Astral Codex Ten

Thomas Huxley

31 min read

Thomas Huxley

Article

Thomas Huxley is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between November 09, 2021 and May 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Their grandfather was Thomas Huxley, one of the first and greatest advocates of evolution, and President of the Royal Society”; “there are two more famous Huxleys: Thomas Huxley”; “Lockyer’s view, shared with his close supporter Thomas Huxley — a biologist known for defending Darwinian evolution”. It most often appears alongside Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Niels Bohr.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: November 09, 2021
  • Last seen: May 20, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Secrets Of The Great Families
November 09, 2021 · Original source
Aldous Huxley was an author most famous for Brave New World, though his other work is also great and underappreciated. His brother Julian Huxley founded UNESCO and the World Wildlife Fund and coined the terms "ethnic group", "cline", and "transhumanism". Their half-brother Andrew Huxley won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering how nerves work. Their grandfather was Thomas Huxley, one of the first and greatest advocates of evolution, and President of the Royal Society.
Inline links: Aldous Huxley, Julian Huxley, Andrew Huxley, Thomas Huxley
When the Darwins weren’t marrying each other, they were marrying others of their same intellectual caliber. There is at least one Darwin-Huxley marriage: that would be George Pember Darwin (a computer scientist, Charles’ great-grandson) and Angela Huxley (Thomas’ great-granddaughter) in 1964. But also, Margaret Darwin (Charles’ granddaughter) married Geoffrey Keynes (John Maynard Keynes’ brother, and himself no slacker - he pioneered blood transfusion in Britain). And John Maynard and Geoffrey’s sister, Margaret Keynes, married Archibald Hill, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. And let’s not forget Marie Curie’s daughter marrying a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Here I can only give personal anecdote - while it would be hubris to compare one’s self to Poincares or Darwins, I’m pretty proud of my own family. My brother and I both have Wikipedia pages - mine redirects to a page about my blog, his focuses on his career as a musician. If we were judging ourselves by the same standards we judge Darwins and Huxleys, we might assume that we both got some share of Generic Talent Genes, he focused on music, and I focused on writing. But in fact I tried really hard to be good at music and failed, badly. I don’t have that talent and I can’t develop it. I can imagine Henri feeling the same way if he tried to go into politics, or Raymond into math. Maybe they both got a big heap of Generic Talent Genes, plus some other genes that helped them specifically apply their talent to one field or another.
Inline links: My brother
Highlights From The Comments On Great Families
November 18, 2021 · Original source
Another way of thinking about this is: the Huxley brothers (Aldous, Julian, and Andrew) are such a great example that I probably would have included them even if they’d had no other interesting relatives, so they’re hardly cherry-picked. But in fact, there are two more famous Huxleys: Thomas Huxley (two generations away) and Matthew Arnold (also two generations away). Suppose that there are about 100 people who are at most two generations away from Aldous on the Huxley family tree. Should we expect by chance that they include two famous geniuses? I think that’s a lot even for upper-class Victorian Britain.
