INSCRIBED TO NOBELIST AT WOODS HOLE. Man Real and Ideal. Observations and Reflections on Man's Nature, Development, and Destiny de Conklin, Edwin G - 1943

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1943. First edition.

INSCRIBED DURING WW2 TO NOBELIST OTTO LOEWI WHO ESCAPED NAZI GERMANY IN 1940--FELLOW RESEARCHERS IN WOODS HOLE.

14x20.5 cm hardcover, bugundy cloth binding, inscribed and signed on front free endpaper, "To my dear friend and fellow idealist Dr. Otto Loewi with cordial thanks for his encouragement and inspiration. Edwin G. Conklin, Woods Hole, Mass. Aug. 21, 1944". i-xvii, [2], 247 pp. Spine faded, lacking dust jacket, very good in custom archival mylar cover. Light pencil notations on front paste-down (presumably by Otto Loewi) citing pages 187, 208, and 209. These correspond to pencilled marginal notations highlighting evolution, religion, and Darwin's own anguish over reconciling mechanistic evolution and morality. DEDICATION: "To my Students in Biology Of the past Fifty Years With whom I have discussed Many of the Topics in this Book, It is, with fond Memories DEDICATED." INTRODUCTION: "Mankind is now in the midst of one of the greatest crises in its long history. For the second time in a quarter century men are engaged in a world-wide war of incomparable devastation and of the utmost ferocity. This war is not confined to armies and navies and battle lines but is totalitarian in scope and is waged against peaceful cities and villages and countrysides; against men and women and children in their homes and shops, their schools and colleges, their hospitals and churches. All the fairest works of civilization that have been built up by the labor and intelligence of hundreds of generations of men are being destroyed as indiscriminately as by an earthquake or hurricane. Deliberate attempts are made to exterminate whole classes, races and nations of mankind." CONTENTS: I. The human species [human evolution], II. Development of the individual [cellular, social and moral development], III. The real and the ideal [science vs. religion, poetry, art].

EDWIN G. CONKLIN (1863-1952) received his BA from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1885 and his MA in 1889. From there Conklin went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where, with fellow students Thomas Hunt Morgan, Shosaburo Watase, Henry V. Wilson, and Ross G. Harrison, he studied physiology with H. Newell Martin, morphology with William Keith Brooks , and geology and paleontology with William B. Clark. Conklin received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1891, with his dissertation being on the cell lineage of the gastropod Crepidula. Conklin's hypothesis was established at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, MA, in the summer of 1891 when he compared his results to those of cell biologist Edmund Beecher Wilson's work with the annelid Nereis. In 1896 Conklin moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained for twelve years until he became professor of biology and chairman of the department at Princeton University in 1908. Conklin remained at Princeton until his retirement in 1933. During his twenty-five years as professor and director, and for several years past retirement, Conklin organized many seminars on the topics of philosophy of biology, giving lectures on topics such as "Science and the Future of Man" in 1930, "Science and Ethics" in 1937, and "The Biological Basis of Democracy" in 1938. A strong proponent of Charles Darwin's theories, Conklin devoted a great deal of time to lecturing and writing, for the scientific community as well as the public, on the various aspects of evolutionary theory. Outside of his scientific and professional work, Conklin had a longstanding interest in the philosophy of biology and the relations between science and human values."--DB Scheurmann-Embryo Project Encyclopedia (2009).

OTTO LOEWI (1873 – 1961) was a German-born pharmacologist whose discovery of acetylcholine helped enhance medical therapy. The discovery earned for him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1936 which he shared with Sir Henry Dale, whom he met in 1902 when spending some months in Ernest Starling's laboratory at University College, London. After escaping Nazi Germany, Loewi moved to the United States in 1940, where he became a research professor at the New York University College of Medicine. In 1946, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, was Loewi's summer home from his arrival in the US until his death.