| George Romanes | |
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 George Romanes
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| Born | 19 May 1848 Kingston, Ontario, Canada |
| Died | 23 May 1894 |
| Citizenship | British |
| Fields | evolutionary biology physiology |
| Known for | comparative psychology |
| Influences | Charles Darwin |
George John Romanes FRS (19 May 1848 – 23 May 1894) was a Canadian-born English evolutionary biologist and physiologist who laid the foundation of what he called comparative psychology, postulating a similarity of cognitive processes and mechanisms between humans and animals.
He was the youngest of Charles Darwin's academic friends, and his views on evolution are historically important. He invented the term neo-Darwinism, which is still often used today to indicate an updated form of Darwinism. Romanes' early death was a loss to the cause of evolutionary biology in Britain. Within six years Mendel's work was rediscovered, and a whole new agenda opened up for debate.
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Romanes was born in Kingston, Ontario, the third son of George Romanes, a Scottish Presbyterian minister. When he was two years old, his parents returned to England, and he spent the rest of his life in England. Like many English naturalists, he nearly studied divinity, but instead opted to study medicine and physiology at Cambridge University. Although he came from an educated home, his school education was erratic. He entered university half-educated and with little knowledge of the ways of the world.[1] He graduated from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge with the degree of BA in 1871,[2] and is commemorated there by a stained glass window in the chapel.
It was at Cambridge that he came first to the attention of Charles Darwin: "How glad I am that you are so young!" said Darwin. The two remained friends for life. Guided by Michael Foster, Romanes continued to work on the physiology of invertebrates at University College London under William Sharpey and Burdon-Sanderson. In 1879, at 31, Romanes was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on the basis of his work on the nervous systems of medusae. However, Romanes' tendency to support his claims by anecdotal evidence (rather than empirical tests) prompted Lloyd Morgan's warning known as Morgan's Canon:
As a young man, Romanes was a believing Christian, and seems to have regained some belief during his final illness. He was more of an agnostic during the middle period, when he was under the influence of Darwin.[4] In a manuscript left unfinished at the end of his life he said that the theory of evolution had caused him to abandon religion.[5]
Towards the end of his life Romanes founded a series of free public lectures – still running to the present day – which are named the Romanes Lectures. He was a friend of Thomas Henry Huxley, who gave the second Romanes lecture.
Romanes tackled the subject of evolution frequently. For the most part he supported Darwinism and the role of natural selection. However, he perceived three problems with Darwinian evolution:
Romanes also made the acute point that Darwin had not actually shown how natural selection produced species, despite the title of his famous book (On the origin of species by means of natural selection). Natural selection could be the 'machine' for producing adaptation, but still in question was the mechanism for splitting species.
Romanes' own solution to this was called 'physiological selection'. His idea was that variation in reproductive ability, caused mainly by the prevention of inter-crossing with parental forms, was the primary driving force in the production of new species. The majority view then (and now) was that geographical separation is the primary force in species splitting (or allopatry) and secondarily was the increased sterility of crosses between incipient species.
GEORGE JOHN ROMANES (1848-1894), British biologist, was born at Kingston, Canada, on the 10th of May 1848, being the third son of the Rev. George Romanes, D.D., professor of Greek at the university of that town. He was educated in England, going in 1867 to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He early formed an intimate friendship with Charles Darwin, whose theories he did much during his life to popularize and support. When studying under Sir J. Burdon Sanderson at University College, London, in 1874-76, he began a series of researches on the nervous and locomotor systems of the Medusae and Echinodermata, which provided him with material for his Croonian lecture in 1876. Subsequently he continued the inquiry, partly in conjunction with Professor J. Cossar Ewart, and the results were published in Jelly fish, Star-fish, and Sea-urchins (1885). Meantime he had been also devoting his attention to broader problems of biology. In 1881 he published Animal Intelligence, and in 1883 Mental Evolution in Animals, in which he traced the parallel development of intelligence in the animal world and in man. He followed up this line of argument in 1888 with Mental Evolution in Man, in which he maintained the essential similarity of the reasoning processes in the higher animals and in man, the highest of all. In 1892 he brought out an Examination of Weismannism, in which he upheld the theory of the hereditability of acquired characters. In 1890 he left London and settled at Oxford, where he .'founded a lecture similar to the "Rede" of Cambridge, to be delivered annually on a scientific or literary topic. In 1893 he published the first part of Darwin and after Darwin, a work dealing with the development of the theory of organic evolution, and based on lectures, which he delivered as Fullerian professor of physiology at the Royal Institution in 1888-91; a second part appeared in 1895 after his death, which occurred at Oxford on the 23rd of May 1894.
Romanes was awarded the Burney prize at Cambridge in 1873 for an essay on "Christian Prayer and General Laws." Five years later, under the pseudonym "Physicus," he issued A Candid Examination of Theism, in which he showed himself out of accord with orthodox religious beliefs. In 1882 he published an article on the "Fallacy of Materialism," and in his Rede lecture of 1885 he appeared as a monist. Subsequently his views again changed in the direction of orthodoxy, as is shown by his Thoughts on Religion, written shortly before his death and published in 1895.
His Life and Letters, by his widow, appeared in 1896.
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