Full House Page 13
Moreover, the rise in general excellence and consequent shrinkage of variation does not remove the possibility of transcendence. In fact, I would argue that transcendence becomes all the more intriguing and exciting for the smaller space now allocated to such a possibility, and for the consequently greater struggle that must attend the achievement. When the norm stood miles from the right wall, records could be broken with relative ease. But when the average player can almost touch the wall, then transcendence of the mean marks a true outer limit for conceivable human achievement. (Again, I would make an analogy to musical performance. Do we not rejoice when every string in a symphony orchestra plays with exquisite beauty and consummate professionalism? And do we not thrill all the more when, in this context of superb general performance, a great soloist does something so special that only angels in heaven could have contemplated the possibility?) I would carry the argument even further and point out that a norm near the right wall pushes the very best to seek levels of greater accomplishment that otherwise might never have been conceptualized. I will speak in the final chapter about the heroic efforts, often with attendant accident and loss of life, that such "pushing of the envelope" imposes in the almost holy mania that infects the greatest performers in the circus arts and other dangerous activities. Call it foolish (and swear up and down that you would never so act yourself), but acknowledge that human greatness often forms a strange partnership with human obsession, and that the mix sometimes spells glory—or death.
The possibility of transcendence can never die, because this pinnacle of admiration in sports can be reached by several attainable routes. First of all, a kind of democracy infests individual games. When we go to the ballpark, we never know what we will witness. At any time, even the worst team may execute a thrilling play with awesome perfection. The event may occur only once a year (or much less often) on average, but the day of your attendance may feature a triple play, a steal of home, a rip-roaring, bench-clearing brawl (yes, as Homo ludens and Homo stupidus, we also root for this sort of rare nonsense from the underside of our complete lives), or an inside-the-park homer, with the runner just slipping under the catcher’s tag. You never know.
The enormous variability of individual performance guarantees that even a mediocre player can, for one day of glory, accomplish something never done before, or even dreamed of in baseball’s philosophy. Harvey Haddix was a fine pitcher, but not the greatest. Yet one day he hurled twelve innings of perfect ball-and then lost the game in the thirteenth (as the opposing pitcher had shut out Haddix’s side for the first twelve innings). Bobby Thomson was a better-than-average outfielder for the New York Giants, but one day in 1951 he hit a home run, perfectly ordinary by the physics of distance, but meaningful beyond measure in baseball’s enclosed system, because this single blow won the pennant for the Giants against their archrivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers, in the last inning of the last game of a play-off series culminating the greatest comeback in the history of baseball (the Giants had trailed the Dodgers by thirteen and a half games in August, and had entered this last inning with an apparently insurmountable three-run deficit). I was a ten-year-old Giants fan watching the game on our family’s first television set, and I have never been so thrilled in all my life (except for one other time).
Don Larsen was a truly mediocre pitcher for the Yankees, but he achieved baseball’s definition of perfection when it mattered most: twenty-seven Dodgers up, twenty-seven Bums down on October 8,1956, for a perfect game in the World Series (no one before or since had ever thrown a no-hitter of any kind in a World Series game). I was a fifteen-year-old Yankees fan (many New Yorkers rooted for two teams, one local club in each league), trying to persuade my French teacher to let us listen to the game’s end on the radio. I have never been so thrilled in all my life (except for one other time).
When we move to the statistics of seasonal or lifetime performance, this kind of democracy vanishes, and only the truly great can achieve transcendence. But some humans can push themselves, by an alchemy of inborn skill, happy fortuity, and maniacal dedication, to performances that just shouldn’t happen—and we revel when such a man reaches farther and actually touches the right wall. Bob Gibson had no business compiling an ERA of 1.12 in 1968. And I can show you with copious statistics that Joe DiMaggio should never have hit in fifty-six straight games in 1941 (see Gould, 1988). I delayed writing the last paragraph of this chapter for several days because I couldn’t bear not to share vicariously in a great moment of transcendence. So I am sitting at this old typewriter on September 6,1995, as Cal Ripken plays his 2131st consecutive game, eclipsing the "unbreakable" record of the Iron Horse, Lou Gehrig.
No records lie beyond fracture (unless rules or practices have changed to make an old achievement unattainable in modern performance). Perhaps I have exaggerated by discussing the "extinction" of 0.400 hitting in this section. (I am a paleontologist and hate to avoid one of the favorite words in my trade.) But I meant extinction in the literal sense of snuffing out a candle that might be lit again, not in the evolutionary and ecological meaning of species death where, by an accurate motto of our times, extinction is truly forever.
I am not arguing that no one will ever hit 0.400 again. I do say that such a mark has become a consummate rarity, achieved perhaps once in a century like a hundred-year flood, and not the common pinnacle of baseball’s early years. The fifty-year drought since Ted Williams supports this view, and I think that this part has identified the reason by reconceptualizing 0.400 hitting as the right tail in a shrinking bell curve of batting averages with a stable mean—all as a necessary and predictable consequence of general improvement in play. But someday, someone will hit 0.400 again—though this time the achievement will be so much more difficult than ever before and therefore so much more worthy of honor. When the idiots on both sides in the great pissing contest of 1994 (otherwise known as a labor dispute) aborted the season and canceled the World Series, Tony Gwynn was batting 0.392 and on the rise. I believe that he would have succeeded had the season unfolded as history and propriety demanded. Someday, someone will join Ted Williams and touch the right wall against higher odds than ever before. Every season brings this possibility. Every season features the promise of transcendence.
