Joseph Thomas Cunningham (1859–1935) was a British marine biologist and zoologist known for his experiments on flatfish and his writings on neo-Lamarckism.
Career
Cunningham worked at the London Hospital Medical College. He completed his science scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford.J. T. Cunningham, M.A. Late Lecturer In Biology, London Hospital Medical College. The British Medical Journal. Vol. 2, No. 3887 (Jul. 6, 1935), p. 42. He was elected a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London (FZS) in 1903.
Cunningham was a neo-Lamarckian. In his book Hormones and Heredity (1921) he proposed that the mechanism for the inheritance of acquired characteristics were hormones. He termed this "chemical Lamarckism".Reid, R. G. B. (2004). Epigenetics and Environment. In Brian Keith Hall, Roy Douglas Pearson, Gerd B. Müller. In Environment, Development, and Evolution: Toward a Synthesis. MIT Press. p. 19.
According to science historian Peter J. Bowler the idea held by Cunningham that hormones transferred from one generation to the next independent of the germ plasm was seen at the time by neo-Lamarckians as a plausible hypothesis, however "its advocates were unable to get beyond the stage of providing indirect evidence for the effect they postulated."Bowler, Peter J. (1983). The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolutionary Theories in the Decades Around 1900. p. 102. Johns Hopkins University Press. .
Experiments In a series of experiments (in 1891, 1893 and 1895) on the action of light on the coloration of flatfish, Cunningham directed light upon the lower sides of flatfishes by means of a glass-bottomed tank placed over a mirror. He discovered that light causes the production of pigments on the lower sides of flatfishes, and gave his results a Lamarckian interpretation. Other scientists interpreted his results differently. Review of Modern Biology (1928) by J. T. Cunningham. George Romanes wrote approvingly of Cunningham's interpretation, but the geneticist William Bateson was not convinced that the cause of the increase in pigmentation was from the illumination. Thomas Hunt Morgan criticized the experiments and did not believe the results were evidence for Lamarckism.
Opposition to sexual selection Cunningham challenged the concept of sexual selection.Bartley, Mary Margaret. (1994). A Century of Debate: The History of Sexual Selection Theory (1871-1971). Cornell University. p. 49 His book Sexual Dimorphism in the Animal Kingdom (1900) attempted to explain secondary sexual characters by Lamarckian principles.Review in The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 4, issue 707 (May, 1900), 243/244. The chemist Raphael Meldola noted in a review for Nature that "although many of us may arrive at the conclusion that Mr. Cunningham has not succeeded in establishing his case, it will be generally admitted that he has discussed the problem, on the whole, in a more or less scientific spirit."Meldola, Raphael. (1900). Sexual Dimorphism in the Animal Kingdom: A Theory of the Evolution of Secondary Sexual Characters. Nature 63: 197-202.
He translated Theodor Eimer's Die Enstehung der Arten (1888) into English.
Publications
Charles Darwin: Naturalist (1886) Sexual Dimorphism in the Animal Kingdom: A Theory of the Evolution of Secondary Sexual Characters (1900) The Preservation of Fishing Nets (1902) Hormones and Heredity (1921) Modern Biology: A Review of the Principal Phenomena of Animal Life in Relation to Modern Concepts and Theories (1928)
References