The Flamingo’s Smile (13 page)

Britain’s leading geologists tended to follow Wallace and Huxley rather than Darwin. They stated that Kelvin had performed a service for geology in challenging the virtual eternity of Lyell’s world and in “restraining the reckless drafts” that geologists so rashly make on the “bank of time,” in T.C. Chamberlin’s apt metaphor. Only late in his campaign, when Kelvin began to restrict his estimate from a vague and comfortable 100 million years (or perhaps a good deal more) to a more rigidly circumscribed 20 million years or so did geologists finally rebel. A. Geikie, who had been a staunch supporter of Kelvin, then wrote:

KELVIN’S SCIENTIFIC CHALLENGE AND THE MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF UNIFORMITY

As a master of rhetoric, Charles Lyell did charge that anyone who challenged his uniformity might herald a reaction that would send geology back to its prescientific age of catastrophes. One meaning of uniformity did uphold the integrity of science in this sense—the claim that nature’s laws are constant in space and time, and that miraculous intervention to suspend these laws cannot be permitted as an agent of geological change. But uniformity, in this methodological meaning, was no longer an issue in Kelvin’s time, or even (at least in scientific circles) when Lyell first published his
Principles of Geology
in 1830. The scientific catastrophists (see essay 7) were not miracle mongers, but men who fully accepted the uniformity of natural law and sought to render earth history as a tale of
natural
calamities occurring infrequently on an ancient earth.

But uniformity also had a more restricted, substantive meaning for Lyell. He also used the term for a particular theory of earth history based on two questionable postulates: first, that rates of change did not vary much throughout time and that slow and current processes could therefore account for all geological phenomena in their accumulated impact; second, that the earth had always been about the same, and that its history had no direction, but represented a steady state of dynamically constant conditions.

Lyell, probably unconsciously, then performed a clever and invalid trick of argument. Uniformity had two distinct meanings—a methodological postulate about uniform laws, which all scientists had to accept in order to practice their profession, and a substantive claim of dubious validity about the actual history of the earth. By calling them both uniformity, and by showing that all scientists were uniformitarians in the first sense, Lyell also cleverly implied that, to be a scientist, one had to accept uniformity in its substantive meaning as well. Thus, the myth developed that any opposition to uniformity could only be a rearguard action against science itself—and the impression arose that if Kelvin was attacking the “doctrine of uniformity” in geology, he must represent the forces of reaction.

In fact, Kelvin fully accepted the uniformity of law and even based his calculations about heat loss upon it. He directed his attack against uniformity only upon the substantive (and dubious) side of Lyell’s vision. Kelvin advanced two complaints about this substantive meaning of uniformity. First, on the question of rates. If the earth were substantially younger than Lyell and the strict uniformitarians believed, then modern, slow rates of change would not be sufficient to render its history. Early in its history, when the earth was hotter, causes must have been more energetic and intense. (This is the “compromise” position that Darwin finally adopted to explain faster rates of change early in the history of life.) Second, on the question of direction. If the earth began as a molten sphere and lost heat continually through time, then its history had a definite pattern and path of change. The earth had not been perennially the same, merely changing the position of its lands and seas in a never-ending dance leading nowhere. Its history followed a definite road, from a hot, energetic sphere to a cold, listless world that, eventually, would sustain life no longer. Kelvin fought, within a scientific context, for a
short-term, directional
history against Lyell’s vision of an essentially eternal steady-state. Our current view represents the triumph of neither vision, but a creative synthesis of both. Kelvin was both as right and as wrong as Lyell.

RADIOACTIVITY AND KELVIN’S DOWNFALL

Kelvin was surely correct in labeling as extreme Lyell’s vision of an earth in steady-state, going nowhere over untold ages. Yet, our modern time scale stands closer to Lyell’s concept of no appreciable limit than to Kelvin’s 100 million years and its consequent constraint on rates of change. The earth is 4.5 billion years old.

