Whitman was born in
Woodstock, Maine. His parents were
Adventist pacifists and prevented his efforts to enlist in the Union army in 1862. He worked as a part-time teacher and converted to
Unitarianism. He graduated from
Bowdoin College in 1868. Following graduation, Whitman became principal of the Westford Academy, a small Unitarian-oriented college preparatory school outside
Lowell, Massachusetts. In 1872 he moved to
Boston and taught a variety of subjects at English High School. During this time, he became a member of the
Boston Society of Natural History in 1874. In 1875, he took a leave of absence and went to the
University of Leipzig in Germany to complete a Ph.D. which he obtained in 1878. from one of Whitman's books A year later he received a postdoctoral fellowship at the
Johns Hopkins University, but immediately gave it up when after being recommended by noted biologist
Edward Sylvester Morse, he was
hired by the Japanese government to succeed Morse as professor at the
Tokyo Imperial University from 1879 to 1881. Influenced by his training in Germany, he introduced systematic methods of biological research, including the use of the
microscope.After leaving Japan, Whitman performed research at the
Naples Zoological Station (1882), became an assistant at the
Museum of Comparative Zoology,
Harvard University (1883–5), then directed the Allis Lake Laboratory, in
Milwaukee (1886–9), where he founded the
Journal of Morphology (1887). In 1884, Whitman married Emily Nunn. He moved to
Clark University (
Worcester, Massachusetts) (1889–92), then became a professor and curator of the Zoological Museum at the
University of Chicago (1892–1910), while concurrently serving as founding director of the
Marine Biological Laboratory,
Woods Hole, Massachusetts (1888–1908). During the 1880s, Whitman established himself as the central figure of academic biology in the United States. He systematized the procedures that European anatomists and zoologists had gradually developed over the past two decades. He was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1890, the United States
National Academy of Sciences in 1895, and the
American Philosophical Society in 1899. Over the course of his career, Whitman worked with more than 700 species of
pigeons, studying the relationship between phenotypic variation and heredity. By the turn of the 20th century, the last group of
passenger pigeons, all descended from the same pair, was kept by Whitman at the
University of Chicago. The last attempt to breed the remaining specimens was done by Whitman and the
Cincinnati Zoo, which included attempts at making a
rock dove foster passenger pigeon eggs. Whitman sent Martha, which was to be the last known specimen, to Cincinnati Zoo in 1902. In December 1910, he caught a chill and died a few days later. Whitman was a non-Darwinian
evolutionist.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote that Whitman did not believe in
Lamarckism,
Darwinism or
mutationism, instead Whitman was an advocate of
orthogenesis. Whitman only wrote one book on orthogenesis which was published nine years after his death in 1919 titled
Orthogenetic evolution in pigeons the book was published in a three volume set titled
Posthumous Works of Charles Otis Whitman, Gould claims that the book was written "too late, to win any potential influence". ==Partial bibliography==