The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics) Read Free

same time, Steinbeck and Ricketts gradually developed a deep and lasting friendship, based largely on the novelist’s interest in Ricketts’s work in the intertidal.
     
    It is generally assumed that Steinbeck’s interest in marine science began when he met Ricketts. But Steinbeck had been interested in the subject for several years, at least since 1923, when he took a summer course in general zoology at the Hopkins Marine Station taught by C. V. Taylor. Taylor was a student of Charles Kofoid at Berkeley, and both were devotees of William Emerson Ritter, whose doctrine of the organismal conception of life formed the zeitgeist of the Berkeley biological sciences faculty at the time. In fact, Ritter’s ideas were transmitted via Kofoid and Taylor to the young and impressionable Steinbeck, who years later told Hopkins professor Rolf Bolin that what he remembered most about his summer at Hopkins was Ritter’s concept of the “superorganism.”
     
    Ritter believed that “in all parts of nature and in nature itself as one gigantic whole, wholes are so related to their parts that not only does the existence of the whole depend upon the orderly cooperation and interdependence of the parts, but the whole exercises a measure of determinative control over its parts.” This notion of “wholeness” is inherent in every unit of existence, claimed Ritter, since each living unit is a unique whole, the parts of which “contribute their proper share to the structure and the functioning of the whole.” Ritter believed that since “one’s ability to construct his own nature from portions of nature in general is a basic fact of his reality,” man is capable of understanding the organismal unity of life and, as a result, can know himself more fully. This, says Ritter, is “man’s supreme glory”—not only “that he can know the world, but he can know himself as a knower of the world.”
     
    Ed Ricketts was not familiar with Ritter’s work when he came to California in 1923, after an uneven career as a biology undergraduate at the University of Chicago (he grew up on the northwest side of the city). But Ritter’s ideas had much in common with those of Ricketts’s favorite teacher at the university, animal ecologist W. C. Allee, whose ideas about the universality of social behavior among animals, and whose theory that animals behave differently in groups than as individuals (described in detail in his classic 1931 treatise on the subject, Animal Aggregations), profoundly affected Ricketts’s way of viewing life. Years later, Jack Calvin told this writer that “we knew W. C. Allee from Ed’s conversations, discovering that all of his former students got a holy look in their eyes at the mention of his name, as Ed always did.” Allee did much of his work at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he eventually concluded that “the social medium is the condition necessary to the conservation and renewal of life,” but that this is an automatic and not a conscious process. And when Allee turned his attention from the lower animals to man, he concluded that so-called altruistic drives in man “apparently are the development of these innate tendencies toward cooperation, which find their early physiological expression in many simpler animals.”
     
    Ritter’s organismal conception, his idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts and that these parts arise from a differentiation of the whole, is different from but complementary to Allee’s thesis that organisms cooperate with one another to ensure their own survival. The ideas of these two pioneering ecologists provided an expansive intellectual ground upon which Steinbeck and Ricketts could develop their friendship. From almost the first day of their meeting, they became members of a larger group of latter-day Cannery Row bohemians, bound together by their poverty, which they combatted, as Jack Calvin noted, “by raiding local gardens and stealing vegetables for