Perhaps no order of mammals presents us with so extraordinary a series of gradations as this—leading us insensibly from the crown and summit of the animal creation down
to creatures, from which there is but a step, as it seems, to the lowest, smallest, and least intelligent of the placental Mammalia. It is as if nature herself had foreseen the arrogance of man, and with Roman severity had provided that his intellect, by its very triumphs, should call into prominence the slaves, admonishing the conqueror that he is but dust.
Nonetheless, and whatever his broader
good intent, Huxley did advance in support a harsh, uncompromising, and undeniably racist argument that arranged all humans in a line of advancing worth, and explicitly identified African blacks as midway at best between gorillas and European whites. Huxley’s error arose from a deep fallacy in his evolutionary reasoning—the progressivist equation of evolution with linear advance. He assumed
that evolution must proceed in a series of rising steps, and he felt that he couldn’t defend human evolution unless he could demonstrate such a linear order among modern people. In this assumption, he committed an even deeper error based on a classically false premise of reasoning: belief in continuity of cause, with failure to recognize that superficially similar phenomena at different scales may
have disparate causes.
Yes, humans differ from apes and, yes, humans vary among themselves. But these facts don’t imply that variation among modern humans acts as a microcosm for larger differences between humans and other species—though Huxley assumed such continuity when he ran human racial variation along the same scale as differences among primate species. Human races are not surrogates for
intermediate steps between ancestral apes and modern people; human races represent an entirely different scale of contemporary variation within a single biological species. We have no reason either to rank variation within a species along any line of worth, or to regard such contemporary diversity as particularly related to modes of our evolutionary derivation. Of course, evolution does predict
that the gap between ancestral apes and modern humans must be bridgeable, but the transitional forms are extinct species of the fossil record, not modern races. Moreover, since modern races are so young (as we now know), our differences are effectively inconsequential in evolutionary terms. No human race is, in toto, more apelike than any other. We are all recently derived varieties of the common
human stock,
Homo sapiens.
Poor, maligned, politically conservative, intellectually antediluvian Richard Owen. He took one look at Huxley’s racist argument, and nailed him—like a kite to the barn door, and exactly for the right reasons. I know that Owen did not refute Huxley in the service of racial egalitarianism. I know that Owen shared all Huxley’s prejudices about racial ranking and the existence
of higher and lower forms of human life. Owen’s text is sprinkled with the conventional language of a shared racist perspective. In 1859 he wrote that the chimpanzee lies “nearer than any other known mammalian animal to the human species, particularly to the lower, or Negro forms.” And later in the same work: “In the low, uneducated, uncivilized races, the brain is rather smaller than in
the higher, more civilized and educated races.” In the 1865 gorilla monograph, he rolls all common prejudices into one line by stating that male skulls must be treated as standards, with both females and lower races (identified, conventionally, as Ethiopian, or African black, and Papuan, or Melanesian black) as inferior: “If the naturalist . . . were to abandon his proper guide, viz. the average condition
of the brain in the male sex, and to take the brain of a female of the lowest Papuan or Ethiopian variety . . .”
I also know that Owen refuted Huxley’s racist argument in order to defend human uniqueness against a claim for continuity, and not for any social or political motive that we might honor today. Nonetheless, intentions and consequences must be separated (and much of the fascinating complexity
and moral ambiguity in our lives arises from the sharp disparity so often encountered between our goals and the opposite, yet unavoidable, side consequences of actions taken in the service of these goals—oppose hunting on principle, and too many deer may eat your flower gardens). Thus, I applaud the consequence of Owen’s argument, whatever his intent.
Moreover, in this particular case, Owen’s
refutation of a racist argument did not arise accidentally from a claim advanced entirely for other reasons. I honor Owen even more because he knew exactly what he was doing—as he directly quoted the few egalitarian sources of his time, and explicitly advanced his claim in the service of racial melioration (though not equality—an option that, sadly, did not exist in Owen’s intellectual framework).
