The Lying Stones of Marrakech (10 page)

But Bacon presented a brilliant and original analysis by concentrating instead on psychological barriers to knowledge about the natural world. He had, after all, envisioned the study of nature as a funneling of sensory data through mental processors, and he recognized that internal barriers of the second stage could stand as high as the external impediments of sensory limitations. He also understood that the realm of conceptual hangups extended far beyond the cool and abstract logic of Aristotelian reason into our interior world of fears, hopes, needs, feelings, and the structural limits of mental machinery. Bacon therefore developed an incisive metaphor to classify these psychological barriers. He designated such impediments as “idols” and recognized four major categories—
idola tribus
(idols of the tribe),
idola specus
(the cave),
idola fori
(the forum, or marketplace), and
idola theatri
(the theater).

Proceeding from the particular to the general, idols of the cave define the peculiarities of each individual. Some of us panic when we see a mathematical formula; others, for reasons of childhood suppression grafted upon basic temperament, dare not formulate thoughts that might challenge established orders.
Idols of the marketplace, perhaps Bacon's most original concept, designate limits imposed by language—for how can we express, or even formulate, a concept that no words in our language can specify?(In his brilliant story, “Averroës'Search,” for example,Jorge Luis Borges—who loved Bacon's work and may well have written this tale to illustrate the idols—imagined the fruitless struggles of the greatest Arabic commentator on Aristotle to understand and translate the master's key concepts of “tragedy” and “comedy,” for such notions could not be expressed, or even conceptualized, in Averroës's culture.)

Idols of the theater identify the most obvious category of impediments based on older systems of thought. We will have one hell of a time trying to grasp Darwinism if we maintain absolute and unquestioned fealty to the “old time religion” of Genesis literalism, with an earth no more than a few thousand years old and all organisms created by a deity, ex nihilo and in six days of twenty-four hours. Finally, idols of the tribe—that is, our tribe of
Homo sapiens
—specify those foibles and errors of thinking that transcend the peculiarities of our diverse cultures and reflect the inherited structures and operations of the human brain. Idols of the tribe, in other words, lie deep within the constitution of what we call “human nature” itself.

Bacon emphasized two tribal idols in his examples: our tendency to explain all phenomena throughout the spatial and temporal vastness of the universe by familiar patterns in the only realm we know by direct experience of our own bodies, the domain of objects that live for a few decades and stand a few feet tall; and our propensity to make universal inferences from limited and biased observations, ignoring evident sources of data that do not impact our senses.(Bacon cites the lovely example of a culture convinced that the Sea God saves shipwrecked men who pray for his aid because rescued sailors so testify. A skeptic, presented with this evidence and asked
“whether he did not now confess the divinity of Neptune?
returned this counter-question by way of answer;
yea, but where are they printed, that are drowned?
And there is the same reason of all such like superstitions, as in astrology, dreams, divinations, and the rest.”)

In a 1674 translation of the
Great Instauration
(originally written in Latin), Bacon defines the idols in his characteristically pungent prose:

Idols are the profoundest fallacies of the mind of man. Nor do they deceive in particulars [that is, objects in the external world]… but from a corrupt and crookedly-set predisposition of the mind; which doth, as it were, wrest and infect all the anticipations of the understanding. For the mind of man… is so far from being like a
smooth, equal and clear glass, which might sincerely take and reflect the beams of things, according to their true incidence; that it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstitions, apparitions, and impostures.

(Gilbert Wats, Bacon's translator, called his subject “a learned man, happily the learned'st that ever lived since the decay of the Grecian and Roman empires, when learning was at a high pitch.” Wats also appreciated Bacon's distinctive approach to defining the embryonic field of modern science as accumulating knowledge about the empirical world, obtained by passing sensory data through the biased processing machinery of the brain. Wats described Bacon as “the first that ever joyn'd rational and experimental philosophy in a regular correspondence, which before was either a subtilty of words, or a confusion of matter.” He then epitomized Bacon's view in a striking image: “For Truth, as it reflects on us, is a congruent conformity of the intellect to the object… when the intellectual globe, and the globe of the world, intermix their beams and irradiations, in a direct line of projection, to the generation of sciences.”)

If our primary tribal idol resides in the ancient Greek proverb that “man [meaning all of us] is the measure of all things,” then we should not be surprised to find our bodily fingerprints in nearly every assessment, even (or especially) in our words for abstractions—as in the strength of virility (from the Latin
vir
, “adult male”),the immaturity of puerility (from
puer
, “boy”), or the madness of hysteria (originally defined as an inherently feminine disease, from the Greek word for “womb”). Nevertheless, in our proper objection to such sexual stereotyping, we may at least take wry comfort in a general rule of most Indo-European languages (not including English) that assign genders to nouns for inanimate objects. Abstract concepts usually receive feminine designations—so the nobility of (manly) virtue presents herself as
la vertu
in France, while an even more distinctively manly virility also cross-dresses as
la virilité
.

