Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (15 page)

Darwin, of course, read the discovery in exactly this sensible light. He wrote to Dana on January 7, 1863:

But wait. The old fighter rises at the count of nine. He circles back; he feints, he bides his time; the bell rings. He rests and recoups; and he comes out fighting for the next round. In November 1863, Dana published his reply to
Archaeopteryx
in an article titled “On Parallel Relations of the Classes of Vertebrates, and on Some Characteristics of the
Reptilian Birds.”
Archaeopteryx
, he proclaimed, provides no evidence for evolution, but becomes instead the best possible discovery for validating his own creationist numerology of classification based on cephalization!

Since we are primates, and primates are visual animals, we often epitomize our worldviews in iconographic form. And nothing can be quite so powerful as a picture for summarizing
and solidifying a view of life. In his article, Dana presents the classification of vertebrates as a picture, and thereby upholds a crucial role for
Archaeopteryx
in completing the geometry of divine numerology. As his picture shows (see the following figure), Dana wishes to classify each of the three terrestrial classes—mammals, birds, and reptiles—into his customary twofold division of typical
and hemitypical. In each case, the hemitypical group should point toward the inferior class below. Mammals, of course, stand on top. Ordinary placentals form their typical group, while marsupials and the egg-laying monotremes (duck-billed platypus and echidna) build the hemitypical group below. He calls these hemitypical mammals “ooticoids”—and they clearly point to birds and reptiles in their
laying of eggs.

Reptiles also come in twos—the typical snakes, turtles, lizards, and others of that ilk; and the hemitypical frogs and salamanders among the amphibians. (We now classify amphibians as a separate class, but taxonomists of Dana’s day often put all terrestrial coldblooded creatures together into an expanded class Reptilia.) As hemitypic egg-laying mammals pointed to the reptilian
class below, so also do hemitypic amphibians point to the fishes below in their initial aquatic phase of tadpole life.

But what about birds? Now Dana encounters a problem, and a threat to the numerical beauty of his system. Flying birds are clearly typical, but what birds can be called hemitypical? Hemitypes must point to the class below—in this case, again to fishes. One might label flightless
ostriches and emus as hemitypical, but in what possible way can these creatures be pointing to fishes? On the contrary, their terrestrial life seems to point upward to mammals (or at least sideways to reptiles), and therefore threatens the entire system. Imagine, then, Dana’s delight in the discovery of
Archaeopteryx
—for he could argue that this fossil’s retention of teeth leads downward to the
hemitypic shark, which, as Mack the Knife so pointedly noted, has “pretty teeth, dear, and he shows them pearly white.” Almost gleefully, therefore, Dana portrayed
Archaeopteryx
, the supposedly final messenger of evolutionary truth, as the salvation of his own numerological system of creation! For
Archaeopteryx
—“erpetoids” in Dana’s terminology—stands forth as the missing hemitypic bird, and Dana’s
system becomes healed and whole. He wrote:

Dana actually drew two arguments against evolution from his new icon of vertebrate classification. First, as noted above,
Archaeopteryx
completed a numerical geometry that could only arise by divine intent and imposition. The organization of fishes provides a second anti-Darwinian argument. Typical fishes are teleosts, the bony fishes that include almost all modern species. But
fishes also include two hemitypic divisions—with the crucial difference that fish hemitypes point
upward
toward the higher terrestrial vertebrates rather than downward. The hemitypic sharks (Selachians on Dana’s chart) point to the hemitypic
Archaeopteryx
and then up to typical birds; and the hemitypical lungfishes (Ganoids on Dana’s chart) point up to the hemitypical amphibians and thence to
the typical reptiles.

The whole system is therefore rounded and complete within itself. The upper divisions point down through their hemitypical groups; while the lower divisions point up through their own hemitypes. What else but a static and created order could be so self-contained and self-defining? Dana concludes, with explicit refutation of Darwin:

This scheme may be madness, as Darwin might have said, but it is surely divine madness.

Historians, like most decent people, tend to be patriotic.
Dana represented America’s best, and who wants to saddle him with a reputation as an old fogey and holdout against the truth of evolution? Several scholarly articles have therefore focused upon Dana’s belated, strictly minimal, and reluctant “conversion” to evolution—as first stated in the 1874 edition of his
Manual of Geology
and, two years later, in his last paper on cephalization. Rather defensively,
Dana now holds (in the 1876 article on cephalization) that evolution may have become the preferred mode of change, but that progress by cephalization still marks the result. Dana now seems to say, “I was right about what happens, but perhaps not about how it happens. What happens is more important anyway. Pattern reveals divine intent; mechanism is only a means to an end.” In his own words:

But we should not cite such grudging passages as Dana’s last hurrah and ultimate redemption—though traditional interpretations have followed this route. Dana made his minimal move toward evolution in order to preserve as much as possible of his crumbling system, not as a zealous, born-again crusader who had finally seen the light. By owning evolution as a mechanism,
Dana could preserve his deeper convictions about progress by cephalization.

