The Lying Stones of Marrakech

  6 A longstanding scholarly muddle surrounding the where and when of Owen’s christening has been admirably resolved in two recent articles by my colleague Hugh Torrens, a geologist and historian of science at the University of Keele in England—“Where did the dinosaur get its name?” New Scientist, volume 134, April 4, 1992, pages 40–44; and “Politics and paleontology: Richard Owen and the invention of dinosaurs,” in J. O. Farlow and M. K. Brett-Surman, editors, The Complete Dinosaur,Indiana University Press, 1997, pages 175–90.

  7 Since this essay focuses on the changing meaning of words, I just can’t resist citing the next line (Acts 9:5) after the ellipsis in my quotation—surely the unintentionally funniest biblical verse based on the passage of a word from high culture into slang between the seventeenth-century King James Bible and our current vernacular: “And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks” (then meaning “obstacles,” as symbolized by sharp thorns on bushes).

  8 See the excellent intellectual and “forensic” work of historian Adrian Desmond on this vexatious question. Incidentally, my own inspiration for this essay began with an invitation to speak at University College in a celebration to honor the reopening of Grant’s zoological museum. In reading about Grant, and developing considerable sympathy for his plight, I naturally extended my research to his enemy Owen, to dinosaurs, and ultimately to this essay.

  10

  Second-Guessing the Future

  FROM ANONYMOUS VICE-PRESIDENTS TO NAMELESS PALOOKAS, a special kind of opprobrium seems to haunt those who finish second—close but no cigar, in an old cliché. I once met “Two Ton Tony” Galento in a bar in upstate New York, a pitiful figure as an old man, stall cadging drinks in exchange for the true story of his moment of glory: when he knocked Joe Louis down before losing their fight for the heavyweight championship. And just consider the stereotype of the sidekick—old, fat, foolish, and in servitude—from Gabby Hayes and Andy Devine in the quintessential epic of our pop culture, to Leporello and Sancho Panza in the literary world. (Strong and noble sidekicks like Tonto get cast as “ethnics” to advertise their secondary rank by another route, now happily—or at least hopefully—fading from the collective consciousness of white America.)

  Second in time fares no better than second in status. I was, at first, surprised by a statement that made perfect sense once I punctured the apparent paradox. A composer friend told me that he could easily obtain funding for a premiere performance of any new work—as special grants and scholarships abound for such a noble purpose. A philanthropist who truly loved music, he told me, would endow the most unprofitable and unfashionable of all genres: second performances of new works.

  I recently had the privilege of speaking with Larry Doby, one of the toughest, most courageous, and most admirable men I have ever met. But how many readers recognize his name? We all know Jackie Robinson, who came first; Larry Doby was the second black player in Major League Baseball (and first in the American League). We all recognize the tune when Rodolfo grasps Mimi’s cold little hand in Puccini’s La Bohème, first performed in 1896. But how many people know that Leoncavallo (who had scored the hit of 1892 with I Pagliacci) also wrote an opera with the same title (and tale) in 1897?

  I can think of only one second finisher who became more famous (at least among Anglophones) than the victor—but only for special circumstances of unusual heroism in death, mingled with a dose of overextended British patriotism: Robert Scott, who reached the South Pole on January 18,1912, only to find that Roald Amundsen had beat him to the bottom by a full month. Confined to a tent by a blizzard, and just eleven miles from his depot, Scott froze to death, leaving a last journal entry that has never been matched in all the annals of British understatement, and that, I confess, still brings tears to my eyes: “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.”

