Edward Drinker Cope - Personality and Legacy

Personality and Legacy

Julia assisted Osborn in writing a biography of her father, titled Cope: Master Naturalist. She would not comment on the name of the woman with whom her father had had an affair with prior to his first European travel. It is believed that Julia burned any of the scandalous letters and journals that Cope had kept but many of his friends were able to give their recollections of the scandalous nature of some of Cope's unpublished routines. Charles R. Knight, a former friend called, "Cope's mouth the filthiest, from hearsay that in heyday no woman was safe within five miles of him." As Julia was the major financier behind The Master Naturalist, she wanted to keep her father's name in good standing and refused to comment on any misdeeds her father may have committed.

Cope was described by zoologist Henry Weed Fowler as "a man of medium height and build, but always impressive with his great energy and activity". To him, Fowler wrote, " was both genial and always interesting, easily approachable, and both kindly and helpful." His self-taught nature, however, meant that he was largely hostile to bureaucracy and politics. He had a famous temper; one friend called Cope a "militant paleontologist". Despite his faults, he was generally well liked by his contemporaries. American paleontologist Alfred Romer wrote that, " little slips from virtue were those we might make ourselves, were we bolder".

Cope was raised as a Quaker, and was taught that the Bible was literal truth. Although he never confronted his family about their religious views, Osborn writes that Cope was at least aware of the conflict between his scientific career and his religion. Osborn writes: "If Edward harbored intellectual doubts about the literalness of the Bible ... he did not express them in his letters to his family but there can be little question ... that he shared the intellectual unrest of the period." Lanham writes that Cope's religious fervor (which seems to have subsided after his father's death) was embarrassing to even his devout Quaker associates. Biographer Jane Davidson believes that Osborn overstated Cope's internal religious conflicts. She ascribes Cope's deference to his father's beliefs as an act of respect or a measure to retain his father's financial support. Frazer's reminiscences about his friend suggest that Cope often told people what they wanted to hear, rather than Cope's true views.

Cope's views on human evolution would today be considered racist, but his beliefs were used by scientists of the time as an excuse for imperialism. He believed that if, "a race was not white then it was inherently more ape-like". He was not opposed to blacks because of the color of their skin but their "degrading vices," believing that the "inferior Negro should go back to Africa." He did not blame blacks for their perceived "poor virtue", but wrote that, "A vulture will always eat carrion when surrounded on all hands by every kind of cleaner food. It is the nature of the bird." Cope was against the modern view of women's rights, believing in the husband's role as protector; he was opposed to women's suffrage as he felt they would be unduly influenced by their husbands.

As a young man, Cope read Charles Darwin's Voyage of a Naturalist, which had little effect on him. The only comment about Darwin's book recorded by Cope was that Darwin discussed "too much geology" from the account of his voyage. Due to his background in taxonomy and paleontology, Cope focused on evolution in terms of changing structure, rather than emphasizing geography and variation within populations as Darwin had. Over his lifetime Cope's views on evolution shifted. His original view, described in the paper "On the Origin of Genera" (1868), held that while Darwin's natural selection may affect the preservation of superficial characteristics in organisms, natural selection alone could not explain the formation of genera. Cope's suggested mechanism for this action was a "steady progressive development of organization" through what Cope termed "a continual crowding backward of the successive steps of individual development". In Cope's view, during embryological development an organism could complete their growth with a new stage of development beyond its parents, taking it to a higher level of organization. Later individuals would inherit this new level of development—thus evolution was a continuous advance of organization, sometimes slowly and other times suddenly; this view is known as the law of acceleration. Cope's beliefs later evolved to one with an increased emphasis on continual and utilitarian evolution with less involvement of a Creator. He became one of the founders of the Neo-Lamarckism school of thought, which holds that individuals can pass on traits acquired in its lifetime to offspring. Although the view has been shown incorrect, it was the prevalent theory among paleontologists in Cope's time. In 1887, Cope published his own "Origin of the Fittest: Essays in Evolution", detailing his views on the subject. He was a strong believer in the law of use and disuse—that an individual will slowly, over time, favor an anatomical part of its body so much that it will become stronger and larger as time progresses down the generations. The giraffe, for example, stretched its neck to reach taller trees and passed this acquired characteristic to its offspring in the new developmental phase that is added on to the fetus in the womb. This new stage of sharing of genetics would be added on after all gestation is completed and the offspring is ready to be conceived.

In fewer than 40 years as a scientist Cope published over 1,400 scientific papers, a record that stands to this day. These include three major volumes: On the Origin of Genera (1867), The Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the West (1884) and "Essays in Evolution". He discovered a total of 56 new dinosaur species during the Bone Wars compared to Marsh's 80. Although Cope is today known as a herpetologist and paleontologist, his contributions extended to ichthyology, in which he catalogued 300 species of fishes over three decades. In total he discovered and described over 1,000 species of fossil vertebrates and published 600 separate titles.

The salamander Dicamptodon copei (Nussbaum, 1970), the dinosaur Drinker nisti (Bakker et al., 1990), the lizard Gambelia wislizenii copeii (H. C. Yarrow, and the Splash tetra Copella arnoldi (Regan, 1912) are among the many species named for Cope. There are currently 21 fish species named copei distributed among 11 families. Copeia is the journal of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH), founded in 1913 by John Treadwell Nichols. Cope's Pine Street home is recognized as a national landmark.