The Faber Book of Science (14 page)
Read The Faber Book of Science Online
Authors: John Carey
The concept of entropy (the dissipation of available energy) was the brainchild of the German physicist Rudolf Clausius (1822–88) who, in 1850, formulated the second law of thermodynamics (that heat cannot of itself pass from a colder to a hotter body). In any closed system, Clausius pointed out, there is an inevitable waste or loss of energy (entropy), and the amount of energy available for work will decrease as entropy increases. Regarding the universe as a closed system, he predicted that its entropy would eventually be maximized, i.e. that it would run down, reaching a state of equilibrium and uniform temperature, with no further energy available for doing work – a condition known as ‘the heat death of the universe’. The American novelist and poet John Updike (b.1932) protests against this conclusion in his ‘Ode to Entropy’:
Some day – can it be believed? –
in the year 10
70
or so,
single electrons and positrons will orbit
one another to form atoms bonded
across regions of space
greater than the present observable universe.
‘Heat death’ will prevail.
The stars long since will have burnt their hydrogen
and turned to iron.
Even the black holes will have decayed.
Entropy!
thou seal on extinction,
thou curse on Creation.
All change distributes energy,
spills what cannot be gathered again.
Each meal, each smile,
each foot-race to the well by Jack and Jill
scatters treasure, lets fall
gold straws once woven from the resurgent dust.
The night sky blazes with Byzantine waste.
The bird’s throbbling is expenditure,
and the tide’s soughing,
and the tungsten filament illumining my hand.
A ramp has been built into probability
the universe cannot re-ascend.
For our small span,
the sun has fuel, the moon lifts the lulling sea,
the highway shudders with stolen hydrocarbons.
How measure these inequalities
so massive and luminous
in which one’s self is secreted
like a jewel mislaid in mountains of garbage?
Or like that bright infant Prince William,
with his whorled nostrils and blank blue eyes,
to whom empire and all its estates are already assigned.
Does its final diffusion
deny a miracle?
Those future voids are scrims of the mind,
pedagogic as blackboards.
Did you know
that four-fifths of the body’s intake goes merely
to maintain our temperature of 98.6
∘
?
Or that Karl Barth, addressing prisoners, said
the prayer for stronger faith is the one prayer
that has never been denied?
Death exists nowhere in nature, not
in the minds of birds or the consciousness of flowers,
not even in the numb brain of the wildebeest calf
gone under to the grinning crocodile, nowhere
in the mesh of woods or the tons of sea, only
in our forebodings, our formulae.
There is still enough energy in one overlooked star
to power all the heavens madmen have ever proposed.
Source: John Updike,
Facing
Nature:
Poems,
London, André Deutsch, 1986.
Philip Henry Gosse, the man who said God had put fossils in the rocks to deceive geologists, is a laughing stock of popular science. His reputation is defended here by one of the foremost modern science writers, Stephen Jay Gould. A research biologist, Gould has devoted many years to the study of the Bahamian land snail
Cerion.
âI love
Cerion'
â
he has declared, âwith all my heart and intellect.' However, it is the clarity and originality of his scientific writing that has brought him the widest fame. Four collections of his monthly columns in
Natural
History
magazine have been published. This is from the fourth,
Hen's
Teeth
and
Horse's
Toes
(1990).
The ample fig leaf served our artistic forefathers well as a botanical shield against indecent exposure for Adam and Eve, our naked parents in the primeval bliss and innocence of Eden. Yet, in many ancient paintings, foliage hides more than Adam's genitalia; a wandering vine covers his navel as well. If modesty enjoined the genital shroud, a very different motive â mystery â placed a plant over his belly. In a theological debate more portentous than the old argument about angels on pinpoints, many earnest people of faith had wondered whether Adam had a navel.
He was, after all, not born of a woman and required no remnant of his nonexistent umbilical cord. Yet, in creating a prototype, would not God make his first man like all the rest to follow? Would God, in other words, not create with the appearance of preexistence? In the absence of definite guidance to resolve this vexatious issue, and not wishing to incur anyone's wrath, many painters literally hedged and covered Adam's belly.
A few centuries later, as the nascent science of geology gathered evidence for the earth's enormous antiquity, some advocates of biblical literalism revived this old argument for our entire planet. The strata and their entombed fossils surely seem to represent a sequential record of countless years, but wouldn't God create his earth with the
appearance of preexistence? Why should we not believe that he created strata and fossils to give modern life a harmonious order by granting it a sensible (if illusory) past? As God provided Adam with a navel to stress continuity with future men, so too did he endow a pristine world with the appearance of an ordered history. Thus, the earth might be but a few thousand years old, as Genesis literally affirmed, and still record an apparent tale of untold eons.
