Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (21 page)

NATURE OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DAWSON AND TEILHARD

Peter Costello, an independent researcher in Dublin and author of a forthcoming book about Piltdown, found previously unpublished letters from Teilhard to Dawson in the archives of the British Museum (Natural History). Costello (1981, see bibliography) published one of the letters, suggesting that its tone provided a refutation of my hypothesis. I quote the entire letter and Costello’s interpretation. Teilhard wrote to Dawson on July 10, 1912:

Costello concludes (1981, pp. 58–59):

I do not see how this letter speaks either for or against my case. If one has been seeing too many old-style gangster movies and develops a peculiarly cardboard view of conspiracies, then I suppose that each participant might have to be slimy, unregenerate, utterly unkind, and devoid of any admirable quality. But I rather suspect that conspirators are not so far from a cross section among all of us. I do not see why they should not show loyalty to each other, pay thanks for kindnesses rendered, and even show deference to large differences in age and experience. Must conspirators be equals? Have no “mentor and pupil” ever plotted together? Shall we exonerate Teilhard because he and Dawson weren’t on a first-name basis in formal, just post-Edwardian England? The letter is touching and it does reflect Teilhard in an admirable light. People are complex, with faults and virtues aplenty. I have always argued that Teilhard’s virtues outweighed the major fault I have tried to identify.

Costello implies (in the statement quoted above) that his evidence is multiple and that “others in the series” confirm the tone of his quoted letter. Perhaps I did not search assiduously enough in the British Museum archives, but I could find only one other letter from Teilhard to Dawson, a short and uninformative piece of June 21, 1912, simply telling Dawson of his imminent departure and urging a visit to select fossils from Teilhard’s collection for the British Museum. In other words, I think that Costello has quoted everything he has.

But I also made some discoveries of my own about the relationship between Dawson and Teilhard as reflected in letters of the British Museum archives. If the archives contain a paucity of Teilhard’s letters, they are rich in Dawson’s—and these letters belie Costello’s chief claim that Dawson and Teilhard had only a passing and formal acquaintance. The high density of references to Teilhard in Dawson’s letters (mostly to Smith Woodward) points both to a strong relationship between the two men and, especially, to a particular solicitude on Dawson’s part towards Teilhard.

Consider, for example, a series of letters from Dawson to Smith Woodward in 1915, after Teilhard had left for the front. On March 9, Dawson writes: “I enclose a P.C. from Teilhard at the French front. He, no doubt, would be glad of any little bits of literature which you can send him.” On April 3, he states: “Teilhard has now been moved to near the back of the English line in Flanders. He says he is all right ‘body and mind’.” And on July 3, in the same letter that reported the “discovery” of the Piltdown 2 molar, Dawson announced: “Teilhard wrote yesterday—he is quite well and in a quiet spot at present.” (Unfortunately, no one has uncovered any of this correspondence between Dawson and Teilhard. I, for one, would dearly love to know what it contained). I submit that this degree of contact indicates a level of friendship and mutual concern far greater than that allowed by my critics. Limited contact is as crucial to their case as this demonstrated bond is to mine.

The prewar correspondence of Dawson and Smith Woodward shows a similar pattern. Six letters between October 1909 and October 1911 mention Teilhard and his work in collecting fossils. The pace picks up following Dawson’s first notice of the Piltdown skull to Smith Woodward on February 14, 1912. Six more letters mention Teilhard between then and November 21, 1912.

I believe, on this point and others, that all my critics have used a peculiar style of argument amounting to an a priori refusal to consider my case seriously—that is, Costello, Lukas, and Schmitz-Moorman all argue that I must be wrong because the written record provides no direct evidence for conspiracy. Costello wrote to me (September 4, 1981): “Nowhere can one read anything that suggests they were plotting together.” Lukas writes (1981 in bibliography, p. 426): “According to his letters, both published and unpublished, to family and friends, Teilhard’s relationship to Dawson was anything but close.” And further on: “Before the Piltdown adventure began Teilhard and Dawson seem to have met only four times.”

