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Copyright

Marianne Sommer

Published On

2024-07-30

Page Range

pp. 91–108

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

7. Map, Scale, and Tree in Natural History

  • Marianne Sommer (author)
Chapter of: The Diagrammatics of ‘Race’: Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, ca. 1770-2020(pp. 91–108)
Chapter 7 looks at the imagery of the map, the chain of being, and the tree in natural history. The linear scale was seen as the underlying order arranging all natural entities according to rungs of perfection, and in the early modern period, it could acquire a dynamic aspect. However, the vast expansion in knowledge of animals and plants from many parts of the world during the seventeenth and eighteenth century compelled naturalists to experiment with diagrams to capture the bountiful diversity of life. Up until Charles Darwin’s influence, relatedness was predominantly represented by keys, map-like, and reticulate diagrams, or geometric figures. The phylogenetic tree to capture the branching transformationist view of life as differentiating from a common origin only appeared later in the nineteenth century.

Contributors

Marianne Sommer

(author)
Chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at University of Lucerne

Marianne Sommer holds the chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Prior to that, she has held postdoctoral positions and professorships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Pennsylvania State University, the ETH Zurich and University of Zurich, and has been a guest at many institutions, including Stanford University. For her research in the history of earth, life, and human sciences, encompassing processes of narration, visualization, and exhibition, she has received the Swiss National Latsis Prize. Her monograph History Within (published with The University of Chicago Press in 2016) engages with the science, politics, and culture related to reconstructions of human evolutionary histories; it traces the generation and circulation of such knowledge from the late nineteenth century to the present, including through venues like the museum, the zoo, literature, or the web. Among her monographs are also Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland (published with Harvard University Press in 2007) and Evolutionäre Anthropologie (published with Junius in 2015). Bones and Ochre tells the scientific and cultural history of paleoanthropology and to a lesser degree archeology through the ‘biography’ of the most likely first fossil human skeleton discovered in 1823. Evolutionäre Anthropologie is an introduction to the history of evolutionary anthropology for scholars, students, and the interested public.