Lyell won this round of a complicated battle because Kelvin’s argument contained a fatal flaw. In this respect, the story as conventionally told has validity. Kelvin’s argument was not an inevitable and mathematically necessary set of claims. It rested upon a crucial and untested assumption that underlay all Kelvin’s calculations. Kelvin’s figures for heat loss could measure the earth’s age only if that heat represented an original quantity gradually dissipated through time—a clock ticking at a steady rate from its initial reservoir until its final exhaustion. But suppose that new heat is constantly created and that its current radiation from the earth reflects no original quantity, but a modern process of generation. Heat then ceases to be a gauge of age.

Kelvin recognized the contingent nature of his calculations, but the physics of his day included no force capable of generating new heat, and he therefore felt secure in his assumption. Early in his campaign, in calculating the sun’s age, he had admitted his crucial dependence upon no new source of energy, for he had declared his results valid “unless new sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation.”

Then, in 1903, Pierre Curie announced that radium salts constantly release newly generated heat. The unknown source had been discovered. Early students of radioactivity quickly recognized that most of the earth’s heat must be continually generated by radioactive decay, not merely dissipating from an originally molten condition—and they realized that Kelvin’s argument had collapsed. In 1904, Ernest Rutherford gave this account of a lecture, given in Lord Kelvin’s presence, and heralding the downfall of Kelvin’s forty-year campaign for a young earth:

Thus, Kelvin lived into the new age of radioactivity. He never admitted his error or published any retraction, but he privately conceded that the discovery of radium had invalidated some of his assumptions.

The discovery of radioactivity highlights a delicious double irony. Not only did radioactivity supply a new source of heat that destroyed Kelvin’s argument; it also provided the clock that could then measure the earth’s age and proclaim it ancient after all! For radioactive atoms decay at a constant rate, and their dissipation does measure the duration of time. Less than ten years after the discovery of radium’s newly generated heat, the first calculations for radioactive decay were already giving ages in billions of years for some of the earth’s oldest rocks.

We sometimes suppose that the history of science is a simple story of progress, proceeding inexorably by objective accumulation of better and better data. Such a view underlies the moral homilies that build our usual account of the advance of science—for Kelvin, in this context, clearly impeded progress with a false assumption. We should not be beguiled by such comforting and inadequate stories. Kelvin proceeded by using the best science of his day, and colleagues accepted his calculations. We cannot blame him for not knowing that a new source of heat would be discovered. The framework of his time included no such force. Just as Maupertuis lacked a proper metaphor for recognizing that embryos might contain coded instructions rather than preformed parts (see next essay), Kelvin’s physics contained no context for a new source of heat.

The progress of science requires more than new data; it needs novel frameworks and contexts. And where do these fundamentally new views of the world arise? They are not simply discovered by pure observation; they require new modes of thought. And where can we find them, if old modes do not even include the right metaphors? The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness. The basic chanciness and unpredictability of science must also reside in the inherent difficulty of such a task.

IN
1745, the great French savant Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis wrote a little book with a big theme and an odd title. (The original measures but 5½ by 3¼ inches and includes fewer than 200 pages of text, printed, thanks to the ample margins of a more generous age, in the even smaller space of 3¼ by 1¾ inches.) He called it
Vénus physique
—the “physical,” or “earthly, Venus,” or, more loosely, “physical love” (as opposed to the interpretive, spiritual, or psychological dimensions of this subject of the centuries). It presents, as the title implies, a wide-ranging account of the natural history of procreation—a primer in how various animals do it. We learn, for example, in juxtaposed contrast that

Proceeding down the scale of being (as his century conceived it), Maupertuis reaches the hermaphroditic land snails and discusses their darts. (Many land snails develop a calcareous “arrow” with a beautifully formed tip. In the elaborate rituals that precede copulation, the snail acting as male thrusts its dart repeatedly into its partner’s muscular foot. The dart is not part of the penis, and beyond the obvious observation that it serves some role in sexual stimulation, we still do not know its precise function.) Maupertuis didn’t have an answer either, but he made an interesting, if fatuous, analogy:

At the bottom of the scale, Maupertuis encountered a special problem with hydras, the soft-bodied, freshwater relatives of corals. Maupertuis and his colleagues considered hydras as transitional forms between plants and animals because they reproduce either by budding new individuals off a parental stalk or by regenerating entire bodies from disarticulated fragments of the same stalk. Maupertuis, in no uncertain terms, had identified pleasure as nature’s end in the process of reproduction:

But if pleasure be nature’s order, then how can the lowly hydra enjoy reproduction by having its stalk cut into pieces?

