Papa Joe’s story illuminates a beacon that will outshine, in the brightness of hope and goodness, the mad act of spectacular destruction that poisoned his centennial. But his story will prevail by its utter conventionality, not by any claim for unusual courage, pain, or suffering. His story is the tale of nearly every American family, beginning with nothing as strangers in a strange land, and eventually prospering, often with delayed gratitude several generations later, by accumulated hard work, achieved in decency and fairness.
Especially in a technological age, when airplanes can become powerful bombs, rare acts of depravity seem to overwhelm our landscape, both geographical and psychological. But the ordinary human decency of a billion tiny acts of kindness, done by millions of good people, sets a far more powerful counterweight, too often invisible for lack of comparable “news value.” The trickle of one family that began on September 11, 1901, multiplied by so many million similar and “ordinary” stories, will overwhelm the evil of a few on September 11, 2001.
I have stood at Ground Zero and contemplated the sublimity of the twisted wreckage of the largest human structure ever brought down in a catastrophic moment. And I recall the words that we all resented when we had to memorize Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in fifth grade, but that seem so eloquent in their renewed relevance today. Our nation has not witnessed such a day of death since Gettysburg, and a few other battles of the Civil War, nearly 150 years ago: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”
The third chapter of Ecclesiastes begins, as quoted to open this piece, with contrasts of birth followed by death. But the next pair of statements then reverses the order to sound a theme of tough optimism. Verse three follows destruction with reconstruction: “A time to kill and a time to heal: a time to break down and a time to build up.” And verse four then extends the sequence from grim determination to eventual joy: “A time to weep, and a time to laugh: a time to mourn and a time to dance.”
My native city of New York, and the whole world, suffered grievously on September 11, 2001. But Papa Joe’s message of September 11, 1901, properly generalized across billions of people, will triumph through the agency of ordinary human decency. We have landed. Lady Liberty still lifts her lamp beside the golden door. And that door leads to the greatest, and largely successful, experiment in democracy ever attempted in human history, upheld by basic goodness across the broadest diversity of ethnicities, economies, geographies, languages, customs, and employments that the world has ever known as a single nation. We fought our bloodiest war to keep our motto, e pluribus unum (one from many), as a vibrant reality. We will win now because ordinary humanity holds a triumphant edge in millions of good people over each evil psychopath. But we will only prevail if we can mobilize this latent goodness into permanent vigilance and action. Verse seven epitomizes our necessary course of action at my Papa Joe’s centennial: “A time to rend, and a time to sew: a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.”
Illustration Credits
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reproduce the images herein:
page 58
Courtesy of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library.
page 65
Republished with permission of Globe Newspaper Company, Inc.
page 92
Courtesy of the Granger Collection, New York.
page 94
Courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
page 101
Courtesy of the Granger Collection, New York.
page 114
Courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London.
page 117
Courtesy of AKG, London.
page 122
Dave Bergman Collection
page 198
Courtesy of the Granger Collection, New York.
page 244
Courtesy of Ron Miller.
page 262
Private Collection
page 264
Courtesy of Scala/Art Resource, New York.
page 266
Courtesy of Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
page 273
Courtesy of Cameraphoto/Art Resource, New York.
page 274
Courtesy of Cameraphoto/Art Resource, New York.
page 275
Courtesy of Cameraphoto/Art Resource, New York.
page 288
Courtesy of Tracie Tso.
page 294
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
page 316
Courtesy of the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
page 317 (top and bottom)
Courtesy of the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
page 322
From “Fighting Dinosaurs,” American Museum of Natural History. Photograph by Denis Finnin.
page 328
After Terry D. Jones, Nature, August 17, 2000.
page 330
From “Fighting Dinosaurs,” American Museum of Natural History. Photograph by Denis Finnin.
page 374
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
page 380
Courtesy of Joe LeMonnier.
page 381
Courtesy of Joe LeMonnier.
All other images appearing throughout are from the author’s collection.
1 Although Jesse, my autistic son and fabulous day-date calculator, has since pointed out to me the fascinating patterns of palindromic years. They “bunch” only at the ends of millennia—so we have enjoyed two in 1991 and 2002. Our ancestors did even better in 999 and 1001. But our descendants must now wait more than a century for 2112, as calendars revert to the usual pattern of more than a century between palindromic years. So these backward-forward years are indeed rarer and more special than I realized.
2 This essay, number 300 of a monthly entry written without a break from January 1974 to January 2001 and appearing in Natural History magazine, terminates a series titled “This View of Life.” The title comes from Darwin’s poetic statement about evolution in the last paragraph of the Origin of Species: “There is grandeur in this view of life . . .”
