On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (58 page)

43
. “How does it happen,” he asks, “that the head should be destroyed in all cases just so far as the orbits?” These and other such arguments refine Lawrence’s belief that internal fusions might arise in utero, causing such monsters as conjoined twins or parasite or autosite twins, but sudden external force does not appear to create monsters.

44
. Here Lawrence takes the high ground against teleologists like Haller, but his own ground is not quite as high as he thinks, since he’s just given a similarly speculative argument about monster variations being held in check by nature’s interest in preserving “uniformity in the species.” Von Haller supported his idea that violence damaged the acephalic (headless) children by saying that it was contrary to the wisdom of nature to create arteries, veins, and nerves in a skull that was destined to be brainless. “This is a dangerous argument,” Lawrence countered. “Is it not equally contradictory that a rectum should be formed without an anus, since life cannot be continued without such an opening? If nature be so wise and careful, why did she not provide against the destruction of the head? And why does she go on working, month after month, to no purpose, in constructing the numerous other monsters, which are incapable of life?”

45
. Our current scientific understanding of teratology is still in its infancy. Roughly speaking, we know that 25 percent of anomalous births are attributable to known genetic and chromosomal factors (e.g., fragile X syndrome, Huntington’s disease, Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis), and 10 percent are attributable to environmental factors (e.g., chemical teratogens, virus infections, radiation), leaving 65 percent to unknown causes. We now know that most (90 percent) malformed fetuses are spontaneously aborted before birth (compared with only 18 percent of phenotypi-cally normal conceptuses). Those anomalous humans who survive to birth make up between 2 and 7 percent of total human births.

1
. See Evelleen Richard’s discussion of Robert Knox in “A Political Anatomy of Monsters, Hopeful and Otherwise,”
Isis
85 (1994).

2
. This makes more sense when we remember that no one at this time knew what a proper “gene” was. We, on the other side of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, think of the “germ” in purely material chemical terms, but in the 1830s there was more conceptual room to imagine teleological forces at work in the mysterious unit of heredity. Owen argued for a teleo-directed monsterology of preset saltations. The historian Evelleen Richards explains, “By appropriating Hunter’s endogenous explanation of teratological change, and the evidence Hunter adduced in its support, Owen was able to oppose Geoffroy’s materialistic emphasis on external causation and to validate his own teleomechanism of divinely preprogrammed evolutionary change in the embryo.” See Richards’s “A Political Anatomy of Monsters.”

3
. In 1838 Darwin filled his red Notebook D with a summary and gloss of John Hunter’s book
Animal Economy
. Darwin’s new friend Richard Owen was editing Hunter’s work and also lecturing on it at this time, so one finds a mishmash of Hunter’s and Owen’s ideas about monsters in Notebook D. Darwin focused his musings on the issue of reproduction and whether it had importance for species transmutation.

4
. Despite their disagreements, the teratologists still learned much from each other’s research. Owen even quotes, approvingly, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s claim that his father had risen above previous theorists: “It was from precisely opposing principles that my father took as his point of departure; and it was also, as it must be, to precisely opposing results that he arrived. Establishing, through a great number of investigations, that monsters are, like those beings said to be normal, subordinated to constant laws, he was led to admit that the method of classification that naturalists employed for the latter, might be applied with success to the former.” Thanks to my colleague Kate Hamerton for improving my translation of the French. The
passage is taken from the section of Owen’s notes, found in Paul H. Barrett et al.’s edition of Notebook D in
Charles Darwin’s Notebooks 1836–1844
(British Museum and Cornell University Press, 1987). All references to Darwin’s Notebooks are from Barrett’s edition.

5
. Apparently Owen sermonized Darwin on the matter regularly, even suggesting to him that such a “production of monsters” presented an “analogy to the production of species.” See Notebook B, entry 161. My subsequent discussion of Owen’s use of monsters is heavily indebted to Richards, “Political Anatomy of Monsters.” For more detailed information on Owen’s complex, and sometimes confusing, theories of transmutation, see Nicolas Rupke,
Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist
(Yale University Press, 1994), and Adrian Desmond,
Archetypes and Ancestors
(University of Chicago Press, 1982), as well as Desmond’s
The Politics of Evolution
(University of Chicago Press, 1989).

6
. See Darwin, Notebook C, no. 86.

7
. This epistemic problem of determining which traits are adaptations and which are simply inherited as neutral continues to trouble some contemporary intellectuals. Jerry Fodor, “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings,”
London Review of Books
18 (October 2007), for example, engages in much hand-wringing over the seeming impossibility of settling such a question. He worries that we have no objective criteria for weighing which traits of an organism are selected for as adaptations versus those that simply piggyback onto the selected traits. We have stats to show that curly tails and tame-ness are correlated traits in dog populations; we can ask, Fodor points out, if natural selection is targeting tameness, and curly tails are accidental byproduct correlations, or the other way around. It is interesting that Darwin himself was worried as early as the 1830s about the epistemic implications of his budding theory. I tend to think that Fodor’s worry is rather exaggerated. Even his own example of tameness (or less aggression) versus curly tail seems to resolve relatively easily. Only the most dogged skepticism (oh, the puns keep coming) would fail to acknowledge the relevance of aggression and tameness to survival, and therefore more likely subjects of selection, whereas curly tails comparatively speaking seem to be the proper candidates for free-rider status. The criticism that we don’t have absolute nomological certainty about the relevance of aggression and tameness strikes me as a futile leftover from logical positivism.

8
. Darwin’s cousin and longtime friend William Darwin Fox had a fascination with hybrid animal breeding, and in Notebook D Charles rehearses a whole series of empirical facts drawn from William’s many stories. Hybrids are considered, with special attention to subsequent offspring: dogs bred with wolves, long- and short-necked geese, blue-eyed deaf cats, common and muscovy ducks, and more.

9
. Darwin, Notebook D, nos. 12–18.

10
. Darwin, Notebook E, no. 3 reveals his first application of Malthus’s ideas from
An Essay on the Principle of Population
to the whole range of organic relations.

11
. Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species
(1859 edition),
chapter 1
, “Variation under Domestication.”

12
. For example, French bulldogs, artificially selected for flat faces, often give birth to offspring with severe cleft palate. Man, in his history of animal domestication, has created some Frankenstein creatures. Darwin says that man “often begins his selection by some half-monstrous form; or at least by some modification prominent enough to catch his eye, or to be plainly useful to him.” In this same passage he plays with the Designer metaphor of natural selection. “Can we wonder,” he asks, “that nature’s productions should be far ‘truer’ in character than man’s productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?” Ibid.

13
. Darwin’s gentle argument with the American naturalist Asa Gray is well known as an example of teleological confusion surrounding natural selection. Gray, who was in most regards very helpful to Darwin’s reception in America, nonetheless received a rebuke from Darwin when Gray argued that the Author of nature foreordained the course of evolution. In a letter to Gray, Darwin writes, “If the right variations occurred, and no others, natural selections would be superfluous.” Gray was arguing that far from destroying the “argument from design,” Darwin in fact buttressed it. Cynthia Russett, in
Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response 1865–1912
(Freeman, 1976), points out that “Asa Gray was…a very distinguished scientist as well as a convinced Christian. But he was not a professional philosopher, and on the question of Darwin’s relevance to the argument from design he seems to have been quite wrong.”

14
. Darwin’s eventual theory could explain more than just adaptations. For a discussion of the causal pluralism of Darwin’s mature theory, see Stephen T. Asma, “Darwin’s Causal Pluralism,”
Biology and Philosophy
11, no. 1 (1996).

15
. The homologous body plans of diverse animals were reinterpreted by Darwin as morphological evidence of common ancestry, not evidence of God’s divine Ideas. Bats, men, moles, and whales share body plans because they have a distant common ancestor, not because a transcendental archetype is instantiated in them. Darwin believed that homologies give us a glimpse into the flesh-and-blood creatures of our phylogenetic past.

16
. For a nice analysis of the various non-Darwinian evolution theories of this time, see Peter Bowler,
The Eclipse of Darwinism
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

17
. Hugo de Vries,
Species and Varieties: Their Origin by Mutation
(Open Court Publishing, 1904), lecture 19, “Experimental Pedigree Cultures.”

18
. “The struggle for life and natural selection are manifestly inadequate to give even the slightest indication of an explanation of this case. It is simply impossible to imagine the causes that might have produced such a character. The only way out of this difficulty is to assume that it has arisen at once, in its present apparently differentiated and very variable condition, and that, being quite uninjurious and since it does not decrease the fertility of the race, it has never been subjected to natural selection, and so has saved itself from destruction.” De Vries continues the argument by extrapolating to other normal plant morphologies: “But if we once grant the probability of the origin of the ‘Nepaul-barley’ by a sudden mutation, we obviously must assume the same in the case of the Helwingia and other normal instances. In this way we gain a further support for our assertion, that even the strangest specific characters may have arisen suddenly.” Lecture 22, “Taxonomic Anomalies.”

19
. My discussion of Goldschmidt is informed by Michael R. Dietrich, “Richard Gold-schmidt: Hopeful Monsters and Other Heresies,”
Nature Reviews: Genetics
4 (January 2003). Also see Stephen Jay Gould’s introduction to a reissue of Goldschmidt’s
The Material Basis of Evolution
(Yale University Press, 1982).

20
. The neo-Darwinians were strenuously reasserting Darwin’s gradualist micromutation theory, reformulating it as a part of the new population genetics. The idea of a steady stream of tiny mutations fit nicely with the emerging statistical methods of quantitative genetics, whereas qualitative jumps, such as Goldschmidt’s hopeful monsters, did not. The major players of the neo-Darwinian synthesis were Julian Huxley, Theodo-sius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, George Gaylord Simpson, J. B. S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright. Simpson and Goldschmidt, in particular, argued with each other in their respective writings.

21
. Quotes of Pere Alberch are taken from his watershed article, “The Logic of Monsters: Evidence for Internal Constraint in Development and Evolution,”
Geobios
, memoire special, no. 12 (1989).

22
. Alberch approvingly refers back to the teratological work of his predecessors, such as the Geoffroys, in this case of the three-headed monster.

23
. My discussion of Gould’s example is drawn from his article “Eight Little Piggies,” collected in his book
Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History
(Norton, 1993).

24
. Using his logic of monsters, Alberch showed how the developmental construction of limbs consists of three fundamental processes: branching (the development of two series from one), segmentation (repetition of the same element), and condensation (fusion between elements). A forelimb, for example, builds outward from the shoulder to the fingers and involves a branching construction, pursuant to the humerus, of the ulna and radius. Further branching builds the wrist bones, and then the digits are composed by segmentation. See Neil Shubin and Pere Alberch, “A Morphogenetic Approach to the Origin and Basic Organization of the Tetrapod Limb,” in
Evolutionary Biology
, vol. 20, edited by Max Hecht, Bruce Wallace, and Sir Ghillean T. Prance (Plenum Publications, 1986).

25
. To be more precise, the penultimate, rather than the ultimate, digit is built first and then forward to the first digit, and back one.