The Flamingo’s Smile
Kinsey felt that he could achieve these larger goals by performing a specific study with such unprecedented factual detail that larger principles would emerge from the volume of information itself. Kinsey was a workaholic before the word was invented. On a traveling fellowship in 1919–1920, he logged 18,000 miles (2,500 on foot) in southern and western regions of the United States and collected some 300,000 specimens of gall wasps. His two trips to rural Mexico and Central America in the 1930s were monuments to his insatiable industry. Still, he was never satisfied. In his 1936 monograph, he lamented that for each of his 165 species, he had collected, on average, “only” 214 insects and 755 galls. For 51 of these species (variable groups in regions of uniform topography), he stated that he would not be satisfied until he had gathered a grand total of 1,530,000 insects and 3 to 4 million galls!
More than mere collection mania underlay Kinsey’s expressed desires and actual efforts. A modern statistician might well argue that Kinsey had an inadequate appreciation of sampling theory; you really don’t need to get every one. Still, Kinsey pursued his copious collecting because he operated and centered his biological beliefs upon one cardinal principle: the primacy and irreducibility of variation.
Ironically, much of taxonomic practice had not fully assimilated this fundamental change brought to biology by evolutionary theory. Many taxonomists still viewed the world as a series of pigeonholes, each housing a species. Species, in this view, should be defined by their “essences”—fundamental features separating them from all others. Variation was regarded as a nuisance at best—a kind of accidental splaying out around the essential form, and serving only to create confusion in the correct assignment of pigeonholes. Most classical taxonomists treated variation as a necessary evil and often established species after studying only a few specimens.
Taxonomists like Kinsey, who understood the full implications of evolutionary theory, developed a radically different attitude to variation. Islands of form exist, to be sure: cats do not flow together in a sea of continuity, but rather come to us as lions, tigers, lynxes, tabbies, and so forth. Still, although species may be discrete, they have no immutable essence. Variation is the raw material of evolutionary change. It represents the fundamental reality of nature, not an accident about a created norm. Variation is primary; essences are illusory. Species must be defined as ranges of irreducible variation.
This antiessentialist way of thinking has profound consequences for our basic view of reality. Ever since Plato cast shadows on the cave wall, essentialism has dominated Western thought, encouraging us to neglect continua and to divide reality into a set of correct and unchanging categories. Essentialism establishes criteria for judgment and worth: individual objects that lie close to their essence are good; those that depart are bad, if not unreal.
Antiessentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status. The taxonomic essentialist scoops up a handful of fossil snails in a single species, tries to abstract an essence, and rates his snails by their match to this average. The antiessentialist sees something entirely different in his hand—a range of irreducible variation defining the species, some variants more frequent than others, but all perfectly good snails. Ernst Mayr, our leading taxonomic theorist, has written elegantly and at length on the difference between essentialism and variation as an ultimate reality (“population thinking” in his terminology—see his recent book, The Growth of Biological Thought).
Kinsey, who understood the implications of evolutionary theory so well, was a radical antiessentialist in taxonomy. His belief in the primacy of variation spurred an almost frantic effort to collect ever more specimens. His belief in continua forced him to explore virtually every square foot of suitable territory for Cynips in North America—for whenever he found large gaps, he strongly suspected (usually correctly) that intermediate forms would be found in some geographically contiguous area.
In the end, Kinsey’s antiessentialism became almost too radical. He was so convinced that species would grade into other species that he began to name truly intermediate geographical variants within a single species as separate entities, and established a bloated taxonomy of full names for transient and minor local variants. (Kinsey decided that species arose by the spread through local populations of discrete mutations with small effects. Thus, whenever he found a local population differing from others by mutations of the sort produced in laboratory stocks, he established a new species. But local populations within a species often establish small mutations without losing their central tie to the rest of the species—the ability to interbreed.)
More important for American social history, Kinsey transported bodily to his sex research the radical antiessentialism of his entomological studies. Kinsey’s twenty years with Cynips may not be judged as a wasteful diversion compared with the later source of his fame. Rather, Kinsey’s wasp work established both the methodology and principles of reasoning that made him a pioneer in sex research.
I am not merely making learned inferences about continuities that the master of antiessentialism didn’t recognize. Kinsey knew perfectly well what he was doing. He regretted not a moment spent on wasps, both because he loved them too, and because their study had set his intellectual sights. In the first chapter of his first treatise on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey included a remarkable section on “the taxonomic approach,” with two subheadings—“in biology,” followed by the explicit transfer, “in applied and social sciences.” Kinsey wrote:
The techniques of this research have been taxonomic, in the sense in which modern biologists employ the term. It was born out of the senior author’s long-time experience with a problem in insect taxonomy. The transfer from insect to human material is not illogical, for it has been a transfer of a method that may be applied to the study of any variable population.