3 This essay, the three-hundredth and last of my series, appeared in January 2001—the inception of the millennium by a less popular, but more mathematically sanctioned, mode of reckoning. My grandfather also began the odyssey of my family in America when he arrived from Europe in 1901.
4 Incidentally, Nabokov represented an intractable mystery to me until I learned that he grew up trilingual in Russian, English, and French—a common situation among the Russian upper classes in his day. Even as a teenager reading Lolita, I couldn’t understand how anyone who learned English as a second tongue could become such a master of linguistic detail. Indeed, one cannot. Conrad narrated wonderful stories, but could never play with his adopted language as Nabokov did with one of his native tongues.
5This article was inspired by Leigh’s film at its opening in December 1999. But the film is rarely mentioned, and this article is in no way a review (the most ephemeral and unrepublishable of all literary genres). Rather, I shamelessly used Leigh’s wonderful film to write the essay I always meant to compose on my heretofore private passion. This piece originally appeared in The American Scholar.
6I greatly amused my Hungarian grandmother (see essay 1) on my first visit at about age five—when I asked her if she had worn such armor as a girl in that far-off land. My mother, after all, had told me that my grandmother was “middle aged.”
7I originally wrote this article for the catalog of a retrospective exhibit of Church’s paintings, displayed in Washington, D.C., at the National Gallery of Art in 1989.
8And again, the universal company and republic of intellectuals did not fail me. Although Isabelle Duncan has not been mentioned in print (except as the otherwise anonymous author of Pre-Adamite Man) since 1915, and never in more than a curs
ory line or two, several scholars knew her identity from two sources: from letters of Jane Carlyle, wife of Thomas Carlyle, who both admired the book and knew the Duncan family, and through her more famous father-in-law, Henry Duncan (1774-1846), a Scottish minister and social reformer, now best remembered as “the father of savings banks” (at least according to the Savings Banks Museum in Ruthwell, Scotland.) But I then hit pay dirt when Stephen D. Snobelen, a young historian of science at Cambridge University, sent me his excellent dissertation on Isabelle Duncan, her evangelical religious views, her commitment to the concordist tradition with scientific findings and her remarkable book, which went through six editions between 1860 and 1866 (probably with a total press run of some six thousand copies—a very respectable sale for the times). Snobelen’s superb detective work in this former terra incognita (including a location of her portrait and the correct spelling of her name—all previous sources had called her Isabella rather than her preferred Isabelle) has since been published as a first scholarly account of this remarkable woman’s life and identity: “Of stones, men and angels: the competing myth of Isabelle Duncan’s Pre-Adamite Man (I860),” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biology and the Biomedical Sciences 32 (2001): 59-104.
9Since writing this essay, I have asked some professional historians and have learned that, indeed, the tale of the “weapon salve” became a major issue, much discussed at the time itself, and by later historians ever since, in defining the norms and limits of scientific explanation.
10 This “viewpoint” appeared in Time magazine on August 23, 1999. As noted elsewhere (see page 242 n.), supporters of good scientific education defeated the creationists in the next school board election in 2000. This newly elected board immediately restored evolution to the biology curriculum.
11 I wrote this short piece as an editorial to introduce a special issue of Science magazine on evolution. This editorial, like the preceding piece for Time magazine, represents my immediate reaction to the Kansas School Board’s rejection of evolution in the state curriculum. I include both pieces, and present them sequentially, because I thought that readers might be interested in my sense of how the same subject can be presented to general and popular audiences (Time) and to professional colleagues (Science — America’s leading technical journal, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the profession’s primary “umbrella” organization).
12 This “viewpoint” appeared in Time magazine, 13 September 1999.
13 As a happy footnote, I can now report (while editing this essay for republication in book form at the outset of the next millennium) that some good old-fashioned political activism turned the fundamentalist rascals out in the subsequent school board election of 2000—and that evolution has now been restored to the Kansas curriculum.
14 I would like to dedicate this essay to Ernst Mayr, the greatest taxonomist of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century, who remains as intellectually active as ever at age ninety-six, and who taught me, through his writing and the human contact of personal friendship, the central principle of our science (and of this essay): that taxonomies are active theories about the causes of natural order, not objective, unchanging, and preexisting stamp albums for housing nature’s obvious facts.
15 An article by Q. Ti and several colleagues, published soon after this essay appeared (Nature, 26 April 2001), elegantly proves the existence of feathered dinosaurs that could not have used these structures for flight.
16This piece appeared in Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, on September 20, 2001. The last paragraph paraphrases several lines from the Canadian national anthem. Mr. Sukanen truly existed (as does the town of Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan). Evangeline belongs to Mr. Longfellow’s artistry, but their link, as Canadians at home vs. those now resident in the United States, reinforces the theme of this small tribute.
