Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (42 page)

Many colleagues offered the sound advice that if Walcott would simply cool off, the whole matter would soon blow over. Others joined him in McCarthyite frenzy. Writing from Columbia, Michael Pupin longed for the good old days, when men were men and could be mobilized to eliminate such scourges:

Walcott heartily agreed: “Thanks for your letter of January 12. It sums up the case of Boas in a very forcible, and to me satisfactory, manner.”

At the Anthropological Society of Washington, Walcott spearheaded a resolution castigating Boas, and it passed with only one dissenting vote on December 26, 1919. Four days later, the American Anthropological Association, meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, condemned Boas by a vote of 21 to 10, with dissenters labeled as “the Boas group.” The resolution included the following interesting prescription as a supposed antidote to Boas’s attacks on true democracy:

It was a jingoistic age, but then, all times have their extremists, and their keepers of the light.

Walcott considered himself a follower of Darwin. By most modern readings, such a stated allegiance should imply a strong feeling for quirkiness and opportunism in evolutionary pathways, and a deep conviction that the story of life is about adaptation to changing local environments, not general “progress.” But Darwin was a complex man; and the label of his name has been applied to several views of life, some mutually contradictory, and with the preferred focus changing from Darwin’s century to our own.

Life was not meant to be free from contradiction or ambiguity. Scholars often err in assuming that their exegesis of a great thinker must yield an utterly consistent text. Great scientists may struggle all their lives over certain issues and never reach a resolution. They may feel the tug of conflicting interpretations and succumb to the attractions of both. Their struggle need not end in consistency.

Darwin waged such a long-standing internal battle over the idea of progress. He found himself in an unresolvable bind. He recognized that his basic theory of evolutionary mechanism—natural selection—makes no statement about progress. Natural selection only explains how organisms alter through time in adaptive response to changes in local environments—“descent with modification,” in Darwin’s words. Darwin identified this denial of general progress in favor of local adjustment as the most radical feature of his theory. To the American paleontologist (and former inhabitant of my office) Alpheus Hyatt, Darwin wrote on December 4, 1872: “After long reflection, I cannot avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive development exists.”

But Darwin was both a critic and a beneficiary of Victorian Britain at the height of imperial expansion and industrial triumph. Progress was the watchword of his surrounding culture, and Darwin could not abjure such a central and attractive notion. Hence, in the midst of tweaking conventional comfort with his radical view of change as local adjustment, Darwin also expressed his acceptance of progress as a theme in life’s overall history. He wrote: “The inhabitants of each successive period in the world’s history have beaten their predecessors in the race for life, and are, insofar, higher in the scale of nature; and this may account for that vague, yet ill-defined sentiment, felt by many paleontologists, that organization on the whole has progressed” (1859, p. 345).

A kind of unsettled consistency can be forged between these apparently contradictory positions. One can argue that Darwin regarded progress as a cumulative side consequence of a basic causal process operating in other terms at any moment. (Anatomical improvement may be viewed as one pathway toward local adjustment; the local adjustments based on advances in general design may result in increased potential for geological longevity, and progress may emerge by this indirect route.) Critics, myself included, have often suggested such a troubled marriage of Darwin’s own conflicting views. Yet I think that the more honorable approach lies simply in acknowledging the genuine contradiction. The idea of progress was too big, too confusing, too central, for such a tidy solution. The logic of theory pulled in one direction, social preconceptions in the other. Darwin felt allegiance to both, and never resolved this dilemma into personal consistency.

Darwin has been a chief scientific saint and guru for more than a century now, and since both views are genuinely part of his thinking, succeeding generations have tended to embrace the side of his thought most in tune with the verities or reforms they wish to support. In our age, so little distant from the “progress” of Hiroshima, and so swamped by the perils of industry and weaponry, we tend to take solace in Darwin’s clear view of change as local adaptation and progress as social fiction. But in Walcott’s generation, particularly for a man of conspicuous success and strong traditionalist inclinations, Darwin’s allegiance to progress as life’s pathway became the centerpiece of an evolutionist’s credo. Walcott considered himself a Darwinian, expressing by this stated allegiance his strong conviction that natural selection assured the survival of superior organisms and the progressive improvement of life on a predictable pathway to consciousness.

Walcott wrote very little about his general, or “philosophical,” approach to the history of life; his published works do not provide the explicit clues that we need to resolve the riddle of his allegiance to the Burgess shoehorn. Fortunately, the archives again provide essential documentation; Walcott preferred to work privately and behind the scenes, but he wrote everything down, in a world innocent of paper shredders and self-dialed transatlantic phone calls.

Amidst his continual emphasis on progress and plan in life’s history, I found two especially revealing documents. The first is a heavily annotated typescript for a popular lecture, entitled “Searching for the First Forms of Life,” and evidently presented between 1892 and 1894.
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Walcott told his audience that Darwin had provided the key to unraveling life’s history as “a certain order of progression”:

Walcott then specified the order revealed by paleontology, in a remarkable passage that embodies the key preconceptions of the shoehorn:

The entire progressionist credo is rolled up into these few words, but three aspects of the passage stand out for me. First, until the invocation of technology for communication and transportation in the last line, the motive force of progress is entirely martial; animals prevail by dint of force and muscle, humans by the ever more potent instruments of war. Second, Walcott recognized no break between biological and social in his smooth continuum of progressive advance. We mount in an unbroken climb through the ranks of organisms, and continue directly upward with the linear improvement of human technology. Third, Walcott was so committed to progress based on conquest and displacement that he didn’t catch the inaccuracy in his own formulation. His chain is not, as implied, a sequence of progressive replacements rooted in superior anatomy (expressed as weaponry) on an eternal battleground. Reptiles did not replace fishes; rather, they represent an oddly modified group of fishes in a novel terrestrial environment. Fishes have never been replaced as dominant vertebrates of the oceans. But Walcott is so committed to an equation between the linear scale of progress by battle and the conventional order of vertebrate taxonomy that he overlooks this basic flaw.

How could such a view of life as a single progressive chain, based on replacement by conquest and extending smoothly from the succession of organic designs through the sequence of human technologies, possibly accommodate anything like our modern interpretation of the Burgess fauna? For Walcott, the Burgess, as old, had to include a limited range of simple precursors for later improved descendants. The modern themes of maximal disparity and decimation by lottery are more than just unacceptable under such a view of life; they are literally incomprehensible. They could never even arise for consideration. For Walcott, the Burgess organisms had to be simple, limited in scope, and ancestral—in other words, products of the conceptual shoehorn. And lest you doubt that Walcott made this logical inference from his own preconceptions, another passage in the same address explicitly restricts all past diversity within the boundaries of a few major lineages, destined for progress: “Nearly all animals, whether living or extinct, are classed under a few primary divisions or morphologic types.”
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If this document were not enough, the second adds a moral and religious dimension to Walcott’s need for progress and the Burgess shoehorn. Walcott’s simple description of evolutionary pathways was sufficient, by itself, to guarantee the shoehorn and preclude any thought of decimation by lottery. But if you believe that nature also embodies moral principles, and that stately progress and predictability form a basis for ethics, then the internal necessity for the shoehorn increases immeasurably. Description is powerful enough by itself; prescription can overwhelm. On January 7, 1926, Walcott wrote to R. B. Fosdick about the moral value of orderly progress in evolution:

The second document on morality and the shoehorn represents Walcott’s deeply felt response to a key episode in twentieth-century American social history—the fundamentalist anti-evolution crusade that culminated in the Scopes trial of 1925. Led by the aged but still potent William Jennings Bryan—America’s greatest orator and a three-time loser for the presidency (see Gould, 1987c)—biblical literalists had persuaded several state legislatures to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools.

The canonical attitude of scientists then and now—and the argument that finally secured our legal victory before the Supreme Court in 1987—holds that science and religion operate in equally legitimate but separate areas. This “separationist” claim allots the mechanisms and phenomena of nature to scientists and the basis for ethical decisions to theologians and humanists in general—the age of rocks versus the rock of ages, or “how heaven goes” versus “how to go to heaven” in the old one-liners. In exchange for freedom to follow nature down all her pathways, scientists relinquish the temptation to base moral inferences and pronouncements upon the physical state of the world—an excellent and proper arrangement, since the facts of nature embody no moral claims in any case.

To Walcott, this separationist view was anathema. He longed to find moral answers directly in nature—his kind of answers, to support his conservative view of life and society. He wished to bring science and religion together, not carve out separate domains in mutual respect. In fact, he charged that the separationist argument had fanned Bryan’s anti-intellectual flame by driving people to the suspicion that scientists really wanted to dispense with religion entirely (but settled, as a temporary and practical matter, for the banning of religion from the affairs of nature). Walcott therefore decided to combat Bryan and his ilk by publishing a statement, signed by a group of respected traditionalists like himself, on the connections between science and religion—particularly on the manifestation of God’s handiwork in the pathways of evolutionary change. Canvassing for signatures, he circulated a letter among his friends:

The statement, published in 1923, two years before the Scopes trial, bore Walcott’s name as first signer, and included Herbert Hoover and such scientific leaders as Henry Fairfield Osborn, Edwin Grant Conklin, R. A. Millikan, and Michael Pupin. “In recent controversies,” the statement held, “there has been a tendency to present science and religion as irreconcilable and antagonistic domains of thought.… They supplement rather than displace or oppose each other.”

Walcott’s statement went on to argue that the fundamentalist assault could only be quelled by showing the unity of science with religious truths that most Americans viewed as basic to their personal equanimity and social fabric. The primary evidence for this unity lay in the ordered, predictable, and progressive character of life’s history—for the pathways of evolution displayed God’s continuous benevolence and care for his creation. Evolution, with its principle of natural selection leading to progress, represented God’s way of showing himself through nature: