Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (22 page)

When Whittington began his work in the late 1960s, two junior colleagues agreed to take on the smaller projects in this list. David Bruton of the University of Oslo received the “merostomoids” (I have discussed his work on
Sidneyia
in my section on techniques, early in chapter III, and shall report his conclusions in proper chronological sequence, in Act 5). Chris Hughes of Cambridge tackled
Burgessia
and
Waptia
, third and fourth most common Burgess arthropods, and forming the group of apparent crustaceans with simple carapaces. The monograph on
Waptia
has yet to appear, but Hughes’s 1975 treatment of
Burgessia
provided an important affirmation of the growing pattern already indicated by
Marrella
and
Yohoia. Burgessia
, with its oval carapace, and long tail spike (almost twice the length of the body), was not a notostracan branchiopod, as Walcott had believed, but yet another arthropod orphan of unique design (figure 3.27). Hughes declined to make a formal taxonomic place for
Burgessia
, because he regarded this genus as a peculiar grabbag, combining features generally regarded as belonging to a number of separate arthropod groups. He concluded:

3.27. Reconstruction of
Burgessia
by Hughes (1975).

The arthropod story was becoming more and more curious.

Universities operate one of the few survivors of the old apprenticeship system in their programs for awarding doctoral degrees. Consider the anomaly. You spend your entire educational career, from kindergarten to college, becoming more and more independent of the power of individual teachers; (cross your first-grade teacher and your life can be hell for a year; displease a college professor, and the worst you can do is fail a single course). Then you become an adult, and you decide to continue for a Ph.D. So what do you do? You find a person whose research intrigues you, and sign on (if he will accept and support you) as a part of a team.

In some fields, particularly those with large and expensive laboratories dedicated to the solution of definite problems, you must abandon all thought of independence, and work upon an assigned topic for a dissertation (choice in research is a luxury of later postdoctoral appointments). In more genial and individualistic fields like paleontology, you are usually given fair latitude in choosing a topic, and may emerge with a project uniquely your own. But in any case you are an apprentice, and you are under your mentor’s thumb—more securely than at any time since the early years of primary school. If you and he have a falling out, you quit, or pack up and go elsewhere. If you work well together, and your mentor’s ties to the profession are secure, you will get your degree and, by virtue of his influence and your proven accomplishments, your first decent job.

It’s a strange system with much to criticize, but it works in its own odd way. At some point, you just can’t proceed any further with courses and books; you have to hang around someone who is doing research well. (And you need to be on hand, and ready to assimilate, all the time, every day; you can’t just show up on Thursday afternoon at two for a lesson in separating parts from counterparts.) The system does produce its horrors—exploitive professors who divert the flow of youthful brilliance and enthusiasm into their own dry wells, and provide nothing in return. But when it works (as it does rather more often than a cynic might expect, given the lack of checks and balances), I cannot imagine a better training.

Many students don’t understand the system. They apply to a school because it has a general reputation or resides in a city they like. Wrong, dead wrong. You apply to work with a particular person. As in the old apprenticeship system of the guilds, mentor and student are bound by mutual obligations; this is no one-way street. Mentors must, above all, find and provide financial support for students. (Intellectual guidance is, of course, more fundamental, but this part of the game is a pleasure. The real crunch is the search for funding. Many leading professors spend at least half their time raising grant support for students.) What do mentors get in return? This reciprocation is more subtle, and often not understood outside our guild. The answer, strange as this may sound, is fealty in the genealogical sense.

The work of graduate students is part of a mentor’s reputation forever, because we trace intellectual lineages in this manner. I was Norman Newell’s student, and everything that I ever do, as long as I live, will be read as his legacy (and, if I screw up, will redound to his detriment—though not so seriously, for we recognize a necessary asymmetry: errors are personal, successes part of the lineage). I happily accept this tradition and swear allegiance to it—and not for motives of abstract approbation but because, again as with the old apprenticeship system, I get my turn to profit in the next generation. As my greatest joy in twenty years at Harvard, I have been blessed with several truly brilliant students. The greatest benefit is an exciting lab atmosphere for the moment—but I am not insensible to the custom that their future successes shall be read, in however small a part, as mine also.

(By the way, this system is largely responsible for the sorry state of undergraduate teaching at many major research universities. A student belongs to the lineage of his graduate adviser, not to the teachers of his undergraduate courses. For researchers ever conscious of their reputations, there is no edge whatever in teaching undergraduate courses. You can do it only for love or responsibility. Your graduate students are your extensions; your undergraduate students are ciphers in your fame. I wish that this could change, but I don’t even know what to suggest.)

This system is even more exaggerated in England. In the United States you apply through a department to work with an adviser. In England, you apply directly to a potential mentor, and he secures the funds, almost always earmarked for particular projects. Harry Whittington knew that the ultimate success of the Burgess project—its expansion from the detailed description of a few odd animals to an understanding of an entire fauna—depended upon graduate students. Of the two ingredients, he could influence one—the garnering of funds; for the other he could only pray to the goddess of good fortune—the interest of brilliant students.

Harry did his job on the first score. He had two projects outstanding (in both senses of that word)—bivalved arthropods and “worms.” He secured funding for two students—for one, from government grants, and for the other, from private monies administered by his college, Sidney Sussex. Lady Luck came through on the second score (with a boost from Harry’s own successes, for good students keep their eyes open and gravitate toward mentors doing the most exciting work). In 1972, at exactly the right stage in the flow of Burgess developments, events disproved my cherished theory of academic spacing—that brilliant students come but once in five years (since five years is the usual length of graduate study, you never have more than one at a time for very long). At the same time, Harry Whittington—lucky, lucky man—received applications from two brilliant students: Derek Briggs, an Irishman who had done undergraduate work at Trinity College, Dublin; and Simon Conway Morris, a Londoner who had just completed his first degree at Bristol University (where Harry had sat, as external examiner, on the committee to judge his undergraduate thesis). From then on, however restricted the daily contact, and despite an individuality in working styles that precluded any cohesive research group, the Burgess work became a joint effort of three increasingly equal partners—Briggs, Conway Morris, and Whittington (in nonjudgmental alphabetical order), three men with a common purpose and a common set of methods, but as different as could be in age and in general approaches to science and life.

Harry Whittington knows the rules and the score. In our conversations, he has emphasized above all else, and with no false modesty, that the Burgess revision became a complete and coherent project—not just a sequence of monographs—when he secured the dedication of Briggs and Conway Morris. For he could then forge a goal that he might live to complete, and not, like the architect of a medieval cathedral, just draft a blueprint and lay a foundation, but never hope to see the entire building.

Odd couples are a staple of drama and comedy. Conservative intellectuals of quality will often embrace radical students with outlandish life styles because they sense the light of brilliance and nothing else then counts. Bernie Kummel, who threatened to take a rubber hose to radical students in the 1970s, and who despised (and feared) any eccentricity of manner or dress, loved Bob Bakker (then our student, now the spearhead of new ideas about dinosaurs) like a son, despite his shoulder-length hair and radical notions about absolutely everything. (Bernie’s judgment was not always so good. At one time, he and Harry Whittington formed the invertebrate-paleontology group at Harvard. Bernie regarded Harry as too traditional, and was pleased when he chose to leave for Cambridge. Bernie then hired me as a very junior replacement. Not much of a trade.)

Simon Conway Morris, who described himself to me as “bloody-minded as a teen-ager, and usually antisocial,” struck Whittington as the best candidate for the craziest of all Burgess challenges—Walcott’s “worms.” Simon’s teachers at Bristol had described him to Harry as a man who “sits in the corner of the library reading, and wears a cloak.” Harry remembers his first reaction to this news: “The anarchist, I thought … Oh Lord.” But Harry had also sensed the spark of brilliance, and as I said, nothing else really counts.

Worms presented both the biggest headache and the greatest promise for a project now explicitly searching for oddballs since the resolution of
Opabinia
. For if oddballs existed in abundance, previous investigators would have shoveled most misfits into the old category Vermes, or “worms.” Worms are the classic garbage-pail group of taxonomy—the slop bucket for the dribs and drabs (Simon calls them “odds and sods”) that don’t fit anywhere, but need to be shunted someplace when you are trying to landscape the estate into rigorous order. Worms have played this role ever since Linnaeus himself, who shoved a remarkably heterogeneous group of creatures into his Vermes. Most animals are basically elongate and bilaterally symmetrical. So if a creature displays this form, and you don’t know what it is, call it a worm.

Harry, a remarkably kind man, trembled at the idea that he might be ending a promising career at the beginning by giving such an intractable project to a greenhorn. To this day, he seems almost wracked with anxiety when he remembers what he did—even though the results have been spectacular: He reminisced to me: “With fear and trepidation, I suggested this to Simon.… I felt awful; of all ghastly things to start a research student on! Gosh, how could I dare to do that to anybody? Yet I had a wild hunch he could do it.”

Simon was delighted; he has been running ever since. The solid centerpieces of this project are his two fine monographs on Burgess worms that truly belong to modern phyla—the priapulids (1977d) and the polychaetes (1979). I shall discuss these works in their proper sequence. But Simon did not begin with this conventional material; would you really expect such a traditional start from a man who wears a cloak and won’t come to morning coffee?

In the spring of 1973, Whittington sent both Briggs and Conway Morris to Washington to draw Walcott’s “type” specimens (the ones used in the original descriptions of the species, and the official bearers of Walcott’s names), and to select specimens for loan to Cambridge. An old saying, attributed to Pasteur, proclaims that fortune favors the prepared mind. Simon, a man of ideas, had chosen to work with Harry, and reveled at receiving the worms as a project, because he sensed that the prospect for a larger message from the Burgess centered upon the documentation of oddballs—both their anatomy and their relative frequency.
Opabinia
had forced its attention upon Harry. Simon, in stark contrast, went hunting for Burgess oddballs. “I have a natural temptation to emphasize the unusual,” Simon told me. “A new brachiopod from Northern Ireland is no competition for a new phylum.”

Imagine the situation, and the opportunity. Simon faced some eighty thousand specimens in Walcott’s collection. Most had never been described, or even gazed upon. No one had ever examined this treasure with the idea that taxonomic oddballs might abound. So Simon did something both simple and obvious in concept, yet profoundly different from any previous approach to the Burgess—and therefore courageous. He went on a protracted fishing expedition in the Smithsonian drawers of Burgess material. He opened every cabinet and looked at every slab, consciously searching for the rarest and most peculiar things he could find. The rewards were great, the success almost dizzying. At first, you jump up and down; after a while, the richness benumbs you. By the time he found
Odontogriphus
(see page 147), he could only say to himself, “Oh fuck, another new phylum.”