  In my parish, the dubious (and admittedly somewhat contradictory) status of most famous second-place finisher goes without contest to Alfred Russel Wallace, who, in 1858 during a malarial fit on the Indonesian island of Ternate, devised virtually the same theory of natural selection that Darwin had developed (but never published) in 1838. In a familiar story, Wallace sent his short paper to Darwin, a naturalist he greatly admired and who, as Wallace knew, maintained a strong interest in “the species question” (though Wallace had no inkling of Darwin’s particular and nearly identical theory, and probably didn’t even realize that Darwin had a theory at all). Darwin, in understandable panic, turned to his best friends, Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, for advice. In a resolution known to later history as the “delicate arrangement,” Darwin’s friends made a joint presentation to the Linnaean Society of London in July 1858. At this meeting, they read both Wallace’s paper and some unpublished letters and manuscripts by Darwin, illustrating his earlier authorship of the same idea.

  Conspiracy theorists always stand at the ready, and several salvos have been launched for this particular episode, but to no avail or validity, in my judgment. Yes, Wallace was never asked (being quite incommunicado, half a world away, while time did press). Yes, Darwin was wealthy and well established; Wallace, poor, younger, and struggling for livelihood and reputation. (But why, then, grant him equal billing with Darwin for a joint presentation of unpublished results?) No, I think that, as usual (and unfortunately for the cause of a good tale), the more boring resolution of ordinary decency applies.

  “Delicate arrangement” describes the result quite accurately: a fair solution to a tough problem. Darwin held legitimate priority, and he had not been shilly-shallying, or resting on old claims and laurels. He had been diligently working on his evolutionary views and had already, when he received Wallace’s paper, finished nearly half of a much longer book on natural selection that he then abandoned (spurred no doubt by fears of further anticipations) to write the shorter “abstract” known to the world as The Origin species (a pretty hefty book of 490 pages), published in 1859.

  Wallace, at least, never complained, and seemed to feel honored that his exercise of an evening had been thus linked with Darwin’s long effort. (I do not, of course, base this claim on Wallace’s public pronouncements, where his secondary status to Darwin would have precluded any overt expression of bitterness. Rather, in his truly voluminous private jottings, letters, and conversations, Wallace never expressed anything but pleasure at Darwin’s willingness to share at least partial credit.)

  I do not, however, deny the usual assessment of Wallace as a man trammeled by meager circumstances and dogged by hard luck. He spent several youthful years of difficult and dangerous fieldwork in the Amazon, only to lose all his specimens in a shipwreck that nearly ended his own life as well. Wallace did not despair, but quickly set sail in the other direction, and spent several years engaged in similar work around the Malay Archipelago, where he took second place in the greatest biological discovery in history. He grew up in poverty (in a family of middle-class social status but much lower means), and while comfortable enough during most of his adult life, he never accumulated adequate resources to reach his true goal: doing science without impediment, and without needing to live by his own wits as a writer and lecturer. (A government pension, secured for Wallace by Darwin and his friends—perhaps partly to assuage a tinge of guilt—didn’t hurt, but didn’t guarantee solvency either.)

  Because Wallace lived a long time (1823–1913), wrote copiously both for his bread and from his convictions, and held a variety of passionate and quirky views, he left us a vast legacy of varied content and quality. He campaigned ardently for the right and the just according to his idiosyncratic standards, and he fought valiandy for a set of causes usually deemed “cranky,” both in his own time and today—including phrenology and spiritualism (where he nearly came to blows with skeptics like Darwin and Huxley)—and against vaccination, which he called “one of the foulest blots on the civilization of the 19th century.” His politics defy simple characterization,
but generally fall into a camp that might be labeled as democratic socialism of a Fabian bent, but spiced by utter devotion to a few favored causes that did not rank high on most people’s list of indispensable reforms.

  The illustrations for this chapter were published in France in the late nineteenth century and represent predictions for twentieth-century achievements.

  I have often called upon Wallace’s large body of work for essays in these books, both for his wisdom (in debunking Percival Lowell’s ideas on Martian canal builders), and for his crankiness (in claiming virtual proof for the proposition that, throughout the entire universe, no planet but the earth could house intelligent life). But now, for the first time, I invoke Wallace proactively, and after considerable patience in waiting for the appropriate moment.

