The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2 page)

Despite conscious efforts at avoidance, I find myself constantly drawn to biography—for absolutely nothing can match the richness and fascination of a person's life, in its wondrous mixture of pure gossip, miniaturized and personalized social history, psychological dynamics, and the development of central ideas that motivate careers and eventually move mountains. And try as I may to ground biography in various central themes, nothing can really substitute for the sweep and storytelling power of chronology. (I regard the Picasso Museum in Paris and the Turner Wing of the Tate Gallery in London as my two favorite art museums because each displays the work of a great creator in the strict chronological order of his life. I can then devise whatever alternative arrangement strikes my own fancy and sense of utility—but the arrow of time cannot be replaced or set aside; even our claims for invariance must seek constant features of style or subject
through
time's passage.)

So I have struggled, harder and more explicitly than for anything else in my life as a writer, to develop a distinctive and personal form of essay to treat great scientific issues in the context of biography—and to do so not by the factual chronology of a life's sorrows and accomplishments (a noble task requiring the amplitude of a full book), but rather by the intellectual synergy between a person and the controlling idea of his life. In this manner, when the conceit works, I can capture the essence of a scientist's greatest labor, including the major impediments and insights met and gathered along the way, while also laying bare (in the spare epitome demanded by strictures of the essay as a literary form of limited length) the heart of a key intellectual concept in the most interesting microcosm of a person's formulation and defense.

The first three parts of this book apply this strategy to three different times, places, subjects, and worldviews—an extended test of my claim for a distinctive voice based on applying biographical perspectives to the illumination of key scientific concepts and their history (following the basic strategy, in each essay, of linking a person's central operating idea, the focus of a professional life in development, to an important concept in human understanding of the natural world—in other words, to summarize the range and power of a principle by
exemplifying its role in the intellectual development of a particularly interesting scientist). Thus I have tried to encapsulate, in the unforgiving form of an essay, the essence of both a person (as expressed in the controlling idea of his scientific life) and a concept (through the quintessentially human device of displaying its development in an individual life).

Part I treats the most fascinating period in my own subject of paleontology, the premodern struggle (sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries) to understand the origin of fossils while nascent science struggled with the deepest of all questions about the nature of both causality and reality themselves. Are fossils the remains of ancient organisms on an old earth, or manifestations of a stable and universal order, symbolically expressed by correspondences among nature's three kingdoms of animal, vegetable, and mineral, with fossils arising entirely within the mineral kingdom as analogs of living forms in the other two realms? No subject could be more crucial, and no alternative view more eerily unfamiliar, than this particular battleground for the nature of reality. I present three variations upon this theme, each biographically expressed: the early-eighteenth-century tale of paleontology's most famous hoax, combined with a weirdly similar story from modern Morocco; the linkage of the unknown Stelluti to the preeminent Galileo through their friendship, and through a common error that unites the master's original view of Saturn with Stelluti's erroneous belief that petrified wood arose in the mineral kingdom; and finally, a “reversed” biography expressed in terms of an organism under study (the brachiopod fossils that were once called “vulva stones” for their resemblance to female genitalia) rather than a person pursuing the investigation.

Part II then discusses the greatest conjunction of a time, a subject, and a group of amazing people in the history of natural history: late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century France, when a group including some of the most remarkable intellects of the millennium invented the scientific study of natural history in an age of revolution. Georges Buffon establishes a discipline, by the grandest route of virtually defining a new and historically based way of knowing, in the forty-four volumes of his eminently literary
Histoire naturelle,
and then loses public recognition, for interesting and understandable reasons, in the midst of his ubiquity. Antoine Lavoisier, the most stunningly incisive intellect I have ever encountered, literally adds a new dimension to our understanding of nature in the geometry of geological mapping, his one foray (amidst intentions cut short by the guillotine) into my profession. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck belies his own unfairly imposed reputation for error and inflexibility with a heartrending reassessment of the foundations of his own deepest belief—in an odyssey that
begins with a handwritten comment and drawing, inked by Lamarck into his own copy of his first evolutionary treatise, and here discovered and presented for the first time.

Part III then illustrates the greatest British challenge to this continental preeminence: the remarkable, and wonderfully literate, leading lights of Victorian science in Darwin's age of turmoil and reassessment: the heart of Lyell's uniformitarianism as seen (literally) by visiting the site of his most famous visual image, the pillars of Pozzuoli, used as a frontispiece to all editions of his
Principles of Geology;
Darwin's own intellectual development from such an unpromising temperament and early training to an ultimately understandable role as the most gentle, yet thorough revolutionary in the history of science; Richard Owen's invention of dinosaurs as an explicit device to subvert the evolutionary views of a generation before Darwin; and Alfred Russel Wallace on Victorian certainties and subsequent unpredictabilities.

The last three parts of this book do not invoke biography so explicitly, but they also use the same device of embodying an abstraction within a particular that can be addressed in sufficient detail and immediate focus to fit within an essay. The interlude of part IV presents some experiments in the different literary form of short takes (op-ed pieces, obituary notices, and even, in one case, an introductory statement for Penguin CD's series of famous classical compositions). Here I include six attempts (the literal meaning of
essay)
to capture the most elusive and important subject of all: the nature and meaning of excellence, expressed as a general statement about substrates (chapter 11) followed by five iterations on the greatness of individuals and their central passions across a full range of human activity—for excellence must be construed as a goal for all varieties of deeds and seasons, not only for mental categories—from bodily grace and dignity within domains debased by the confusion of celebrity with stature; to distinctive individuality within corporate blandness; to the intellectual innovations more commonly cited by scholars to exemplify this most precious (and uncommon) of human attributes.