Extensive sampling was the hallmark of Kinsey’s work. Most earlier studies of human sexual behavior had either confined their reporting to unusual cases (Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, for example) or had generalized from small and homogeneous samples. If Kinsey had hoped for millions of wasps and their galls, he would at least interview many thousands of humans. He knew that he needed such large numbers because his antiessentialist perspective proclaimed two truths about variation for wasps and people alike—apparently homogeneous populations in one place (all college students at Indiana or all murderers at Alcatraz) would exhibit an enormous range of irreducible variation, and discrete local populations in different places (older middle-class women in Illinois or poor young men in New York) would differ greatly in average sexual behaviors. (Biologists refer to these two types of variation as within-population and between-population.) Kinsey decided that he would have to sample many differing groups and large numbers within each group. He wrote in the first paragraph of his treatise on males:
It is a fact-finding survey in which an attempt is made to discover what people do sexually, and what factors account for differences in sexual behavior among individuals, and among various segments of the population.
In his section on “the taxonomic approach in biology” he explained why his experience with wasps had set his methods for humans:
Modern taxonomy is the product of an increasing awareness among biologists of the uniqueness of individuals, and of the wide range of variation which may occur in any population of individuals. The taxonomist is, therefore, primarily concerned with the measurement of variation in series of individuals which stand as representatives of the species in which he is interested.
Kinsey’s belief in the primacy of variation and diversity became a crusade. His 1939 Phi Beta Kappa lecture, “Individuals,” focused on the “unlimited nonidentity” among organisms in any population and castigated both biological and social scientists for drawing general c
onclusions from small and relatively homogeneous samples. For example:
A mouse in a maze, today, is taken as a sample of all individuals, of all species of mice under all sorts of conditions, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. A half dozen dogs, pedigrees unknown and breeds unnamed, are reported on as “dogs”—meaning all kinds of dogs—if, indeed, the conclusions are not explicitly or at least implicitly applied to you, to your cousins, and to all other kinds and descriptions of humans…. A noted American colloid chemist startles the country with the announcement of a new cure for drug addicts; and it is not until other laboratories report failure to obtain similar results that we learn that the original experiments were based on a half dozen individuals.
As a second important transfer from his entomologically based antiessentialism, Kinsey repeatedly emphasized the impossibility of pigeonholing human sexual response by allocating people into rigidly defined categories. As his wasps formed chains of continuity from one species to the next, human sexual response could be fluid, changing, and devoid of sharp boundaries. Of male homosexuality, he wrote:
Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separate pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.
The third transfer—the one that ultimately brought Kinsey so much trouble—raised the contentious issue of judgment. If variation is primary, copious, and irreducible, and if species have no essences, then what “natural” criterion can we discover for judgment? An odd variant is as much a member of its species as an average individual. Even if average individuals are more common than peculiar organisms, who can identify one or the other as “better”—for species have no “right” form defined by an immutable essence. Kinsey wrote in “Individuals,” again making explicit reference to wasps:
Prescriptions are merely public confessions of prescriptionists…. What is right for one individual may be wrong for the next; and what is sin and abomination to one may be a worthwhile part of the next individual’s life. The range of individual variation, in any particular case, is usually much greater than is generally understood. Some of the structural characters in my insects vary as much as twelve hundred percent. This means that populations from a single locality may contain individuals with wings 15 units in length, and other individuals with wings 175 units in length. In some of the morphologic and physiologic characters which are basic to the human behavior which I am studying, the variation is a good twelve thousand percent. And yet social forms and moral codes are prescribed as though all individuals were identical; and we pass judgments, make awards, and heap penalties without regard to the diverse difficulties involved when such different people face uniform demands.
Kinsey often claimed in his two great reports that he had merely recorded the facts of sexual behavior without either passing or even implying judgment. On the prefatory page to his report on males, he wrote:
For some time now there has been an increasing awareness among many people of the desirability of obtaining data about sex which would represent an accumulation of scientific fact completely divorced from questions of moral value and social custom.
His critics countered by arguing that an absence of judgment in the context of such extensive recording is, itself, a form of judgment. I think I would have to agree. I see no possibility for a completely “value-free” social science. Kinsey may have disclaimed in the reports themselves, but the statement just quoted from his 1939 essay makes no bones about his conviction that nonjudgmental attitudes are morally preferable—and his basic belief in the primacy of variation has evident implications itself. Can one despise what nature provides as fundamental? (One can, of course, but few people will favor an ethic that rejects life and the world as we inevitably find them.)
What, in any case, is the alternative? Should we not compile the factual data of human sexual behavior? Or should people who undertake such a study sprinkle each finding with an irrelevant assessment of its moral worth from their personal point of view? That would be hubris indeed. Ultimately, however, I must confess that my approval of Kinsey, and my strong attraction to him, arises from our shared values. I too am a taxonomist.
