The Canon (13 page)

I once reported on an astonishing discovery from the world of primatology: In the typical social grouping of chimpanzees, with multiple adult males living with multiple adult females, and manic multiple mating on the scale of the old Manhattan swingers' haunt Plato's Retreat, it seemed that the resident males were often wasting their time, Darwinically speaking. Yes, they were consorting with the resident females, over and over again, but DNA analysis seemed to indicate that, despite the males' exertions, half the baby chimpanzees in a given group had been sired by fathers other than the resident studs. How could this be? The discovery roiled the close-knit but competitive community of chimpanzee researchers. Over decades of fieldwork, devoted ape gapers from Jane Goodall onward had seen virtually no evidence of extratroop cavorting, of females sneaking off for liaisons with nonresident males.

The short answer to "How could it be?" is "Oops." As another team of researchers determined a year later, the finding that defied biological plausibility turned out to be erroneous, the regrettable outcome of suboptimal genetic samples crossed with misleading statistical comparisons of the chimpanzees' DNA. On reanalyzing the DNA fingerprints, the primatologists brought molecular evidence into alignment with field studies and showed the resident male chimpanzees to be the true father figures to whatever hairy bairns would dare gambol among them.

Once again, the abiding scientific verity proved apt: when confronted with an astonishing result, cache a kernel of doubt until the finding has been independently verified, preferably by an old rival of the researcher who had hoped to do anything but.

Other questions to ask of a statistic include: Who discovered you? Was it an interested party with an economic, emotional, or political stake in the outcome? Pharmaceutical companies had abundant incentive to promote so-called hormone replacement therapy as a cure for anything that frails you, and for a few years in the 1990s huge numbers of women were convinced that the benefits of drugs like Premarin in keeping their hearts hale, their spines straight, and their collagen bouncy far outweighed any small, added risk of breast cancer the hormones might bring. But when a reasonably impartial jury, the Women's Health Initiative, tackled the worthiness of the hormones on a nationwide scale, they found the risks dwarfed the benefits, that in fact the benefits were almost negligible. Unfortunately, most drugs are not subject to a similar degree of federally financed scrutiny. The pharmaceutical industry pays for most of its own safety and efficacy trials, and, yes, many instances of corporate chicanery or negligence have surfaced over
the years: warnings about the dangers of the painkiller Vioxx ignored, evidence that some antidepressants may raise the risk of suicide among adolescents suppressed. Still, your best bet is to ask where a statistic comes from, and whether it has been verified by an impartial source.

As mentioned earlier, you should also seek to put a statistic in context and bring key background facts to the fore. If you hear that the incidence of a childhood cancer rose by 50 percent between last year and this, take a look at the numbers for the preceding five years. Childhood cancers are always devastating, but thankfully even the commonest members of the perverse class—leukemia, for example, or neuroblastoma—are still quite rare. With rare diseases, a few extra cases can make a huge difference in rates. Look at how the figures fluctuate over time. If there's been a slow but steady rise in incidence over a decade, then a report warning of the trend merits attention. But for an erratic zigging and zagging, random misfortune is as likely an explanation for a bad year as anything else.

Above all, remember that numbers are not mystical, infallible, or always pure of heart. Many people say they hate being treated as "just another statistic." Well, a statistic is never "just" a statistic, either. It's the product of a human mind, a human judgment call, human imagination, human bias, human weakness. Learning to think quantitatively helps one surmount a tendency to accept a quantity without quibble or qualification. A young relative of mine recently took the SAT and scored 1,300 out of 1,600. My family obviously has known her for years, but now we had a quantity by which we could really peg her to the board: she's pretty smart, but not flagrantly smart. A few months later, without the aid of a tutor or a Stanley Kaplan course, she took the SAT again, and scored 1,410. Phew! She's not just pretty smart, she's extremely smart.

The Scholastic Aptitude Test may be a wholly hominid invention, written by a small cabal of elders for untold throngs of youngers, but we treated it as though it offered cosmic truth. And when it presented two different versions of that truth, we did what any loving family would do, and called the first figure a liar.

