The Evolutionary Archive

let me introduce our speaker for today um Katrina Dean who comes from Tasmania so she's come a long way to talk to us all today um it's taken her 10 years to get here and the last five of which she has spent as curator for History of Science at the British Library which strikes me as an absolutely gorgeous job to have however it's not all that gorgeous because you find a better one and in three months time Katrina will be going off to be the archivist at Melbourne University so that's sort of most of the way home but not quite well um so this is this your last public appearance in London no uh in two weeks time time Museum so this is almost your last chance to catch Katrina and if you want a second helping then you have chance in two weeks time meanwhile we have a talk on John Maynard Smith who is a much loved fellow with rossites and highly respected within the society in a way that few pillows are so we to an extent I should say and um we look forward very much to learning more about him and about his archery well thank you very much for taking the time thank you thank you for coming along today so um today I'm going to just give you a very straightforward talk about about the archive of John Maynard Smith how it came to the British Library um what we're doing to curate it and what kind of historical questions might be able to be explored using this archive and of course I'll give you a little bit of background about John Maynard Smith and his work as well but I'll just preface it with some sort of Reflections on on issues around information that I've been thinking about for a time in relation to the history of science more generally so in the history of biology the information metaphor is one of the most contested and pervasive metaphors really and it's helped and it's hindered many biologists think about issues of transmission communicate with the public and connect with other disciplines analogies have spread to other Sciences as in the ice core archive here in the earth sciences and the metaphor has returned to be adopted rather uncritically by the information profession when I first saw this news story I thought it was actually a story about the archiving of some kind of digital genomic information but in fact it is um the storage of digital preservation technology um to preserve information in the future it doesn't actually have anything to do with genomic information or biology at all they're just using the metaphor of the genome as information so it's sort of going around in a circle a metaphor that started out in one area has been applied to biology and now it's coming back into the information profession and some of you have read Richard Dawkins the selfish Gene will be familiar with the idea of the meme and the transmission of culture and that's just another example of that so while these are kind of separate issues I think by analogy it's quite useful to think about the history of biology in terms of its information Heritage and it's quite a familiar approach for which there are many precedents notable in this are the large distributed Archives of 19th century Evolution including the papers of Darwin Wallace Bateson and others of which the British Library holds a number of items but also many other archives the primary Darwin archives at Cambridge University library for example but today I'm going to talk about the lesser-known archives of post-world War II evolutionary science and in particular the archive of John Maynard Smith 1920-2004 this is update I will suggest some ways in which these new sources might contribute to the history of evolution and to the history of 20th century science I think we can think about the study of the history of evolution in terms of quite different informational models we can think about it in terms of tree-like or ancestral models vertical models that look back to the precursors of current evolutionary ideas or alternatively we can look at it in terms of a network model that traces the horizontal relationships to contemporary development in the history of science so while studies of 19th century Evolution have explored their ancestors they've tended to emphasize the discontinuity of darwinian evolution as a new Theory historians have studied the wider networks of 19th century correspondence and natural history to explain the major developments in 19th century evolutionary thinking that by way of contrast perhaps the historiography of the 20th century Evolution has emphasized connections to Darwin and or to other ancestors like Lamarck and even within the so-called neo-darwinian Camp of modern evolutionary science particular ancestral lines can be traced for example John Maiden Smith to John burden Sanderson haldane or William Donald Hamilton to Ronald Fisher and indeed evolutionary scientists have tended to think and to write about the history of their own disciplines in this way as genealogists of ideas and to put 2009 celebrations of Darwin in context there is plenty of previous Darwin commemoration material in the John Mayer Smith archive in the 1980s there was a big commemoration and there's lots of activity by John Maynard Smith and others around that commemoration thinking about their own work in relation to the history of the discipline and that's a very interesting part of the archive so in this sense contemporary evolutionary scientists can be seen as basically filling out the pieces of a puzzle that was set by their intellectual ancestors through a series of empirical and and refined theoretical tools so I think this approach is being explored in Popular Science in philosophy and sociology and some examples of some of the work in this field are Andrew Brown's book on the Darwin Wars there's a book by oluka sagerstral called Defenders of the truth which is about the sociobiology debate in the 1970s and 80s and there's a there's a few examples around so it seems possible if that if we look into the archive however that we might we might be able to write some new directions um in the history of evolutionary science using some new sources I'm giving some examples um some of the Richer studies of 19th century evolutionary science have explored the relationship of intellectual with social and political development not just for the political implications of evolution so social Darwinism for example but also as forms of historical explanation of the development of Darwin's theory itself so I guess my aim today is simply to suggest how the emerging evolutionary archive might support the study of intellectual developments in evolutionary thinking alongside the study of evolution as part of the wider networks of 20th century science and Society so that's the preface