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Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia University

Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia University THOMAS HUNT MORGAN AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Genes, Chromosomes, and the Origins of Modern Biology The student of the humanities as well as the intelligent public looks at the history of human thought as a history of abstract ideas. . . . It is true that minds like those of Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Descartes, Hegel and Kant have exercised a strong influence upon the progress of thinking in all spheres, even upon the actual course of historical events. The scientist who looks beyond his specialized work is as fully aware of these historical facts as the humanist. But he is also aware that abstract thinking, remote from, and even antagonistic to the study of nature, leads easily into dogma, taboos and fettering of free thinking because it does not carry its own corrective, the recourse to factual evidence. The scientist, therefore, with all respect for the many facets of the human mind, is more impressed by the revolutions in thinking brought about by great factual discoveries, which by their very nature lead to generalizations which change at once the outlook of many, if not all, lines of thought. Such events are rare. In modern history three are most conspicuous: the explanation of the movements of the celestial bodies by Kepler, Copernicus and Newton; Galileo's experiments inaugurating the age of inductive science, and Darwin's establishment of the theory of evolution on the basis of an overwhelming body of facts. All of them at once evoked the wrath of the vested interests of the mind; all conquered within a generation or two all fields of intellectual endeavor and changed the basic aspects of practically every science, natural or humanistic.

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