Bully for Brontosaurus

IN FRANCE
, they call this genre
vulgarisation
—but the implications are entirely positive. In America, we call it “popular (or pop) writing” and its practitioners are dubbed “science writers” even if, like me, they are working scientists who love to share the power and beauty of their field with people in other professions.

In France (and throughout Europe),
vulgarisation
ranks within the highest traditions of humanism, and also enjoys an ancient pedigree—from St. Francis communing with animals to Galileo choosing to write his two great works in Italian, as dialogues between professor and students, and not in the formal Latin of churches and universities. In America, for reasons that I do not understand (and that are truly perverse), such writing for nonscientists lies immured in deprecations—“adulteration,” “simplification,” “distortion for effect,” “grandstanding,” “whiz-bang.” I do not deny that many American works deserve these designations—but poor and self-serving items, even in vast majority, do not invalidate a genre. “Romance” fiction has not banished love as a subject for great novelists.

I deeply deplore the equation of popular writing with pap and distortion for two main reasons. First, such a designation imposes a crushing professional burden on scientists (particularly young scientists without tenure) who might like to try their hand at this expansive style. Second, it denigrates the intelligence of millions of Americans eager for intellectual stimulation without patronization. If we writers assume a crushing mean of mediocrity and incomprehension, then not only do we have contempt for our neighbors, but we also extinguish the light of excellence. The “perceptive and intelligent” layperson is no myth. They exist in millions—a low percentage of Americans perhaps, but a high absolute number with influence beyond their proportion in the population. I know this in the most direct possible way—by thousands of letters received from nonprofessionals during my twenty years of writing these essays, and particularly from the large number written by people in their eighties and nineties, and still striving, as intensely as ever, to grasp nature’s richness and add to a lifetime of understanding.

We must all pledge ourselves to recovering accessible science as an honorable intellectual tradition. The rules are simple: no compromises with conceptual richness; no bypassing of ambiguity or ignorance; removal of jargon, of course, but no dumbing down of ideas (any conceptual complexity can be conveyed in ordinary English). Several of us are pursuing this style of writing in America today. And we enjoy success if we do it well. Thus, our primary task lies in public relations: We must be vigorous in identifying what we are and are not, uncompromising in our claims to the humanistic lineages of St. Francis and Galileo, not to the sound bites and photo ops in current ideologies of persuasion—the ultimate in another grand old American tradition (the dark side of anti-intellectualism, and not without a whiff of appeal to the unthinking emotionalism that can be a harbinger of fascism).

Humanistic natural history comes in two basic lineages. I call them Franciscan and Galilean in the light of my earlier discussion. Franciscan writing is nature poetry—an exaltation of organic beauty by corresponding choice of words and phrase. Its lineage runs from St. Francis to Thoreau on Walden Pond, W. H. Hudson on the English downs, to Loren Eiseley in our generation. Galilean composition delights in nature’s intellectual puzzles and our quest for explanation and understanding. Galileans do not deny the visceral beauty, but take greater delight in the joy of causal comprehension and its powerful theme of unification. The Galilean (or rationalist) lineage has roots more ancient than its eponym—from Aristotle dissecting squid to Galileo reversing the heavens, to T. H. Huxley inverting our natural place, to P. B. Medawar dissecting the follies of our generation.

I love good Franciscan writing but regard myself as a fervent, unrepentant, pure Galilean—and for two major reasons. First, I would be an embarrassing flop in the Franciscan trade. Poetic writing is the most dangerous of all genres because failures are so conspicuous, usually as the most ludicrous form of purple prose (see James Joyce’s parody, cited in Chapter 17). Cobblers should stick to their lasts and rationalists to their measured style. Second, Wordsworth was right. The child is father to the man. My youthful “splendor in the grass” was the bustle and buildings of New York. My adult joys have been walks in cities, amidst stunning human diversity of behavior and architecture—from the Quirinal to the Piazza Navona at dusk, from the Georgian New Town to the medieval Old Town of Edinburgh at dawn—more than excursions in the woods. I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary twig called
Homo sapiens
. And I find, among these works, nothing more noble than the history of our struggle to understand nature—a majestic entity of such vast spatial and temporal scope that she cannot care much for a little mammalian afterthought with a curious evolutionary invention, even if that invention has, for the first time in some four billion years of life on earth, produced recursion as a creature reflects back upon its own production and evolution. Thus, I love nature primarily for the puzzles and intellectual delights that she offers to the first organ capable of such curious contemplation.