  An impassioned author, approaching a public turning point at the height of his own supposed wisdom and maturity, could scarcely resist such a temptation for proclamation. The turnings of our centuries may bear no relationship to any natural cycle in the cosmos. (I label such passages as “precisely arbitrary” in the subtitle to my previous book, Questioning the Millennium.) But we construe such artificial transitions as occasions for taking stock, especially at the centurial boundaries that have even generated their own eponymous concept of cyclical Angst—the fin de siècle (end of century) phenomenon. (The forthcoming millennium might provoke an even greater burst, but we have too little experience for any prediction. I am at least amused by a diminution in the quality of anxiety for the two documented transitions: last time around, Europe feared all the gory prophecies of Armageddon, as recorded in Revelation 20. For this second experience in Western history, we focus our worries on what might happen if computers misread the great turning as a recursion to the year 1900.)

  Thus, Alfred Russel Wallace could not let the nineteenth century expire without presenting his summation, his evaluation, and his own predictions to the world. He published The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Failures in 1898, and I have been waiting for several years to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of this book near the dawn of our own new millennium.* I saved my remarks for this forum of evolutionary essays, both because Wallace plays a major role on this particular stage, and because the genre of fin-de-siècle summations includes two linked and distinctive themes that have served as linchpins for these essays: the relationship between science and society (an unavoidable centerpiece in assessing the nineteenth century, with its technologically inspired industrial and colonial expansions), and the unpredictability of evolutionary and social futures (ironically, the theme that ultimately undermines this entire genre of summing up the past in hopes of securing a better future).

  Wallace presents a simple thesis as the foundation for his epitome of the nineteenth century—a standard view about.the relation of science to society, stated in the context of a particular time. Science, Wallace argues, has made unprecedented gains, largely expressed as technological advance (at least in terms of impacts upon everyday life), but this progress has been blunted, if not perverted, by our failure to make any moral improvements, especially as expressed in the alleviation of social inequities. Thus, and ironically, the progress of science, however bursting with potential for social improvement as well, has actually operated to increase the sum total of human misery.

  Wallace opens with a statement of his thesis:

  The present work is not in any sense a history, even on the most limited scale. It may perhaps be termed an appreciation of the century—of what it has done, and what it has left undone…. A comparative estimate of the number and importance of these [material and intellectual] achievements leads to the conclusion that not only is our century superior to any that have gone before it, but that it may be best compared with the whole preceding historical period. It must therefore be held to constitute the beginning of a new era in human progress. But this is only one side of the shield. Along with these marvelous Successes—perhaps in consequence of them—there have been equally striking Failures, some intellectual, but for the most part moral and social. No impartial appreciation of the century can omit a reference to them; and it is not improbable that, to the historian of the future, they will be considered to be its most striking characteristic.

  In his first, and shorter, section on scientific and technological progress, Wallace even tries to quantify the relative value of nineteenth-century achievements, reaching the conclusion that this single century had surpassed the summation of all previous human history in weight of accumulated progress:

  In order to estimate its [the nineteenth century’s] full importance and grandeur—more especially as regards man’s increased power over nature, and the application of that power to the needs of his life today, with unlimited possibilities in the future—we must compare it, not with any preceding century, or even with the last millennium, but with the whole historical period—perhaps even with the whole period that has elapsed since the stone age.

  The chapters of this first part then detail the major inventions, spurred by advancing science, that brought such great potential improvement to nineteenth-century life: control of fire (with wide-ranging implications from steam engines to generating plants), labor-saving machinery, transportation, communication, and lighting (culminating in the incandescent bulb). Wallace’s examples often combine charm with insight (as we recall, from yet a century further on, the different lives of not-so-distant forebears). For example, Wallace writes of his own childhood:

  The younger generation, which has grown up in the era of railways and of ocean-going steamships, hardly realize the vast change which we elders have seen…. Even in my own boyhood the wagon for the poor, the stage coach for the middle class, and the post-chaise for the wealthy, were the universal means of communication, there being only two short railways then in existence…. Hundreds of four-horse mail and stage coaches, the guards carrying horns or bugles which were played while passing through every town or village, gave a stir and liveliness and picturesqueness to rural life which is now almost forgotten.