At the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath, as Tom Joad heads home after a prison term, he meets Casy, his old preacher. Casy explains that he no longer holds revivals because he could not reconcile his own sexual behavior (often inspired by the fervor of the revival meeting itself) with the content of his preaching:
I says, “Maybe it ain’t a sin. Maybe it’s just the way folks is.”…Well, I was layin’ under a tree when I figured that out, and I went to sleep. And it come night, an’ it was dark when I come to. They was a coyote squawkin’ near by. Before I knowed it, I was sayin’ out loud…“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do…. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.”
11 | Opus 100*
THROUGHOUT A LONG DECADE of essays I have never, and for definite reasons, written about the biological subject closest to me. Yet for this, my hundredth effort, I ask your indulgence and foist upon you the Bahamian land snail Cerion, mainstay of my own personal research and fieldwork. I love Cerion with all my heart and intellect but have consciously avoided it in this forum because the line between general interest and personal passion cannot be drawn from a perspective of total immersion—the image of doting parents driving friends and neighbors to somnolent distraction with family movies comes too easily to mind. These essays must follow two unbreakable rules: I never lie to you, and I strive mightily not to bore you. But, for this one time in a hundred, I will risk the second for personal pleasure alone.
Cerion is the most prominent land snail of West Indian islands. It ranges from the Florida Keys to the small islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, just off the Venezuelan coast, but the vast majority of species inhabit two principal centers—Cuba and the Bahamas. Cerion’s life includes little excitement by our standards. Most species inhabit rocks and sparse vegetation abutting the seashore. They may live for five to ten years, but they spend most of this time in the warm weather equivalent of hibernation (called estivation), hanging upside down from vegetation or affixed to rocks. After a rain or sometimes in the relative cool and damp of night, they descend from their twigs and stones, nibble at the fungi on decaying vegetation, and perhaps even copulate. We have marked and mapped the movement of individual snails and many can be found on the same few square yards of turf, year after year.
Why pick Cerion? Why, indeed, spend so much time on any detailed particular when all the giddy generalities of evolutionary theory beg for study in a lifetime too short to manage but a few? Iconoclast that I am, I would not abandon the central wisdom of natural history from its inception—that concepts without percepts are empty (as Kant said), and that no scientist can develop an adequate “feel” for nature (that undefinable prerequisite of true understanding) without probing deeply into minute empirical details of some well-chosen group of organisms. Thus, Aristotle dissected squids and proclaimed the world’s eternity, while Darwin wrote four volumes on barnacles and one on the origin of species. America’s greatest evolutionists and natural historians, G.G. Simpson, T. Dobzhansky, and E. Mayr, began their careers as, respectively, leading experts on Mesozoic mammals, ladybird beetles, and the birds of New Guinea.
Scientists don’t immerse themselves in particulars only for the grandiose (or self-serving) reason that such studies may lead to important generalities. We do it for fun. The pure joy of discovery transcends import. And we do it for adventure and for expansion. As drama, Bahamian
field trips may seem risible compared with Darwin on the Beagle, Bates on the Amazon, and Wallace in the Malay Archipelago—although I would not care to repeat my only close brush with death, caught in a shoot-out among drug runners on North Andros. So much more do I value the quiet times in different worlds: an evening’s discussion of bush medicine on Mayaguana, an exploration of ornamental carvings that adorn roofs on Long Island and South Andros, and the finest meal I have ever eaten—a campfire pot of fresh conch stewed with sweet potatoes from Jimmy Nixon’s garden on Inagua, after a hot and hard day’s work.
If all good naturalists must choose a group of organisms for detailed immersion, we do not select mindlessly or randomly (or even, as some cynics have suggested, because the Bahamas beat the Yukon as a field area). I am interested primarily in the evolution of form and have concentrated on how the varying shapes of an individual’s growth can serve as a source of evolutionary change (see my technical book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, in bibliography). An invertebrate paleontologist with these interests would naturally be led to snails, since their shells preserve a complete record of growth from egg to adult.
A student of form with a penchant for gastropods could not avoid Cerion, for this genus exhibits, among its several hundred species, a range of form unmatched by any other group of snails. Some Cerions are tall and pencil thin; others are shaped like golf balls. When a colleague ventured “square snails” as an example of impossible animals at a public meeting, I was able to show him the peculiar quadrate Cerion from the photo on p. 170, bottom row, second from left. Five years ago, I discovered the largest Cerion, a thin and parallel-sided fossil giant from Mayaguana more than 70 mm tall. The smallest is a virtual sphere, scarcely 5 mm in diameter, from Little Inagua (see photo).