O
F THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS,
the one with perhaps the most diverse menu of antivenins is the sin of pride. Need a quick infusion of humility? Climb to a scenic overlook in the mountain range of your choice and gaze out over the vast cashmere accordion of earthscape, the repeating pleats swelling and dipping silently into the far horizon without even deigning to disdain you. Or try the star-spangled bowl of a desert sky at night and consider that, as teeming as the proscenium above may seem to your naked gape, you are seeing only about 2,500 of the 300 billion stars in our Milky Way—and that there are maybe 100 billion other star-studded galaxies in our universe besides, beyond your unaided view. A visit to a cemetery also does the trick: no, not one of those poignant churchyards tucked beside a James Renwick, Jr., cathedral, where the gravestones are few, slate, and safely antique; but a place like the Montefiore Cemetery complex in Queens, in which my grandmother, two of her siblings, and maybe another 150,000 of the recently deceased are buried, and which sprawls for several hundred acres just off the Long Island Expressway.

Yet of the many humbling tonics to which I have willingly or incidentally been exposed, perhaps the most effective was also the most humble. Not long ago, I revisited the old Bronx neighborhood where I spent my childhood, and I was overcome with an embarrassing case of existential angst. It wasn't that the neighborhood had changed terribly much. True, the apartment building where we lived had been torn down and replaced by a parking lot, but many of the surrounding prewar buildings were still standing, as grimily well intentioned as ever. Instead, what distressed me was how minor and compressed everything
seemed, how much shorter the distances between the touchstones of my formative years were in reality than in memory. The geography of my childhood had been momentous, every block a continent, every ordinary excursion my own private odyssey. The weekly pilgrimage to the Garden Bakery for a loaf of challah or seedless rye, and maybe a black-and-white cookie if Lady Luck had chatted up my mother beforehand? Surely we're talking a half mile or more! No. The bakery is gone, but the corner remains, a mere two blocks from my home. The daily trek to P.S. 28, my elementary school, along a slalom of uphills and downhills, switchbacks and sinister intersections, and the dauntingly long stretch at the end where a gang of girls had assaulted me and stolen my brand-new purse? Four and a half blocks.

Obviously my sense of scale had been out of whack and off the map, a puerile version of Saul Steinberg's often imitated Manhattanite's view of the world. I'd felt overwhelmed in childhood by every detail of my microhabitat, and so I'd exaggerated the physical dimensions of my surroundings to match their emotional might. Now that I could size up the neighborhood through the pitilessly polished lens of adulthood, I realized how slight my all had been, how badly I had misjudged the distance between any two points. It wasn't my fault. I was a kid, and children are by nature preternaturally alert to the particulars of the niche into which they've been thrust. But the experience offered a graphic example of how often we humans stumble over our scales. Throughout history, people have wildly misjudged distances, proportions, comparisons, the bead of being. We non–Native American Americans owe our presence in and possession of the New World to that colossal navigational blunder called the "Enterprise of the Indies," Christopher Columbus's attempt to reach the Far East by sailing west. Maps traditionally are centered on the land most beloved by the mapmaker—Jerusalem to the medieval illuminist, country of birth or current employer to the cartographers of today. By all appearances, we have evolved to view life on a human scale, to concern ourselves almost exclusively with the rhythms of hours, days, seasons, years, and with objects that we can readily see, touch, and count on, because those are what we have to work with, those are the ambient utensils with which we must build our lives.

Yet the vital pacemakers and proportions of daily life are entirely incidental. Consider, for example, that satisfying quantity, the handful. We humans are able to glance at groupings of up to about five objects together and instantly know, without counting, the quantity, a skill thought to be a legacy of the five fingers with which we've always
grabbed at treasures like ripe blueberries (or better yet, chocolate-covered blueberries) and against which we could then evaluate the magnitude of the plucked bounty. Yes, we have ten fingers, but we're a strongly handed species, about 90 percent of us right-handed, and we do most of our grasping with that favored fivesome. It's remarkable how difficult it is to see a cluster of, say, seven or eight objects and recognize them as such without going through the tedium of counting—unless, that is, they're arranged in tidy subgroups of five or fewer. Our sense of time, too, reflects our everyday experiences. The basic unit of ordinary time, the second, corresponds remarkably closely to the two most basic rhythms of life: the time it takes to fill our lungs with a breath and the duration of a single healthy heartbeat.