Your Book Review: Making Nature
May 20, 2022 · Original source
Lockyer had a cushy job as a civil servant in the British government, but dabbled in astronomy in his spare time. In the 19th century, dabbling in astronomy in your spare time could be an intellectually productive hobby: the line between professional and amateur science was blurrier then, and it wasn’t hard to contribute original research even without formal training. During the 1860s, Lockyer published several papers on astronomical observations, the most consequential of which might be the co-discovery and naming of the element helium, from his studies of the sun. His reputation grew among the “men of science” (as scientists called themselves then) of Victorian Britain, and he was soon elected to the Royal Society. But astronomy was an expense, not a source of income. Lockyer routinely supplemented his government job by writing nonspecialist scientific articles and books for a lay audience. Then, one day, he had an idea for a new kind of publication. It would be a weekly periodical to disseminate scientific knowledge to the broader public — but unlike the other periodicals that existed at the time, it would be written by the prominent men of science themselves. It would have a simple, evocative name: Nature. Lockyer summarized the two aims of Nature like this: FIRST, to place before the general public the grand results of Scientific Work and Scientific Discovery, and to urge the claims of Science to a more general recognition in Education and in Daily Life; And, SECONDLY, to aid Scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of Natural knowledge throughout the world, and by affording them an opportunity of discussing the various Scientific questions which arise from time to time. In other words (and getting rid of the old-fashioned capitalization of random adjectives and nouns), Nature was meant to do two things: communication from scientists to the public, and communication among scientists. It was an interesting idea. It was also a new one; until then the two aims had been separate. Recall that scientific journals have existed since 1665. During their first two hundred years, they primarily served to record the meetings of learned societies. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society were originally just that: summaries of whatever “philosophical” questions were discussed at the Royal Society. Aside from journals, specialized books were common and were in fact the higher-status way to communicate science in Victorian Britain. Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, published in 1859, is the most famous example. Informal correspondence between scientists was also a major, but private, channel: Darwin wrote more than 15,000 letters in his lifetime, enough to fill 30 volumes. With the exception of some books, none of the above were intended for laypeople. Educated non-scientists (professionals, clergymen, statesmen, etc.) instead got their science news from generalist or literary periodicals such as the Athenaeum magazine. The articles in those publications were not written by specialists, but by journalists and dilettantes. Lockyer’s view, shared with his close supporter Thomas Huxley — a biologist known for defending Darwinian evolution — was that they were riddled with errors and theological overtones. It would be better, they thought, if scientists did the work of communicating their research themselves. It was bold of Lockyer and Huxley to assume that scientists would be interested in doing this communication work. They weren’t. Almost immediately after Nature was founded, its contributors ignored the popularization part (“not a high-status undertaking,” Baldwin’s book says) and focused on the intra-science communication part. They did write summaries and abstracts of their own research, as Lockyer had intended, but they expected that their readers would be other men of science. Within three years, the educated laypeople who were Lockyer’s target audience were complaining that they could no longer understand the contents. Thus the first of Nature’s two aims was met mostly with failure. Fortunately, this was balanced out by unexpected success at the second aim. Scientists did actually enjoy writing for Lockyer’s magazine, in large part because it was published weekly. They found that writing a summary of their own research in Nature was an excellent way to share their results quickly and gain attention from other scientists. Books were slow; Darwin took many years to write and publish On the Origin of Species, for instance. The journals of scientific societies were slow; you had to wait for a meeting to take place and then for the meeting’s “transactions” to be published. Private correspondence was fast, but it wasn’t public. Through publication speed, as well as other factors as we’ll see below, Nature filled a niche in the ecosystem. It was the Twitter of 19th-century British science. Soon enough, this model would be copied, most notably by the journal Science in 1880. According to its first editor, Science was explicitly meant to, “in the United States, take the position which ‘Nature’ so ably occupies in England.” In just a few years, Nature had disrupted scientific publishing and established itself as a useful and unique institution of science, recognized by specialists both in the UK and abroad. First page of the first edition of Nature, 4 November 1869 II. One Hundred Years of Building a Reputation Despite its popularity, Nature didn’t become prestigious overnight. Far from it, in fact. Making Nature often reminds us that the journal spent most of its history as a low-grade publication where anything could be printed quickly, as long as it was factually correct. (This was ensured by basic checks from the editorial team; Nature articles were not consistently peer-reviewed until the 1970s.) As late as the 1960s, a researcher publishing a preliminary report in Nature was expected to follow up with a longer paper “in a more serious journal.” In other words, Nature delivered quick and cheap distribution, not luxury brand approval. This changed about fifty years ago, as we’ll see in Part III. But to understand what happened then, we first need to examine the characteristics of the journal in the roughly 100-year period from its early days until prestige took over, starting with a deeper look into publication