Franciscans may seek a poetic oneness with nature, but we Galilean rationalists have a program of unification as well—nature made mind and mind now returns the favor by trying to comprehend the source of production.

This is the fifth volume of collected essays from my monthly series, “This View of Life,” now approaching two hundred items over eighteen years in
Natural History
magazine (the others, in order, are
Ever Since Darwin, The Panda’s Thumb, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes
, and
The Flamingo’s Smile
). The themes may be familiar (with a good dollop of novelty, I trust), but the items are mostly new (and God has never left his dwelling place in the details).

Against a potential charge of redundancy, may I advance the immodest assertion that this volume is the best of the five. I think that I have become a better writer by monthly practice (I sometimes wish that all copies of
Ever Since Darwin
would self-destruct), and I have given myself more latitude of selection and choice in this volume. (The previous four volumes discarded only a turkey or two and then published all available items in three years of essays. This volume, covering six years of writing, presents the best, or rather the most integrated, thirty-five pieces from more than sixty choices.)

These essays, while centered on the enduring themes of evolution and the innumerable, instructive oddities of nature (frogs that use their stomachs as brood pouches, the gigantic eggs of Kiwis, an ant with a single chromosome), also record the specific passage of six years since the fourth volume. I have marked the successful completion of a sixty-year battle against creationism (since the Scopes trial of 1925) in our resounding Supreme Court victory of 1987 (see essays under “Scopes to Scalia”), the bicentennial of the French revolution (in an essay on Lavoisier, most prominent scientific victim of the Reign of Terror), and the magnificent completion of our greatest technical triumph in
Voyager
’s fly-by and photography of Uranus and Neptune (Essays 34 and 35). I also record, as I must, our current distresses and failures—the sorry state of science education (approached, as is my wont, not tendentiously, abstractly, and head-on, but through byways that sneak up on generality—fox terriers and textbook copying, or subversion of dinomania for intellectual benefit), and a sad epilogue on the extinction, between first writing and this republication, of the stomach-brooding frog.

Yet I confess that my personal favorites usually treat less immediate, even obscure, subjects—especially when correction of the errors that confined them to ridicule or obscurity retells their stories as relevant and instructive today. Thus, I write about Abbot Thayer’s theory that flamingos are red to hide them from predators in the sunset, Petrus Camper’s real intent (criteria for art) in establishing a measure later used by scientific racists, the admirable side of William Jennings Bryan and the racist nonsense in the text that John Scopes used to teach evolution, the actual (and much more interesting) story behind the heroic, cardboard version of the Huxley-Wilberforce debate of 1860.

For what it’s worth, my own favorite is Essay 21 on N. S. Shaler and William James (I won’t reveal my vote for the worst essays—especially since they have been shredded in my mental refuse bin and will not be included in these volumes). At least Essay 21 best illustrates my favorite method of beginning with something small and curious and then working outward and onward by a network of lateral connections. I found the fearful letter of Shaler to Agassiz in a drawer almost twenty years ago. I always knew that I would find a use for it someday—but I had no inkling of the proper context. A new biography of Shaler led me to explore his relationship with Agassiz. I then discovered the extent of Shaler’s uncritical (and lifelong) fealty by reading his technical papers. At this point, luck intervened. One of my undergraduate advisees told me that William James, as a Harvard undergraduate, had sailed with Agassiz to Brazil on the master’s penultimate voyage. I knew that Shaler and James had been friendly colleagues and intellectual adversaries—and now I had full connectivity in their shared link to Agassiz. But would anything interesting emerge from all these ties? Again, good fortune smiled. James had been critical of Agassiz right from the start—and in the very intellectual arena (contingency versus design in the history of life) that would host their later disagreements as distinguished senior professors. I then found a truly amazing letter from James to Shaler offering the most concise and insightful rebuttal I have ever read to the common misconception—as current today as when James and Shaler argued—that the improbability of our evolution indicates divine intent in our origin. James’s document—also a brilliant statement on the general nature of probability—provided a climax of modern relevance for a story that began with an obscure note lying undiscovered in a drawer for more than a hundred years. Moreover, James’s argument allowed me to resolve the dilemma of the museum janitor, Mr. Eli Grant, potential victim of Shaler’s cowardly note—so the essay ends by using James’s great generality to solve the little mystery of its beginning, a more satisfactory closure (I think) than the disembodied abstraction of James’s brilliance.