Because our solar system formed when a great mass of gas, dust, and rock began collapsing in on itself (a subject we'll take up in some detail later), and because gravitational condensation causes bodies to start spinning like those amazing vertigo-proof figure skaters, all the planets rotate on their axes at greater or lesser speeds. Earth happens to be spinning at a rotational speed that takes just about twenty-four hours to complete (23.934 hours, to be exact). As Annie Dillard said, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives," and the boundaries of those days are the accidental bounty, a literal spinoff, of gravity. In fact, Earth's dervish dancing has been gradually slowing down, largely as a result of the tidal tugging of our tagalong moon. Early on, Earth completed a twirl in only ten hours, and even as recently as 620 million years ago a day was done in 21.9 hours, nightmarish notions for those of us already inclined to whine about deadlines and sleep deprivation.

Location is everything, and it was ours during the birth of the solar system that granted us our annum. Earth sails around its orbit of more than half a billion miles at 66,600 miles per hour because of its distance relative to the gravitational master, the sun. Venus, by contrast, is 26 million miles closer to the sun than we are, which means that (a) its orbit is shorter than ours; (b) the comparatively greater gravitational pull of the sun prompts Venus to dash through each lap at a heightened pace (78,400 miles per hour); and (c) a year there lasts only 226 Earth days, another unpleasant thought for book writers with contracts to fulfill. And let's not dwell on that solar toady of a planet named after the Roman god with feathers on his shoes, where a "year" lasts less than three months.

What little visceral sense we have of history tends to be based on the average human life span of some three-score and ten. Any interval
greater than a century in either direction blurs in our mental calendar into an ameboid abstraction. I've known for most of my life that my ancestor Silas Angier fought in the Revolutionary War, but until recently I had no idea how many generations lay between him and me. When people would ask me, in light of my surname, whether I am French, I'd reply, Not lately, and I'd explain that the Angier family came to America from England in the seventeenth century; and while I was at it, I'd throw in a reference to my heraldic vinculum to our nation's founding. "In fact, my great-great-great, great-great"—a rapid waving of the hand backward through air and space-time—"great-great and so forth grandfather Silas Angier fought in the Revolutionary War." Wow, they'd say. Is there something wrong with your hand?

In the course of writing an essay about Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, however, the town in which Silas and many other Angiers are buried, I had another of those back-to-the-Bronx moments, an embarrassed recognition of my distorted sense of scale. By going through town records, I determined that the greats between Silas and me were not so great after all, that they could be sized up handily with a finger to spare. He of the musket, breeches, and tricornered hat, the fellow born six years before Thomas Jefferson, was merely my great-great-great-great-grandfather. Contrary to myth, time doesn't fly particularly fast when you're dead.

Kings and assorted other highnesses often believed their personal parts to be of sufficiently divine proportions to merit adoption as standard units of measurement. The Roman emperor Charlemagne declared in the ninth century that the length of
his
foot would henceforth be
the
foot; and by that measure the emperor, who was said to be of good but not towering physical stature, could boast of standing seven feet tall. Three centuries later, the British monarch King Henry I decreed that the yard would be equal to the distance from his nose to the tip of the middle finger of his extended arm. The ever roaming Romans devised the concept of the mile as the distance a man can cover in 1,000 full-stride, manly paces; "mile" comes from the Latin term
milia passuum,
or thousand paces.

All such measurements were gradually standardized beginning in the Renaissance and continuing into the twentieth century. And while I am an ardent partisan of the metric system that has been embraced by all scientists and by virtually every nation save ours, I admit that there is nothing particularly fundamental about most of the metric units. They are not based on essential properties of atoms, or light, or gravity. (With one notable exception: the metric of temperature, degrees Celsius, is derived from critical phases of a cosmically abundant molecule without which we could not exist—water. The temperature at which water freezes is given the coveted slot of naught as 0 degrees Celsius, while the boiling point of water is designated as 100 degrees Celsius.) Regardless of origin, the metric system is defensible for its base-ten beauty, its ease of arpeggioing up and down the keyboard. How many millimeters in a centimeter, centimeters in a meter, meters in a kilometer? That's 10, 100, and 1,000 respectively. How many inches in a foot and a yard, how many yards in a mile? 12, 36, 1,760. Gee. Tough choice about which system we should be teaching our kids. So why does my daughter still have to learn both? When are we going to give up our inches, take out our miles, and toss them all on one last Fahrenheit fire? I have a sneaking but wholly unsubstantiated suspicion that the real block-and-tackle to American metrification is the American football field, and the hallowed quantum of the ten-yard line.
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