speed. Publication Speed John Maddox, editor of Nature in the late 20th century, said that “one of Nature’s greatest early assets was the speed of the Royal Mail.” You could write to Nature, be published within a week, and read the replies to your communication within two weeks. This was state-of-the-art communication tech! Consider how many times publication speed is mentioned throughout the first half of the book (emphasis mine): What made Nature unique was, in large part, its ability to act as a venue for . . . discussions via its correspondence columns and its weekly publication schedule. (p. 8) Many British men of science found that one of the fastest ways to bring a scientific issue or idea to their fellow researchers’ attention was to send a communication to Nature. (p. 39) Unlike the literary periodicals, there was almost no delay between the submission of a piece and its appearance in the journal. (p. 63) A second reason Nature’s speed of publication would have been compelling to men of science is that getting one’s work into print quickly had become an increasingly essential part of establishing priority for a scientific finding or theory. (p. 65) Scientific weeklies [such as Nature] played a unique role in researchers’ publishing strategies at the end of the nineteenth century by offering researchers a forum where short articles could be printed quickly. (p. 105) Both the Proceedings [of the Royal Society of London] and the Philosophical Magazine had significant lag times between submission and publication . . ., which made Nature and its weekly turnaround uniquely valuable for the priority-conscious Rutherford. (p. 109) [Rutherford] sent his most interesting experimental results [to Nature] immediately, both as a way of keeping his colleagues updated on his work and as insurance against being scooped as he had in 1899. (p. 112) These quotes highlight two distinct reasons why speed was important. The first, as I hinted at earlier, was Nature’s role as the аcademic social media of its time. It was simply the best way to have discussions about scientific topics — or science itself — that could, unlike private correspondence, reach a large audience. More on this in the next section. The second reason, as shown by the mentions of physicist Ernest Rutherford, was establishing priority. Today we take for granted that being the first to publish new ideas or results is important, but in the 19th century this was less clear. To bring up Darwin as an example again, he kept his thoughts on evolution private for many years, because he wanted to make sure his argument was sound before he submitted it to the public (although he did eventually sense the urgency of publishing the theory before Alfred Russel Wallace did). But as science became professionalized, “not being scooped” became more and more crucial, and the weekly Nature was a good tool to avoid that. All this talk of speed may surprise anyone who has recently submitted a paper to Nature. In 2016, an analysis revealed that the median time for Nature to review a paper was 150 days, i.e. 5 months, up from 85 days a decade earlier. Nature itself reports, for the year 2020, a median time of 226 days between submission and acceptance. We’re a long way from “less than a week.” Why was there a decrease in publication speed? As we might expect, the reason was Nature’s growing popularity, especially among the international scientific community. At least, that’s what happened the first time there was a slowdown, in the mid-20th century. Early on, Nature was a journal for and by British scientists. But in the first half of the 20th century, science in general and Nature in particular began to involve much more collaboration between researchers across borders. It was a big deal, for instance, when a foreign government banned Nature, as Nazi Germany did in 1938; German researchers had been using it as an important source of scientific news. The ban was furthermore covered in non-British media, such as The New York Times, indicating that the journal was internationally newsworthy. Such an increase in international readership meant more letters and articles sent to the editors, and by the 1950s, there was such a backlog that submissions needed to be held for six months or more. In the 1960s, the new editor John Maddox recognized this as a problem. He began his editorship by clearing the backlog, and even printed the date of submission along with each scientific paper to show everyone how quick Nature was at reviewing articles (“often within a month,” Baldwin’s book says). Clearly, Maddox thought that restoring the speedy reputation of the journal was important. He seems to have succeeded, for a time. As late as 1989, during a controversy around cold fusion, a Wall Street Journal article said that Nature was still fast: it was able to print papers “in as little as three weeks instead of the more usual lead time of six to twelve months for other scientific publications.” Thus, despite a dip in the middle of the century due to its popularity and international reach, speedy publication was still an important characteristic of Nature in the 1970s. A second — and so far permanent — decrease occurred more recently, perhaps as a result of prestige and the competition of near-instantaneous online platforms, but that’s another story. Network Effects As of 2022, scientists argue in public on Twitter, blogs, and other online platforms, like ResearchHub. In the 19th century, Twitter and ResearchHub hadn’t been invented [citation needed]. Fortunately, Nature was there. A network effect occurs when the value of a product comes primarily from the people who use it. If there are two competing telephone systems, the most valuable one is whichever has the most users (or at least the users you want to talk to). If you create an improved Twitter clone, then all its amazing features won’t do much if you don’t somehow manage to capture Twitter’s network of several million people. Likewise, Nature became an interesting journal to read and contribute to because it gained the attention of Britain’s scientific elite as the place to discuss big science questions. This role as a forum was a constant in Nature’s history, as Making Nature shows with several detailed accounts of debates that took place within the journal’s pages. Some examples: Controversies over the age of the Earth in the 1880s.
