Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

  Walcott’s persona

  Walcott, an “old American” with rural roots and pure Anglo-Saxon background, became a wealthy man, primarily through judicious investment in power companies. He moved, at least for the last thirty years of his life, in the highest social circles of Washington as an intimate of several presidents and some of America’s greatest industrial magnates, including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. He was a conservative by belief, a Republican in politics, and a devout Presbyterian who almost never missed (or failed to record in his diary) a Sunday morning in church.

  The letters already quoted have provided some insight into his traditional social attitudes—his differential treatment of sons and daughter, his ideas on frugality and responsibility. The archives reveal many other facets of this basic personality; I present a small sample just to provide a “feel” for the attitudes of a powerful conservative thinker during the last great age of confidence in American secular might and moral superiority.

  In 1923, Walcott wrote to John D. Rockefeller about religion:

  I was brought up at Utica, New York, by my mother and sister, who were consistent Christian women, and I have always adhered to the Presbyterian Church, as I believe in the essentials of the Christian religion and in carrying them out in cooperation with people who believe in the efficacy of the Church as an agency for the preservation and upbuilding of the human race.

  I cite Walcott’s views on alcohol (to W. P. Eno on October 6, 1923), not because I regard them as quaint or antediluvian (in fact, I agree with Walcott’s individual stand, while doubting the political consequences that he envisions in the second paragraph), but because I regard the tone of this passage as so evocative of Walcott’s personality and general attitudes:

  When I came to Washington 40 years ago, I used to meet with a group of young men in the afternoon to talk over matters of mutual interest, and we usually had beer and, those who wished, brandy or cocktails. I cared little for any of the drinks and concluded that I was just as well off without them. As time passed on, the homeopathic doses of alcohol gradually showed their effect upon the men by a certain deterioration of character, willpower and effectiveness, and years before they should have done so they passed out [he means died, not collapsed in inebriation] mainly as the result of difficulties with the liver, kidneys and stomach. Only one of them is living today and he gave up “nipping” twenty years ago or more.

  I believe that if all alcoholic drinks could be absolutely dispensed with, the betterment and welfare of the human race would be so improved in a generation or two that a large percentage of the suffering, immorality and decadence of individuals and peoples would disappear.

  In politics, Walcott seesawed between the conservative poles of jingoism and libertarian respect for untrammeled individual opportunity. In the latter mode, for example, he rejected the labeling of entire races or social classes as biologically inferior, and argued for equal access to education, so that socially widespread genius might always surface. He wrote to Mrs. Russell Sage on June 30, 1913:

  I am particularly interested in your educational work as I believe that it is through education that the great masses of the people are to be brought up to a standard that will enable them to live healthful, clean lives.

  It seems that talent or genius appears about as frequently in one social class as another, in working class children as in the children of the well-to-do. The fact that through the centuries most of the great men have sprung from the comfortable classes simply proves the might of opportunity.

  Walcott’s jingoistic side emerged particularly in his anger toward Germany over World War I, where he lost a son in aerial combat. In a letter of December 11, 1918, he declined an invitation from the president of Princeton University to a memorial service for students who had died in battle (Walcott frequently used the common epithet of his generation in referring to Germans as Huns):

  I have avoided all memorial meetings and services as the effect upon me is detrimental to my mental and moral poise owing to the depth of feelings aroused against the “Tribe of the Huns” and their allies. This feeling began with the invasion of Belgium, was emphasized by the sinking of the Lusitania and the many crimes committed during the war, and now it is not lessened by the many events that have taken place since the signing of the armistice.

  All the worst of Walcott’s venom poured forth, as the archives reveal, in his confidential spearheading of an extraordinary campaign against the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas in 1920. Boas, as German by birth, Jewish by origin, left-leaning in politics, and pro-German in sympathy, inspired wrath from each and every corner of Walcott’s prejudices. In the December 12, 1919, issue of the Nation, Boas had published a short letter, entitled “Scientists as Spies,” charging that several anthropologists had gathered intelligence data for America during the war while claiming the immunity of science to gain access to areas and information that might otherwise have been declared off limits. He argued that although surreptitious gathering of intelligence is acceptable for men of politics, business, or the military because these professions practice duplicity as a norm, such chicanery can only be viewed as heinous and destructive of scientific principles. Boas’s letter would raise few emotions today, and would be read by most people as a somewhat naive evocation of scientific ideals.

  But reactions were different in the intensely jingoistic climate of postwar America. To Walcott, Boas’s letter was the last straw from a long-standing, disloyal, foreign nuisance. Boas, he claimed, had directly accused President Wilson of lying, for Wilson had stated that “only autocracies maintain spies; these are not needed in democracies.” Walcott also interpreted Boas’s letter as impugning the integrity of American science in toto because a handful of practitioners might have acted as “double agents,” both for knowledge and intelligence.

  Walcott used this exaggerated reading as the basis for a vigorous campaign to censure Boas, and perhaps to drive him out of American science altogether. Walcott immediately and peremptorily canceled Boas’s honorary position at the Smithsonian. He then wrote to all his important and well-placed conservative colleagues, seeking advice on how Boas might be punished. For example, to Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University (where Boas taught), Walcott wrote on January 3, 1920:

  The position that Dr. Boas had in connection with the Smithsonian Institution was abolished, as it was specially created for him by Secretary Langley in 1901.

  The article published by Dr. Boas in the Nation of 12/20 was of such a character that I did not consider a man holding such sentiments a proper person to have an official connection with the Smithsonian. I prefer to have 100 per cent Americans, and have no use personally or officially for the addle-minded Bolshevik type, whether it be Russian or German, Hebrew or Gentile. I realize that the fighting is over with Germany, but it is only begun with the elements that would spread distrust, internal conflict, and ultimate ruin to all that Americans have stood for.

  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:

  He [Boas] attacks the United States for the purpose of defending Germany, and yet he is allowed to teach our youth and enjoy the honors of being a member of the National Academy of Sciences. This thought makes me long for the good old days of absolutism when the means were always at hand for ridding oneselfe [sic] of such a nuisance as Franz Boas (letter of January 12, 1920).

  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, Massach
usetts, 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 is further respectfully asked, in the name of Americanism as against un Americanism, that Dr. Boas and also the ten members of the American Anthropological Association, who by voting against the latter resolution thus supporting him in his disloyalty, be excluded from participation in any service respecting which any question of loyalty to the United States Government may properly be raised.

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

  Walcott’s general view of life’s history and evolution

  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.* Walcott told his audience that Darwin had provided the key to unraveling life’s history as “a certain order of progression”:

  From the beginning of life on earth there was a connection so close and intimate that, if the entire record could be obtained, a perfect chain of life from the lowest organism to the highest would be established.

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

  In early times the Cephalopoda ruled, later on the Crustacea came to the fore, then probably fishes took the lead, but were speedily outpowered by the Saurians. These Land and Sea Reptiles then prevailed until Mammalia appeared upon the scene, since when it doubtless became a struggle for supremacy until Man was created. Then came the age of Invention; at first of flint and bone implements, of bows and arrows and fish-hooks; then of spears and shields, swords and guns, lucifer matches, railways, electric telegraphs.

  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 jus
t 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.”*

  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:

  I have felt for several years that there was danger of science running away with the orderly progress of human evolution and bringing about a catastrophe unless there was some method found of developing to a greater degree the altruistic or, as some would put it, the spiritual nature of man.

  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.