The 2002 BBC documentary series The Century of the Self is available in various forms on YouTube. Adam Curtis examines at how Freud’s theories gave rise to—among much else—the field of public relations.

• I loved this interview with one of the author’s of the AAAS Press Package team’s recent generative AI experiment in the Last Word on Nothing. While ChatGPT Plus could explain findings in simpler terms, it struggled to put them into human context.

• This study in Nature finds that people from groups historically less trusting of science are more likely to trust scientists who share their characteristics, and that expanding representation can increase trust in science.

I’ll end with this beautiful reflection from my friend Mary O’Reilly in her newsletter The Art of Basic Science: 

See you in the new year!