Perhaps these passages inspired Maupertuis’s decision to publish anonymously, although he lived in a century so refreshingly less prudish than the one that followed (while his direct and charming words also stand in such favorable contrast to the perpetual, self-conscious analysis of our own age). Nonetheless,
Vénus physique
is not primarily a work about the natural history of love, whatever the value of these sections for publicity and immediate renown. It is, for most of its length, a sophisticated treatise on the science of embryology—on the most direct and enduring physical effects of love. The title, perhaps, was a come-on, but the book is a masterpiece.

Maupertuis was born in France in 1698. Although he ranged widely across the disciplinary boundaries imposed by a later age, he won his reputation for work in the physical sciences—both for his courage in introducing and expounding Newton’s work in a nation strongly wedded to Descartes’s alternatives and for directing an arduous expedition to Lapland that affirmed Newton’s prediction of an earth not perfectly spherical, but flattened at the poles. This combination of care and daring won him Voltaire’s support and his star rose. In 1738, Voltaire recommended to Frederick the Great that Maupertuis might be just the man to direct his rehabilitated Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Maupertuis took the job and flourished in it for several years. But a series of involved intrigues brought him down and incurred Voltaire’s undying wrath and the deadly satire of his acerbic pen. Maupertuis was eventually exonerated, but he never recovered his health and reputation, and he died, a broken man, in 1759.

Like many general treatises, the
Vénus physique
had its origin in a specific problem. In a culture with deep racist traditions, human skin color has exerted a perpetual fascination, and no aspect of the subject inspired more interest than the occasional discovery of peculiar individuals who seemed to breach the boundaries. Jeremiah’s God, pessimistic about redemption among those who had fallen by the wayside, proclaimed: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” But some humans did transgress beyond the limits of apparently stable categories, leading to fear that one’s own future relatives might stray or that the categories themselves might not be so comfortably fixed in their conventional statuses of relative worth. Essay 22 discusses a Caucasian woman with large patches of melanic skin, who fascinated a London physician in 1813. But her case was rare and irrelevant. A more general phenomenon was, however, fairly common and thus both threatening and fascinating—namely, albinism among black people. Albinism is well known among most, or all, dark-skinned vertebrate races and species; albino blacks, paler than any Caucasian, are not rare, and the trait is inherited in family lines.

An albino child of black parents had been on exhibit in Paris and Maupertuis’s thoughts and observations served as the inspiration for his
Vénus physique
. His work bears the subtitle:
Dissertation physique à l’occasion du nègre blanc
(“A physical dissertation inspired by the white Negro”).
Vénus physique
contains two parts, the much longer first section on embryology and the natural history of love and a forty-five-page closing statement on the origin of human races. (This second section contains some poorly formed evolutionary speculations and is largely responsible for Maupertuis’s reputation as a Darwinian precursor—an unfair and anachronistic assessment, based on a few fleeting passages that abstract Maupertuis from the concerns of his time.
Vénus physique
is a treatise on embryology and the exciting debates of his own century.)

This second section features a discussion of human biogeography and tries to explain a false pattern reconstructed from unreliable reports by travelers—a belief that blacks inhabited the tropics, while arctic regions were the exclusive preserve of giants and dwarfs. Maupertuis argues, in short, that superior white races had simply pushed all miscreants and oddballs out of the more favorable temperate regions. We can easily see how the albino child had inspired Maupertuis’s thoughts for this second section, but what influence could he have exerted over the heart of
Vénus physique
—the first, long section on embryology? An answer to this question provides the key to
Vénus physique
and a proper assessment of Maupertuis’s creative and unusual opinion in the great embryological debate of his age.

