Saint George Jackson Mivart was a British biologist. He is remembered as a leading critic of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Background
Saint George Jackson Mivart was born on November 30, 1827, in London, City of London, United Kingdom. He was the third son of James Edward Mivart, owner of Mivart's Hotel in Brook Street, was born at 39 Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, London. His parents were Evangelicals. His father’s associations in natural history encouraged him to develop his own interests in that field, which he did through reading and collecting.
Education
Mivart's early education was received at the Clapham Grammar School, at Harrow, and at King's College London; from which latter institution he intended to go to Oxford. On his conversion to Roman Catholicism, he proceeded to Oscott College, where he remained until 1846. On 15 January of that year, he became a student at Lincoln's Inn and was called to the Bar in 1851.
Mivart’s primary interests in natural history persisted, and he came to know many of the naturalists of his day, particularly Owen and Huxley. The latter demonstrated to Mivart the excitement of natural history as a discipline in its own right. It was undoubtedly through Huxley’s influence that Mivart worked in the 1860s and 1870s on his series of papers on Primate comparative anatomy. Huxley viewed the development of a precise body of knowledge about the Primates as significant to the elaboration and documentation of Darwinian evolution. The prosimians themselves had not been systematically studied as a group; and Mivart’s work, which culminated in “On Lepilemur and Cheirogaleus and the Zoological Rank of the Lemuroidea” (1873), was a major contribution to an understanding of this enigmatic Primate group and their systematic relationship to the rest of the order.
Meanwhile, Mivart attained a modest reputation in comparative anatomy; he published a series of descriptive studies, lectured to lay audiences, and from 1862 to 1884 taught anatomy at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London. Mivart had been a member of the Royal Institution since 1849, and he was elected fellow of the Zoological Society in 1858, of the Linnean Society in 1862, and of the Royal Society in 1869. In 1869 he became a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London, and in 1874 he was appointed by Monsignor Thomas John Capel as Professor of Biology at the short-lived (Catholic) University College, Kensington a post he held until 1877.
Mivart's parents were Evangelicals; and his early education was received at the Clapham Grammar School, at Harrow, and at King's College, London; from which latter institution he intended to go to Oxford. His enthusiasm for architecture led him, at the age of sixteen, to make a tour of Pugin's Gothic churches; and while visiting St. Chad's, in Birmingham, he met John Moore (afterwards President of St. Mary's College, Oscott) who received him into the Catholic Church in 1844. Mivart's conversion is said to have been determined by Milner's "End of Religious Controversy." His conversion to Roman Catholicism automatically excluded him from entering the University of Oxford, then open only to members of the Anglican faith. Mivart also fell from favor with the church. While a professor of the philosophy of natural history at the Catholic University of Leuven, he published several articles that seemed to conflict with religious teachings. These articles were placed on the Vatican’s index of forbidden readings, and further controversial articles led to Mivart’s excommunication by Cardinal Vaughan in 1900.
Views
Although he was initially an adherent of the new biology for which Huxley was the most articulate spokesman, and for which Darwinism was the most influential method, Mivart regarded the tendency to universalize and to reify organic evolution as a threat both to the truths of his own Catholicism and to his more restricted definition of the canons of science. The conflict led to the publication of On the Genesis of Species (1871) and Man and Apes (1873); in both works, Mivart criticized Darwinism as insufficient to explain anomalies in the data of observation or to answer the more general questions which dealt with the initiation of specific forms which must precede the action of natural selection. Such attacks on Darwinism - which were coupled with what were defined as insulting personal allusions - precipitated a formal break with Huxley and the Darwinians and through them Mivart’s removal from the main current of natural science, so that after 1873, although he continued to publish, his work appeared more and more dated.
Membership
Mivart was a member of the Royal Society, the Zoological Society of London, the Metaphysical Society and a fellow of the Linnean Society of London.
Royal Society
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United Kingdom
Zoological Society of London
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United Kingdom
Linnean Society of London
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United Kingdom
Metaphysical Society
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United Kingdom
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Mivart suffered from diabetes which was a cause of his death on 1 April 1900 in London.
Connections
Saint George Jackson Mivart was married. His son, Doctor F. St. George Mivart, is a medical inspector of the local government board.