But surely, if any principle regulates conspiracy, we may state that plotters do not generally write extensive, contemporary accounts of their deeds (later confessions for profit or expiation notwithstanding). If Teilhard and Dawson were plotting, their machinations would certainly not have appeared in letters to parents and friends, or in preserved letters to each other. To identify conspiracy, one must search for implicit pattern behind the stated record, not for explicit contemporary confessions.

Thus, in conclusion, I believe that no strong arguments have been raised against my case and that, in one area, I have bolstered my account by recognizing the extent of Dawson’s concern for Teilhard as expressed in his letters to Smith Woodward. Moreover, for all the criticism of my first strong point (the letters to Oakley), my detractors have been conspicuously silent about my second strong argument (Teilhard’s pattern of silence concerning Piltdown in his extensive publications on human evolution). The more I think about this, the more it becomes, in Alice’s immortal words, “curiouser and curiouser.”

Since writing the original article, another small point, making Teilhard’s silence even more puzzling, has come to my attention. When Peking man was discovered, its cranium was reconstructed incorrectly to yield a capacity lying, like Piltdown’s, in the modern human range. This unleashed a flurry of commentary about the relationship between Piltdown and Peking. Now Teilhard was in China where he was contributing (as a geologist) to the original Peking finds. He was the only one there with personal knowledge of Piltdown. Yet, so far as I can tell, he said nothing at all. His own mentor, Marcellin Boule, published a paper comparing the Peking and Piltdown crania. It included long quotations from Teilhard about the geology of the Peking site, but not a word from him about the crania.

Again I repeat, if Teilhard considered the Piltdown material to be genuine, the skull
¹
provided his strongest direct evidence for the postulate that he held most dear and that motivated all his work on man’s spiritual evolution—multiple parallel lineages ascending toward the domination of spirit over matter. And he never mentioned Piltdown beyond a half-dozen quick, unavoidable, and almost embarrassed references. Why?

Lest readers think that all speculation on Piltdown has gone against Teilhard’s involvement of late, I add that Dr. L. Harrison Matthews, one of the grand old men of British zoology (see essay 11) and a personal acquaintance of nearly everyone involved in the original case, has published his novel-length reconstruction in the
New Scientist
(see bibliography). He sees the necessity of Teilhard’s involvement, but develops a highly complicated scenario in which Dawson begins the hoax alone, Teilhard then recognizes what Dawson is doing and, to let Dawson know and warn him off any future hoaxing, Teilhard manufactures, plants, and finds the canine himself. The war then intervenes, Dawson dies, and Teilhard is backed into a corner of silence. I welcome this basic insight that Teilhard cannot be excluded, but regard his case as too complex in that most difficult of ways—to be right, each of two dozen unsubstantiated events must break exactly in Harrison Matthews’s way. I continue to urge the simpler view—that Teilhard worked with Dawson at least from 1912 until he left for the front.

In his last public comment on Piltdown, Kenneth Oakley, who died on November 2, 1981, wrote a letter to the
New Scientist
(published posthumously on November 12, 1981) stating his disagreement with Harrison Matthews. I do not know what opinion he held of my case at the time of his death. After my original article, he wrote, by invitation, a letter to
The Times
(London) stating that, in the absence of definite proof, Teilhard should be given the benefit of the doubt. (Were I a judge, and this a legal proceeding with standards so necessarily different from historical inquiry, I would have to concur. Of my original article, one close friend remarked that I had established the grounds for an indictment, but not for a conviction.) I have also seen statements from a private letter in which Oakley, arguing from the 1913 letter of Dawson to Smith Woodward, rejects my first claim based on the letters between Teilhard and Oakley, but explicitly does not state a belief in Teilhard’s innocence. (I have already indicated why I think the 1913 letter is irrelevant to my case.) It is a matter of record among several of Oakley’s close friends that he long maintained private suspicions of Teilhard’s active involvement in at least some aspect of the case.

