The Flamingo’s Smile (40 page)

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I have since learned that the story is not disappointing and one-directional (ostensible sense to coincidence) as I had concluded when I wrote the essay. Linguistic history has provided a back formation from morphological arches to sex. In
A Browser’s Dictionary
(Harper and Row, 1980), John Ciardi reports (p. 137): “…because the Romans used…arched brickwork in the underground parts of great buildings, and because the poor and the prostitutes of Rome lived in such undergrounds…early Christian writers evolved the verb
fornicari
, to frequent brothels. The whores of Pompeii worked in similar stone cribs.”

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One reader suggested the obvious and elegant solution to this dilemma of the ages—jacks-in-pulpits. How incredibly stupid of me not to have thought of it myself.

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I am tempted to revise this sentence, and assert a universality transcending time, in the light of two back-to-back stories from the
New York Times
of November 23, 1984—first, that the heirs of Barney Clark (the deceased first recipient of a mechanical heart) have filed a $2 million lawsuit against
Reader’s Digest
for breaking their contract to publish a book on the case by Mr. Clark’s widow; second, that Baby Fae’s parents (she of the baboon heart transplant) have sold exclusive rights for their story to
People Magazine
.

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I gave a lecture on this essay soon after its publication and drilled into my eager students the key phrase—“you thought a Portuguese man-of-war was a jellyfish, but it ain’t.” Later in the semester a student reported to my horror that she had lost a game of “Trivial Pursuit” by giving the
correct
answer to the question: “What is a Portuguese man-of-war?” Would you believe that the Solons of pop culture have officially proclaimed this colony a jellyfish—right on the little blue card, so it must be so. But it still ain’t!

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Since botanists face this dilemma more often than zoologists, they have devised a terminology for these ambiguous cases—“genet” for the entire aggregation and “ramet” for each iterated set of parts. This new terminology is no solution, but simply a formal recognition that the issue cannot be resolved with our usual concepts of individuality.

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Dr. S.I. Joseph has since told me that he saw the same lady at a fruit stand later that day. She was asking about the price of grapefruit. “Two for thirty-five cents” she learned. “How much for one,” she asked. “Twenty cents” came the reply. “Fine,” she said, “I’ll take the other.”

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This is the fourth volume of essays compiled from my monthly column in
Natural History
magazine. I marked ten years of work, and never a deadline missed (I won’t tell you about the numerous close calls), with this act of self-indulgence as my treat to myself for the one hundredth effort.

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I wrote this essay in November, 1983—just after the meeting here described.

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See essay 30 for further, and rather remarkable, developments.

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D.J. Boorstin’s wonderful book,
The Discoverers
(New York, Random House, 1983), has been published since this essay appeared. It continues the unfortunate tradition of praising Tyson as a courageous modernist and harbinger of evolution, not realizing that his discovery of intermediacy did not foment a revolution, but rather solved a problem in the standard “chain of being” theory as understood in Tyson’s own time. Boorstin writes (p. 461): “Just as Copernicus displaced the earth from the center of the universe, so Tyson removed man from his unique role above and apart from all the rest of Creation…. Never before had there been so circumstantial or so public a demonstration of man’s physical kinship with the animals…. The implication was plain that here was the ‘missing link’ between man and the whole ‘lower’ animal creation…. Just as the heliocentric vista once seen could not be forgotten, so, after reading Tyson, who could believe that man was an isolate from the rest of nature.”

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Iltis’s unconventional theory quickly unleashed the expected volley of criticism from defenders of the more traditional views. Readers wishing to pursue the controversy further might begin with the critiques of two “grand old men” of corn studies (Walton C. Galinat and Paul C. Mangelsdorf) and Iltis’s response, all published in
Science
, September 14, 1984, pp. 1093–1096, soon after this essay originally appeared. Mangelsdorf’s book
Corn
(Harvard University Press, 1974) contains a wealth of detail on our hemisphere’s greatest contribution to human nutrition.

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I wrote this essay in 1983, for the centenary of Just’s birth.

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This quirky connection so tickles my fancy that I break my own strict rule about eliminating redundancies from these essays and end both this and the next piece with this prod to thought and action.

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Now up to one-and-a-half years between composition and book—an impossibly long time for an exciting area in science.