Bully for Brontosaurus (45 page)

Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal—why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics? But we cannot, lest we lose the very respect that tempted us in the first place.

If this plea sounds like the conservative and pessimistic retrenching of a man on the verge of middle age, I reply that I advocate this care and restraint in order to demonstrate the enormous power of science. We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domains. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers. Besides, high-falutin morality aside, if we continue to overextend the boundaries of science, folks like Bryan will nail us properly for their own insidious purposes.

We should give the last word to Vernon Kellogg, the great teacher who understood the principle of strength in limits, and who listened with horror to the ugliest misuses of Darwinism. Kellogg properly taught in his textbook (with David Starr Jordan) that Darwinism cannot provide moral answers:

Kellogg also possessed the cardinal trait lacked both by Bryan and by many of his evolutionary adversaries: humility in the face of our profound ignorance about nature’s ways, combined with that greatest of all scientific privileges, the joy of the struggle to know. In his greatest book,
Darwinism Today
(1907), Kellogg wrote:

Amen, brother!

Postscript

As I was writing this essay, I learned of the untimely death from cancer (at age forty-seven) of Federal Judge William R. Overton of Arkansas. Judge Overton presided and wrote the decision in
McLean
v.
Arkansas
(January 5, 1982), the key episode that led to our final victory in the Supreme Court in June 1987. In this decision, he struck down the Arkansas law mandating equal time for “creation science.” This precedent encouraged Judge Duplantier to strike down the similar Louisiana law by summary judgment (without trial). The Supreme Court then affirmed this summary judgment in their 1987 decision. (Since Arkansas and Louisiana had passed the only anti-evolution statutes in the country, these decisions close the issue.) Judge Overton’s brilliant and beautifully crafted decision is the finest legal document ever written about this question—far surpassing anything that the Scopes trial generated, or any document arising from the two Supreme Court cases (
Epperson
v.
Arkansas
of 1968, striking down Scopes-era laws that banned evolution outright, and the 1987 decision banning the “equal time” strategy). Judge Overton’s definitions of science are so cogent and clearly expressed that we can use his words as a model for our own proceedings.
Science
, the leading journal of American professional science, published Judge Overton’s decision verbatim as a major article.

I was a witness in
McLean
v.
Arkansas
(see Essay 21 in
Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes
). I never spoke to Judge Overton personally, and I spent only part of a day in his courtroom. Yet, when I fell ill with cancer the next year, I learned from several sources that Judge Overton had heard and had inquired about my health from mutual acquaintances, asking that his best wishes be conveyed to me. I mourn the passing of this brilliant and compassionate man, and I dedicate this essay to his memory.

ON INDEPENDENCE DAY
, 1919, in Toledo, Ohio, Jack Dempsey won the heavyweight crown by knocking out Jess Willard in round three. (Willard, the six-foot six-inch wheat farmer from Kansas, was “the great white hope” who, four years earlier in Havana, had finally KO’d Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champ, and primary thorn in the side of racist America.) Dempsey ruled the ring for seven years, until Gene Tunney whipped him in 1926.

Yet during Dempsey’s domination of pugilism in its active mode, some mighty impressive fighters were squaring away on other, less physical but equally contentious turfs. One prominent battle occurred entirely within Dempsey’s reign, beginning with William Jennings Bryan’s decision in 1920 to launch a nationwide legislative campaign against the teaching of evolution and culminating in the Scopes trial of 1925. The main bout may have pitted Bryan against Clarence Darrow at the trial itself, but a preliminary skirmish in 1922, before any state legislature had passed an anti-evolution law, had brought two equally formidable foes together—Bryan again, but this time against Henry Fairfield Osborn, head of the American Museum of Natural History. In some respects, the Bryan-Osborn confrontation was more dramatic than the famous main event three years later. One can hardly imagine two more powerful but more different men: the arrogant, patrician, archconservative Osborn versus the folksy “Great Commoner” from Nebraska. Moreover, while Darrow maintained a certain respect based on genuine affection for Bryan (or at least for his earlier greatness), I detect nothing but pure venom and contempt from Osborn.