but what we really want to know is uh who was John Maynard Smith and what's in his archive so John Maynard Smith was the son of a banker his father died in 1928 and he lived in bakshu spending summers in Devon with his paternal grandparents and exploring Natural History he went to Eden which he disliked very much until around the age of 16 when he discovered Darwinism communism and the work of JBS haldane he studied maths and Engineering at Cambridge and he worked as an aeronautical engineer in in World War II working on problems of stress in aircraft but after the war he decided to change disciplines and he studied zoology at University College London with haldane and he started a PhD in fruit fly genetics working on the classical organism of population genetics and he formed a lifelong connection with haldane and there's quite a lot of scientific and personal material relating to haldane in the archive there's some commemorative material around the time that haldane went to India some poems John Mayer Smith is a is a contributor but also there are some correspondence mainly to do with events in the later part of holidays live around his settling invest Affairs after he'd gone to India Maynard Smith had an engineer's ability to use numbers to model systems and most of his work was in the field of population biology he joined the Communist Party when a teenager but he left in 1956. in 1965 he was appointed the professor of biology and the founding dean of the new school of biology at University of Sussex and at a time of Reform of Departments of biology across the UK aiming to facilitate a liberal education and interdisciplinary studies intellectually Mainland Smith was known or is known as a neodyist one who studied the evolution of adaptation through natural selection and who tried to apply this approach to different problems and environments and many have his intellectual concerns address traditional unsolved problems such as the evolution of sex which can be traced to ancestral concerns in the history of evolution but his main Innovation was however in the application of Game Theory to the evolution of animal behavior and he's well known for this paper with another figure called George price George price was a really interesting character who had started out in um Computing had worked for IBM had tried to write some popular books on on cold war strategy in the U. S and migrated to the UK and just started working on evolutionary problems using mathematical techniques so he was a bit of an outsider to this field but he managed to submit a paper to nature which came by John Maynard Smith as a reviewer and they began work together and this became the sort of famous Atlas papers of 1973 in which he first started to develop the idea of the evolutionary stable strategy Maynard Smith also studied topics like the evolution of language and later in his career molecular Evolution and variation as applied to the case of bovanta regulosis for example and what's interesting about this archive is actually unlike most 20th century scientist archives there's very very little committee papers uh you know sitting on scientific committees advising government all that sort of thing there's very little of that in this material and I I suspect that's partly because that wasn't an activity John Maynard Smith was was heavily involved in but he was involved in this particular study with uh in veterinary science and I think it might be quite fruitful to consider how some of these studies related to wider networks in the social and biological sciences so for example whilst Mainland Smith isn't a laboratory scientist and he's not a field scientist either he has lots of connections to people who are working in laboratories on molecular problems people who are working on the fields in ethology and observation of animal behavior and so on so at Sussex Maynard Smith was part of the population studies group and again very dissimilar to many scientists that we we know quite well in post-war history he didn't build a research school so it wasn't that he had lots of students and they all worked on problems that he defined or anything like that but on the other hand as is totally clear from the archive he wasn't a lone thinker by any means and his group hosted lots of visitors and you can sort of see I think Between 1979 and 82 there's a hundred letters of people wanted to come and visit his group so he has a lot of international visitors coming and going having lots of conversations in Fairly informal contexts attends a lot of conferences speaks to doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers at those conferences so a lot of the interaction is very informal rather than through specific training in a research school and that's quite unusual at this time really he was definitely a convivial person who was renowned at conferences and had a huge correspondence Network and they're about I think there's more than 600 letters in the archive from scientists all around the world and also a lot of John Mayer Smith outgoing correspondence so he actually copied his replies and kept those with his archive as well the correspondences of a Kind again that's rarely seen in a contemporary archive it has detailed discussion and workings out of scientific arguments including reasoning and equations so this letter to dick lewinton is around the time probably of the reviews that John Maynard Smith did of EO Wilson's book sociobiology and other other Publications that came up following that Republic or possibly the review of Gene's mind and culture which was a later book and he gets engaged in very very detailed discussions with people about the content of the books what are the arguments they're making does that help hold up to the extent that he will go and rerun calculations he will develop little computer models to test what they're exploring and so on and here's an example on the right of the handwritten notes so you can see he's actually going into quite a lot of detail about you know what are they thinking how does the reasoning work how could one mathematize that and so on I think this on the left is actually a letter from Wilson I'm talking about that so I mean the whole sociobiology debate and Maynard Smith's role in that is quite interesting as well it's basically a debate um in the 1970s and 80s about whether or not it's appropriate to apply the methodologies and findings of animal studies and animal behavior to human so ciety and whether that's fruitful or beneficial in any way whether it is scientifically plausible and it became very entrenched with different political stances it came following the um debate around around intelligence testing in the 1970s the work of Arthur Jensen and it involved people in the US it involved biologists in the UK including people like Stephen Rosen and John Maynard Smith so it was a very um big event you know in terms of looking at science and Society in this period and John Mayer and Smith's way of dealing with this was very very scientific so he got very engaged in the detailed arguments that people are making rather than trying to get involved in posing um with regard to particular political views or particular ideological views he wanted to get down to you know what are the arguments how do they work scientifically and for that reason he spent quite a long time doing these reviews of the books that came out and he went through all the maths and he sort of said that he felt that he was one of the the one one of the people who could engage with the mass and so he felt a responsibility to do it and he he read through all of that work so his work was collaborative it was International and it was on paper and in a sense the archive has an even more important role in understanding his work and to this extent it doesn't really correspond to the history of science As We Know It with its emphasis on laboratories on facilities and on Vic science however we can pick up some other themes of 20th century science later but John Mayer Smith was a gardener and a chess player which is kind of two interesting connections with traditional natural history on the one hand and he has quite a lot of plant lists and observations in his archive as well as a chess player and there's this notebook of Chess book nodes and chess moves that he's recording and he actually played chess with Donald Mickey who was an artificial intelligence scientist contemporary of his also in the Communist party for a long time and um they actually had chess matches together and so he's sort of recording the moves that he's making and so on so this seems a good place to talk about what's in the archive but first a little bit about its provenance or you know where did it come from how did it come to the British Library so it was donated to the British Library by John Maynard Smith in 2004 and it followed the deposit of another large evolutionary archive that of William Don Hamilton following the latest untimely death in 2004 on a oh no 2000 I think on a trip to the Amazon and the biologist John Ashworth was then the chair of the British Library board and so basically that's a connection there and that's how these two large collections came to the British library and they sort of provided a bit of emphasis for collecting some of the post-war archives of science at the British Library so the archive was transported directly from John Maynard Smith's office at Sussex University in what is now the Maynard Smith building and unfortunately I don't have any photographs of the collection before it was moved but I think if we were collecting this archive today we would want to sort of document it in its context um a bit more so the archive for that reason mainly documents May announce Miss time at Sussex University although there's a smaller amount of scientific material largely off prints dating back to 1948.

it covers all of his major research and public activities um he was quite involved in in public debates around creationism and often got asked to speak at public debates at the the Oxford Union and so on um but also was a public broadcaster mainly on the radio and was very involved with the talks Division and would often get asked to give sort of you know the scientist perspective on science and religion or philosophical questions so he was actually seen as a scientist who would be able to explain some some scientific ideas to the public um you know sort of public media context I think in 19 early 1950s he wrote a more a penguin sort of more of a popular book on evolutionary theory as well and that sort of started to establish his reputation in that area he was also um a kind of peculiar file in the archive which is basically on the topic of gay Evolution and this is kind of interesting because it shows how Maynard Smith would deal with inquiries from non-scientific members of the public there's a really kind of interesting interaction around Leia and and scientific interaction there and the way that Mainland Smith deals with this is rather than seeing it as a sort of crown glitter or whatever he actually tries to engage scientifically with the content of the argument and there's a bit of Correspondence and so on about scientific problems of the evolution of sex and and Maynard Smith does give it a serious consideration but in the end um given that his interlocutor isn't a scientist and there isn't really any kind of common language to have a discussion about this I think Maynard Smith basically takes what is a liberal position in the in the relationship between science and society and he basically says as Richard Dawkins does that although science um may say that nature is in a certain way that in no way constraints how humans should behave or organize themselves socially so it's kind of a separation of the two things uh you know while while there may be um biological reasons that humans are in touch in such a way on the other hand that you know we're also made to think and to socialize and to be creative and and to make our own decisions about how we want to organize Society so he kind of made a separation between those two things which I think is kind of interesting given his political background it's very different from the science and Society position of people like Bernal and uh haldane even and I think that would be very interesting to try and track some of those changes in the relationship between science and politics say from the 1940s to the 1960s so the other thing I guess that's interesting about this archive is while um people are very happy to categorize Maynard Smith as a as a neo-darminist and to have had a particular position about you know how Evolution happens um in fact the archive documents are much much wider variety of approaches in evolutionary science so there's a whole file again about the sociobiology positions which are quite different studies of animal behavior there's a whole file on the work of Marion lamb and Eva Leon Blanca on the inheritance of acquired variation effectively looking into more of a Lamarcus position and so on so in fact he does actually seriously engage with a whole range of different perspectives in in science not just his own particular position I think that's important to remember and that's what makes the archive rather interesting yes and again this is uh some of the computer printouts and so on in his farm in relation to the review of Jane's mind and culture that he did in the 1980s again he he must have spend a huge amount of time reviewing this book and had sort of printed you know written his own computer programs and so on so what's missing from the archive that's also an interesting question to ask not just what's there but what's missing as I said before there are no committee papers and there's little concerning his early life or politics and I think these are two absences which kind of reinforce one another if we consider that his most active political life was before it was early in his career before he moved to Sussex so much of that material is just lost or perhaps I don't know perhaps other people have it perhaps it remains with the family but I haven't been able to track any of that material down if it does exist so what we have is very much his you know established scientific professional career from the 1960s at Sussex and this is not unique to the JMS archive and it's something I've noticed in other contemporary archives at the British library in particular and I think it may have something to do with what we consider as interesting in scientists lives you know that the only thing that's interesting about scientists is their science and and that you know that's perhaps the perspective they have on themselves as well whereas I think you know from a historical point of view we're actually interested in their whole biography we're interested in their personal background we're interested in their education what other cultural inferences there were on them and I think that would be quite an important message to get across if you were advising scientists about what kind of material to keep for the future and it actually has quite a big effect on the way that scientists are perceived um on the death of McLaren and who is a Ross foreignty and her ex-husband Donald Mickey there's an interesting correspondence in the newspaper from members of her family saying uh it's all very interesting all the obituaries and so on that have been written about the wonderful scientific contributions that these people have made but but these are actually two individuals who've had a very strong commitment to social justice and a social agenda over a long period of years and there's actually been very little vision about that and I I thought that was an interesting perspective from a from a family member and a family which itself is in many different ways still quite committed to issues of of social interest as well so I think that sort of covered what's not in the archive the archive is how is it arranged well it's largely arranged in the original order that it that it came to um when when we got it from Sussex and the main categories are Publications by JMS then there are some correspondence files that cover some pretty routine day-to-day correspondence like testimonials and there are some kind of pretty hilarious testimonials in there for people in my own field in this History of Science and Science and Technology studies John Maynard Smith was obviously the scientist that people rang up when they weren't really sure how to understand what historians of science were doing and say could you give us a perspective on this fellow um there there's a lot of review material in there and you know there's a bigger a lot of review of penrose's work for example Roger penrose's work on the emperor's new mind and other things so these are very much part of that review culture there's lots of information about visits there are referees reports for other scientists lots of correspondence with Publishers and of course he published several books lots of stuff about his conference arrangements and so on and this is kind of another interesting um perspective this is a review for a contribution of Maynard Smith to a book by Lynn margulias and I think it's Ronald Fester again you know people who who Lynn margulis has known for her work with James Lovelock in looking at the evolution of organisms in response to their environment but also of the environment in response to organisms which is a very controversial position relative to that of John manit Smith and his colleagues and again he's engaging with that through a publication there are the most important part of the archive are actually subject files and these are the main part of the archive they document John Mayer Smith's own work so they've got off prints drafts handwritten notes showing his bibliographic style equations his reasoning and they've got detailed and substantial correspondence and these files are basically arranged by uh subjects using his own titles so you can see how he classified his own work so that could be quite good for historians I think who don't want to feel like they're sort of you know the the original context is being written over by an archivist later I mean it pretty much is organized as men and Smith organizer himself and computer printouts will show the importance of the of the personal computer to the scientists work as well this is not at all uh Computing that's done on a big supercomputer in a big facility this is just stuff that he's running little programs modeling on his on his personal computer and these are just some examples of the of the little handwritten notes that he would do when he's working on a problem trying to reason it out these uh this file is actually on uh his studies of mycobacterium so the the tuberculosis question again there's also a small amount of um lecture notes and that's an example of both slides and so on that he was giving at his lectures um there are some notebooks and I think this one is is really lovely it's a book of expenses of monies received for services rendered basically all the talks and public lectures and so on that he was giving you know and this is not his handwriting so I wonder if it is possibly his his wife who's keeping keeping these accounts and keeping this notebook um of you know where the things are coming from and so forth there are off prints um that show the work of other people again that lots of people are sending papers to John Wayne and Smith they're seeking advice um and it just shows how seriously he engaged with this wider literature in evolutionary science and there's lots of annotations and lots of letters and notes around other people's work as well um interesting aspect of this archive are the born digital so-called well electronic manuscripts or digital files however you want to call them um and there were two hard drives and approximately 100 floppy disks that came with uh Maine and Smith archive they don't appear to be many files on the hard drive but there are a few and there are some drafts of his book with David Harper on animal signals and with you know you can see on