We can, I believe,dig to an even deeper level in identifying tribal idols that probably lie in the evolved and inherited structures of neural wiring—the most basic and inherent substrate of “human nature” itself (if that ill-defined, overused, and much-abused term has any meaning at all). Some properties of human thinking seem so general, so common to all people, that such an evolutionary encoding seems reasonable, at least as a working hypothesis. For example, neurologists have identified areas of the brain apparently dedicated to the perception of faces. (One can easily speculate about the evolutionary value of such a propensity, but we must also recognize that these inherent biases of
perception can strongly distort our judgment in other circumstances—Bacon's reason for designating such mental preferences as idols—as when we think we see a face in the random pitting of a large sandstone block on Mars, and then jump to conclusions about alien civilizations. I am not making this story up, by the way; the Martian face remains a staple of “proof” for the UFO and alien abduction crowd.) I suspect that the neural mechanism for facial recognition becomes activated by the abstract pattern of two equal and adjacent circles with a line below—a configuration encountered in many places besides real faces.

In this “deeper” category of tribal idols, I doubt that any rule enjoys wider application, or engenders greater trouble at the same time, than our tendency to order nature by making dichotomous divisions into two opposite groups. (Claude Lévi-Strauss and the French structuralists have based an entire theory of human nature and social history on this premise—and two bits from this corner says they're right, even if a bit overextended in their application.) Thus, we start with a few basic divisions of male versus female and night versus day—and then extend these concrete examples into greater generalities of nature versus culture (“the raw and the cooked” of Lévi-Strauss's book), spirit versus matter (of philosophical dualism),the beautiful versus the sublime (in Burke's theory of aesthetics); and thence (and now often tragically) to ethical belief, anathematization, and, sometimes, warfare and genocide (the good versus the bad, the godly who must prevail versus the diabolical, ripe for burning).

Again, one can speculate about the evolutionary basis of such a strong tendency. In this case, I rather suspect that dichotomization represents some “baggage” from an evolutionary past of much simpler brains built only to reach those quick decisions—fight or flight, sleep or wake, mate or wait—that make all the difference in a Darwinian world. Perhaps we have never been able to transcend the mechanics of a machinery built to generate simple twofold divisions and have had to construct our greater complexities upon such a biased and inadequate substrate—perhaps the most restrictive tribal idol of all.

I devoted the first part of this essay to a general discussion of our mental limitations because this framework, I believe, so well illuminates a particular problem in the history of paleontology that caught my fancy and attention both for unusual intrigue in itself, and for providing such an excellent “test case” of an important general pattern in the growth of scientific knowledge.

Classical authors, particularly Pliny in his
Natural History
,spoke in a limited way about fossils, usually (and correctly) attributing the shells found on mountaintops to a subsequent elevation of land from ancient seabeds. A few medieval authors (particularly Albert the Great in the thirteenth century) added a few
comments, while Leonardo da Vinci, in the Leicester Codex (written in the early 1500s), made extensive and brilliant paleontological observations that were, however, not published until the nineteenth century, and therefore had no influence upon the field's later development. Essentially, then, the modern history of paleontology began in the mid-sixteenth century with the publication of two great works by two remarkable scholars: treatises on fossils published in 1546 by the German physician and mining engineer Georgius Agricola, and in 1565 (the year of his death in an epidemic of plague in Zurich) by the Swiss polymath Conrad Gesner.

In the compendium of Latinized folk names then used to identify fossils, most designations noted either a similarity in appearance to some natural or cultural phenomenon, or a presumed and legendary mode of origin. Thus, the flat and circular components of crinoid stems were called
trochites
, or wheel stones; the internal molds of rounded pairs of clamshells were
bucardites
(see accompanying figure, published in 1665), or bull's hearts; well-rounded concretions of the appropriate size were
enorchites
, or testicle stones (and if three were joined together, they became
triorchites
, or “three balls”); sea urchin tests became
brontia
(or thunder stones) because they supposedly fell from the sky in lightning storms.

A prominent group of fossils in this old taxonomy, and a puzzle (as we shall see) to early paleontologists, received the name of
hysteroliths
, also designated, in various vernaculars, as woman stones, womb stones, mother stones, or vulva stones (with the scholarly name derived from the same root as
hysteria
, an example cited earlier in this essay). The basis for this taxonomic consensus stands out in the first drawing of hysteroliths ever published—by the Danish natural historian Olaus Worm in 1665. A prominent median slit on one side
(sometimes both) of a rounded and flattened object can hardly fail to suggest the anatomical comparison—or to cite Worm's own words,
“quod muliebre pudendum figura exprimat”
(because its form resembles the female genitalia).
*
Interestingly, as Worm's second figure (to the right) shows, the opposite side of some (but not all) hysteroliths seems to portray a less obvious figure of the male counterparts! The men who wrote the founding treatises of modern paleontology could hardly fail to emphasize such a titillating object (especially in an age that provided few opportunities for approved and legitimate discussion, and illustration, of such intimate subjects).

Olaus Worm's 1665 illustration of the internal mold of a clamshell pair. His generation did not know the source of these fossils and called them
bucardites,
or “bull's hearts.”