In one of the hottest arguments of eighteenth-century science, students of development lined up on both sides of an ancient dichotomy stretching back to Greek science. Aristotle had argued that embryonic development is both the greatest of all biological mysteries and the key to a deep understanding of organisms—propositions that remain as true today (for our ignorance is still profound) as when the “master of them that know” proclaimed them more than two thousand years ago. Greek scientists had envisaged two broad types of solutions, and their eighteenth-century successors continued to respect the categories. One group, the preformationists, argued that embryology must represent an unfolding of preexisting structure. A tiny homunculus must be curled up in the egg or sperm. It need not be a perfect miniature of the adult—for the relative form and position of parts may change with growth—but the structures must all be present and connected from the first. A second group including Maupertuis, the epigeneticists, argued that the visual appearance of development must be respected as a literal truth. The embryo seems to differentiate complex parts from an original simplicity, and so it must be in reality (preformationists, in response, claimed that contemporary microscopes were too poor to see preformed parts in the tiny and gelatinous early embryo). Embryology is addition and differentiation, not mere unfolding.

We must reject the silly good guy–bad guy scenario usually attached in false retrospect to this tale: namely, that preformationists were blinded by theological prejudice against change of any sort and therefore imposed upon the egg or sperm what they could not observe—while epigeneticists were heroes of empirical science and merely called it as they saw it under their microscopes.

In fact, the preformationists maintained an idea of science far closer to our own. They were the mechanists who insisted upon a material cause for all phenomena. And they were stuck in the limited knowledge of their own century. What alternative did they have? The wondrous complexity of a human body cannot develop mysteriously from an original formless nothingness; organs must therefore be present from the start. Most epigeneticists, on the other hand, were comfortable with a view of causality that we would now reject as “vitalistic”—the idea that an external, nonmaterial force could impose complex design upon a fertilized egg that began with unformed potential alone.

Maupertuis was a conspicuous oddball in this great debate, for he was both a fervent epigeneticist and a committed mechanist. Unlike his epigeneticist colleagues, therefore, he expected to find material precursors for all parts in eggs and sperm. But these parts could not form a prebuilt homunculus. They must be totally scattered and completely disaggregated. They must also exist in numbers far in excess of what the embryo needs (for if eggs and sperm included all the right parts, and these only, then Maupertuis might have been labeled an odd preformationist who advocated a disarticulated homunculus). Embryonic development must therefore represent a selection, sorting out, attraction, and creative joining of these separated parts, not a mere enlargement of structures already fixed in form, place, or number. But how could disaggregated parts come together, and how could the right ones be sorted out and joined (or the wrong ones occasionally incorporated in abnormal fetuses)? The idea of a preformed homunculus seemed to present fewer problems.

Several of Maupertuis’s arguments against preformationism were the conventional retorts of his age. Against the ovists (those who placed the homunculus in the female egg) Maupertuis raised the usual, and always troubling, issue of encapsulation. The egg cells of the homunculus must contain other, vastly smaller, homunculi and so on back to countless generations of inconceivable tininess. All of human history, in fact, must have been prefigured in the ovaries of Eve.

And why then do males exist at all? Does their semen merely release and inspire the previously lifeless homunculus? Was this, Maupertuis asks, the fire that Prometheus stole from the gods?

Against the spermaticists (those who placed the homunculi within sperm cells), Maupertuis raised the additional problem that many million cells are expelled in each ejaculation. Could nature be so profligate and endow millions of unused cells with perfect homunculi that will never enjoy life?

Maupertuis ventured an alternate, and interestingly incorrect, function for the recently discovered “spermatick animalcules,” as his English colleagues called them. He imagined that they stirred and mixed the seminal fluids of male and female, thus bringing together the parts that must form the embryo.

But Maupertuis added to this great embryological contretemps some new arguments and a strikingly original perspective. For centuries, the turf of debate had been the embryo and its observable process of development. True creativity often resides in the joining of previously disparate fields, in the recognition that apparently unrelated phenomena from other disciplines may offer solutions to old dilemmas. And so, finally, we return to albinos and to Maupertuis’s creative insight.