Inline links: more than 15,000 letters, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Athenaeum_(British_magazine), took many years, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GYj8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa4f03221-7d79-42f6-bf6c-35d90fe3f7e5_1142x1600.jpeg, revealed, reports, ResearchHub
High-profile controversies about homeopathy and cold nuclear fusion in the 1980s. How did Nature become the main scientific forum in the UK and, later, the world? As we saw, the weekly publication schedule was one of the key factors, since discussion requires people to be able to reply to each other in a timely fashion. But speed alone wasn’t sufficient. There were many scientific weekly periodicals in Victorian Britain, and Nature wasn’t even the most popular: in the 1870s, “other weeklies—such as Chemical News, Knowledge, and English Mechanic—all boasted more subscribers than Nature’s estimated 5,000.” Why didn’t one of these magazines become the best venue to discuss science? One answer seems to be that Norman Lockyer personally relished controversy and encouraged “spirited disagreement” within his journal, making it ideal for whoever was itching to pick a fight over scientific ideas. If Lockyer had chosen to dampen the tone of some Letters to the Editor he received, or even reject them for publication, then the debates would have moved elsewhere. Easy enough to make a parallel with the social media that thrive today on what we’ll also politely call “spirited disagreement.” Another answer is that Nature managed to occupy the sweet spot on the tradeoff curve between generalist and specialist publications. Since it covered all fields of science, Nature was a better fit than a magazine like Chemical News to discuss interdisciplinary questions as well as questions on how science should be done. At the same time, it was a specialized journal in terms of its audience and contributors: they were almost all professional scientists. Add the fact that it was read by most scientists in Britain, as well as a significant proportion of non-British scientists, and you get a publication that was widely considered the best means “to get to the right people” as the editor of Chemical News himself admitted in 1895. Establishing this network of “the right people” was an explicit goal of Lockyer from the beginning. One of the first things he did after founding the journal was to ask “men of science—some whom he knew personally, others whom he knew by reputation” (i.e. he cold emailed them) to publish their names as supporters and future contributors. The most important of those names was the aforementioned Thomas Huxley, who was not only a prominent biologist but also a popular essayist in the literary periodicals as well as the leader of an influential group of scientists called the X Club. Huxley was a strong supporter of Lockyer’s project, and he frequently wrote for Nature in the early years, which helped it cement its reputation. Thomas Huxley. Also known for establishing a network of other famous Huxleys, such as his grandson Aldous, the author of Brave New World. Victorian Britain’s most beloved scientist — yes, I’m talking about Darwin again — also enjoyed publishing in Nature. Darwin was an elderly and highly respected scientist by the time of the journal’s founding, and the abstracts and letters he frequently sent to Lockyer’s publication certainly gave it a status boost. And this was only the start of a long list of household names who got involved with Nature at one point or another. In physics, for instance, Lord Kelvin, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Lise Meitner were all important contributors. Some of the most famous papers in the field, such as James Chadwick’s 1932 report on the possible existence of the neutron, or Meitner and Otto Frisch’s 1939 letter proposing the idea of nuclear fission, were published in Nature. In biology, James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 work on the structure of DNA is probably the most historic paper to have appeared within its pages. Since Nature in the mid-20th century was popular but still not very prestigious, I’m comfortable assuming that these famous scientists and discoveries helped its reputation rather than the other way around. Today, the arrow of causation is mostly reversed: scientists become influential because they publish research in the most prestigious journal, rather than the journal becoming prestigious because it publishes big names and big papers. Of course, this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that keeps benefiting Nature, thanks to network effects. Finally, a word about language. Nature, obviously, is published in English. But English wasn’t the dominant intellectual language back in the 19th century: French and German were more important. The rise of English as the lingua franca of science occurred during the 20th century, thanks to the political dominance of the British Empire and then the United States. As a result, Nature and its American equivalent Science gained a major advantage over their French (e.g. La Nature) and German (e.g. Naturwissenschaften) counterparts. Making Nature doesn’t belabor this self-evident point, but it’s worth