By identifying human racial variation as both small in extent and fully encompassed within an indivisible species—in other words, as something different from the gaps between species—Owen refuted Huxley’s second crucial point, that the gap from highest ape to lowest man did not exceed the space between lowest and highest men. In the key passage, he writes:
The extent of differences in the proportion
of the cerebrum . . . in the different varieties of mankind is small, and with such slight gradational steps as to mark the unity of the human family in a striking manner.
But the most important sentence occurs two pages earlier:
Although in most cases the Negro’s brain is less than that of the European, I have observed individuals of the Negro race in whom the brain was as large as the average
one of Caucasians; and I concur with the great physiologist of Heidelberg, who has recorded similar observations, in connecting with such cerebral development the fact that there has been no province of intellectual activity in which individuals of the pure Negro race have not distinguished themselves.
Owen then appends an interesting footnote:
The University of Oxford worthily conferred,
in June 1864, the degree of Doctor of Divinity on Bishop Crowther, a member of pure West African Negro race, who was taken from his native land as a slave, and recaptured in the middle passage. I record with pleasure the instruction I have received in conversation with this sagacious and accomplished gentleman.
(Samuel Adjai Crowther, 1812–1891, was captured from a slaving ship by a British
man-of-war in 1822 and returned as a free man to Sierra Leone. Baptized in 1825, he attended mission schools in Africa, and then traveled to England, where he was ordained in 1842 and consecrated in 1864. He then served as bishop of Niger territory, where he translated the Bible into Yoruba.)
Owen’s passage surely reeks with paternalism by irrelevant modern standards, but we should honor his
decency at a time when some colleagues wouldn’t ever deign to socialize with a black man. Owen’s most revealing words, however, refer to “the great physiologist of Heidelberg”—for here we do grasp his unconventional allegiances. Friedrich Tiedemann, professor of anatomy at Heidelberg, was the only genuine egalitarian among early-nineteenth-century European scientists of eminence. He measured skulls
of all races and wrote several treatises on the putative intellectual equality of all people. He submitted a major article in English to the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
in 1836, the document quoted by Owen. If Owen explicitly cited Tiedemann, we can be confident that he chose to refute Huxley’s argument on race, at least in part, by defending the high intellectual achievement
and capacity of all human groups.
From 1859 until his death in 1870, Charles Dickens published a weekly miscellany of literature and current events entitled
All the Year Round.
He did not write each piece himself, but he exercised such a strong editorial hand that the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
remarks: “He took responsibility for all the opinions expressed (for authors were anonymous) and selected
and amended contributions accordingly. Thus comments on topical events may generally be taken as expressing his opinions, whether or not he wrote them.” Dickens published his major commentary on Darwin in the July 7, 1860, issue of
All the Year Round.
The closing paragraph reads:
Timid persons, who purposely cultivate a certain inertia of mind, and who love to cling to their preconceived ideas,
fearing to look at such a mighty subject from an unauthorized and unwonted point of view, may be reassured by the reflection that, for theories, as for organized beings, there is also a Natural Selection and a Struggle for Life. The world has seen all sorts of theories rise, have their day, and fall into neglect.
Owen’s theory fell and died; Huxley’s views prevailed, both by virtue of essential
truth and possession of the right to tell history. But amalgamations usually forge our best solutions in a complex world—and I wish we had preserved Owen’s correct and principled argument on race in proper integration with Huxley’s evolutionary perspective. Such a conjunction, if incorporated into political and social policy as well, could have spared human history from most major horrors of
the past century. We must still struggle to craft the conjunction, a tale of two worlds—for, in so doing, we might convert the “worst of times” to “the best of times, an “age of foolishness” into an “age of wisdom,” and the “season of Darkness” into a “season of Light.”
7
MR. SOPHIA’S PONY
I
F A STOLEN PURSE COUNTS ONLY AS TRASH COMPARED WITH A GOOD NAME
lost, how shall we judge the happily expiring custom of addressing a married woman by her husband’s name? Perhaps I was an incipient feminist from my cradle, but I do remember wondering, at a very early age, why my mother, Eleanor, often received letters addressed to a Mrs. Leonard Gould.
