I Have Landed (2 page)

Coincidence and numerology exert an eerie fascination upon us, in large part because so many people so thoroughly misunderstand probability, and therefore believe that some deep, hidden, and truly cosmic significance must
attend such “unexpected” confluences as the death of both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (no great pals during most of their lives) on the same day, July 4, 1826, coincidentally the fiftieth anniversary of the United States as well; or the birth of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln on the same day of February 12, 1809. Scholars can also put such coincidences to good use—as Jacques Barzun did in a famous book
(Darwin, Marx, Wagner)
by centering a contrast among these three key figures upon a focal work completed by each in the same year of 1859, a technique that I have borrowed in a smaller way herein (see essay 5) by joining Darwin with a great painter and a great naturalist through an even more tightly coordinated set of events in the same year of 1859. And yet, I would argue that these numerological coincidences remain fascinating precisely because they can boast
no
general or cosmic meaning whatsoever (being entirely unremarkable at their observed frequency under ordinary expectations of probability), and therefore can only embody the quirky and personal meaning that we choose to grant them.

Thus, when I realized that my three-hundredth monthly essay for
Natural History
(written since January 1974, without a single interruption for cancer, hell, high water, or the World Series) would fall fortuitously into the millennial issue of January 2001, the inception of a year that also marks the centenary of my family's arrival in the United States, I did choose to read this coincidence of numerological “evenness” as a sign that this particular forum should now close at the equally portentous number of ten volumes (made worthy of mention only by the contingency of our decimal mathematics. Were I a Mayan prince, counting by twenties, I would not have been so impressed, but then I wouldn't have been writing scientific essays either). When I then felt the double whammy of an equally “exact” and notable twenty-five years (a quarter of the square of our decimal base) between two odd and fortuitous conjunctions in life's passage—the yoking of my first essay and first technical book in 1977, followed by a similar duality in 2002 of this tenth and last essay book from
Natural History
and my life's major technical “monstergraph” (as we tend to call overly long monographs in the trade), well then, despite my full trust and knowledge of probability, how could I deny that something must be beaming me a marching order to move on to other scholarly and literary matters (but never to slow the pace or lose an iota of interest—for no such option exists within my temperament).

In trying to epitomize what I have learned during these twenty-five years and ten volumes, I can only make a taxonomic analogy based upon locating a voice by finer subdivision toward my own individuality. That is, I grew and differentiated from a nondescript location on the bough of a biggish category on the tree of writers into unique occupancy of a little twiglet of my own true self. At the very start,
for reasons both ethical and practical (for otherwise I would have experienced neither pleasure nor learning), I opted for the
family
of “no conceptual simplification,” as stated above—in other words, for the great humanistic tradition of treating readers as equals and not as consumers of “easy listening” at drive time under cruise control. I then, if you will, entered a distinctive
genus
of such general writers, a taxon that I have long called Galilean—the intellectual puzzle solvers as opposed to the lyrical exalters of nature, or Franciscans. I then cast my allegiance to a distinctive
species
within the Galilean genus—writers who try to integrate their scientific themes into humanistic contexts and concerns, rather than specializing in logical clarity for explaining particular scientific puzzles. (Incidentally, when I claim that I no longer like my regrettably still popular first book,
Ever Since Darwin
, I say so not primarily because much of its content has been invalidated (a necessary consequence of scientific health and progress for any book written twenty-five years ago), or because its stylistic juvenilities now embarrass me, but rather because I now find these essays too generic in lacking the more personal style that I hope I developed later.)

If I have succeeded in finding a distinctive voice for a
subspecies
of humanistic natural history, my interest in how people actually do science guided my long and tortuous path. How do scientists and other researchers blast and bumble toward their complex mixture of conclusions (great factual discoveries of enduring worth mixed with unconscious social prejudices of astonishing transparency to later generations)? When my method works, I fancy that I can explain complex interfaces between human foibles and natural realities through the agency of what might be designated as “mini intellectual biography”—the distilled essences of the central motivations and concepts of interesting and committed scholars and seekers from all our centuries and statuses—from the greatest physician of his age (essay 11) who could only name, but could not cure or characterize, the new scourge of syphilis (Fracastoro in the sixteenth century), to an unknown woman with a wondrous idea for reconciling scripture and paleontology with all the fervor of Victorian evangelicalism (Isabelle Duncan of essay 7), to solving the mystery of why the greatest stuffed shirt of Edwardian biology had, as a young man, attended Karl Marx's funeral as the only English scientist present (essay 6), to a biological view, then legitimate but now disproved, that led Sigmund Freud to some truly weird speculations about the course of human phylogeny (essay 8). Each mini intellectual biography tells an interesting story of a person and (if successful) elucidates an important scientific concept as well.

The eight categories for parsing the 31 essays of this final volume follow the general concerns of the entire series, but with some distinctive twists. (Perhaps the author protesteth too much, but I am always happily surprised to find, when
the time comes to collate these essays into a volume, that they fall into a tolerably coherent order of well-balanced sets of categories, even though I write each piece for itself, with no thought of a developing superstructure made of empty rooms crying out for verbal furniture.) The first essay, and title-bearer of the book, stands alone, as an end focused upon a beginning, all to exalt the continuity of personal life through family lineages and of earthly life through evolution.

The second group expresses my explicit commitment to meaningful joinings between the facts, methods, and concerns of science and the humanistic disciplines, one per essay in this case: to literature in essay 2, history in essay 3, music and theater in essay 4, and art in essay 5. The third group includes three of my mini-intellectual biographies, each in this case devoted to a person and a controlling idea that Darwin's revolution made compelling and relevant. In the fourth group, I try to apply the same basically biographical strategy to the much “stranger” and (for us) difficult intellectual approach to the natural world followed by thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before “the scientific revolution” (the term generally used by professional historians of science) of Newton's generation fully established the notions of empiricism and experimentation that continue to feel basically familiar to us today. By grappling with this “intellectual paleontology” of fascinating, potent, but largely extinct worldviews held by folks with exactly the same basic mental equipment that we possess today, we can learn more about the flexibility and limitation of the mind than any study of any modern consensus can provide.