I bring this up because some critics have charged me with dishonesty in imputing a more favorable view to Oakley than he actually held. I can only state that I sent a copy of the original article to Oakley before it was published, asking directly if I had represented him accurately and if he approved my attribution. He wrote to me (on June 6, 1980): “I read straight through your paper without finding anything (of any importance) which I would wish you to alter.”

As a final comment, I must express mixed feelings two years after the original article. I am delighted to find my hypothesis strong and undiminished (admittedly in my biassed view) by a series of searching and intensely negative commentaries. On the other hand, I confess that I held secret hopes, nurtured perhaps by my own overly heroic view of life. I hoped that some old man would come down off a mountain or out of a monastery bearing a yellowed document of confession from Teilhard. Or that some trusted friend would open a bank vault and make public the “letter to be read either at the 100th anniversary of my death or when someone figures out my involvement in Piltdown.” Nothing like this has happened. No good arguments have been raised against me, but I must admit that nothing of great consequence has turned up in my favor either. I began the first essay that I wrote on Piltdown (reprinted in
The Panda’s Thumb
) before I was much interested in Teilhard’s role, with the words: “Nothing is quite so fascinating as a well-aged mystery.” And so Piltdown remains, though I might add that nothing would be quite so satisfying as a definitive resolution.

WHEN LINNAEUS SOUGHT
to classify all of life in 1758, he called his great work the
Systema Naturae
, the “System of Nature.” Biologists of all subsequent generations have flooded the scientific literature with alternative, but equally comprehensive, systems. The content changes, but the passion for building systems remains. Our urge to make sense of the complexity that surrounds us, to put it
all
together, overwhelms our natural caution before such a daunting task.

A curious irony infects this tradition of building comprehensive systems in biology. Biologists present their systems either as necessary truths of superior logic or as ineluctable conclusions drawn from unrivaled powers of observation—in other words, as objective renderings of nature, heretofore unappreciated. In fact, these systems share only one common property—and it is neither objectivity nor superior wisdom. They are, at base, attempts to resolve a (perhaps
the
) cardinal question of intellectual history: What is the role and status of our own species,
Homo sapiens
, in nature and the cosmos?

Systems follow one of two strategies in their attempt to make sense of “man’s place in nature,” to use T. H. Huxley’s phrase. One strategy, the “picket fence” in my terminology (see essay 12 in
The Panda’s Thumb
), devises a pervasive order for the rest of nature, but separates humans alone with a brand of superiority. Thus, Charles Lyell envisaged a world ever churning and changing, but always remaining the same—replacement without improvement. Only man, a recent imposition of moral perfection upon a stable world, broke the pattern of change without progress. A. R. Wallace attributed all features of organisms to the molding power of natural selection—except for one product of divine inspiration: the human brain.

The second strategy takes an opposite tack in pursuit of the same goal—a placement within nature that will make some sense of our lives. This strategy argues for no separation between man and nature at all. These theories of continuity can proceed in either direction, and I shall discuss one recent example of each as representatives of a long tradition of flawed argument. The first view—I shall call it zoocentric—builds general principles from the behavior of other animals and then subsumes humans completely into the rubric because we are, after all and undeniably, animals too. The second view—I shall call it anthropocentric—tries to subsume nature in us by viewing our peculiarities as the goal of life from the start.

Evolutionary theory itself has an appropriately zoocentric core. General principles cannot arise from the behavior of a single species, yet all species must conform to the principles. The role of this mild zoocentricity in breaking down the sturdy picket fences that existed before Darwin’s time ranks as a great event in the history of human thought. But the zoocentric view can be extended too far into a caricature often called the “nothing but” fallacy (humans are “nothing but” animals).

