Nathaniel Shaler
Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (20 February 1841 – 10 April 1906) was an American paleontologist and geologist. In 1909, he published his autobiography. He also published a novel about Elizabeth I of England and poems about the Civil War. The lunar crater Shaler is named after him. The same has been true for the Shaler cliffs in East Antarctica's Coatsland since 1972.
Life
Born in 1841 in Newport, Kentucky to Dr. Nathaniel Burger Shaler and Ann Hinde, née Southgate, Shaler studied at Harvard College under Louis Agassiz and would go on to become a Harvard fixture in his own right, as lecturer and professor of paleontology for two decades (1869–1888) and as professor of geology for nearly two more (1888–1906).
Early in his professional career Shaler was broadly a creationist and anti-Darwinist. This was largely out of deference to the brilliant but old-fashioned Agassiz, whose patronage served Shaler well in ascending the Harvard ladder. When his own position at Harvard was secure, Shaler gradually accepted Darwinism in principle but viewed it through a neo-Lamarckian lens. Shaler extended Charles Darwin's work of the importance of earthworm soil bioturbation to soil formation to other animals, such as ants.
Like many other evolutionists of the time, Shaler incorporated basic tenets of natural selection—chance, contingency, opportunism—into a picture of order, purpose and progress in which characteristics were inherited through the efforts of individual organisms.
Shaler was also an apologist for slavery and an outspoken believer in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. In his later career, Shaler continued to support Agassiz's polygenism, a theory of human origins that was often used to support racial discrimination. In his 1884 article, "The Negro Problem", published in the Atlantic Monthly, Shaler claimed that black people freed from slavery were "like children lost in the wood, needing the old protection of the strong mastering hand," that they became increasingly dominated by their "animal nature" as they grew from children into adults, and American slavery had been "infinitely the mildest and most decent system of slavery that ever existed.".
In his later career, Shaler served as Harvard's Dean of Sciences and was considered one of the university's most popular teachers. He published scores of long and short treatises in his lifetime, with subjects ranging from topographical surveys to moral philosophy. Shaler also served two years as a Union Army officer (which was ended by illness) in the U.S. Civil War.
Wikipedia
Leftist Wikipedia has a highly dubious and inaccurate description of his racial views, for example describing his 1884 article "The Negro Problem" as pro-slavery, when it stated that "I am not criticising the policy that enfranchised the blacks when their freedom came." and "Whatever the dangers they might give rise to, they would be less if the Africans were freemen than if they were slaves." Wikipedia also gives the impression that his racial views were very influential on "Scientific Racism", when they are not even mentioned at all in other sources on Shaler.
Works (excerpt)
- Geological Survey of Kentucky, 6 Bände, 1876–1882
- The Geology of Boston and its Environs, in: "The Memorial History of Boston", 1880
- Illustrations of the Earth’s Surface: Glaciers, Boston 1881
- A first book in geology, Boston 1884
- Nature and Man in America, New York 1891
- Kentucky, a Pioneer Commonwealth, Boston 1884
- Aspects of the earth, New York 1889
- The Story of Our Continent, 1892
- Sea and Land: Features of Coasts and Oceans, New York 1892
- The Interpretation of Nature, 1893
- The United States of America, 2 Bände, 1894
- Domesticated Animals, 1895
- The Geology of the Road-Building Stones of Massachusetts, 1895
- American Highways, 1896
- Geology of the Cape Cod District, 1898
- Outlines of the Earth’s History, New York 1898
- Geology of the Narragansett Basin, 1899
- The Individual: Study of Life and Death, 1900
- A Comparison of the Features of the Earth and the Moon, 1903
- The Citizen: A Study of the Individual and the Government, 1904
- The Neighbor, 1904
- Man and the earth, 1905
- From Old fields. Poems of the Civil War, 1906
- The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, with a supplementary memoir by his wife, Boston 1909