Part Four
THE MODAL BACTER:
WHY PROGRESS DOES NOT
RULE THE HISTORY
OF LIFE
12
The Bare Bones of Natural Selection
I quote verbatim from a discussion held in 1959:
HUXLEY: I once tried to define evolution in an overall way somewhat along these lines: a one way process, irreversible in time, producing apparent novelties and greater variety and leading to higher degrees of organization.
DARWIN: What is "higher"?
HUXLEY: More differentiated, more complex, but at the same time more integrated.
DARWIN: But parasites are also produced.
HUXLEY: I mean a higher degree of organization in general, as shown by the upper level attained.
Charles Darwin died in 1882, Thomas Henry Huxley in 1895—so, unless I am reporting a seance, something strange is going on here. The date of 1959 might give a hint for aficionados, for Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859, and the interval of exactly one hundred years smells of a centennial celebration. Huxley, in fact, is Thomas Henry’s grandson Julian, an eminent biologist and statesman in his own right, while Darwin is Charles’s grandson, also Charles, and also a scientist and social thinker. The two grandsons held their dialogue at the largest centennial celebration for Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, held at the University of Chicago in 1959 and published in 1960 as an influential three-volume work edited by Sol Tax.
Not only did the Darwin and Huxley clans maintain a genealogical tradition for evolutionary studies, but also, and more curiously as we shall see, the errors and insights of modern Chicago’s Darwin and Huxley closely parallel the attitudes of their blood ancestors. Julian makes the same err
ors as Thomas Henry; Charles offers some of the same correctives as the elder Charles. Both are confused on the notion of progress. Darwin asks a good question about parasites—and so did his grandfather. Julian Huxley gives a muddled answer that contains the germ of resolution within the standard, central confusion.
The problem that spawns this confusion within the Darwinian tradition may be simply stated as a paradox. The basic theory of natural selection offers no statement about general progress, and supplies no mechanism whereby overall advance might be expected. Yet both Western culture and the undeniable facts of a fossil record that started with bacteria alone, and has now produced exalted us, cry out in unison for a rationale that will place progress into the center of evolutionary theory.
Charles Darwin reveled in the radical nature of his biological philosophy. His early and private notebooks practically shout for joy at the outrageous character of his valid conjectures. He writes to himself, for example, that our feelings of reverence for God arise from some feature of our neurological organization. Only our arrogance, he continues, makes us so reluctant to ascribe our thoughts to a material substrate:
Love of the deity [an] effect of organization, oh you materialist! ... Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves.
Darwin toned down his exultation as he grew older and presented his work for public appraisal, but he never abandoned his radical perspective—and we have therefore, as discussed in Part One, never been able or willing to complete his revolution in Freud’s sense by owning the true implications of Darwinism for the dethronement of human arrogance. None of Darwin’s outré ideas could have been more unacceptable than his denial of progress as a predictable outcome of the mechanisms of evolutionary change. Most other nineteenth-century evolutionists, including Lamarck, presented much more congenial theories that did include predictable progress as a central ingredient. In fact, evolution entered our language as the favored word for what Darwin had called "descent with modification" because most Victorian thinkers equated such biological change with progress—and the word evolution, propelled into biology by the advocacy of Herbert Spencer, meant progress (literally "unfolding") in the English vernacular. Darwin initially resisted the word because his theory embodied no notion of general advance as a predictable consequence of any mechanism of change. Evolution never appears in the first edition of the Origin of Species, and Darwin first used the word in The Descent of Man in 1871. He never liked evolution, and only acquiesced because Spencer’s term had gained general currency.
Darwin was not shy in advertising his nonprogressivism. He jotted a note in the margins of a major book that did advocate progress in the history of life: "Never say higher or lower." He wrote the following line in a letter (December 4, 1872) to the paleontologist Alpheus Hyatt, who had proposed an evolutionary theory based on intrinsic progress (I now inhabit Hyatt’s old office, so the connection has a special meaning for me): "After long reflection, I cannot avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive development exists."
Darwin’s denial of progress arises for a special and technical reason within his theory, and not merely from a general philosophical preference. In a famous anecdote, T. H. Huxley, upon first learning the content of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, proclaimed himself "extremely stupid" not to have figured out this principle by himself. Unlike other celebrated (and truly arcane) ideas in the history of science, natural selection is a remarkably simple notion—basically three undeniable facts followed by an obvious, almost syllogistic conclusion. (I speak of simplicity only for the "bare bones" of natural selection as a mechanism; the inferences and implications that flow from the operation of selection can be quite subtle and complex.)
Darwin devotes the beginning chapters of the Origin of Species to validating the three facts:
All organisms tend to produce more offspring than can possibly survive (Darwin’s generation gave this principle the lovely name of "super-fecundity").
Offspring vary among themselves, and are not carbon copies of an immutable type.
At least some of this variation is passed down by inheritance to future generations. (Darwin did not know the mechanism of heredity, for Mendel’s principles did not gain acceptance until early in our century. However, this third fact requires no knowledge of how heredity works, but only an acknowledgment that heredity exists. And mere existence is undeniable folk wisdom. We know that black folks have black kids; white folks, white kids; tall parents tend to have tall children; and so on.)
The principle of natural selection then emerges as a necessary inference from these facts:
If many offspring must die (for not all can be accommodated in nature’s limited ecology), and individuals in all species vary among themselves, then on average (as a statistical statement, and not in every case), survivors will tend to be those individuals with variations that are fortuitously best suited to changing local environments. Since heredity exists, the offspring of survivors will tend to resemble their successful parents. The accumulation of these favorable variants through time will produce evolutionary change.
If this presentation seems overly abstract, consider a potential example (something of a simplistic caricature, to be sure, but not bad as a representation of the central features of Darwin’s argument): an earlier Siberia is nicely temperate, and a population of minimally hairy elephants dwells there in excellent adaptation. As the earth enters a glacial age, and ice begins to build up to the north, climates become colder and possession of more than the usual amount of hair becomes a decided advantage. On average, the hairier elephants will be more successful and therefore leave more surviving offspring. (On average, that is, and not every time—the hairiest elephant in the population can still slip into a crevasse and die.) Since hairiness is inherited, the next generation will contain more elephants with increased hair (for the hairiest of the last generation enjoyed greater success in reproduction). Continue this process for a large number of generations, and eventually Siberia will house a population of woolly mammoths—the evolutionary descendants of the original elephants.
Fine, in outline. But note what this scenario leaves out (that almost all popular views of evolution include as a defining feature). Natural selection talks only about "adaptation to changing local environments"; the scenario includes no statement whatever about progress—nor could any such claim be advanced from the principle of natural selection. The woolly mammoth is not a cosmically better or generally superior elephant. Its only "improvement" is entirely local; the woolly mammoth is better in cold climates (but its minimally hairy ancestor remains superior in warmer climates). Natural selection can only produce adaptation to immediately surrounding (and changing) environments.
No feature of such local adaptation should yield any expectation of general progress (however such a vague term be defined). Local adaptation may as well lead to anatomical simplification as to greater complexity. As an adult, the famous parasite Sacculina, a barnacle by ancestry, looks like a formless bag of reproductive tissue attached to the underbelly of its crab host (with "roots" of equally formless tissue anchored within the body of the crab itself)—a devilish device to be sure (at least by our aesthetic standards), but surely less anatomically complex than the barnacle on the bottom of your boat, waving its legs through the water in search of food.
If a sequence of local environments could elicit progressive advance through time, then some expectation of progress might be drawn from natural selection. But no such argument seems possible. The sequence of local environments in any one place should be effectively random through geological time—the seas come in and the seas go out, the weather gets colder, then hotter, etc. If organisms are tracking local environments by natural selection, then their evolutionary history should be effectively random as well.
These arguments led Darwin to his denial of progress as a consequence of the "bare bones mechanics
" of natural selection—for this process yields only local adaptation, often exquisite to be sure, but not universally advancing. The mammoth is every bit as good as an elephant—and vice versa. Do you prefer a marlin for its excellent spike; a flounder for its superb camouflage; an anglerfish for its peculiar "lure" evolved at the end of its own dorsal fin ray; a seahorse for its wondrous shape, so well adapted for bobbing around its habitat? Could any of these fishes be judged "better" or "more progressive" than any other? The question makes no sense. Natural selection can forge only local adaptation—wondrously intricate in some cases, but always local and not a step in a series of general progress or complexification.
Darwin reveled in this unusual feature of his theory—this mechanism for immediate fit alone, with no rationale for increments of general progress or complexification. So far, so good; so logical, so clear. I should end my discussion of Darwin right here, extolling him as a consistent intellectual radical whose vision of a history of life devoid of predictable progress proved too much for his Western compatriots to accept.
Simple, and heroic for Darwin, but quite untrue—for real history (and biography) tends to be much messier. Actual lives, especially for brilliantly complex men like Darwin, abound in pieces that don’t quite mesh, or that truly contradict. Darwin was intellectually radical; but he was also politically liberal, a defender of mild social reform and a passionate opponent of slavery; and decidedly conservative in lifestyle—a wealthy country squire himself, reared in the same background, and with no desire to change the amenities of his comfortable existence.
Moreover, Darwin enjoyed this comfort in a society that, more than any other in human history, had enshrined progress as the fundamental doctrine of its meaning and being—Victorian Britain at the height of industrial and colonial expansion. How could a patrician Englishman, at the very apex of his nation’s thundering success, abjure the principle that embodied this triumph? And yet, natural selection could produce only local adaptation, not general progress. How could these contradictory needs— the intellectual and the social—be reconciled?