mentioning that Nature benefitted from a global network effect that would have been far less attainable outside the Anglosphere. Survival and Conservatism Speed, elite networks, and English are great, but they won’t help if your publication fails to turn a profit and shuts down. As they say, the lesson of survivorship bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor. Thus the story of Nature is also the story of how it managed to stay alive, unlike most of its contemporaries. Nature was (and still is!) a venture of a London publisher called Macmillan and Company. It was very much intended to make money. But Victorian Britain was a crowded market for periodicals. It was common for publications to last just a few years after proving unable to attract enough subscribers. Lockyer himself had been briefly involved as the co-founder and science editor of a generalist magazine called The Reader, which existed only from 1863 to 1867 (and lost its science section in 1865). It would be tempting to contrast this with the popular success of Nature, but as we saw, most of Nature’s target audience couldn’t even understand the journal, and as a result both its subscriber base and revenue remained small. The survival of Nature therefore depended on the goodwill of its owner, Alexander Macmillan. And it took a lot of goodwill! Nature operated at a loss for an entire 30 years. Only at the very end of the 19th century did it manage to turn a profit. This surprising tolerance for financial loss seems to have stemmed from the other activities of Macmillan and Company: they sold scientific books, and Nature was a good way to reach that market. Still, without a wealthy publisher who was committed to back up Lockyer’s project for a long time, it would likely not have survived. Lockyer also displayed impressive commitment. He remained at the helm of the journal for a full half-century, from 1869 to 1919. Although none of his successors would hold the position that long, most would last at least twenty years, resulting in a strikingly short list of eight editors-in-chief over a 153-year history. Meanwhile, the journal was never sold: Macmillan and Company still exists and still owns Nature, even though corporate mergers have made the exact ownership structure difficult to figure out. (Springer Nature, a company created in 2015 by merging some divisions of Macmillan and other entities, is the immediate parent company of Nature.) The picture that emerges is that of a stable, conservative institution, with committed owners and editors, that has changed slowly even as it was a witness to the changes in science itself. This is nicely reflected in the stability of Nature’s mission and visual identity. The original mission statement was left unchanged from 1869 to 2000, including gendered references to “Scientific men” and “men eminent in Science.” The current version is shorter and gender-neutral, but overall similar, although I note that the ordering of the two main aims has been reversed: First, to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science. Second, to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life. Similarly, the original masthead image, which dates from the very first issue, appeared at the top of the journal for 89 years, until 1958 (with slight variations). A central point of Making Nature is that Nature co-evolved with the British and international institutions of science. To do so, it had to strike a balance between conservatism and innovation. My impression is that Nature was more often on the conservative end of the spectrum, serving as a rock-solid stage where the rest of science could take place. Such an attitude was helpful from the beginning, but it probably became even more important after the 1970s, when everything changed. III. WTF Happened in the 1970s? A fun puzzle from the social sciences: what happened in the early seventies? As evidenced from a multitude of charts, various patterns in society seem to have veered off course around 1971, including growth in wages, inflation, housing costs, energy consumption, number of lawyers, divorce rates, fertility rates, and meat consumption. Whether it was a coincidence or part of the same mysterious phenomenon, we can add to this list the rise of prestige in the science publishing industry. To be clear, I’m the one who claims that this shift was a specific and momentous event. Melinda Baldwin acknowledges many times that Nature went from a low-grade magazine to a prestigious journal, but she remains vague as to what, exactly, was the turning point. In the chapter on the 1970s, she treats the increased selectivity and reputation as just one of many things that happened during this period. It was only in the course of writing this review — with a deliberate focus on prestige — that I realized something significant had occurred in that decade, and that this something affected more than just Nature. Let’s see what the book does tell us, and then I’ll offer a plausible explanation from elsewhere. Changes to Nature in the 1970s The 1970s mostly coincide with the leadership of Nature’s shortest-tenured editor, David Davies. Davies took over from John Maddox in 1973 and proceeded to make a number of changes. He made