The enemy within, as the old saying goes, is always more dangerous than the enemy without. An atheist might have laughed at Bryan or merely felt bewildered. But Osborn was a dedicated theist and a great paleontologist who viewed evolution as the finest expression of God’s intent. For Osborn, Bryan was perverting both science and the highest notion of divinity. (Darrow later selected Osborn as one of his potential witnesses in the Scopes trial not only because Osborn was so prominent, socially as well as scientifically, but primarily because trial strategy dictated that religiously devout evolutionists could blunt Bryan’s attack on science as intrinsically godless.)

On February 26, 1922, Bryan published an article in the Sunday
New York Times
to further his legislative campaign against the teaching of evolution. Bryan, showing some grasp of the traditional parries against Darwin, but constantly confusing doubts about the mechanism of natural selection with arguments against the fact of evolution itself, rested his case upon a supposed lack of direct evidence for the claims of science:

The
Times
, having performed its civic duty by granting Bryan a platform, promptly invited Osborn to prepare a reply for the following Sunday. Osborn’s answer, published on March 5 and reissued as a slim volume by Charles Scribner’s Sons under the title
Evolution and Religion
, integrated two arguments into a single thesis: The direct, primarily geological evidence for evolution is overwhelming, and evolution is not incompatible with religion in any case. As a motto for his approach, and a challenge to Bryan from a source accepted by both men as unimpeachable, Osborn cited a passage from Job (12:8): “…speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.” When, on the eve of the Scopes trial, Osborn expanded his essay into a longer attack on Bryan, he dedicated the new book to John Scopes and chose a biting parody of Job for his title
—The Earth Speaks to Bryan
(Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925).

When a man poses such a direct challenge to an adversary, nothing could possibly be more satisfying than a quick confirmation from an unanticipated source. On February 25, 1922, just the day before Bryan’s
Times
article, Harold J. Cook, a rancher and consulting geologist, had written to Osborn:

In those bygone days of an efficient two-penny post, Osborn probably received this letter on the very morning following Bryan’s diatribe or, at most, a day or two later. Osborn obtained the tooth itself on March 14, and, with his usual precision (and precisely within the ten-word limit for the basic rate), promptly telegraphed Cook: “Tooth just arrived safely. Looks very promising. Will report immediately.” Later that day, Osborn wrote to Cook:

But Osborn’s enthusiasm only warmed as he studied the tooth and considered the implications. The human fossil record had improved sufficiently to become a source of strength, rather than an embarrassment, to evolutionists, with Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal in Europe (not to mention the fraudulent Piltdown, then considered genuine and strongly supported by Osborn) and
Pithecanthropus
(now called
Homo erectus
) in East Asia. But no fossils of higher apes or human ancestors had ever been found anywhere in the Americas. This absence, in itself, posed no special problem to evolutionists. Humans had evolved in Asia or Africa, and the Americas were an isolated world, accessible primarily by a difficult route of migration over the Bering land bridge. Indeed, to this day, ancient humans are unknown in the New World, and most anthropologists accept a date of 20,000 years or considerably less (probably more like 11,000) for the first peopling of our hemisphere. Moreover, since these first immigrants were members of our stock,
Homo sapiens
, no ancestral species have ever been found—and none probably ever will—in the Americas.

Still, an American anthropoid would certainly be a coup for Osborn’s argument that the earth spoke to Bryan in the language of evolution, not to mention the salutary value of a local product for the enduring themes of hoopla, chauvinism, and flag-waving.

Therefore, Osborn’s delight—and his confidence—in this highly worn and eroded molar tooth only increased. Within a week or two, he was ready to proclaim the first momentous discovery of a fossil higher primate, perhaps even a direct human ancestor, in America. He honored our hemisphere in choosing the name
Hesperopithecus
, or “ape of the western world.” On April 25, less than two months after Bryan’s attack, Osborn presented
Hesperopithecus
in two simultaneous papers with the same title and different content: one in the prestigious
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences;
the other, containing figures and technical descriptions, in the
Novitates of the American Museum of Natural History—“Hesperopithecus
, the First Anthropoid Primate Found in America.”