This argument, so often cited as a premier example of reason at its most perfectly and preciously ridiculous, was most seriously and comprehensively set forth by the British naturalist Philip Henry Gosse in 1857. Gosse paid proper homage to historical context in choosing a title for his volume. He named it
Omphalos
(Greek for navel), in Adam's honor, and added as a subtitle:
An
Attempt
to
Untie
the
Geological
Knot.
Since
Omphalos
is such spectacular nonsense, readers may rightly ask why I choose to discuss it at all. I do so, first of all, because its author was such a serious and fascinating man, not a hopeless crank or malcontent. Any honest passion merits our attention, if only for the oldest of stated reasons â Terence's celebrated
Homo
sum:
humani
nihil
a
me
alienum
puto
(I am human, and am therefore indifferent to nothing done by humans).
Philip Henry Gosse (1810â88) was the David Attenborough of his day, Britain's finest popular narrator of nature's fascination. He wrote a dozen books on plants and animals, lectured widely to popular audiences, and published several technical papers on marine
invertebrates
. He was also, in an age given to strong religious feeling as a mode for expressing human passions denied vent elsewhere, an extreme and committed fundamentalist of the Plymouth Brethren sect. Although his
History
of
the
British
Sea-Anemones
and other assorted ramblings in natural history are no longer read, Gosse retains some notoriety as the elder figure in that classical work of late Victorian
self-analysis
and personal exposé, his son Edmund's wonderful account of a young boy's struggle against a crushing religious extremism imposed by a caring and beloved parent â
Father
and
Son.
My second reason for considering
Omphalos
invokes the same theme surrounding so many of these essays about nature's small oddities: Exceptions do prove rules (prove, that is, in the sense of probe or test, not affirm). If you want to understand what ordinary folks do, one thoughtful deviant will teach you more than ten
thousand solid citizens. When we grasp why
Omphalos
is so unacceptable (and not, by the way, for the reason usually cited), we will understand better how science and useful logic proceed. In any case, as an exercise in the anthropology of knowledge,
Omphalos
has no parallel â for its surpassing strangeness arose in the mind of a stolid Englishman, whose general character and cultural setting we can grasp as akin to our own, while the exotic systems of alien cultures are terra incognita both for their content and their context.
To understand
Omphalos,
we must begin with a paradox. The argument that strata and fossils were created all at once with the earth, and only present an illusion of elapsed time, might be easier to appreciate if its author had been an urban armchair theologian with no feelings or affection for nature's works. But how could a keen naturalist, who had spent days, nay months, on geological excursions, and who had studied fossils hour after hour, learning their distinctions and memorizing their names, possibly be content with the prospect that these objects of his devoted attention had never existed â were, indeed, a kind of grand joke perpetrated upon us by the Lord of All?
Philip Henry Gosse was the finest descriptive naturalist of his day. His son wrote: âAs a collector of facts and marshaller of observations, he had not a rival in that age.' The problem lies with the usual caricature of
Omphalos
as an argument that God, in fashioning the earth, had consciously and elaborately lied either to test our faith or simply to indulge in some inscrutable fit of arcane humor. Gosse, so fiercely committed both to his fossils and his God, advanced an opposing interpretation that commanded us to study geology with diligence and to respect all its facts even though they had no existence in real time. When we understand why a dedicated empiricist could embrace the argument of
Omphalos
(âcreation with the appearance of preexistence'), only then can we understand its deeper fallacies.
Gosse began his argument with a central, but dubious, premise: All natural processes, he declared, move endlessly round in a circle: egg to chicken to egg, oak to acorn to oak.
This, then, is the order of all organic nature. When once we are in any portion of the course, we find ourselves running in a circular groove, as endless as the course of a blind horse in a mill ⦠[In premechanized mills, horses wore blinders or, sad to say, were actually blinded, so that they would continue to walk a circular
course and not attempt to move straight forward, as horses relying on visual cues tend to do.] This is not the law of some particular species, but of all: it pervades all classes of animals, all classes of plants, from the queenly palm down to the protococcus, from the monad up to man: the life of every organic being is whirling in a ceaseless circle, to which one knows not how to assign any commencementâ¦. The cow is as inevitable as a sequence of the embryo, as the embryo is of the cow.
When God creates, and Gosse entertained not the slightest doubt that all species arose by divine fiat with no subsequent evolution, he must break (or âerupt,' as Gosse wrote) somewhere into this ideal circle. Wherever God enters the circle (or âplaces his wafer of creation,' as Gosse stated in metaphor), his initial product must bear traces of previous stages in the circle, even if these stages had no existence in real time. If God chooses to create humans as adults, their hair and nails (not to mention their navels) testify to previous growth that never occurred. Even if he decides to create us as a simple fertilized ovum, this initial form implies a phantom mother's womb and two nonexistent parents to pass along the fruit of inheritance.