  I confess to a personal reason for intrigue with Wallace’s best example for regarding the nineteenth century as exceeding all previous history in magnitude of technological improvement: the trip from London to York, he states, took less time during the Roman occupation than in 1800, just before the advent of railroads—for the Romans built and maintained better roads, and horses moved no faster in 1800 than in A.D. 300. (I am amused by the analogous observation that rail travel on my frequent route between New York and Boston has slowed during the last century. A nineteenth-century steam engine could make the journey faster than Amtrak’s quickest train, which now runs by electricity from New York to New Haven, but must then lose substantial time in switching engines for the diesel run on a nonelectrified route from New Haven to Boston. Yes, they tell us, vast improvement and full electrification lie just around the temporal corner. But how long, oh Lord, how long!)

  In reading Wallace’s examples, I also appreciated the numerous reminders of the central principle that all truly creative invention must be tentative and flexible, for many workable and elegant ideas will be quickly superseded—as in this temporary triumph for news over the newly invented telephone:

  Few persons are aware that a somewhat similar use of the telephone is actually in operation at Buda Pesth [sic for Budapest, a city then recently amalgamated from two adjoining towns with Wallace’s separate names] in the form of a telephonic newspaper. At certain fixed hours throughout the day a good reader is employed to send definite classes of news along the wires which are laid to subscribers’ houses and offices, so that each person is able to hear the particular items he desires, without the delay of its being printed and circulated in successive editions of a newspaper. It is stated that the news is supplied to subscribers in this way at little more than the cost of a daily newspaper, and that it is a complete success.

  But Wallace’s second and longer section then details the failures of the nineteenth century, all
based on the premise that moral stagnation has perverted the application of unprecedented scientific progress:

  We of the 19th century were morally and socially unfit to possess and use the enormous powers for good or evil which the rapid advance of scientific discovery had given us. Our boasted civilization was in many respects a mere surface veneer; and our methods of government were not in accordance with either Christianity or civilization. This view is enforced by the consideration that all the European wars of the century have been due to dynastic squabbles or to obtain national aggrandizement, and were never waged in order to free the slave or protect the oppressed without any ulterior selfish ends.

  Wallace then turns to domestic affairs, with the damning charge that our capitalist system has taken the wealth accrued from technological progress, and distributed the bounty to a few owners of the means of production, while actually increasing both the absolute and relative poverty of ordinary working people. In short, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer:

  One of the most prominent features of our century has been the enormous and continuous growth of wealth, without any corresponding increase in the well-being of the whole people; while there is ample evidence to show that the number of the very poor— of those existing with a minimum of the bare necessities of life— has enormously increased, and many indications that they constitute a larger proportion of the whole population than in the first half of the century, or in any earlier period of our history.

  At his best, Wallace writes with passion and indignation, as in this passage on preventable industrial poisoning of workers:

  Let every death that is clearly traceable to a dangerous trade be made manslaughter, for which the owners … are to be punished by imprisonment…. and ways will soon be found to carry away or utilize the noxious gases, and provide the automatic machinery to carry and pack the deadly white lead and bleaching powder; as would certainly be done if the owners’ families, or persons of their own rank of life, were the only available workers. Even more horrible than the white-lead poisoning is that by phosphorus, in the match-factories. Phosphorus is not necessary to make matches, but it is a trifle cheaper and a little easier to light (and so more dangerous), and is therefore still largely used; and its effect on the workers is terrible, rotting away the jaws with the agonizing pain of cancer followed by death. Will it be believed in future ages that this horrible and unnecessary manufacture, the evils of which were thoroughly known, was yet allowed to be carried on to the very end of this century, which claims so many great and beneficent discoveries, and prides itself on the height of civilization it has attained?