Among several possible
redresses, the game of turning tables in favorable circumstances surely has appeal. Samuel Gridley Howe (1801–1876) did good work as an educator of the blind, but I once took great pleasure in identifying him as Mr. Julia Ward Howe to acknowledge his more famous wife, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
We do not often encounter such an opportunity among married scientists, given the
virtual exclusion of women before our current generation. Mme. Curie stands among the greatest scientists of all time, but her husband, Pierre, was also no slouch, and must therefore remain Pierre, not Mr. Marie. But I do know one scientific couple subject to this strategy of inversion for pairing an eminent wife with an obscure husband—and I do feel quite protective, for Mr. Sophia Kovalevsky was
a paleontologist, and a damned fine (if forgotten) scientist in his own right.
The
Dictionary of Scientific Biography
begins its entry on Sophia Kovalevsky (1850-1891) by calling her “the greatest woman mathematician prior to the twentieth century.” She studied abroad, for women could not obtain degrees from Russian universities. In Berlin, she received four years of private tutoring from professors,
for women could not attend university lectures. In 1874, she earned her doctorate in absentia from the University of Göttingen in Germany. Despite the acknowledged excellence of her research, and solely for reasons of her gender, Kovalevsky could not obtain an academic position anywhere in Europe. She therefore returned to Russia—to a life of odd jobs, failed business ventures, and stolen
hours for mathematical study. In 1883, following the death of Mr. Sophia—we shall come to him shortly—she again tried to obtain an academic post, this time successfully. She enjoyed several years of productive work as a professor of mathematics at the University of Stockholm, but died of influenza and subsequent pneumonia at age forty-one, at the height of her accomplishments and fame.
Sophia
Kovalevsky published only ten papers on mathematical subjects during her brief life (she also attempted, less successfully, a simultaneous career in literature, writing several novels, a play, and a critical commentary on George Eliot, whom she had met on a trip to England). But these substantial works on diverse problems in mathematics brought her much renown. She studied the propagation of light
in a crystalline medium, the rings of Saturn, and the rotation of rigid bodies around fixed points; she wrote several papers on technical matters (that I do not pretend to understand) in integral calculus. In 1888, she won the Boudin Prize of the French Academy of Science for her memoir on the rotation of rigid bodies (which generalized the work of her French predecessors Poisson and Lagrange).
The judges were so impressed by her research that they raised the award from three thousand to five thousand francs to express their gratitude.
Vladimir Onufrievich Kovalevsky (1842-1883)—Mr. Sophia—entered his wife’s life in a most unromantic, but eminently practical, manner integral to this tale of Sophia’s career. Single women of intellectual bent languished in Catch-22 in mid-nineteenth-century
Russia. They could not study at Russian universities, but they could not travel abroad as independent persons, either. To escape this bind, freethinking women often arranged sham marriages with men of similar persuasions. The technically married couple could then travel abroad for foreign study. Sophia wed Vladimir for emancipation and the right to travel. The newlyweds then left for Germany,
to live in different apartments and study in different cities.
Sophia and Vladimir belonged to the culture of freethinking Russians who, in pre-revolutionary times, gave their name to one of the few English words with a Russian etymology—the intelligentsia. The men and women of the intelligentsia tended to radicalism in politics, Bohemianism in lifestyle (in stark contrast to the proclaimed asceticism
of later Bolshevism), and—in a striking difference from American and Western European versions of the same phenomenon—fascination for science and confidence in its power to transform the world for good. These men and women sought scientists for their idols, rather than the literary or philosophical intellectuals who fronted for similar movements in other lands. Darwin, in particular, became
their icon—and for this reason (and as a historical curiosity rarely acknowledged or appreciated), most Russian intellectuals were strict Darwinians while, to Darwin’s own frustration, other European scientists, although convinced of evolution’s truth by the
Origin of Species
, tended to reject Darwin’s favored mechanism of natural selection.