Bully for Brontosaurus (24 page)

T. Barbour, former director of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (where I now sit composing this piece), and J. C. Phillips emphasized this point in reviewing Thayer’s book in 1911:

Teddy Roosevelt addressed the same issue with more vigor in a letter to Thayer on March 19, 1912 (just imagine any presidential candidate taking time out to pursue natural history more than a month after the New Hampshire primary—oh, I know, campaigns were shorter then):

Contemporary (and later) accounts of Thayer’s debacle rest largely upon a red herring, concealed in more than the sunset, that will not explain his failure and only reinforces a common and harmful stereotype about the intrinsic differences among intellectual styles. In short, we are told that Abbott Thayer ultimately failed because he possessed an artist’s temperament—good for an initial insight perhaps, but with no staying power for the hard (and often dull) work of real science.

Such charges were often lodged against Thayer, and with undoubted rhetorical effect, but they represent a dangerous use of ad hominem argument with anti-intellectual overtones. Thayer may have laid himself open to such ridicule with a passionate temperament that he made no effort to control in a more formal age. John Jay Chapman, the acerbic essayist, wrote of Thayer (admittedly in a fit of pique when his wife, at his great displeasure, decided to study art in Thayer’s studio):

But is such passion the exclusive birthright of artists? I have known many scientists equally insufferable.

Thayer’s scientific critics also raised the charge of artistic temperament. Roosevelt wrote, in a statement that might have attracted more attention in our litigious age: Thayer’s misstatements “are due to the enthusiasm of a certain type of artistic temperament, an enthusiasm also known to certain types of scientific and business temperaments, and which when it manifests itself in business is sure to bring the owner into trouble as if he were guilty of deliberate misconduct.” Barbour and Phillips argued that “Mr. Thayer, in his enthusiasm, has ignored or glossed over with an artistic haze…. This method of persuasion, while it does appeal to the public, is—there is no other word—simple charlatanry however unwitting.” Barbour and Phillips then defended the cold light of dispassionate science in a bit of self-serving puffery:

Do friendly spirits ever accuse their opponents of “simple charlatanry”?

The charge of artistic temperament may be convenient and effective, especially since it appeals to a common stereotype—but it won’t wash. The facile interpretation that scientists wouldn’t give Thayer a hearing because he was an “outsider” won’t work either—for contemporary accounts belie such charges of territoriality and narrowness. Even though Thayer made such strong claims—quoted above—for scientists’ incompetence in a domain accessible only to artists, naturalists welcomed his insights about countershading and enjoyed both his initial articles and his outdoor demonstrations. E. B. Poulton, one of England’s greatest evolutionists, warmly supported Thayer and wrote introductions to his publications. Frank M. Chapman, great ornithologist and editor of
The Auk
, wrote in his
Autobiography of a Bird Lover:

Thayer’s ultimate failure reflects a more universal tendency, distributed without reference to profession among all kinds of people. Nothing but habit and tradition separate the “two cultures” of humanities and science. The processes of thought and modes of reason are similar—so are the people. Only subject matter differs. Science may usually treat the world’s empirical information; art may thrive on aesthetic judgment. But scientists also traffic in ideas and opinions, and artists surely respect fact.

The
idée fixe
is a common intellectual fault of all professions, not a characteristic failure of artists. I have often written about scientists as single-mindedly committed to absurd unities and false simplifications as Thayer was devoted to the exclusivity of concealing coloration in nature. Some are charming and a bit dotty—such as old Randolph Kirkpatrick, who thought that all rocks were made of single-celled nummulospheres (see Essay 22 in
The Panda’s Thumb
, 1980). Others are devious and more than a bit dangerous—such as Cyril Burt, who fabricated data to prove that all intelligence resided in heredity (see my book
The Mismeasure of Man
).

Abbott Thayer had an
idée fixe;
he burned with desire to reduce a messy and complex world to one beautiful, simple principle of explanation. Such monistic schemes never work. History has built irreducible complexity and variety into the bounteous world of organisms. Diversity reigns at the superficial level of overt phenomena—animal colors serve many different functions. The unifying principles are deeper and more abstract—may I suggest evolution itself for starters.

Postscript

Abbott H. Thayer extended his flamingo theory ever further than I had realized. Historian of science Sharon Kingsland, who wrote an excellent technical article on “Abbott Thayer and the Protective Coloration Debate” in 1978 (and who therefore would have made my own work ever so much easier had I known of her prior efforts), sent me a 1911 note by Thayer triumphantly announcing a new genre of paintings with backgrounds made from the actual skins of animals supposedly concealed by their colors and markings. Thayer wrote, including flamingos of course:

On a more practical and positive note, I learned from my correspondents that Thayer’s views on concealment were far more important in the history of naval camouflage than I had realized or that the biological literature had recorded. I received two fascinating letters from Lewis R. Melson, USNR. He wrote:

Melson continued:

Melson also taught me some history of camouflage during the two world wars. Despite our later and fruitful use in World War II, the U.S. Navy had originally rejected Thayer’s proposal during World War I. However, Thayer had greater success in Britain, where his designs proved highly valuable during the First World War. Melson wrote:

Melson ended his letter with a fine affirmation of potential interaction between pure and applied science:

I REMEMBER WATCHING
Toscanini, a little old man made even smaller on the tiny screen of our first television set. I understood nothing of classical music when I was nine, but Toscanini’s intensity nearly moved me to tears—a man older than my grandfather and scarcely bigger than me, drawing such concerted sound from his players. I remember how he stepped off the podium after each piece and mopped his brow with a handkerchief.

Classical music had little currency in those days just before the long-playing record. In television’s only other foray into this arcane world, we could watch the annual Christmas presentation of Menotti’s opera
Amahl and the Night Visitors
. Amahl, the young cripple with a passion for embellishment, tells his mother that two kings are outside, requesting entry to their humble cottage. She chides him, laments his disinclination to speak truly, and sends him to the door again. Amahl returns to admit that, indeed, two kings do not stand outside. His mother rejoices, but Amahl proclaims: “There are three kings…and one of them is black.”

I remembered this line when I started to visit art museums much later and soon realized that Menotti had been following an old tradition, not making a modern plea for racial harmony. One of the Magi is always depicted as a black man. This traditional iconography is not biblical, but a later interpretation. The gospel writers do not even specify the number of wise men who saw the star in the east and came to worship. Some early sources cite up to twelve, but the number soon stabilized at three. Later, this trio received names—Balthazar, Melchior, and Gaspar, first specified in a sixth-century mosaic in Ravenna—and then, symbolic interpretations. As these allegories moved from the specific to the general, the portrayal of one Magus as black stabilized. The three were first seen as kings of Arabia, Persia, and India, then (by the Venerable Bede, for example) as symbols for the three great continents of Africa, Europe, and Asia, and finally, as representatives of the three major human races: white, yellow, and black.

I was reminded of this iconographical tidbit recently as I read one of the classic works of physical anthropology—the historical beginning of scientific measurement of the human skull. Petrus Camper, Dutch anatomist and painter, was born in Leiden in 1722. He studied both art and science, then trained as a midwife before receiving his degree as a physician. (Men may be mid-wives. The name refers to a person, male or female, who stays with [
mit
, as in modern German] a woman [
wif
] during birth—so the female end of the etymology refers to the mother, not the attendant.) In 1755, he became a professor of anatomy in Amsterdam and spent the rest of his comfortable life alternating between his country home and his professional duties in Amsterdam and Groningen. Camper, who discovered the air spaces in bird bones and studied the hearing of fishes and the croaking of frogs, was revered as one of the great intellects of Europe during his own lifetime. The busy life that such attention brings, made even more hectic by the political career that he forged during his later years, left Camper little time to write and publish his scientific studies. At his death in 1789, he left his major work on the measurement of human anatomy in manuscript. His son published this posthumous document in 1791, both in the original Dutch and in French translation. (I read the French, an edition printed in Utrecht, presumably by typesetters who didn’t know the language, and so full of errors that I almost decided it might be easier to learn Dutch and work from the other version.)

This work bears an extended title, both characteristic of the age and expressive of the contents:
Physical dissertation on the real differences that men of different countries and ages display in their facial traits; on the beauty that characterizes the statues and engraved stones of antiquity; followed by the proposition of a new method for drawing human heads with the greatest accuracy
. Camper’s treatise is remembered today for one primary achievement—the definition of the so-called facial angle, the first widely accepted measurement for comparing the skulls of different races and nationalities. Camper’s facial angle is the traditional beginning of craniometry, or the science of measuring human skulls, a major subdiscipline of physical anthropology.

Illustration from Camper’s original work showing increasing value for the facial angle of (left to right) an ape, an African, and a Grecian head.
NEG. NO. 337249. COURTESY DEPARTMENT OF LIBRARY SERVICES, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
.

The human skull may be divided into two basic components: the vault of the cranium itself and the face in front. Camper’s facial angle sought to specify the relationship between these two parts. Camper first drew a line connecting the ear opening with the base of the nose (the so-called horizontal, or “h-k” on his illustration of an African head). He then constructed another line joining the most forward projection of the upper jaw (the bottom of the upper lip in living heads, usually the edge of the incisor teeth on skulls) with the most protruding point of the brow above the eyes (“h-n” on his African head), and called ever since the facial line. Camper then defined the facial angle as the intersection of the horizontal (his basis of reference) with the facial line (roughly, the forward slant of the face).

In a general way, the facial angle measures the relative flatness versus forward extension of the face. A low value means that the jaws extend far in front of the cranial vault, giving the entire skull a sloping appearance. A high value indicates a flat face with jaws projecting no farther forward than the brow itself. When a facial angle exceeds 90 degrees, the vault of the cranium projects farther forward than the underlying jaws.

The facial angle soon became the first widely accepted tool for quantitative comparison of human skulls. It spawned an immense literature, a host of proposals for slight improvements based on different criteria, and a bevy of instruments designed to measure this fundamental aspect of human life. Camper’s angle became the first quantitative device for establishing invidious comparisons, based on inherent distinctions, among human races. The early craniometricians reported that African blacks possessed the lowest facial angles (farthest forward projection of the jaws), with Orientals in the middle, and Europeans on top, with facial angles sometimes approaching 90 degrees. Since apes had facial angles even lower than blacks, and since the facial angles for ancient statues of Greek deities exceeded those of all living Europeans, the smooth ascent from monkey to majesty seemed assured. Historian John S. Haller writes:

I had never read Camper’s original definition of the facial angle or his own recommendations for its use and meaning. Neither had most of the nineteenth-century craniometricians who established the facial angle as a primary instrument of scientific racism (Camper’s posthumous work has always been rare and difficult to obtain). I am no longer surprised when the study of a neglected original shows, as in this case, that later interpretations departed from an author’s own intentions. Such stories cannot rank as news; they fall into the category of “dog bites man.” And besides, maybe the later readings were correct and the initial proposal wrong—good insights for bad reasons are legion in the world of intellect.

The story of Camper’s own interpretation of his facial angle is interesting for another reason. The archaeology of knowledge assumes greatest importance when it seeks new insights from our past. By cultural heritage and proven reliability, we approach problems in a set of stereotyped ways and often assume (following the cardinal sin of pride) that our modern conventions exhaust the domain of possible inquiry. We should study the past for the simplest of reasons—to increase our “sample size” in modes of thought, for we need all the help we can get. Camper’s own rationale is instructive because it departs fundamentally from the sociology and a conceptual basis of modern scientific-inquiry into human variability. We should recover and understand Camper’s reasoning both to pay proper respect to a fine thinker and to expand our own sense of possibility.

Camper did not define the facial angle as a device for ranking races or nations by innate worth or intellect. He did not even approach the problem of human variability with motives that we would now recognize as scientific. In Camper’s day, anthropology did not exist as a discipline; science had not been defined, either as a word or as a separate domain of knowledge. Scholars often worked simultaneously in areas now walled off into separate faculties of universities. Such “cross-disciplinary” work seemed neither odd nor prodigious to eighteenth-century thinkers.

Camper was a professor of anatomy and medicine, but he was also an accomplished artist, good enough to win admission to the Painter’s Academy during a long visit to England (1748 to 1750). Camper defined his facial angle with the requisite precision of geometry and the quantitative preferences of science, but his motive lay in the domain of art. (He saw no contradiction, and neither should we.) We may now return to the issue of the black Magus and to Camper’s own statement about his intentions.

Camper tells us right at the outset of his treatise that his desire to quantify human variation first arose in response to a minor annoyance with Western painting. He had studied the black Magus in many classical paintings and noted that, while his color matched the hues of Africa, his face almost always displayed the features of European whites—a kind of Renaissance minstrel show with whites in blackface. (Since few Africans then lived in Europe, Camper reasoned that most artists had used white models, faithfully copying the facial features of a European and then painting the figure black.)

Camper wanted to prevent such errors by establishing a set of simple guidelines (lengths and angles) to define the chief characters of each human group. His treatise devotes more space to differences between old and young than to disparity among races or nations—for Camper was also distressed that the infant Jesus had often been drawn from an older model (no photographic surrogates to keep a baby’s image still in Camper’s day).

Yet Camper did not locate his immediate motive for the facial angle in descriptive anthropology of actual humans, but in a much loftier problem—no less than the definition of beauty itself. Like so many of his contemporaries, Camper believed that the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome had reached a height of refinement never since repeated and perhaps not even subject to recapture. (This is a difficult concept to grasp in the light of our later cultural preference for progress as a feature of technological history—old must mean inferior. But our forebears were not so encumbered, and ideas of a previous golden age, surpassing anything achieved since, had great power and attraction. The Renaissance [literally, rebirth] received its name from this conviction, and its heroes were trying, or so they thought, to recapture the knowledge and glory of antiquity, not to create novel improvements in art or architecture.)

Camper was obsessed with a particular issue arising from this reverence for antiquity. We can all agree, he states, that the great sculptors of ancient Greece achieved a beauty and nobility that we have not been able to match in our new art or often even to duplicate in simple attempts to copy ancient statues. One might take the easy route out of this dilemma and argue that Phidias and his brethren were just good copyists and that the people of ancient Greece surpassed all modern folk in beauty and proportion. But Camper had evidence against this proposition, for he noted that the few Greek attempts at actual portraiture (on coins, for example) showed people much like ourselves, warts and all. Moreover, the Greeks had made no secret of their preference for idealization. Camper quotes Lysippus’s desire “not to represent men as they are, but as they present themselves to our imagination.” “The ideal of Antique Beauty,” Camper writes, “does not exist in nature; it is purely a concept of the imagination.”

But how shall we define this ideal of beauty? Camper traces the sorry attempts by poets, artists, and philosophers throughout the centuries. He notes that, in the absence of a firm criterion, each field has tried to fob off the definition by analogy—poets exemplify beauty by reference to art; artists by reference to poetry. Explicit attempts often foundered in nonsense, as in this example from 1584: “Beauty is only beautiful by its own beauty,” a motto that inspired Camper’s appropriate riposte, “Can there be a greater absurdity?”

And yet, Camper argues, we all agree about the beauty of certain objects, so some common criterion must exist. He writes: