Noble, Gladwyn Kingsley
NOBLE, GLADWYN KINGSLEY
(b. Yonkers, New York, 20 September 1894; d. Englewood, New Jersey, 9 December 1940)
herpetology, ethology, experimental biology.
Noble’s father, Gilbert Clifford Noble, was one of the founders of the Barnes and Noble bookstore and publishing house, which, however, experienced serious reverses while Noble was in college. His mother, Elizabeth Adams, was a member of the first graduating class at Vassar, G.K. (as he was called) was their second son (of seven children).
After graduating from Yonkers High School, Noble entered Harvard, majoring in zoology. He received his A.B. in 1916 and his A.M. in 1918. He spent much of his time as student at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, working as assistant to Thomas Barbour, who greatly influenced him. In the summers from 1914 to 1916 he made field expeditions (Guadeloupe, Newfoundland, Peru) and learned under Barbour’s guidance how to publish on his collections and observations. At first mostly interested in birds, Noble gradually moved to reptiles and amphibians through Barbour’s influence. After one year’s service in the U.S. Navy in 1918 and 1919, he entered Columbia University, selecting William K. Gregory as his supervisor. At the same time he accepted a position as assistant curator of herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History. In 1921 he married Ruth Crosby; they had two sons.
Noble’s thorough training in comparative anatomy under Gregory enabled him in his dissertation to place the classification of frogs and toads on a much more secure foundation. That dissertation, “Phylogeny of the Salientia” (1922) was soon recognized as a major contribution to herpetology. The classification was mainly based on such anatomical characters as the vertebral articulation and the configuration of the thigh muscles, instead of the more superficial characters previously used.
Noble devoted the years after he received the Ph.D.(1922) to the intense study of the amphibians; this resulted in the great text The Biology of the Amphibia (1931), which had an enormous impact on the field and was for many decades the “bible” of herpetologists. It was perhaps the first book in any branch of biology to be a successful synthesis of natural history and experimental biology. The volume documents not only Noble’s very broad competence, ranging from anatomy and physiology to ontogeny, life history, behavior, ecology, and classification, but also his mastery of the literature and in particular his familiarity with the foreign—language literature (French and German). At a time when frogs and salamanders were increasingly used in experimental embryology and other fields of laboratory biology, such a synthesis was particularly useful.
In a series of studies in the 1920’s and 1930’s, Noble tested the effect of thyroid, pituitary, and gonadal hormones on development and particularly on metamorphosis in various amphibians and reptiles; he also investigated the effect of hormones on life history, particularly reproduction.
Inevitably the study of hormonal effects on behavior led to a study of behavior per se and to the neural control of behavior. The study of behavior in the field and in the laboratory became Noble’s dominant interest in the last decade of his life. Social dominance, peck order, sexual selection, and many other aspects of behavior were studied experimentally in organisms of all classes of vertebrates from fishes to mammals. Noble pioneered in conducting experiments with wild individuals in free-living populations. How would a male flicker react to his female if the male characters were painted on the female? How would a territory-holding male act if the dummy of a conspecific male or female were introduced into the territory? How would the behavior of a free-living immature male be changed if it was injected with male hormone?
In the case of fixed behavior patterns Noble was very much interested in whether he could locate the control center in a defined area in the brain. His experimental researches were so successful that he was able to persuade the administration to build for him a two-story department of experimental biology as part of the American Museum, a great innovation as far as any natural history museum is concerned. He became curator of this department in 1928, in part as a reward for having planned and supervised the installation of two remarkably innovative museum exhibits, the Hall of Living Reptiles and the Hall of Animal Behavior, in which the latest findings of science were made available to the public. At the same time Noble massively enlarged the museum’s collections of reptiles and amphibians.
Noble was dynamic, tending to express his convictions forcefully, and thus was not always easy to deal with. His list of achievements in less than twenty years of professional life provides some indication of his almost compulsive drive. Yet his achievements were combined with such enthusiasm that Noble was able to inspire many amateurs to join him in research projects; there are thirty-seven coauthors in the list of his publications. During the depression of the 1930’s Noble succeeded in putting an “army” of W.P.A. workers to work card indexing the literature, translating important papers from the foreign literature, and setting up a voluminous information storage system. In the midst of working on numerous unfinished researches and of planning several new projects, Noble, otherwise in splendid health, succumbed within forty-eight hours to a strep throat infection, at age forty-six.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. Original Works. Noble wrote 135 papers on reptiles and amphibians, and about 50 papers on anatomy, behavior, and experimental biology. Among his works are “The Phylogeny of the Salientia”, in Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 46 (1922), 1–87, with 23 plates; “Contributions to the Herpetology of the Belgian Congo”, in Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 49 (1923–1924), 147–347; and The Biology of the Amphibia (New York, 1931).
II. Secondary Literature. Lester R. Aronson, “The Case of The Case of the Midwife Toad”, in Behavior Genetics, 5 (1975), 115–125 [Noble is widely known as the discoverer of one of Paul Kammerer’s frauds; Aronson corrects many of the errors and insinuations in Arthur Koestler’s book The Case of the Midwife Toad]; William K. Gregory, “Gladwyn Kingsley Noble”, in American Philosophical Society, Year Book 1941 (1942), 393–397; Walter L. Necker, “Gladwyn Kingsley Noble, 1894–1940; A Herpetological Bibliography”, in Herpetologica, 2 , no. 2 (1940), 47–55; and Ruth Crosby Noble, The Nature of the Beast (Garden City, N.Y., 1945), which includes detailed accounts of Noble’s behavioral studies and a bibliography of 33 of his behavioral writings.