the right there this is the kind of draft and this is our our little cataloging system that we've got on the left there so we're just trying to catalog those and bring those into the system as well so researchers can use them um again there's this sort of interesting thing with modern archives where you have some versions of one piece of work which might be a digital file and the next one is a printout and then it's back to the digital file again so the kind of study of trying to link all those different versions together if you're interested in how a manuscript changes over time or something it will be quite a lot of work for researchers but you can sort of see there were several versions of some of these chapters within that hard drive and I was able to tell which was the earlier one and you know just by looking at the publication basically and you know who who contributed what um the other interesting thing that uh my colleague Jeremy John who's the curator of e-manuscripts at the library has experimented with is to basically emulate the the hard drive and how it looked um how John Wayne Smith's hard drive looked so what we would really like to do is not just kind of show you a file and a catalog record but it wouldn't it be nice if you could just sit down and pretend that you're doing management for the day and boot off his computer and see okay well this is how he had his files this is where they were and it's technically possible there are just all sorts of kind of logistical issues and I guess not least data protection issues around doing that but um this is what his his hard drive would look like when he booted it up basically this is what we've run from his hard drive you can see it sort of that slightly 1980s typeface and so on different versions of Windows um and then you know you can just go through and open some of the documents there and this is some of the haldane memorial kind of literature so I guess I just sort of want to finish really um fairly briefly with what we're doing in terms of archival projects to make this archive available um a draft catalog is available now and uh oh that's not showing up very well oh yes you can see it there if you if you go to this link the top link there search archive. bl. uk and you type in Maynard Smith you will be able to go to the catalog and you'll be able to search the whole catalog for yourself really and it's got quite a lot of background information about his career and things he was working on there as well um the other thing that I I kind of have struggled with with some of these contemporary archives is they often come with a lot of off prints and Publications now obviously it's a British library and many other libraries as well we hold many of these Publications in duplicate triplicate you know we're subscribers to these journals and so the question is for if they come in as part of a Sciences archive do you really want to keep them or you know is it just duplicating but of course the the great thing about an off-print collection is it shows you everything they were reading a church who's writing to them there's annotations all those kinds of things so I sort of it's quite labor intensive but I do think it is worth trying to bibliography um those collections even if you're not going to keep them because then at least you can sort of see what was in the collection what was being read and I think that would be quite a good resource for a historian to then just go back to rather than having to reconstitute that bibliography later on so we've done we've done uh about 600 of the off prints in the collection but there are many many more I'd say that's probably only a quarter of what what there are um correspondence it would be great to um do a calendar of the correspondence and perhaps to publish some of the correspondence online and one of the main risks around this obviously is third-party rights in in correspondence and I you know I don't know how many of you professional archivists or or what you know what what the audience constitutes but really um when you write a letter to someone you're passing ownership to them but you're not passing your copyright in the content of the letter that you've written so often many archives actually contain mostly letters from other people of which you do not own the copyright neither John Mayer Smith nor the British librarian the copyright so there's a kind of risk that if you put all this information online which is effectively publishing it um copyright is retained by others but actually I think that's less daunting than it than it might be because I know that some scientists students colleagues of John Maynard Smith are actually publishing the correspondences from him online already and I've found examples of that on the web where they've published their correspondence and so perhaps you know perhaps putting it up and having a takedown policy if people objected would not be actually so risky especially where most of these correspondence is is of a scientific nature it's not personal correspondence and then obviously you would need to examine it quite carefully to protect um any private or personal information so um of course there's also the other archives we hold a very small amount of manuscripts and letters of George price at the British Library as well which came to us and they complement this archive very nicely and there's also a larger a much larger Archive of Hamilton which is held at the library on loan as well and and that's um together those three really make up a quite an amazing resource and there's still a lot of work to be done especially on the Hamilton archive um there's a small amount of audio visual material that's come into the main and Smith archive but this needs to be examined for rights Etc um and I think it's interesting one of the other projects I'm involved in at the moment is an oral history of British Science where we're looking at interviewing a number of living scientists in in um particular themed areas and I thought it would have been really interesting to have been able to interview John Maynard Smith in these in this way these are very long interviews they're covering someone's whole life story their family background their education their early career politics religion morality beliefs as well as their scientific work and I think that would have made a great compliment to this archive given what is missing from the archive and so it's kind of interesting to think about how those two sources might work together and if you want to find out more about the oral history project um there's a link there actually the easiest way to get to that is just to go www.

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