Edgar Anderson of the Missouri Botanical Garden had long and rich collaborations with such mathematicians and mathematically inclined biologists as R. A. Fisher, Sewall Wright, and John Tukey. It was Anderson’s Iris data that Fisher used to develop his linear discriminant function to capture multiple variations. A sabbatical with Wright in 1933 helped hone Anderson’s mathematical skills while helping him understand what mathematics could and could not do. He and Tukey shared an interest in conveying data graphically. This long-standing commitment to applying mathematics to natural history problems informed his scientific career as he sought to capture the variations he recognized in the natural populations. He used graphical tools to examine hybridization as an evolutionary mechanism and to use the taxonomic data from these variations to study the underlying genetic forces at work in evolution. In important synthesis articles in the mid-1950s, he summarized his conclusions about applied mathematics and natural history. They were not mere technical tools, but reflected a commitment to observation and pattern recognition as the basis of his science. Understanding these views more fully deepens an appreciation of this constantly independent-minded contributor to evolutionary theory in the twentieth century.

One of the best arguments for approaching the history of information processing and handling in the human and natural sciences as a “history of data” is that it focuses our attention on relationships, convergences, and contingent historical developments that can be obscured following more traditional areas of focus on individual disciplines or technologies. This essay explores one such case of convergence in nineteenth-century data history between empirical natural history (paleontology and botany), bureaucratic statistics (cameralism), and contemporary historiography, arguing that the establishment of visual conventions around the presentation of temporal patterns in data involved interactions between ostensibly distinct knowledge traditions. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Histories of Data and the Database edited by Soraya de Chadarevian and Theodore M. Porter.

This paper traces the emergence of a new visual language for statistical paleontology in the early nineteenth century as part of a broader project to uncover a deep genealogy of modern practices in data visualization. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, natural historians had amassed large quantities of taxonomic data, but lacked quantitative and visual methods to produce and communicate knowledge derived from their data collections. As our “main witness” (in Ian Hacking’s sense), we call on the German paleontologist H. G. Bronn—one of the earliest proponents of a “data-driven” approach to statistical natural history—to highlight two unexpected sources of a transformative visual idiom introduced at the time: so-called spindle diagrams representing historical patterns in taxonomic diversity. The first source—which informed Bronn’s general statistical approach to fossil data—was the bureaucratic science of cameralism, in which Bronn was steeped as a student and professor at the University of Heidelberg. The second was an earlier tradition of historical visualization popularized by Joseph Priestley and others, which represented time—or the “timeline”—as measured graphical space on the horizontal axis of a chart. In combining the tabular statistical approach of Heidelberg cameralism and the historical timeline, Bronn contributed to the emergence of a powerful new visual language for producing and communicating aggregative statistical generalizations.

This paper discusses the political dimension of Odón de Buen's (1863–1945) expository practices—teaching and popularizing—as a university professor of natural history in Barcelona and later in Madrid at the turn of the nineteenth century. De Buen appropriated Ernst Haeckel's ideas on evolution in order to promote an ambitious political agenda, based on republican, freethinking, anticlerical values. To that end, he moved beyond the confines of academic science within the university and sought to bring modern concepts of natural history into elementary schools, athenaeums, political clubs and associations, scientific trips, popular books, periodicals, and the daily press. In such places, de Buen's natural history acted as an intellectual weapon with which to confront the conservative monarchic attitudes of the Spanish Restoration, but it also provided a moral backing to a society, which felt backward in terms of science and technology and was desperately seeking new sources of inspiration and national pride.

Recognizing natural history collections as dynamic scientific tools that enable unique forms of comparative analysis, theorizing, and questioning offers a new perspective on the history of the life sciences in the twentieth century that emphasizes the important role that collections played in the transformation of biology. To build an understanding of “collections-based research,” this paper focuses on the career of Alden Holmes Miller, who led the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley through significant institutional, disciplinary, and technological changes (1940–1965). This paper examines how Miller’s efforts as researcher, administrator, and teacher enabled him to foster collections-based research. Miller’s own research into speciation and reproductive physiology are examples of collectionsbased work, incorporating concepts, theories, practices, and tools from the laboratory, museum, and field.

The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) is reputed to have transformed botanical practice by shunning the process of illustrating plants and relying on the primacy of literary descriptions of plant specimens. Botanists and historians have long debated Linnaeus's capacities as a draftsman. While some of his detailed sketches of plants and insects reveal a sure hand, his more general drawings of landscapes and people seem ill-executed. The overwhelming consensus, based mostly on his Lapland diary (1732), is that Linnaeus could not draw. Little has been said, however, on the role of drawing and other visual representations in Linnaeus's daily work as seen in his other numerous manuscripts. These manuscripts, held mostly at the Linnean Society of London, are peppered with sketches, maps, tables, and diagrams. Reassessing these manuscripts, along with the printed works that also contain illustrations of plant species, shows that Linnaeus's thinking was profoundly visual and that he routinely used visual representational devices in his various publications. This paper aims to explore the full range of visual representations Linnaeus used through his working life, and to reevaluate the epistemological value of visualization in the making of natural knowledge. By analyzing Linnaeus's use of drawings, maps, tables, and diagrams, I will show that he did not, as has been asserted, reduce the discipline of botany to text, and that his visual thinking played a fundamental role in his construction of new systems of classification.

The rise of experimentation and the decline of natural history constitute the historiographic backbone to most narratives about the history of the life sciences in the twentieth century. As I argue here, however, natural history practices, such as the collection and comparison of data from numerous species, and experimental practices have actually converged throughout the century, giving rise to a new hybrid research culture which is essential to the contemporary life sciences. Looking at some examples of researchers who studied experimentally the relationships between organisms offers a unique window into how the norms, values, and practices of natural history entered the laboratory and, conversely, how the norms, values, and practices of experimentation transformed natural history. This paper concentrates on a largely overlooked episode in the history of the life sciences: the development of Alan A. Boyden's serological taxonomy. In the United States, from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, he was the most prominent advocate of this experimental approach in natural history. His quest for an objective method to understand the relationships among species, his creation of a serological museum where he could apply his comparative perspective, and his continued negotiations between natural historical and experimental traditions, illustrate the rise of a new hybrid research culture in the twentieth century. It also helps us solve a historiographic puzzle, namely how biological diversity become so central in the experimental life sciences, i.e., in a tradition which we generally understand as having focused on a few model organisms, and which relegated the study of biodiversity to naturalists and their museums.