Part V explores the different genre of the op-ed format, limited to 1,000 words or fewer. Essays 12 and 13 provide two different takes—one for the fully vernacular audience of
Time
, the other for the professional readers of
Science
—on creationist attacks upon the study of evolution. The remaining four short pieces, from the
New York Times
op-ed page and from
Time
magazine, show how strongly evolution intrudes into our public lives, perhaps more so (in a philosophical and intellectual rather than a purely practical or technological sense) than any other set of scientific concepts.

Each essay in part VI then discusses a truly basic or definitional concept in evolutionary theory (the meaning of the word itself, the nature and limitations of creation stories in general, the meaning of diversity and classification, the direction—or nondirection—of life's history). I use a variety of tactics as organizing devices, ranging from my biographical interests (21 on Linnaeus, 22 on Agassiz, Von Baer, and Haeckel), to a more conventional account of organisms (23 on feathered dinosaurs or early bipedal ground birds), to a personal tale about why this evolutionary biologist felt so comfortable spending the millennial day of January 1, 2000, singing in a performance of Haydn's
The Creation
.
Part VII treats the social implications, utilities, and misutilities of evolution, as seen through the ever-troubling lens of claims for false and invidious innate distinctions of worth among organisms, ranging from native versus introduced plants (essay 24) to supposedly inferior and superior races of humans, with three optimistic final essays on three worthy scientists, from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries respectively, who stood among the infrequent defenders of natural equality.

The short pieces of parts V and VIII first appeared as editorials or op-ed commentaries. The full-length essays of all other sections represent the final entries in a series of three hundred written for
Natural History
magazine from January 1974 to January 2001—with five exceptions from other fora: essay 2, on Nabokov, from an exhibition catalog by antiquarian bookseller Paul Horowitz; essay 4, on Gilbert and Sullivan, from
The American Scholar;
essay 5 from the exhibition catalog for a retrospective of Frederick Church's great landscape paintings, displayed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; essay 24, on native plants, from the published proceedings of a conference on the architecture of landscape gardening held at Dunbarton Oaks; and essay 26 from
Discover
magazine.

In closing (but bear with me for an extended final riff), I cannot begin to express the constant joy that writing these essays has brought me since I began late in 1973. Each has taught me something new and important, and each has given me human contact with readers who expressed a complete range of opinion from calumny to adulation, but always with feeling and without neutrality—so God bless them, every one. In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original languages (with only two exceptions, when Fracastoro's elegant Latin verse and Beringer's foppish Latin pseudocomplexities eluded my imperfect knowledge of this previously universal scientific tongue).

Moreover, because I refuse to treat these essays as lesser, derivative, or dumbed-down versions of technical or scholarly writing for professional audiences, but insist upon viewing them as no different in conceptual depth (however distinct in language) from other genres of original research, I have not hesitated to present, in this format, genuine discoveries, or at least distinctive interpretations, that would conventionally make their first appearance in a technical journal for professionals. I confess that I have often been frustrated by the disinclinations, and sometimes the downright refusals, of some (in my
judgment) overly parochial scholars who will not cite my essays (while they happily quote my technical articles) because the content did not see its first published light of day in a traditional, peer-reviewed publication for credentialed scholars. Yet I have frequently placed into these essays original findings that I regard as more important, or even more complex, than several items that I initially published in conventional scholarly journals. For example, I believe that I made a significant discovery of a previously unknown but pivotal annotation that Lamarck wrote into his personal copy of his first published work on evolution. But I presented this discovery in an essay within this series (essay 6 in my previous book
The Lying Stones of Marrakech)
, and some scholars will not cite this source in their technical writing.

By following these beliefs and procedures, I can at least designate these essays as distinctive or original, rather than derivative or summarizing—however execrable or wrongheaded (or merely eminently forgettable) any individual entry may eventually rank in posterity's judgment. In scholars' jargon, I hope and trust that my colleagues will regard these essays as
primary rather than secondary sources
. I would defend this conceit by claiming originality on four criteria of descending confidence, from a first category of objective novelty to a fourth that detractors may view as little more than a confusion of dotty idiosyncrasy with meaningful or potentially enlightening distinctiveness.

By my first criterion, some essays present original discoveries about important documents in the history of science—either in the location of uniquely annotated copies (as in Agassiz's stunning marginalia densely penciled into his personal copy of the major book of his archrival Haeckel, essay 22), or in novel analysis of published data (as in my calculation of small differences in mean brain sizes among races, explicitly denied by the author of the same data, essay 27).

In this category of pristine discovery, I can claim no major intellectual or theoretical significance for my own favorite among the true novelties of this book. But when I found the inscription of a great woman, begun as a dedication in a gift from a beautiful young fiancée to her future husband, Thomas Henry Huxley, in 1849, and then completed more than sixty years later, as a grandmother and elderly family matriarch, to Julian Huxley—the sheer human beauty in this statement of love across generations, this wonderfully evocative symbol of continuity (in dignity and decency) within a world of surrounding woe, struck me as so exquisitely beautiful, and so ethically and aesthetically “right,” that I still cannot gaze upon Henrietta Huxley's humble page of handwriting without tears welling in my eyes (as, I confess, they flow even now just by writing the thought!). I am proud that I could find, and make public, this little precious gem, this pearl beyond price, of our human best.