Nature a unitary publication again, after a short-lived experiment to split it into three journals. He reformed the style guide for contributors. He allowed for cartoons and some humor in his editorials. He also overhauled the journal’s physical appearance: from now on, Nature’s covers would feature interesting images as opposed to articles or advertisements. Today’s covers are still in that tradition. Here’s the Nature cover from 2016, as used on the Wikipedia page of the journal. Nature under Maddox and Davies followed the same trend of internationalization as in the previous decades, but the seventies saw what was perhaps the fastest growth outside the UK. Consider these approximate statistics on the origin of research articles from the years when there was a change in editorship: 1966 (when Maddox became editor): 40% British and 60% international
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RrPB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F87a122ec-64da-481b-85e5-f54673522419_241x316.jpeg, a network of other famous Huxleys, report, letter, work, La Nature, Naturwissenschaften, The Reader, still exists, Springer Nature, original mission statement, current version, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wOmg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1a1567d4-73fa-4fa9-9a65-f73b6dd233a1_800x320.png, a multitude of charts, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CaUh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F783677da-78c8-4b94-b0c5-673658b060f8_454x599.jpeg, Wikipedia page of the journal
Thomas Huxley. Also known for establishing a network of other famous Huxleys, such as his grandson Aldous, the author of Brave New World. Victorian Britain’s most beloved scientist — yes, I’m talking about Darwin again — also enjoyed publishing in Nature. Darwin was an elderly and highly respected scientist by the time of the journal’s founding, and the abstracts and letters he frequently sent to Lockyer’s publication certainly gave it a status boost. And this was only the start of a long list of household names who got involved with Nature at one point or another. In physics, for instance, Lord Kelvin, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Lise Meitner were all important contributors. Some of the most famous papers in the field, such as James Chadwick’s 1932 report on the possible existence of the neutron, or Meitner and Otto Frisch’s 1939 letter proposing the idea of nuclear fission, were published in Nature. In biology, James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 work on the structure of DNA is probably the most historic paper to have appeared within its pages. Since Nature in the mid-20th century was popular but still not very prestigious, I’m comfortable assuming that these famous scientists and discoveries helped its reputation rather than the other way around. Today, the arrow of causation is mostly reversed: scientists become influential because they publish research in the most prestigious journal, rather than the journal becoming prestigious because it publishes big names and big papers. Of course, this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that keeps benefiting Nature, thanks to network effects. Finally, a word about language. Nature, obviously, is published in English. But English wasn’t the dominant intellectual language back in the 19th century: French and German were more important. The rise of English as the lingua franca of science occurred during the 20th century, thanks to the political dominance of the British Empire and then the United States. As a result, Nature and its American equivalent Science gained a major advantage over their French (e.g. La Nature) and German (e.g. Naturwissenschaften) counterparts. Making Nature doesn’t belabor this self-evident point, but it’s worth mentioning that Nature benefitted from a global network effect that would have been far less attainable outside the Anglosphere. Survival and Conservatism Speed, elite networks, and English are great, but they won’t help if your publication fails to turn a profit and shuts down. As they say, the lesson of survivorship bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor. Thus the story of Nature is also the story of how it managed to stay alive, unlike most of its contemporaries. Nature was (and still is!) a venture of a London publisher called Macmillan and Company. It was very much intended to make money. But Victorian Britain was a crowded market for periodicals. It was common for publications to last just a few years after proving unable to attract enough subscribers. Lockyer himself had been briefly involved as the co-founder and science editor of a generalist magazine called The Reader, which existed only from 1863 to 1867 (and lost its science section in 1865). It would be tempting to contrast this with the popular success of Nature, but as we saw, most of Nature’s target audience couldn’t even understand the journal, and as a result both its subscriber base and revenue remained small. The survival of Nature therefore depended on the goodwill of its owner, Alexander Macmillan. And it took a lot of goodwill! Nature operated at a loss for an entire 30 years. Only at the very end of the 19th