The simplistic accounts of human sociobiology now flooding popular literature embody this overextended version of zoocentrism. Sociobiology is not just any statement that biology, genetics, and evolutionary theory have something to do with human behavior. Sociobiology is a specific theory about the nature of genetic and evolutionary input into human behavior. It rests upon the view that natural selection is a virtually omnipotent architect, constructing organisms part by part as best solutions to problems of life in local environments. It fragments organisms into “traits,” explains their existence as a set of best solutions, and argues that each trait is a product of natural selection operating “for” the form or behavior in question. Applied to humans, it must view
specific
behaviors (not just general potentials) as adaptations built by natural selection and rooted in genetic determinants, for natural selection is a theory of genetic change. Thus, we are presented with unproved and unprovable speculations about the adaptive and genetic basis of specific human behaviors: why some (or all) people are aggressive, xenophobic, religious, acquisitive, or homosexual.

Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of “lower” animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis. Humans are animals too, aren’t we? Yes, but animals with a difference. And that difference arises, in part, as a result of enormous flexibility based on the complexity of an oversized brain and the potentially cultural and nongenetic basis of adaptive behaviors—aspects of human construction that debar any zoocentric extrapolation from why some insects eat their mates to murder in human families.

Ironically, the zoocentrism of human sociobiology is often an illusion hiding a precisely opposite mode of reasoning. I argued previously that “objective” systems are often unconscious masquerades that reflect our own prejudices and hopes imposed upon nature. Much of human sociobiology trades upon the idea that if distinctive human behaviors can be found, albeit in rudimentary form, among “lower” animals, then these behaviors must be “natural” in humans too, a product of biological evolution. Sociobiologists are often fooled by misleading external and superficial similarity between behaviors in humans and other animals. They attach human names to what other creatures do and speak of slavery in ants, rape in mallard ducks, and adultery in mountain bluebirds. Since these “traits” now exist among “lower” animals, they can be derived for humans as natural, genetic, and adaptive. But they never did exist outside a human context. If mallard males seem to force physically weaker females to copulate, what possible relationship, beyond meaningless superficial appearance, can such an act have with human rape? No one can argue that the two behaviors are truly homologous—that is, based on the same genes inherited from a common ancestor. If the similarity is meaningful, it can only be analogous—that is, reflecting different evolutionary origins but performing the same biological function. Yet mallard behavior is part of the normal repertoire and seems to have evident utility in increasing the reproductive fitness of males; while human rape is a social pathology rooted in power and powerlessness, not in sex and reproduction.

Is this not mere pedantic grousing? Aren’t the human terms a cute, graphic, and acceptable shorthand for what we all recognize as a more complex reality? Not when a colleague describes aggressive responses of male mountain bluebirds toward other males in the vicinity of its nest with these words: “The term ‘adultery’ is unblushingly employed…without quotation marks, as I believe it reflects a true analogy to the human concept…. It may also be prophesied that continued application of a similar evolutionary approach will eventually shed considerable light on various human foibles as well.”

Such an old story. We hold a mirror to nature and see ourselves and our own prejudices in the glass. Historical examples abound. Aristotle described the large bee that leads the swarm as a “king,” and this misidentification of the only sexual female around persisted for nearly two thousand years, at least to an Elizabethan madrigal I sang last week: “I do love thee as the spring/Or the bees their careful king” (careful, that is, in the old sense of caring, not the modern meaning of cautious). Zoocentric systems fail primarily because they never are what they claim to be. The “objective” animal behavior, under which they subsume human acts, is an imposition of human preferences from the start.

The more venerable, anthropocentric systems at least have the virtue of explicit self-recognition. They take Protagoras seriously in his claim that “man is the measure of all things,” and falter only in the hubris of arguing that evolution undertook its elaborate labor of some 3½ billion years only to generate the little twig that we call
Homo sapiens
. Anthropocentric systems have been out of vogue among scientists, at least in England and America, since Darwin’s time, but one version enjoyed some spectacular popularity a few years back—the system of a man discussed in quite a different context elsewhere in this section, the Jesuit priest and distinguished paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

When Teilhard died in 1955, his evolutionary speculations, long suppressed by ecclesiastical authority, saw light, and his best seller,
The Phenomenon of Man
, became a cult book of the 1960s. Teilhard’s florid and mystical writing is often more difficult to decipher than his role at Piltdown, but I believe that the general line of his argument can be simply expressed. (A convinced Teilhardian might brand me as a shallow, heartless scientist, unable to appreciate the profundity of Teilhard’s vision. But difficult, convoluted writing may simply be fuzzy, not deep. Teilhard’s vision is rich in scope and tradition—for it is an old argument clothed in new terminology—but the essence of his position can still be stated with everyday words.)

Teilhard believed that evolution proceeds in a definite and irreversible direction. To understand the nature of that movement, we do not look back to the origin of life and its physical properties, but to the latest product—to
Homo sapiens
itself. For life has been moving in our direction from the start. The advance of life records an ever increasing domination of spirit over matter. This ineluctable increase in consciousness can be grasped by studying two of its material products: among lower animals, diffuse and simple nervous systems evolve into centralized organs (brains) with subsidiary parts; among higher animals, brains increase in size and complexity throughout evolution. In an autobiographical essay, Teilhard wrote:

Human evolution is the culmination of this psychic advance. In the anthropocentric vision, life only makes sense in terms of its striving toward man. We are inextricably part of nature because nature has been yearning toward us from the start. In a 1952 manuscript on human socialization, Teilhard stated:

Since evolution follows a directed path, the tree of life is not a randomly ramifying network, but a bundle of branches, tied by genealogy at their base, diverging during their history, yet always moving in the same basic direction. The energy of matter compels divergence; the force of increasing consciousness imposes a common upward advance. Related species should form a set of
multiple, parallel lineages
, each diverging and adapting to a local environment, but each gaining continually in its spirit/matter ratio. Teilhard wrote in 1922 that “evolution…resolves itself into innumerable lines which diverge at such length that they appear parallel.”

With the appearance of man, evolution has reached a crux. Spirit has accumulated far enough to reach self-consciousness. Indeed, a new layer has appeared in the earth’s concentric structure. Teilhard praised the great Austrian geologist Eduard Suess for introducing the term “biosphere” as an addition to the traditional concentric layers of lithosphere and atmosphere. But consciousness, Teilhard argued, has added yet another layer: “the psychically reflexive human surface…the noosphere.”

Teilhard describes the noosphere as a physical reality, as a thin and fragile layer, now spread throughout the earth following the emergence of human ancestors from Africa and their subsequent migration to all continents. He wrote in a 1952 manuscript: “Above the old Biosphere there is spread now a ‘Noosphere’. As to the material reality of this enormous event, there is nobody who will disagree.” In a posthumous essay published four years later, he described the noosphere as “the marvelous sheet of humanized and socialized matter, which, despite its incredible thinness, has to be regarded positively as the most sharply individualized and the most specifically distinct of all the planetary units so far recognized.”

The emergence of a noosphere, now so thin and fragile, represents the turning point of universal evolution. Teilhard wrote in 1930:

Evolution has now reached its halfway point. Heretofore, despite the progressive gain of spirit, matter has dominated and evolutionary lineages, although moving in the same general direction, have constantly diverged. But the noosphere marks the beginning of the dominion of spirit over matter. As spirit gains the upper hand, convergence shall begin. The fragile noosphere shall thicken. The direction of a billion years shall be reversed, and conscious lineages (within
Homo sapiens
at least) will begin to converge as spirit gains rapidly in its sway over matter.

Convergence has already begun in the process of human socialization. In terms of vulgar mechanics, human cultural evolution may be a process different from Darwinian biological evolution, but both participate in a higher unity as sequential aspects of universal direction. Human socialization, Teilhard writes, has engendered “a vast and specific process of physico-psychical convergency…whose sudden appearance and acceleration in the course of the last century is perhaps the most revolutionary event registered so far in human history…. The human world is decidedly caught, today and forever, in an irresistibly tightening vortex of unification.”