I Have Landed Read online

  Part V explores the different genre of the op-ed format, limited to 1,000 words or fewer. Essays 12 and 13 provide two different takes—one for the fully vernacular audience of Time, the other for the professional readers of Science—on creationist attacks upon the study of evolution. The remaining four short pieces, from the New York Times op-ed page and from Time magazine, show how strongly evolution intrudes into our public lives, perhaps more so (in a philosophical and intellectual rather than a purely practical or technological sense) than any other set of scientific concepts.

  Each essay in part VI then discusses a truly basic or definitional concept in evolutionary theory (the meaning of the word itself, the nature and limitations of creation stories in general, the meaning of diversity and classification, the direction—or nondirection—of life’s history). I use a variety of tactics as organizing devices, ranging from my biographical interests (21 on Linnaeus, 22 on Agassiz, Von Baer, and Haeckel), to a more conventional account of organisms (23 on feathered dinosaurs or early bipedal ground birds), to a personal tale about why this evolutionary biologist felt so comfortable spending the millennial day of January 1, 2000, singing in a performance of Haydn’s The Creation. Part VII treats the social implications, utilities, and misutilities of evolution, as seen through the ever-troubling lens of claims for false and invidious innate distinctions of worth among organisms, ranging from native versus introduced plants (essay 24) to supposedly inferior and superior races of humans, with three optimistic final essays on three worthy scientists, from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries respectively, who stood among the infrequent defenders of natural equality.

  The short pieces of parts V and VIII first appeared as editorials or op-ed commentaries. The full-length essays of all other sections represent the final entries in a series of three hundred written for Natural History magazine from January 1974 to January 2001—with five exceptions from other fora: essay 2, on Nabokov, from an exhibition catalog by antiquarian bookseller Paul Horowitz; essay 4, on Gilbert and Sullivan, from The American Scholar; essay 5 from the exhibition catalog for a retrospective of Frederick Church’s great landscape paintings, displayed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; essay 24, on native plants, from the published proceedings of a conference on the architecture of landscape gardening held at Dunbarton Oaks; and essay 26 from Discover magazine.

  In closing (but bear with me for an extended final riff), I cannot begin to express the constant joy that writing these essays has brought me since I began late in 1973. Each has taught me something new and important, and each has given me human contact with readers who expressed a complete range of opinion from calumny to adulation, but always with feeling and without neutrality—so God bless them, every one. In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original languages (with only two exceptions, when Fracastoro’s elegant Latin verse and Beringer’s foppish Latin pseudocomplexities eluded my imperfect knowledge of this previously universal scientific tongue).

  Moreover, because I refuse to treat these essays as lesser, derivative, or dumbed-down versions of technical or scholarly writing for professional audiences, but insist upon viewing them as no different in conceptual depth (however distinct in language) from other genres of original research, I have not hesitated to present, in this format, genuine discoveries, or at least distinctive interpretations, that would conventionally make their first appearance in a technical journal for professionals. I confess that I have often been frustrated by the disinclinations, and sometimes the downright refusals, of some (in my judgment) overly parochial scholars who will not cite my essays (while they happily quote my technical articles) because the content did not see its first published light of day in a traditional, peer-reviewed publication for credentialed scholars. Yet I have frequently placed into these essays original findings that I regard as more important, or even more complex, than several items that I initially published in conventional scholarly journals. For example, I believe that I made a significant discovery of a previously unknown but pivotal annotation that Lamarck wrote into his personal copy of his first published work on evolution. But I presented this discovery in an essay within this series (essay 6 in my previous book The Lying Stones of Marrakech), and some scholars will not cite this source in their technical writing.

  By following these beliefs and procedures, I can at least designate these essays as distinctive or original, rather than derivative or summarizing—however execrable or wrongheaded (or merely eminently forgettable) any individual entry may eventually rank in posterity’s judgment. In scholars’ jargon, I hope and trust that my colleagues will regard these essays as primary rather than secondary sources. I would defend this conceit by claiming originality on four criteria of descending confidence, from a first category of objective novelty to a fourth that detractors may view as little more than a confusion of dotty idiosyncrasy with meaningful or potentially enlightening distinctiveness.

  By my first criterion, some essays present original discoveries about important documents in the history of science—either in the location of uniquely annotated copies (as in Agassiz’s stunning marginalia densely penciled into his personal copy of the major book of his archrival Haeckel, essay 22), or in novel analysis of published data (as in my calculation of small differences in mean brain sizes among races, explicitly denied by the author of the same data, essay 27).

  In this category of pristine discovery, I can claim no major intellectual or theoretical significance for my own favorite among the true novelties of this book. But when I found the inscription of a great woman, begun as a dedication in a gift from a beautiful young fiancée to her future husband, Thomas Henry Huxley, in 1849, and then completed more than sixty years later, as a grandmother and elderly family matriarch, to Julian Huxley—the sheer human beauty in this statement of love across generations, this wonderfully evocative symbol of continuity (in dignity and decency) within a world of surrounding woe, struck me as so exquisitely beautiful, and so ethically and aesthetically “right,” that I still cannot gaze upon Henrietta Huxley’s humble page of handwriting without tears welling in my eyes (as, I confess, they flow even now just by writing the thought!). I am proud that I could find, and make public, this little precious gem, this pearl beyond price, of our human best.

  By the second criterion, I reach new interpretations, often for material previously unanalyzed at all (bypassed in total silence or relegated to an embarrassingly perfunctory footnote)—as in my all-time favorite evolutionary historical puzzle of why E. Ray Lankester appeared as the only native Englishman at Karl Marx’s funeral (essay 6); my first-ever modern exegesis of the bizarre, but internally compelling, reconciliation of Genesis and geology presented by the unknown Isabelle Duncan, even though the chart accompanying her book has become quite famous as an early “scene from deep time” (essay 7); the first analysis based on proper biological understanding of the Lamarckian and recapitulatory theories needed to justify the particular claims of a newly found essay by Sigmund Freud (essay 8); the recognition that the apparently trivial addition of a fifth race (Malay) permitted Blumenbach, in devising a system that became almost universal in application, to make a fundamental alteration in the geometry of racial classification from unranked geographic location to two symmetrical departures from maximal Caucasian beauty (essay 26); and the first published analysis of the first extensive set of fossils ever drawn and printed from a single locality, the 1598 treatise of Bauhin, invoked as a model for inevitable errors in depicting empirical objects when no well-formulated theory of their origin and meaning guides the enterprise (essay 10).

  A third category indulges my personal convictio
n that the joining of two overtly disparate people (in time, temperament, or belief), or two apparently different kinds of events, in a legitimate union based on some deeper commonality, often provides our best insight into a generality transcending the odd yoking. Thus, Church, Darwin, and Humboldt do shout a last joint hurrah in 1859 (essay 5); the stunning anti-Semitism stated so casually and en passant in the preface of a famous seventeenth-century pharmacopoeia does link to old ways of thinking, the little-known classification of fossils, and the famous case of the weapon salve (essay 9); the Latin verses used by Fracastoro to name and characterize syphilis in 1530 do contrast in far more than obvious ways to the recent decipherment of the bacterial genome causing the disease (essay 11); Bill Buckner’s legs in the 1986 World Series do deeply link to Jim Bowie’s Alamo letter, hidden in plain sight, as both become foci for a universal tendency to tell our historical tales in predictably distorted ways (essay 3); and the totally different usage and meaning of the same word evolution by astronomers discussing the history of stars and biologists narrating the history of lineages does starkly identify two fundamentally different styles of explanation in science (essay 18).

  In a fourth, last, and more self-indulgent category, I can only claim that a purely (and often deeply) personal engagement supplies a different, if quirky, theme for treating an otherwise common subject, or gaining an orthogonal insight into an old problem. Thus, a different love for Gilbert and Sullivan at age ten (when the entire corpus fell into my permanent memory by pure imbibition) and age fifty leads me to explore a different argument about the general nature of excellence (essay 4); I could develop some arguments that far more learned literary critics had missed about Nabokov and his butterflies because they did not know the rules and culture of professional taxonomy, the great novelist’s other (and original) profession (essay 2); the unlikely conjunction of a late-twentieth-century ballplayer with a dying hero at the Alamo does reinforce an important principle about the abstraction behind the stark differences, but how could the linkage even suggest itself, absent a strong amateur’s (in the best and literal sense of a lover’s) affection for both baseball and history (essay 3); and, finally, T. H. Huxley’s dashing wife, passing a grandmother’s torch to grandson Julian two generations later does mirror the first words written in terror and exhilaration by my grandfather at age thirteen, fresh off the boat and through Ellis Island, but unknowingly “banked” for a potential realization that required two generations of spadework, and then happened to fall upon me as the firstborn of the relevant cohort—a tale that could not be more personal on the one hand, but that also, at the opposite end of a spectrum toward full generality, evokes the most important evolutionary and historical principle of all the awe and necessity of unbroken continuity (essay 1, my ave atque vale).

  Finally—and how else could I close—if I found a voice and learned so much in three hundred essays (literally “tries” or “attempts”), I owe a debt that cannot be overstated to the corps of readers who supplied will and synergy in three indispensable ways, making this loneliest of all intellectual activities (writing by oneself) a truly collective enterprise. First, for showing me that, contrary to current cynicism and mythology about past golden ages, the abstraction known as “the intelligent layperson” does exist—in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning (indeed to a virtual definition of life as the never-ending capacity so to do); we may be a small minority of Americans, but we still form multitudes in a nation 300 million strong.

  Second, for the simple pleasure of fellowship in the knowledge that a finished product, however satisfactory to its author, will not slide into the slough of immediate erasure and despond, but will circulate through dentists’ offices, grace the free-magazine shelf of the Bos Wash shuttle flights, and assume an honored place on the reading shelf (often just the toilet top) of numerous American bathrooms.

  Third, and most gratifying, for the practical virtues of interaction: As stated explicitly in two of these essays (1 and 7), I depend upon readers to solve puzzles that my research failed to illuminate. Time and time again, and unabashedly, I simply ask consumers for help—and my reward has always arrived, literally posthaste (quite good enough, for the time scale of this enterprise does not demand e-mail haste). As the first and title essay proves—for the piece itself could not have been written otherwise—I have also received unsolicited information of such personal or intellectual meaning to me that tears became the only appropriate response.

  In previous centuries of a Balkanized Western world, with any single nation sworn to enmity toward most others, and with allegiances shifting as quickly as the tides and as surprisingly as the tornado, scholars imagined (and, for the most part, practiced in their “universal” Latin) the existence of a “Republic of Letters” freely conveying the fruits of scholarship in full generosity across any political, military, or ethnic divide. I have found that such a Republic of Letters continues, strong and unabated, allowing me to participate in something truly ecumenical and noble. And, for this above all, I love and admire you all, individually and collectively. I therefore dedicate this last volume “to my readers.”

  I

  Pausing in Continuity

  1

  I Have Landed

  As A YOUNG CHILD, THINKING AS BIG AS BIG CAN BE AND getting absolutely nowhere for the effort, I would often lie awake at night, pondering the mysteries of infinity and eternity—and feeling pure awe (in an inchoate, but intense, boyish way) at my utter inability to comprehend. How could time begin? For even if a God created matter at a definite moment, then who made God? An eternity of spirit seemed just as incomprehensible as a temporal sequence of matter with no beginning. And how could space end? For even if a group of intrepid astronauts encountered a brick wall at the end of the universe, what lay beyond the wall? An infinity of wall seemed just as inconceivable as a never-ending extension of stars and galaxies.

  I will not defend these naïve formulations today, but I doubt that I have come one iota closer to a personal solution since those boyhood ruminations so long ago. In my philosophical moments—and not only as an excuse for personal failure, for I see no sign that others have succeeded—I rather suspect that the evolved powers of the human mind may not include the wherewithal for posing such questions in answerable ways (not that we ever would, should, or could halt our inquiries into these ultimates).

  However, I confess that in my mature years I have embraced the Dorothean dictum: yea, though I might roam through the pleasures of eternity and the palaces of infinity (not to mention the valley of the shadow of death), when a body craves contact with the brass tacks of a potentially comprehensible reality, I guess there’s no place like home. And within the smaller, but still tolerably ample, compass of our planetary home, I would nominate as most worthy of pure awe—a metaphorical miracle, if you will—an aspect of life that most people have never considered, but that strikes me as equal in majesty to our most spiritual projections of infinity and eternity, while falling entirely within the domain of our conceptual understanding and empirical grasp: the continuity of etz chayim, the tree of earthly life, for at least 3.5 billion years, without a single microsecond of disruption.

  Consider the improbability of such continuity in conventional terms of ordinary probability: Take any phenomenon that begins with a positive value at its inception 3.5 billion years ago, and let the process regulating its existence proceed through time. A line marked zero runs along below the current value. The probability of the phenomenon’s descent to zero may be almost incalculably low, but throw the dice of the relevant process billions of times, and the phenomenon just has to hit the zero line eventually.

  For most processes, the prospect of such an improbable crossing bodes no permanent ill, because an unlikely crash (a year, for example, when a healthy Mark McGwire hits no home runs at all) will quickly be reversed, and ordinary residence well above the zero line reestablished. But life represents a different kind of u
ltimately fragile system, utterly dependent upon unbroken continuity. For life, the zero line designates a permanent end, not a temporary embarrassment. If life ever touched that line, for one fleeting moment at any time during 3.5 billion years of sustained history, neither we nor a million species of beetles would grace this planet today. The merest momentary brush with voracious zero dooms all that might have been, forever after.

  When we consider the magnitude and complexity of the circumstances required to sustain this continuity for so long, and without exception or forgiveness in each of so many components—well, I may be a rationalist at heart, but if anything in the natural world merits a designation as “awesome,” I nominate the continuity of the tree of life for 3.5 billion years. The earth experienced severe ice ages, but never froze completely, not for a single day. Life fluctuated through episodes of global extinction, but never crossed the zero line, not for one millisecond. DNA has been working all this time, without an hour of vacation or even a moment of pause to remember the extinct brethren of a billion dead branches shed from an evergrowing tree of life.