Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (34 page)

For his second claim—that
Gryphaea
did not increase in coiling during its evolution—I have reexamined all the published data and concluded that while
Gryphaea
did increase in body size, its degree of adult coiling remained constant. Ironically, this means that later
Gryphaea
were actually more loosely coiled than earlier specimens of the same body size, for coiling increases with growth, and if a larger adult descendant will reach the same intensity of coiling as its smaller adult ancestor, then the descendant’s shell must be more loosely coiled when it is still a juvenile of the same size as an ancestral adult. (I have reprinted all major papers from the great
Gryphaea
debate in a volume entitled:
The Evolution of Gryphaea
, Arno Press, 1980.)

If Trueman’s edifice toppled so easily, why was his “fact” accepted so readily in the first place? One might suspect that the overcoiling of
Gryphaea
had received lengthy and complex documentation, however unreliable it proved to be, and that Trueman simply snowed potential critics. Not at all. The original evidence was flimsy almost beyond belief. In his 1922 paper, Trueman showed how most large adult
Gryphaea avoid
calamitous overcoiling by decreasing the tightness of their spiral late in growth.

Trueman’s claim for overcoiling was based on a single specimen, the “type” (or name-bearing) specimen of the species
Gryphaea incurva
. I examined this specimen at the British Museum in 1971. At first glance, the coiled valve does seem to press hard upon the flat valve. But the specimen was found in very fine-grained muds of the same color as the shell itself. A bit of probing revealed—and X-ray photographs later confirmed—that the supposed “lock” upon the flat valve had not been formed by the coiled valve itself, but by mud that wedged its way into the space between flat and coiled valve—the space that allowed the shell to open—after the animal’s death.

If telegony and overcoiling are false “facts,” why did each command prestige and inspire no attempt at refutation for so long? I believe, first of all, that the reputation of false facts is bolstered by the naïve belief that facts are bits of unsullied information extracted from nature by an objective process of pure observation or by scientific inference. But facts arise in contexts of expectation, and both the eye and the mind are notoriously fallible instruments. (Anyone who thinks that claims for direct observation possess some special, irrefutable status should read Elizabeth Loftis’s chilling book on eyewitness testimony.) Paleontologists, accepting the reality of orthogenesis, were primed to believe in
Gryphaea
’s overcoiling; telegony seemed reasonable until Weismann challenged it seventy years later. Secondly, facts achieve an almost immortal status once they pass from primary documentation into secondary sources, particularly textbooks. No publication is quite so conservative as a textbook; errors are copied from generation to generation and seem to gain support by sheer repetition. No one goes back to discover the fragility of original arguments.

I am not trying to convey the message that all knowledge is relative and that facts can never achieve universal approbation—quite the reverse. Rather, we have to distinguish between the kinds of factual claims that can achieve acceptance and those that must remain in limbo. The most troublesome facts are single cases—the offspring of Lord Morton’s mare, the overcoiling of one
Gryphaea
. We must, as William Bateson advised, “treasure our exceptions.” But we must also be aware that single cases are fragile, and that sturdy facts are pervasive patterns in nature, not individual peculiarities. Most “classic stories” in science are wrong.

The need to distinguish sturdy fact (pervasive pattern) from shaky factual claim (single cases with dubious documentation) has never been more evident to me than in the current debate between evolutionists and so-called “scientific creationists.” The fact of evolution is as sturdy as any claim in science. Its sturdiness resides in a pervasive pattern detected by several disciplines—for example, the age of the earth and life as affirmed by astronomy and geology, and the pattern of imperfections in organisms that record a history of physical descent.

Against this pattern, creationists employ a destructive, shotgun approach. They present no testable alternative but fire a volley of rhetorical criticism in the form of unconnected, shaky factual claims—a potpourri (literally, a rotten pot, in this case) of nonsense that beguiles many people because it masquerades in the guise of fact and trades upon the false prestige of supposedly pure observation.

The individual claims are easy enough to refute with a bit of research. Creationists themselves have been forced to retreat from the more embarrassing items. Noted creationist Henry Morris, for example, has often cited the supposed footprints of dinosaurs and humans together in rocks of the Paluxy River of Texas. But creationist Leonard Brand attributes some of the “human” prints to erosion and others to a three-toed dinosaur. He also adds: “We do know that there was a fellow during the Depression who carved tracks.”

Yet each time we explode one creationist “fact,” two more are invented to take its place. Hercules finally killed the Lernaean Hydra, a beast with similar tendencies toward proliferation after partial destruction. We can deprive creationism of all intellectual respectability (though not, alas, of some popular appeal) by remembering that sturdy facts are built from widespread patterns and that coherence in structure is the sign of strong arguments and theories. Unconnected, individual items remain shaky until they form a pattern or attain a confidence in individual documentation that neither telegony nor overcoiling—not to mention any creationist claim—ever achieved.

If shaky factual claims were always easy to dislodge, this column could end on a purely optimistic note. But telegony lasted for seventy years, and the ghost of William Jennings Bryan again stalks our nation. If I end with measured optimism, however, I do so in urging that we focus upon the second phrase of what may be Darwin’s most famous statement (from the
Descent of Man
): “False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes delight in proving their falseness.”

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