Masarykova univerzita Filozofická fakulta Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky Magisterská diplomová práce

3.3 Anton Markoš – background and translations

Anton Markoš (*1949) has been an acknowledged scientist as well as non-fiction literature writer and translator of Slovak origin. He studied animal physiology at the Faculty of Sciences of Charles University in Prague and later on worked and taught mainly cell physiology and developmental biology at its Department of Animal Physiology and Developmental Biology. He has published a number of biological studies in Czech as well as in English and translated seven books from English. Since 2002, Markoš has been the head of the Department of Philosophy and History of Science at the Faculty of Sciences of Charles University in Prague.

3.3.1 Stephen Jay Gould and The Mismeasure of Man

An American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and theorist, historian of science and educator at Harvard University, Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), is best known to many as an author of popular science works. Throughout the course of his life, Gould published nearly a thousand scientific papers and articles, many essays and books mainly contributing to evolutionary theory and the philosophy and history of science. He advocated a theory known as punctuated equilibrium claiming that species do not change or change only a little for very long spans of time and, after that, appearance of new species is abrupt (Elsberry, 1996). He “touched off numerous debates, forcing scientists to rethink sometimes entrenched ideas about evolutionary patterns and processes” (Yoon, 2002). As a renowned author, he received a number of awards, such as the Silver National Medal of the Zoology Society of London (The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive).

The beginning of the fifth chapter called The Hereditarian Theory of IQ: An American Invention introduces the French psychologist Alfred Binet, the scale he devised for measuring intelligence and that has been—slightly modified—used till now, and the development of his thoughts and opinions. Disappointed by his own suggestibility and by the results achieved with the help of the “medical” method of craniometry (the most popular method of the 19^th century), Binet turned to “psychological” techniques and compiled a set of diverse tasks that were to identify children who needed special educational help—a task assigned to him by the ministry of education. He was well aware of the possibility of misuse of his device and refused to award any theoretical interpretation to his scale of intelligence. His research was purely empirical.

3.3.2 James Lovelock and The Ages of Gaia

The only author of British origin whose text was used for compiling the corpus for the present thesis is an acknowledged scientist, researcher, environmentalist, the originator of the Gaia theory, and the pioneer in the development of environmental awareness, James Ephraim Lovelock (*1919). He has written more than 200 papers on medical, biological and geophysiological topics as well as on topics related to atmospheric science. He won a number of prizes and awards, among others the Tswett Medal for Chromatography in 1975 and the first Amsterdam Prize for the Environment from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990 (Lovelock’s personal website).

The Gaia theory holds that the Earth is “a coherent system of life, self-regulating and self-changing, a sort of immense living organism” (Lewis, Thomas, Amazon.com), a superorganism that consists not only of living organisms but also the non-living environment. “Gaia has the ability to self-regulate climate and chemistry of the earth” (Korthof, 2004). The Ages of Gaia is the second book James Lovelock published on his Gaia theory, the first one being Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979).

The beginning of the fourth chapter called The Archean invites the readers to join the author in speculating about the early Earth. The Archean is the bygone period in the history of Earth in which, scientists argue, life came into existence and changed the nature of the planet. Had life not appeared, the Earth would be an arid place like Venus or Mars.

We know very little about that time but there are ways that can provide valuable information, i.e. genetic material of living organisms and the composition of rocks. Living organisms in each generation restore and renew the message about the chemistry of the early Earth. Nevertheless, they change and mutate and we have to be aware of this fact. We have to bear in mind that our Universe is nuclear-powered. The presence of radioactive and heavy elements in the mass of the Earth suggests how the Earth was created and how long ago. There must have been an enormous explosion of a supernova; otherwise, the elements such as uranium would not have been synthesized and the composition of the Earth would have to be different. The last part of the passage ponders on atmosphere as a face of the planet from which we can infer whether a planet is alive or dead. In accordance with the Gaia theory, the Earth is understood to be a planet where life does not just adapt to the Earth it finds itself upon, but also adapts the Earth to make it and keep it a home.
The aim of the previous subchapters has been to provide the basic theoretical setting of the texts used in the corpus, not to provide detailed studies of the biographies of the authors and a solid scientific background for individual theories and hypotheses. All the four texts have been important in the scientific discourse, the concepts of cooperation and diversity being essential (with the exception of The Mismeasure of Man). From now on, the studies as such will not be considered; the extracts from the fourth chapters of the books will be analyzed from the linguistic point of view regardless of their authors and historical and scientific setting.