Creation can be nothing else than a series of irruptions into circles ⦠Supposing the irruption to have been made at what part of the circle we please, and varying this condition indefinitely at will, â we cannot avoid the conclusion that each organism was from the first marked with the records of a previous being. But since creation and previous history are inconsistent with each other; as the very idea of the creation of an organism excludes the idea of pre-existence of that organism, or of any part of it; it follows, that such records are false, so far as they testify to time.
Gosse then invented a terminology to contrast the two parts of a circle before and after an act of creation. He labeled as âprochronic,' or occurring outside of time, those appearances of preexistence actually fashioned by God at the moment of creation but seeming to mark earlier stages in the circle of life. Subsequent events occurring after creation, and unfolding in conventional time, he called âdiachronic.' Adam's navel was prochronic, the 930 years of his earthly life diachronic.
Gosse devoted more than 300 pages, some 90 per cent of his text, to
a simple list of examples for the following small part of his complete argument â if species arise by sudden creation at any point in their life cycle, their initial form must present illusory (prochronic) appearances of preexistence. Let me choose just one among his numerous illustrations, both to characterize his style of argument and to present his gloriously purple prose. If God created vertebrates as adults, Gosse claimed, their teeth imply a prochronic past in patterns of wear and replacement.
Gosse leads us on an imaginary tour of life just an hour after its creation in the wilderness. He pauses at the sea-shore and scans the distant waves:
I see yonder a ⦠terrific tyrant of the sea ⦠It is the grisly shark. How stealthily he glides alongâ¦. Let us go and look into his mouthâ¦. Is not this an awful array of knives and lancets? Is not this a case of surgical instruments enough to make you shudder? What would be the amputation of your leg to this row of triangular scalpels?
Yet the teeth grow in spirals, one behind the next, each waiting to take its turn as those in current use wear down and drop out:
It follows, therefore, that the teeth which we now see erect and threatening, are the successors of former ones that have passed away, and that they were once dormant like those we see behind themâ¦. Hence we are compelled by the phenomena to infer a long past existence to this animal, which yet has been called into being within an hour.
Should we try to argue that teeth in current use are the first members of their spiral, implying no predecessors after all, Gosse replies that their state of wear indicates a prochronic past. Should we propose that these initial teeth might be unmarred in a newly created shark, Gosse moves on to another example.
Away to a broader river. Here wallows and riots the huge hippopotamus. What can we make of his dentition?
All modern adult hippos possess strongly worn and beveled canines and incisors, a clear sign of active use throughout a long life. May we not, however, as for our shark, argue that a newly created hippo might have sharp and pristine front teeth? Gosse argues correctly that no
hippo could work properly with teeth in such a state. A created adult hippo must contain worn teeth as witnesses of a prochronic past:
The polished surfaces of the teeth, worn away by mutual action, afford striking evidence of the lapse of time. Some one may possibly object⦠âWhat right have you to assume that these teeth were worn away at the moment of its creation, admitting the animal to have been created adult. May they not have been entire?' I reply, Impossible: the Hippopotamus's teeth would have been perfectly useless to him, except in the ground-down condition: nay, the unworn canines would have effectually prevented his jaws from closing, necessitating the keeping of the mouth wide open until the attrition was performed; long before which, of course, he would have starved. ⦠The degree of attrition is merely a question of timeâ¦. How distinct an evidence of past action, and yet, in the case of the created individual, how illusory!
This could go on forever (it nearly does in the book), but just one more dental example. Gosse, continuing upward on the topographic trajectory of his imaginary journey, reaches an inland wood and meets
Babirussa,
the famous Asian pig with upper canines growing out and arching back, almost piercing the skull:
In the thickets of this nutmeg grove beside us there is a Babiroussa; let us examine him. Here he is, almost submerged in this tepid pool. Gentle swine with the circular tusk, please to open your pretty mouth!
The pig, created by God but an hour ago, obliges, thus displaying his worn molars and, particularly, the arching canines themselves, a product of long and continuous growth.
I find this part of Gosse's argument quite satisfactory as a solution, within the boundaries of his assumptions, to that classical dilemma of reasoning (comparable in importance to angels on pinpoints and Adam's navel): âWhich came first, the chicken or the egg?' Gosse's answer: âEither, at God's pleasure, with prochronic traces of the other.' But arguments are only as good as their premises, and Gosse's inspired nonsense fails because an alternative assumption, now accepted as undoubtedly correct, renders the question irrelevant â namely, evolution itself. Gosse's circles do not spin around eternally; each life cycle traces an ancestry back to inorganic chemicals in a primeval
ocean. If organisms arose by acts of creation
ab
nihilo,
then Gosse's argument about prochronic traces must be respected. But if organisms evolved to their current state,
Omphalos
collapses to massive irrelevance. Gosse understood this threat perfectly well and chose to meet it by abrupt dismissal. Evolution, he allowed, discredited his system, but only a fool could accept such patent nonsense and idolatry (Gosse wrote
Omphalos
two years before Darwin published the
Origin
of
Species
).