Finally, and now thrice lucky, I received two years later a fascinating letter from Jimmy Carter presenting a theological alternative to the view of contingency and improbability in human evolution advanced in my last book,
Wonderful Life
. Carter’s argument, though more subtle and cogent than Shaler’s, follows the same logic—and James’s rebuttal has never been bettered or more apropos. And so, by presidential proclamation, I had an epilogue that proved the modern relevance of Shaler’s traditionalism versus James’s probing.

Some people have seen me as a polymath, but I insist that I am a tradesman. I admit to a broad range of explicit detail, but all are chosen to illustrate the common subjects of evolutionary change and the nature of history. And I trust that this restricted focus grants coherence and integration to an overtly disparate range of topics. The bullet that hit George Canning in the ass really is a vehicle for discussing the same historical contingency that rules evolution. My sweet little story about nostalgia at the thirtieth reunion of my All-City high school chorus is meant to be a general statement (bittersweet in its failure to resolve a cardinal dichotomy) about the nature of excellence. The essay on Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak is a disquisition on probability and pattern in historical sequences; another on the beginnings of baseball explores creation versus evolution as primal stories for the origin of any object or institution. And Essay 32, the only bit I have ever been moved to write about my bout with cancer, is not a confessional in the personal mode, but a general statistical argument about the nature of variation in populations—the central topic of all evolutionary biology.

A final thought on Franciscans and Galileans in the light of our environmental concerns as a tattered planet approaches the millennium (by human reckoning—as nature, dealing in billions, can only chuckle). Franciscans engage the glory of nature by direct communion. Yet nature is so massively indifferent to us and our suffering. Perhaps this indifference, this majesty of years in uncaring billions (before we made a belated appearance), marks her true glory. Omar Khayyám’s old quatrain grasped this fundamental truth (though he should have described his Eastern hotel, his metaphor for the earth, as grand rather than battered):

Think, in this battered caravanserai

Whose portals are alternate night and day,

How sultan after sultan with his pomp

Abode his destined hour, and went his way.

The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves).

The hubris that got us into trouble in the first place, and that environmentalists seek to avoid as the very definition of their (I should say our) movement, often creeps back in an unsuspected (and therefore potentially dangerous) form in two tenets frequently advanced by “green” movements: (1) that we live on a fragile planet subject to permanent ruin by human malfeasance; (2) that humans must act as stewards of this fragility in order to save our planet.

We should be so powerful! (Read this sentence with my New York accent as a derisive statement about our false sense of might, not as a literal statement of desire.) For all our mental and technological wizardry, I doubt that we can do much to derail the earth’s history in any permanent sense by the proper planetary time scale of millions of years. Nothing within our power can come close to conditions and catastrophes that the earth has often passed through and beyond. The worst scenario of global warming under greenhouse models yields an earth substantially cooler than many happy and prosperous times of a prehuman past. The megatonnage of the extraterrestrial impact that probably triggered the late Cretaceous mass extinction has been estimated at 10,000 times greater than all the nuclear bombs now stockpiled on earth. And this extinction, wiping out some 50 percent of marine species, was paltry compared to the granddaddy of all—the Permian event some 225 million years ago that might have dispatched up to 95 percent of species. Yet the earth recovered from these superhuman shocks, and produced some interesting evolutionary novelties as a result (consider the potential for mammalian domination, including human emergence, following the removal of dinosaurs).

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Taken by H.M. McQueen