Jefferson's Shadow: The Story of His Science

by Keith S. Thomson

In the voluminous literature on Thomas Jefferson, little has been written about his passionate interest in science. This new and original study of Jefferson presents him as a consummate intellectual whose view of science was central to both his public and his private life. Keith Thomson reintroduces us in this remarkable book to Jefferson's eighteenth-century world and reveals the extent to which Jefferson used science, thought about it, and contributed to it, becoming in his time a leading American scientific intellectual.

With a storyteller's gift, Thomson shows us a new side of Jefferson. He answers an intriguing series of questions—How was Jefferson's view of the sciences reflected in his political philosophy and his vision of America's future? How did science intersect with his religion? Did he make any original contributions to scientific knowledge?—and illuminates the particulars of Jefferson's scientific endeavors. Thomson discusses Jefferson's theories that have withstood the test of time, his interest in the practical applications of science to societal problems, his leadership in the use of scientific methods in agriculture, and his contributions toward launching at least four sciences in America: geography, paleontology, climatology, and scientific archaeology. A set of delightful illustrations, including some of Jefferson's own sketches and inventions, completes this impressively researched book.

Genres: History, Science

336 pages, Hardcover

First published November 5, 2012

About the author

Keith Thomson is Executive Officer of the American Philosophical Society and Professor Emeritus of Natural History, University of Oxford.

Modified from an interview with Greg Ross in “American Scientist”
I have had a wonderful career as a professor of biology and dean (at Yale), a museum director (Yale, Philadelphia, and Oxford), and more recently as an author. I started out as a biologist interested in the evolution of fishes and the origin of major features in the transition between fishes and tetrapods. That inevitably drew me both to paleontology and to study of the “living fossil” lungfishes and the extraordinary living coelacanth. In 1966 I obtained for study the first fresh specimen of the coelacanth from the Comoro Islands (Living Fossil, Norton, 1991). My overall goal was to understand fossils in the same physiological, biomechanical, and ecological terms as we study living animals. In the process I have published on subjects ranging from the evolution of cell size and DNA content in lungfish, and intracranial mechanics in the coelacanth and its fossil relatives, to the origin of the tetrapod middle ear and the body shape and swimming mechanics of sharks. From an early interest in embryology, it was but a short step also to what is now called (rather unhappily) “evo-devo,” or the study of the roles that developmental processes play in evolution, and to writing Morphogenesis and Evolution (Oxford University Press, 1988).

After having been supported by NSF continuously for some 20 years, I cheerfully stepped off the grant treadmill, and in recent years I have had immense pleasure in studying the history of science and in writing for a popular audience, starting with the column Marginalia in American Scientist that I have written for thirty years. My current interests range from Thomas Jefferson and 18th-century science to Charles Darwin. Recent books include Treasures on Earth (Faber and Faber, 2002), Before Darwin (Yale University Press, 2005), Fossils: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005), The Legacy of the Mastodon: The Golden Age of Fossils in America (Yale University Press, 2008), A Passion for Nature: Thomas Jefferson and Natural History (Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2008) and The Young Charles Darwin (Yale University Press, 2009). Jefferson’s Shadow: the Story of his Science (Yale University Press, 2012) was the culmination of several years of work as a visiting fellow at the International Centre for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. Due in 2015 is Private Doubt, Public Dilemma (Yale University Press) based on my Terry Lectures at Yale in 2012.
http://keithsthomson.com/index.html

Reviews

[Barbara Adde · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting, although slow in spots.
Favorite passage is from a letter from Jefferson to John Adams (April 11, 1823):

"I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power on every atom of its composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in a their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms."

[Elizabeth]

As seen in Nature .

[Patrick Riley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Balanced look at TJ's scientific contributions as well as his scientific mistakes which were often a result of his unscientific read on the Bible's creation story.