Hesperopithecus
was good enough news in the abstract, but Osborn particularly exulted in the uncannily happy coincidences of both time and place. Cook had probably written his letter at the very moment that the compositors were setting Bryan’s oratory in type. Moreover, for the crowning irony,
Hesperopithecus
had been found in Nebraska—home state of the Great Commoner! If God had permitted a paleontologist to invent a fossil with maximal potential to embarrass Bryan, no one could have bettered
Hesperopithecus
for rhetorical impact. Needless to say, this preciously ironical situation was not lost on Osborn, who inserted the following gloat of triumph into his article for the staid
Proceedings
—about as incongruous in this forum as the erotic poetry of the Song of Songs between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah.

Old Robert Burns certainly knew his stuff when he lamented the frequent unraveling of the best laid plans of mice and men. Unless you browse in the marginal genre of creationist tracts, you will probably not have encountered
Hesperopithecus
in anything written during the past fifty years (except, perhaps, as a cautionary sentence in a textbook or a paragraph on abandoned hopes in a treatise on the history of science). The reign of
Hesperopithecus
was brief and contentious. In 1927, Osborn’s colleague William King Gregory, the man identified in Cook’s original letter as the best-qualified expert on primate teeth, threw in the towel with an article in
Science: “Hesperopithecus
Apparently not an Ape nor a Man.” Expeditions sent out by Osborn in the summers of 1925 and 1926 to collect more material of
Hesperopithecus
, and to test the hypothesis of primate affinity, had amassed a large series to complement the original tooth. But this abundance also doomed Osborn’s interpretation—for the worn and eroded
Hesperopithecus
tooth, when compared with others in better and more diagnostic condition, clearly belonged not to a primate but to the extinct peccary
Prosthennops
.

One can hardly blame modern creationists for making hay of this brief but interesting episode in paleontology. After all, they’re only getting their fair licks at Osborn, who used the original interpretation to ridicule and lambaste their erstwhile champion Bryan. I don’t think I have ever read a modern creationist tract that doesn’t feature the tale of “Nebraska Man” in a feint from our remarkable record of genuine human fossils, and an attempted KO of evolution with the one-two punch of Piltdown and
Hesperopithecus
. I write this essay to argue that Nebraska man tells a precisely opposite tale, one that should give creationists pause (though I do admit the purely rhetorical value of a proclaimed primate ancestor later exposed as a fossil pig).

The story of
Hesperopithecus
was certainly embarrassing to Osborn and Gregory in a personal sense, but the sequence of discovery, announcement, testing, and refutation—all done with admirable dispatch, clarity, and honesty—shows science working at its very best. Science is a method for testing claims about the natural world, not an immutable compendium of absolute truths. The fundamentalists, by “knowing” the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science—or of any honest intellectual inquiry. The actual story of
Hesperopithecus
could teach creationists a great deal about science as properly practiced if they chose to listen, rather than to scan the surface for cheap shots in the service of debate pursued for immediate advantage, rather than interest in truth.

When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of “popular” writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher of science Karl Popper once labeled as “conjecture and refutation.”

Therefore, I propose that we reexamine the case of Nebraska Man, not as an embarrassment to avoid in polite company, but as an exemplar complete with lessons and ample scope for the primary ingredient of catharsis and popular appeal—the opportunity to laugh at one’s self. Consider the story as a chronological sequence of five episodes:

1.
Proposal
. Harold Cook’s fossil tooth came from a deposit about 10 million years old and filled with mammals of Asiatic ancestry. Since paleontologists of Osborn’s generation believed that humans and most other higher primates had evolved in Asia, the inclusion of a fossil ape in a fauna filled with Asian migrants seemed entirely reasonable. Osborn wrote to Cook a month before publication:

Osborn then announced the discovery of
Hesperopithecus
in three publications—technical accounts in the
American Museum Novitates
(April 25, 1922) and in the British journal
Nature
(August 26, 1922), and a shorter notice in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(August 1922, based on an oral report delivered in April).

2.
Proper doubt and statement of alternatives
. Despite all the hoopla and later recrimination, Osborn never identified
Hesperopithecus
as a human ancestor. The tooth had been heavily worn during life, obliterating the distinctive pattern of cusps and crown. Considering both this extensive wear and the further geological erosion of the tooth following the death of its bearer, Osborn knew that he could make no certain identification. He did not cast his net of uncertainty widely enough, however, for he labeled
Hesperopithecus
as an undoubted higher primate. But he remained agnostic about the crucial issue of closer affinity with the various ape branches or the human twig of the primate evolutionary tree.