century did it manage to turn a profit. This surprising tolerance for financial loss seems to have stemmed from the other activities of Macmillan and Company: they sold scientific books, and Nature was a good way to reach that market. Still, without a wealthy publisher who was committed to back up Lockyer’s project for a long time, it would likely not have survived. Lockyer also displayed impressive commitment. He remained at the helm of the journal for a full half-century, from 1869 to 1919. Although none of his successors would hold the position that long, most would last at least twenty years, resulting in a strikingly short list of eight editors-in-chief over a 153-year history. Meanwhile, the journal was never sold: Macmillan and Company still exists and still owns Nature, even though corporate mergers have made the exact ownership structure difficult to figure out. (Springer Nature, a company created in 2015 by merging some divisions of Macmillan and other entities, is the immediate parent company of Nature.) The picture that emerges is that of a stable, conservative institution, with committed owners and editors, that has changed slowly even as it was a witness to the changes in science itself. This is nicely reflected in the stability of Nature’s mission and visual identity. The original mission statement was left unchanged from 1869 to 2000, including gendered references to “Scientific men” and “men eminent in Science.” The current version is shorter and gender-neutral, but overall similar, although I note that the ordering of the two main aims has been reversed: First, to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science. Second, to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life. Similarly, the original masthead image, which dates from the very first issue, appeared at the top of the journal for 89 years, until 1958 (with slight variations). A central point of Making Nature is that Nature co-evolved with the British and international institutions of science. To do so, it had to strike a balance between conservatism and innovation. My impression is that Nature was more often on the conservative end of the spectrum, serving as a rock-solid stage where the rest of science could take place. Such an attitude was helpful from the beginning, but it probably became even more important after the 1970s, when everything changed. III. WTF Happened in the 1970s? A fun puzzle from the social sciences: what happened in the early seventies? As evidenced from a multitude of charts, various patterns in society seem to have veered off course around 1971, including growth in wages, inflation, housing costs, energy consumption, number of lawyers, divorce rates, fertility rates, and meat consumption. Whether it was a coincidence or part of the same mysterious phenomenon, we can add to this list the rise of prestige in the science publishing industry. To be clear, I’m the one who claims that this shift was a specific and momentous event. Melinda Baldwin acknowledges many times that Nature went from a low-grade magazine to a prestigious journal, but she remains vague as to what, exactly, was the turning point. In the chapter on the 1970s, she treats the increased selectivity and reputation as just one of many things that happened during this period. It was only in the course of writing this review — with a deliberate focus on prestige — that I realized something significant had occurred in that decade, and that this something affected more than just Nature. Let’s see what the book does tell us, and then I’ll offer a plausible explanation from elsewhere. Changes to Nature in the 1970s The 1970s mostly coincide with the leadership of Nature’s shortest-tenured editor, David Davies. Davies took over from John Maddox in 1973 and proceeded to make a number of changes. He made Nature a unitary publication again, after a short-lived experiment to split it into three journals. He reformed the style guide for contributors. He allowed for cartoons and some humor in his editorials. He also overhauled the journal’s physical appearance: from now on, Nature’s covers would feature interesting images as opposed to articles or advertisements. Today’s covers are still in that tradition. Here’s the Nature cover from 2016, as used on the Wikipedia page of the journal. Nature under Maddox and Davies followed the same trend of internationalization as in the previous decades, but the seventies saw what was perhaps the fastest growth outside the UK. Consider these approximate statistics on the origin of research articles from the years when there was a change in editorship: 1966 (when Maddox became editor): 40% British and 60% international
Inline links: a network of other famous Huxleys, report, letter, work, La Nature, Naturwissenschaften, The Reader, still exists, Springer Nature, original mission statement, current version, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wOmg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1a1567d4-73fa-4fa9-9a65-f73b6dd233a1_800x320.png, a multitude of charts, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CaUh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F783677da-78c8-4b94-b0c5-673658b060f8_454x599.jpeg, Wikipedia page of the journal