Part V, on scientific subjects with more obvious and explicit social consequences (and often, unacknowledged social origins as well), also uses biography, but in a different way to link past stories with present realities—to convey the lesson that claims for objectivity based on pure discovery often replay episodes buried in history, and proving (upon exhumation and linkage) that our modern certainties flounder within the same complexities of social context and mental blockage: Spencer's social Darwinism, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and modern eugenics (chapter 17); contemporary boasts about the discovery of
genes for specific behaviors, Davenport's heritability of wanderlust, and the old medical theory of humors (18); Dolly the cloned sheep, the nature of identical twins, and the decapitation of Louis XVI (19); J.B.S. Haldane on the “humaneness” of poison gas in warfare, and the role and status of unpredictability in science (20).

Finally, part VI abandons biography for another device of essayists: major themes (about evolution's different expression across scales of size and time) cast into the epitome of odd or intriguing particulars: fossil embryos nearly 600 million years old (21); three stories about measurable evolution in snails, lizards, and fishes (22), conventionally misinterpreted as modest enough to prove the efficacy of Darwin's mechanism extended across the immensity of geological time, but far too rapid and convulsive to convey any such meaning when properly read at this grand and unfamiliar scale; and avoidance in antipathy among several Christian groups (23) that “share” Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre (the traditional site of Christ's crucifixion).

At this equipoise, with one more foray into the breach yet to come, I can only thank readers who have joined me on this rocky journey. For only the conjunction of growing fellowship and increasing knowledge—a loop of ethical and intellectual, emotional and rational feedback that positively rings with the optimism of potential survival, maybe even transcendence, in this endlessly fascinating world of woe—can validate the accident of our existence by our free decision to make maximal use of those simple gifts that nature and evolution have granted us.

W
E TEND TO THINK OF FAKERY AS AN ACTIVITY DEDI
cated to minor moments of forgivable fun (from the whoopie cushion to the squirting lapel flower), or harmless embellishment (from my grandfather's vivid eyewitness tales of the Dempsey-Firpo fight he never attended, to the 250,000 people who swear they were there when Bobby Thomson hit his home run in a stadium with a maximal capacity of some fifty thousand).

But fakery can also become a serious and truly tragic business, warping (or even destroying) the lives of thousands, and misdirecting entire professions into sterility for generations. Scoundrels may find the matrix of temptation irresistible, for immediate gains in money and power can be so great, while human gullibility grants the skillful forger an apparently limitless field of operation. The Van Gogh
Sunflowers
, bought in 1987 by a Japanese insurance company
for nearly 25 million pounds sterling—then a record price for a painting—may well be a forged copy made around 1900 by the stockbroker and artist manqué Emile Schuffenecker. The phony Piltdown Man, artlessly confected from the jaw of an orangutan and a modern human cranium, derailed the profession of paleoanthropology for forty years, until exposed as a fake in the early 1950s.

Earlier examples cast an even longer and broader net of disappointment. A large body of medieval and Renaissance scholarship depended upon the documents of Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice-Great Hermes), a body of work attributed to Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom, and once viewed as equal in insight (not to mention antiquity) to biblical and classical sources—until exposed as a set of forgeries compiled largely in the third century A.D. And how can we possibly measure the pain of so many thousands of pious Jews, who abandoned their possessions and towns to follow the false messiah Shabbetai Tzevi to Jerusalem in the apocalyptic year of 1666—only to learn that their leader, imprisoned by the sultan and threatened with torture, had converted to Islam, been renamed Mehmed Efendi, and made the sultan's personal doorkeeper.

The most famous story of fraud in my own field of paleontology may not qualify for this first rank in the genre, but has surely won both general fame and staying power by persistence for more than 250 years. Like all great legends, this story has a canonical form, replete with conventional moral messages, and told without any variation in content across the centuries. Moreover, this standard form bears little relationship to the actual course of events as best reconstructed from available evidence. Finally, to cite the third common property of such legends, a correction of the conventional tale wins added and general value in teaching us important lessons about how we use and abuse our own history. Thus, the old story merits yet another retelling—which I first provide in the canonical (and false) version known to so many generations of students (and no doubt remembered by many readers from their college courses in natural science).

In 1726, Dr. Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer, an insufferably pompous and dilettantish professor and physician from the town of Würzburg, published a volume, the
Lithographiae Wirceburgensis
(Würzburg lithography), documenting in copious words and twenty-one plates a remarkable series of fossils that he had found on a mountain adjacent to the city. These fossils portrayed a large array of objects, all neatly exposed in three-dimensional relief on the surface of flattened stones. The great majority depicted organisms, nearly all complete, including remarkable features of behavior and soft anatomy that had never been noted in conventional fossils—lizards in their skin, birds complete with beaks and eyes, spiders with their webs, bees feeding on flowers, snails next to their
eggs, and frogs copulating. But others showed heavenly objects—comets with tails, the crescent moon with rays, and the sun all effulgent with a glowing central face of human form. Still others depicted Hebrew letters, nearly all spelling out the tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of God—YHVH, usually transliterated by Christian Europe as “Jehovah.”

Beringer did recognize the difference between his stones and conventional fossils, and he didn't state a dogmatic opinion about their nature. But he didn't doubt their authenticity either, and he did dismiss claims that they had been carved by human hands, either recently in an attempt to defraud, or long ago for pagan purposes. Alas, after publishing his book and trumpeting the contents, Beringer realized that he had indeed been duped, presumably by his students playing a prank. (Some sources say that he finally acknowledged the trickery when he found his own name written in Hebrew letters on one stone.) According to legend, the brokenhearted Beringer then impoverished himself by attempting to buy back all copies of his book—and died dispirited just a few years later. Beringer's false fossils have been known ever since as
Lügensteine
, or “lying stones.”