The “heroic” approach does great disservice to Dana’s powerful intellect, and perpetuates a silly doctrine of validation by redemption in late conversion to a current truth (almost like an apostate Christian who reconciles with Jesus on his deathbed and expires in grace, despite the ignominy of his former existence).
Dana’s last hurrah for evolution was a little blip, not the definition of his scientific life. We should honor and respect him for the power of his lifelong view, ably and honorably defended over decades, though now judged wanting. Surely, in science, it is no sin to be wrong for good reasons.

If we dismiss those scientists now judged wrong, only valuing them if they eventually saw the light,
we will miss a grand opportunity to address one of the most elusive and portentous questions in scholarly life. What is the nature of genius; why, among brilliant people, do some make revolutions and others die in the dust of concepts whose time had begun to pass in their own day? What is the crucial difference between Darwin’s transcendent greatness and Dana’s merely ordinary greatness? (Ordinary
greatness is not an oxymoronic concept, but a definition of leadership in old guards throughout history.)

I do not know the answer to this question of questions, but we can surely specify a key ingredient. Somehow, for some reason of psyche or quirk of mind, some impetus of social life or some drive of temperament, Darwin was driven to challenge, to be fearless in bringing down an intellectual
universe, to be joyful in trying out each thrilling and lovely bit of furniture in a reconstructed world. Dana, for other properties of the same attributes, could not, or dared not, abandon the traditional hope and succor of centuries: Rock of ages, cleft for me; let me hide myself in thee.

Consider, in closing, how the two men treated Plato, the greatest of all intellectual Gods. Dana simply
revered his name and his concept of a permanent realm of idealized perfection. Darwin delighted in challenging the master—in showing how simply, and how elegantly, the new evolutionary view could interpret and explain some of the great mysteries and arcana of the ages. Just one comment, privately penned in one of Darwin’s youthful notebooks, after he returned to London on the
Beagle
, captures
this fundamental difference between Darwin’s flexibility and Dana’s immobility. With one line, Darwin cuts through two thousand years of traditional interpretation for innate concepts of the human brain. They are not, he nearly shouts for joy, manifestations of Platonic absolutes transmitted from the ideal realm of archetypes, but simple inheritances from our past:

A SEAHORSE FOR ALL RACES

R
ICHARD
O
WEN
, E
NGLAND
’
S GREATEST ANATOMIST
,
AWAITED WITH KEEN
anticipation the monthly installments of Charles Dickens’s latest novel,
Our Mutual Friend.
Owen needed no special reason to join his countrymen in reading the serialized work of England’s most beloved writer. But Owen did have a personal stake in the new book, for Dickens had shaped the character of Mrs.
Podsnap for his scientific friend: “A fine woman for Professor Owen, quantity of bone, neck and nostrils like a rocking-horse, hard features, majestic head-dress in which Podsnap has hung golden offerings.”

Our Mutual Friend
appeared in full form in 1865. In the same year, perhaps in specific gratitude, but perhaps only to acknowledge their general friendship, Owen inscribed a copy of his newly
published
Memoir on the Gorilla
to “Charles Dickens, Esq. from his friend the Author.” I regard my ownership of this copy as a rare and precious privilege. Dickens made no annotations, but a bookplate on the cover, presumably inserted as a come-on for a sale after Dickens’s death in 1870, does prove that Owen’s friend kept and shelved the book: “From the library of Charles Dickens, Gadshill Place,
June 1870.” The friendship of Owen and Dickens blossomed within that bastion of Victorian connectivity among males of good breeding or accomplishment (sometimes even both): club life. They met most frequently at the Athenaeum—the major London club for intellectuals, and including both Darwin and Huxley as members. The Athenaeum still exists and still excludes women from several of its spaces.
Traditions and memories, both good and bad, die hard. I was once shown the very spot on the main staircase where Dickens and Thackeray almost came to blows.

In our current consciousness, gorillas have become familiar, if continually fascinating. But in Owen’s day, mystery and novelty increased the allure of these largest apes. Chimpanzees had been known for more than a century (the London physician
Edward Tyson had written a classic monograph on chimp anatomy in 1699), while Dutch ships had brought orangutans back from Indonesian colonies. But the gorilla, though featured in numerous legends, did not prove its existence to scientists until 1846, when Thomas Savage, an American missionary, obtained some skulls in Gabon. Owen, who had published many papers on the anatomy of other apes and
monkeys, narrowly lost the race for priority in identifying and naming the gorilla, when the French anatomist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and the American physician Jeffries Wyman barely beat him into print.

But Owen, as chief of natural history at the British Museum, had maximal access to new specimens. In 1851, he received the first complete skeleton to reach England, followed in 1858 by
a nearly full-grown male preserved in spirits. In 1861, the Museum purchased a collection of skins for mounting and exhibition, including females, males, and juveniles shot by the explorer Paul B. du Chaillu. Owen, therefore, possessed both the skills and the material to become the first great scientific expert on gorillas—and he accepted the challenge in many publications, culminating in his 1865
monograph.

Owen had the skin, muscles, and bones, but knowledge of behavior and ecology still depended upon unconfirmed reports of African travelers. Du Chaillu himself tended to skepticism. He regarded gorillas as mostly herbivorous (correct, as we now know), despite numerous reports of frightening carnivory. Owen writes in 1865: