Eight Little Piggies (27 page)

The personal argument is more difficult and requires substantial biographical knowledge. Attitudes are one thing, actions another—and by their fruits ye shall know them. What did Darwin do with his racial attitudes, and how do his actions stack up against the mores of his contemporaries? By this proper criterion, Darwin merits our admiration.

Darwin was a meliorist in the paternalistic tradition, not a believer in biologically fixed and ineradicable inequality. Either attitude can lead to ugly statements about despised peoples, but practical consequences are so different. The meliorist may wish to eliminate cultural practices, and may be vicious and uncompromising in his lack of sympathy for differences, but he does view “savages” (Darwin’s word) as “primitive” by social circumstance and biologically capable of “improvement” (read “Westernization”). But the determinist regards “primitive” culture as a reflection of unalterable biological inferiority, and what social policy must then follow in an era of colonial expansion: elimination, slavery, permanent domination?

Even for his most despised Fuegians, Darwin understood the small intrinsic difference between them in their nakedness and him in his regalia. He attributed their limits to a harsh surrounding climate and hoped, in his usual paternalistic way, for their eventual improvement. He wrote in his
Beagle
diary for February 24, 1834:

Darwin’s final line on the Fuegians (in the
Voyage of the Beagle
) uses an interesting and revealing phrase in summary: “I believe, in this extreme part of South America, man exists in a lower state of improvement than in any other part of the world.” You may cringe at the paternalism, but “lower state of improvement” does at least stake a claim for potential brotherhood. And Darwin did recognize the beam in his own shipmates’ eyes in writing of their comparable irrationalisms:

I must note a precious irony and summarize (all too briefly) a bizarre and wonderful story. Were it not for paternalism, the
Beagle
might never have sailed, and Darwin would probably have lost his date with history. Regret paternalism, laugh at it, cringe mightily—but grant its most salutary, if indirect, benefit for Darwin. Captain FitzRoy had made a previous voyage to Tierra del Fuego. There he “acquired,” through ransom and purchase, four Fuegian natives, whom he brought to England for a harebrained experiment in the “improvement” of “savages.” They arrived at Plymouth in October 1830 and remained until the
Beagle
set sail again in December 1831.

One of the four soon died of smallpox, but the others lived at Walthamstow and received instruction in English manners, language, and religion. They attracted widespread attention, including an official summons for a visit with King William IV. FitzRoy, fiercely committed to his paternalistic experiment, planned the next
Beagle
voyage primarily to return the three Fuegians, along with an English missionary and a large cargo of totally incongruous and useless goods (including tea trays and sets of fine china) donated, with the world’s best will and deepest naiveté, by women of the parish. There FitzRoy planned to establish a mission to begin the great task of improvement for the earth’s most lowly creatures.

FitzRoy would have chartered a boat at his own expense to return York Minster, Jemmy Button, and Fuegia Basket to their homes. But the Admiralty, pressured by FitzRoy’s powerful relatives, finally outfitted the
Beagle
and sent FitzRoy forth again, this time with Darwin’s company. Darwin liked the three Fuegians, and his long contact in close quarters helped to convince him that all people share a common biology, whatever their cultural disparity. Late in life, he recalled in the
Descent of Man
(1871):

FitzRoy’s noble experiment ended in predictable disaster. They docked near Jemmy Button’s home, built huts for a mission station, planted European vegetables, and landed Mr. Matthews, avatar of Christ among the heathen, along with the three Fuegians. Matthews lasted about two weeks. His china smashed, his vegetables trampled, FitzRoy ordered him back to the
Beagle
and eventually left him in New Zealand with his missionary brother.

FitzRoy returned a year and a month later. He met Jemmy Button, who told him that York and Fuegia had robbed him of all his clothes and tools, and left by canoe for their own nearby region. Jemmy, meanwhile, had “reverted” completely to his former mode of life, though he remembered some English, expressed much gratitude to FitzRoy, and asked the captain to take some presents to his special friends—“a bow and quiver full of arrows to the schoolmaster of Walthamstow…and two spearheads made expressly for Mr. Darwin.” In a remarkable example of stiff upper lip in the face of adversity, FitzRoy put the best possible spin upon a personal disaster. He wrote in conclusion:

But the strongest argument for admiring Darwin lies not in the relatively beneficent character of his belief, but in his chosen form of action upon these convictions. We cannot use a modern political classification—Bork vs. Marshall on affirmative action—as termini of an old spectrum. Thurgood Marshall’s end did not exist for the policymakers of Darwin’s day. All were racists by modern standards. On that spectrum, those we now judge most harshly urged that inferiority be used as an excuse for dispossession and slavery, while those we most admire in retrospect urged a moral principle of equal rights and nonexploitation, whatever the biological status of people.

Darwin held this second position with the two Americans best regarded by later history: Thomas Jefferson and Darwin’s soulmate (for they shared the same birthdate) Abraham Lincoln. Jefferson, though expressing himself tentatively, wrote: “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks…are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and of mind.” But he wished no policy of forced social inequality to flow from this suspicion: “Whatever be their degree of talents, it is no measure of their rights.” As for Lincoln, many sources have collected his chilling (and frequent) statements about black inferiority. Yet he is national hero numero uno for his separation of biological assessment from judgments about moral issues and social policies.

Darwin, too, was a fervent and active abolitionist. Some of the most moving passages ever written against the slave trade occur in the last chapter of the
Voyage of the Beagle
. Darwin’s ship, after calling at Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa (where FitzRoy and Darwin submitted their bit of juvenilia to a local paper) stopped for a last visit in Brazil, before setting a straight course to England. Darwin wrote:

In the next line, Darwin moves from description to refutation and plea for action:

Refuting the standard argument for benevolent treatment with a telling analogy from his own land, Darwin continues:

Though I have read them a hundred times, I still cannot encounter Darwin’s closing lines without experiencing a spinal shiver for the power of his prose—and without feeling great pride in having an intellectual hero with such admirable human qualities as well (the two don’t mesh very often):

Thus, if we must convene a court more than 150 years after the event—a rather foolish notion in any case, though we seem driven to such anachronism—I think that Darwin will pass through the pearly gates, with perhaps a short stay in purgatory to think about paternalism. What then is the antidote to paternalism and its modern versions of insufficient appreciation for human differences (combined with too easy an equation of one’s own particular and largely accidental way with universal righteousness)? What else but the direct and sympathetic study of cultural diversity—the world’s most fascinating subject in any case, whatever its virtues in moral education. This is the genuine theme behind our valuable modern movement for pluralism in the study of literature and history—for knowing the works and cultures of minorities and despised groups rendered invisible by traditional scholarship.

I don’t deny that occasional abuses have been perpetrated by people with strong emotional commitments to this good cause; what else is new? But the attempt by even more zealous conservatives to distort and caricature this movement as a leftist fascism of “political correctness” ranks as a cynical smokescreen spread to cover a power struggle for control of the curriculum. Yes, Shakespeare foremost and forever (Darwin too). But also teach about the excellence of pygmy bushcraft and Fuegian survival in the world’s harshest climate. Dignity and inspiration come in many guises. Would anyone choose the tinhorn patriotism of George Armstrong Custer over the eloquence of Chief Joseph in defeat?

Finally, think about one more Darwinian line—perhaps the greatest—from the slavery chapter in the
Voyage of the Beagle
. We learn about diversity in order to understand, not simply to accept:

THE VISITOR’S CENTER
at Petrified Forest National Park, in Arizona, houses an exhibit both heartwarming and depressing. Signs throughout the park beg, exhort, order, and plead with visitors not to collect and keep any fossil wood, lest the park be denuded on less than a geological time scale. The exhibit contains pieces of wood stolen from the park, but returned in guilt—the heartwarming side.

The depressing side resides in the notes written to explain decisions to send the contraband back to its natural place. No note from an adult cites any moral principle or even a personal sense of guilt. All tell tales of bad luck, usually trivial rather than catastrophic, that occurred soon after the theft—Uncle Joe’s broken hip or three hundred bucks worth of fender bending. The wood, as an evil talisman, must be returned. Apparently, these penitents understand neither principles of conservation nor laws of probability. A single exception—restoring one’s faith in primal feeling—lies in the only letter from a child:

I have often wondered why so many people feel compelled to take such a souvenir in the face of so many good reasons for abstaining. I know that the motives are varied and complex, but I believe that for many people a primary impetus arises from a common misunderstanding about fossils.

Many people think that fossils, almost by definition, are rare and precious. (Some are, of course—the six specimens of
Archaeopteryx
and our limited evidence of human ancestry, for example.) The urge to own something both uncommon and unusual must inspire many of the thefts. But most ordinary fossils, including petrified wood, are not single jewels on vast beaches of common sand, but intrinsic and abundant parts of their geological strata. Why purloin a piece from a national park, thereby committing both an illegal and an immoral act, when petrified wood can be found in abundance at so many places right outside the park boundaries? The fossils are beautiful, and they are tempting. But they are also plentiful.

Fossils are, for the most part, not comparable with single archeological sites—limited to one spot and easily exhausted without hope of replenishment. Destroy Troy by careless collecting, and that’s that forever. (On this point, two tangential and contentious comments deserve essays in themselves, but shall have to pass by in epitome. First, most fossil localities should not be regulated like unique archeological sites. Fossils in the ground, wrapped in red tape, are worthless, and fossils exposed in an outcrop will quickly be weathered and destroyed if not collected. I abhor both careless collecting and commercial exploitation of fossils with scientific value, but misplaced regulation, based on a false taxonomy that equates paleontology with archeology, can be just as harmful. Second, paleontological expeditions are not called digs, because we so rarely go to a single spot and excavate. Since specimens are usually intrinsic to strata and spread throughout wide areas of outcrop, digging in one place would be a very foolish way to collect most fossils. But the archeologists’ term
dig
has permeated pop culture, where it lurks as a snare for the unwary bluffer. If you wish to prove the opposite of your intention to impress, then ask a paleontologist, as I have been asked perhaps a thousand times, “Have you been on any interesting digs lately?” Sorry for those petty explosions, but grant me the catharsis of getting some parochial issues off my chest.)

Many fossils, then, are abundant components of their strata, exposed over miles of outcrop: Just consider the clam shells exposed by the millions on polished marble surfaces in the bathrooms of New York’s finest art deco skyscrapers, or the thousands of
Turitella
shells weathering out of the limestone in older parts of Quasimodo’s bailiwick at Notre Dame de Paris.

The Big Badlands of South Dakota replay the tale of the Petrified Forest. Fossil vertebrates can be outstandingly abundant, and these beds have been collected by professionals for more than a century. In much of the Brule Formation, source of the “worst” terrain, fossils are so common that every tiny pinnacle and elevation has a bone on top. (The fossils are harder than the enclosing sediments. Bones and teeth therefore weather out to form tops of tiny promontories, capping and protecting a column of sediment below, while surrounding rock crumbles away on all sides.) Yet visitors think they are seeing precious and tempting rarities on the official trails—and the stealing begins again. On the major nature trail, park officials covered the best specimens with plastic boxes. But people broke the boxes and took the bones underneath. So naturalists replaced the real fossils with casts and then put the plastic boxes back for good measure!

This extraordinary abundance of some fossils illustrates something important about the history of life. Evolution is a theory about change through time—“descent with modification,” in Darwin’s words. Yet when fossils are most abundant during substantial stretches of time, well-represented species are usually stable throughout their temporal range or alter so little and in such superficial ways (usually in size alone) that an extrapolation of observed change into longer periods of geological time could not possibly yield the extensive modifications that mark general pathways of evolution in larger groups. Most of the time, when the evidence is best, nothing much happens to most species.

Niles Eldredge and I have tried to resolve this paradox with our theory of punctuated equilibrium. We hold that most evolution is concentrated in events of speciation, the separation and splitting off of an isolated population from a persisting ancestral stock. These events of splitting are glacially slow when measured on the scale of a human life—usually thousands of years. But slow in our terms can be instantaneous in geological perspective. A thousand years is one-tenth of one percent of a million years, and a million years is a good deal less than average for the duration of most fossil species. Thus, if species tend to arise in a few thousand years and then persist unchanged for more than a million, we will rarely find evidence for their momentary origin, and our fossil record will only tap the long periods of prosperity and stability. Since fossil deposits of overwhelming abundance record such periods of success for widespread species living in stasis, we can resolve the apparent paradox that when fossils are most common, evolution is most rarely observed.

The abundant fossils of the classic Big Badlands strata provide an excellent illustration of this paradox. My colleague Donald Prothero has been studying all well-preserved mammalian species in these deposits. He finds that none change gradually during their residence in Big Badlands strata. New species enter with geological abruptness, either because they have evolved
in situ
as the theory of punctuated equilibrium predicts or because they have simply migrated into the area.

One of my graduate students, Tim Heaton, recently completed a thesis on the most common genus of rodents (themselves the most diverse group of mammals) from Oligocene sediments throughout western North America, prominently including the Big Badlands. Paleontologists divide the Oligocene into three “land mammal ages” called Chadronian, Orellan, and Whitneyan. Heaton’s genus,
Ischyromys
, is relatively rare in the Chadronian, but fantastically abundant in the Orellan, where thousands of jaws have been collected (and nearly all—in an extended fit of admirable activity—photographed, measured, and statistically analyzed by Heaton).

The Orellan
Ischyromys
has a traditional interpretation consistent with conventional views of evolutionary gradualism. The Orellan sequence has been read as a tale of steady increase in size within a single species. But Heaton’s statistical work on several thousand specimens has disproved this old idea in favor of an opposite interpretation. Heaton finds two separate species, one small and one large, in the lower Orellan; the small species then becomes extinct and only the large form persists into the upper Orellan. Neither species shows much, if any, change throughout its range (the large form may undergo a slight size increase in the upper beds). The old impression of gradual increase results from mixing the two species together and falsely treating the complex as a single form. As the small species decreases in abundance and finally dies off, average size of the whole complex increases because more and more (and finally all) specimens represent the stable large form—not because any gradual evolution is occurring.

On the other hand, in the older Chadronian beds, where
Ischyromys
is relatively rare, Heaton has discovered a previously unrecognized richness of taxonomic diversity: several species of
Ischyromys
and a related genus,
Titanotheriomys
. Although none of these species shows any change after its origin (most are too rare to provide much evidence for anything beyond simple existence), this diversity illustrates marked evolutionary activity for
Ischyromys
in the Chadronian, while Heaton has shown that nothing happens (beyond the extinction of the small species) in the overlying Orellan, where
Ischyromys
is so abundant. The small, isolated, and rapidly speciating populations that produced so much evolution among Chadronian
Ischyromys
did not often leave their calling cards in the fossil record.

Again, we note the paradox: Nothing much happens for most of the time when evidence abounds; everything happens in largely unrecorded geological moments. We could attribute this pattern to a devious or humorous God, out to confuse us or merely to chuckle at our frustration. But I choose to look upon this phenomenon in a positive light. There is a lesson, not merely frustration, in the message that change occurs in infrequent bursts and that stability is the usual nature of species and systems at any moment.

Being human, I love to toot my own horn in support of punctuated equilibrium. But I am writing this essay for another reason. What’s past (in this essay), as the Bard says, is prologue—a prologue to make a point by analogy about the real subject of this essay: the vexatious issue of human nature.

Let us return to the irony of
Ischyromys
in the Chadronian and Orellan, and of punctuated equilibrium in general. Evolution has constructed the tree of life; yet, at almost any moment for any species, change is not occurring and stasis prevails. If we then ask, What is the normal nature of a species? the only possible reply is, stability. Yet exquisitely rare change has built the tree of life and made history on a broad scale. We now come to the nub of my argument: The defining property of a species, its normal state, its nature, its appearance at almost any time stands contrary to the process that makes history (and new species). If we tried to infer the nature of species from the process that constructs the history of life, we would get everything precisely backward!—for events of great rarity (but with extensive consequences) make history.

The same separation should be enforced between human nature and the events that construct our history. We have committed an enormous error in assuming that the behavioral traits involved in history-making events must define the ordinary properties of human nature. Must we not link the causes of our history, or so the false argument goes, to the nature of our being?

But if my analogy holds, precisely the opposite might be true. If rare behaviors make history, then our usual nature must be defined by our general actions in an everyday world that engulfs us nearly all the time, but does not set the fate of nations. The causes of history may be opposed to the ordinary forces that prevail at almost every moment—just as the processes that construct the tree of life are invisible and inactive nearly all the time within stable species.

History is made by warfare, greed, lust for power, hatred, and xenophobia (with some other, more admirable motives thrown in here and there). We therefore often assume that these obviously human traits define our essential nature. How often have we been told that “man” is, by nature, aggressive and selfishly acquisitive?

Such claims make no sense to me—in a purely empirical way, not as a statement about hope or preferred morality. What do we see on any ordinary day on the streets or in the homes of any American city—even in the subways of New York? Thousands of tiny and insignificant acts of kindness and consideration. We step aside to let someone pass, smile at a child, chat aimlessly with an acquaintance or even with a stranger. At most moments, on most days, in most places, what do you ever see of the dark side—perhaps a parent slapping a child or a teenager on a skateboard cutting off an old lady? Look, I’m no ivory-tower Pollyanna, and I did grow up on the streets of New York. I understand the unpleasantness and danger of crowded cities. I’m only trying to make a statistical point.

Nothing is more unfamiliar or uncongenial to the human mind than thinking correctly about probabilities. Many of us have the impression that daily life is an unending series of unpleasantnesses—that 50 percent or more of human encounters are stressful or aggressive. But think about it seriously for a moment. Such levels of nastiness cannot possibly be sustained. Society would devolve to anarchy in an instant if half our overtures to another human being were met with a punch in the nose.

No, nearly every encounter with another person is at least neutral and usually pleasant enough.
Homo sapiens
is a remarkably genial species. Ethologists consider other animals relatively peaceful if they see but one or two aggressive encounters while observing an organism for, say, tens of hours. But think of how many millions of hours we can log for most people on most days without noting anything more threatening than a raised third finger once a week or so.

Why, then, do most of us have the impression that people are so aggressive, and intrinsically so? The answer, I think, lies in the asymmetry of effects—the truly tragic side of human existence. Unfortunately, one incident of violence can undo ten thousand acts of kindness, and we easily forget the predominance of kindness over aggression by confusing effect with frequency. One racially motivated beating can wipe out years of patient education for respect and toleration in a school or community. One murder can convert a friendly town, replete with trust, into a nexus of fear with people behind barred doors, suspicious of everyone and afraid to go out at night. Kindness is so fragile, so easy to efface; violence is so powerful.