17This New York Times op-ed piece ran on September 26, 2001. They used a different title; I now restore my original and intended version.
18From Natural History magazine. I wrote this piece after the other three of this section. The chronology is important for my general intention and feelings, but, for obvious reasons in the context of this book, the subsequent piece must come last.
19This op-ed appeared in the Boston Globe on September 30, 2001.
Index
Aaron, Hank, (i)
Abel, murder of, (i), (ii)
abnormalities, “fixing” of, (i)
Abraham, Nicolas, (i)
accuracy, value of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Acton, Lord John, (i)
Ada (Nabokov), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Adam
children of, (i), (ii)
creation of, (i), (ii)
as generic term, (i)
Hebrew meaning of name, (i)
human existence before, (i)
names assigned by, (i), (ii)
as progenitor of all humans, (i)
as progenitor of Jewish history, (i)
sins of, (i)
Adams, John, (i)
adaptation, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
as mimicry, (i), (ii)
of native plants, (i)
Adler, Alfred, (i), (ii)
Aeschylus, (i)
aesthetics, theory of, (i), (ii), (iii)
aetites (pregnant stones), (i), (ii)
Africa, human evolution in, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
African Americans
census of, (i)
racism against, (i)
Tuskegee study of, (i)
Africans
racism and, (i), (ii)
study of brains of, (i)
taxonomy of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Agassiz, Louis, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and Haeckel, (i), (ii), (iii)
at Harvard, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and von Baer, (i), (ii)
Agincourt, Battle of (1415), (i)
Agricola, Georgius, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
airports, scheduling boards of, (i), (ii)
Alamo, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus), (i), (ii)
alchemy, (i)
Alexander VII, Pope, (i)
alphabetical order, (i), (ii)
Alvarez, Luis, (i)
amateurs, use of term, (i), (ii)
Americans, taxonomy of, (i), (ii), (iii)
ammonite shells, drawings of, (i)
analysis, meaning of term, (i)
Andes Mountains, (i), (ii)
anesthesia, electricity and magnetism in, (i)
angels, (i), (ii)
animation, technical skill in, (i)
Anselment, R. A., (i)
Anthropogenice (Haeckel), (i), (ii)
anthropology, (i)
anti-intellectualism, (i)
anti-Semitism, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
apes, (i), (ii)
apple brown betty, (i)
Aquinas, St. Thomas, (i)
Archaeopteryx, (i), (ii)
Ariadne’s thread, (i), (ii)
Aristotle, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
art
anti-intellectual current in, (i)
composition on two planes of, (i)
ennobling capacity of, (i)
landscape painting, (i)
as limitation, (i)
and nature, (i), (ii)
and science, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
teaching authority of, (i)
Arthurian mythology, (i)
artistic license, (i), (ii), (iii)
art nouveau, (i)
Asians, taxonomy of, (i), (ii), (iii)
astronomy, evolution in, (i), (ii), (iii)
atheism, (i)
Atlanta, Georgia, (i)
Atlantis, (i), (ii)
Augustine, Saint, (i), (ii)
“Aurelian, The” (Nabokov), (i)
Australian marsupials, (i)
Aveling, Edward, (i)
Averroës, (i), (ii)
Avicenna, (i), (ii)
Bach, Johann Sebastian, (i), (ii), (iii)
Bacon, Francis, (i), (ii)
bacteria, (i), (ii), (iii)
Baer, Karl Ernst von, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Barker, F., (i)
Barzun, Jacques, (i)
baseball, as metaphor, (i)
Battle of the Alamo, The (Proctor), (i)
Bauer, Georg, (i)
Bauhin, Caspar, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Bauhin, Jean, (i), (ii)
Bauhinia bijuga, (i)
B. burgdorferi, (i)
Beagle, Darwin’s voyage on, (i), (ii), (iii)
Becher, J. J., (i), (ii)
beetles, (i)
Behe, Michael, (i)
belemnites, drawings of, (i)
Berlin, Isaiah, (i)
bezoar stone, (i), (ii)
Bible
E (Elohim) vs. J (Yahweh) documents of, (i)
as fallible document, (i), (ii)
King James version of, (i)
literal interpretation of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
and millennium, (i)
parody of, (i)
and pre-Adamite man, (i)
on resurrection, (i)
sources of, (i)
and women, (i)
bibliographies, authors’ names in, (i), (ii), (iii)
big bang theory, (i)
binomial nomenclature, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
biography, mini intellectual, (i), (ii)
biology
embryology in, (i)
evolutionary, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
political uses of, (i)
reductionism in, (i)
biotechnology, (i)
birds, and dinosaurs, (i), (ii)