Read Bully for Brontosaurus Online
Authors: Stephen Jay Gould
Shaler’s loyalty to Agassiz persisted right through this fundamental change from creationism to evolution. For example, though he could scarcely deny the common origin of all humans in the light of evolutionary theory, Shaler still advocated Agassiz’s distinctive view (representing the “polygenist” school of pre-Darwinian anthropology) that human races are separate species, properly and necessarily kept apart both on public conveyances and in bedrooms. Shaler argued for an evolutionary separation of races so long ago that accumulated differences had become, for all practical purposes, permanent.
Practical purposes, in the genteel racism of patrician Boston, abetted by a slaveholding Kentucky ancestry, meant “using biology as an accomplice” (in Condorcet’s words) to advocate a “nativist” social policy (where “natives” are not the truly indigenous American Indians, but the earliest immigrants from Protestant western and northern Europe). Shaler reserved his lowest opinion for black Americans, but invested his social energies in the Immigration Restriction League and its attempts to prevent dilution of American whites (read WASPs) by the great Catholic and Jewish unwashed of southern and eastern Europe.
One can hardly fathom the psychological and sociological complexities of racism, but the forced intellectual rationales are always intriguing and more accessible. Shaler’s own defense merged his two chief interests in geography and zoology. He argued that we live in a world of sensible and optimal pattern, devoid of quirk or caprice. People differ because they have adapted by Lamarckian means to their local environments; our capacities are a map of our original homes—and we really shouldn’t live elsewhere (hence the biological rectitude of restricting immigration). The languid tropics cannot inspire genius, and you cannot contemplate the Pythagorean absolute while trying to keep body and soul together in an igloo. Hence the tough, but tractable, lands of northern Europe yielded the best of humanity. Shaler wrote:
Our continents and seas, cannot be considered as physical accidents in which, and on which, organic beings have found an ever-perilous resting place, but as great engines operating in a determined way to secure the advance of life.
Shaler then applied this cardinal belief in overarching order (against the Darwinian specter of unpredictable contingency) to the largest question of all—the meaning of human life as a proof of God’s existence and benevolence. In so doing, he completed the evolutionary version of Agassiz’s dearest principle—the infusion of sensible, progressive, divine order into the cosmos, with the elevation of “man” (and I think he really meant only half of us) to the pinnacle of God’s intent. Shaler could not deny his generation’s proof of evolution, and had departed from his master in this conviction, but he had been faithful in constructing a vision of evolution so mild that it left all cosmic comfort intact, thereby affirming the deepest principle of Agassiz’s natural theology.
Shaler rooted his argument in a simple claim about probability. (Shaler often repeated this line of reasoning. My quotations come from his last and most widely read book
—The Individual: A Study of Life and Death
, 1901.) Human life is the end result of an evolutionary sequence stretching back into the immensity of time and including thousands of steps, each necessary as a link in the rising sequence:
The possibility of man’s development has rested on the successive institution of species in linked order…. If, in this succession of tens of thousands of species, living through a series of millions of years, any of these links of the human chain had been broken; if any one of the species had failed to give birth to its successor, the chance of the development of man would have been lost.
Human evolution, Shaler holds, would have been “unattainable without the guidance of a controlling power intent on the end.” If one sequence alone could have engendered us, and if the world be ruled by Darwinian caprice and contingency, our appearance would have been “essentially impossible.” For surely, one link would have failed, one step in ten thousand been aborted, thus ending forever the ascent toward consciousness. Only divine watchfulness and intent could have produced the human mind (not a direct finger in the pot, perhaps, but at least an intelligent construction of nature’s laws with a desired end in view):
The facts connected with the organic approach to man afford what is perhaps the strongest argument, or at least the most condensed, in favor of the opinion that there is an intelligent principle in control of the universe.
Nathaniel Southgate Shaler was one of the most influential American intellectuals of his time. Today, he is unknown. I doubt that one in a hundred readers of this essay (geologists and Harvardians excepted) has ever heard of him. His biography rates thirteen lines in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, more than half devoted to a listing of book titles. Why has he faded, and what does his eclipse teach us about the power and permanence of human thought? We can, perhaps, best approach this question by considering one of Shaler’s best friends, a man also influenced by Agassiz, but in a different way—William James. In their day, Shaler and James were peas in a pod of Harvard fame. Now Shaler is a memory for a few professionals, and James is one of America’s great gifts to the history of human thought. Why the difference?
William James also came under Agassiz’s spell during his student years. Agassiz decided to take six undergraduates along on his famous Thayer Expedition to Brazil (1866). They would help the trained scientists in collecting specimens and, in return, hear lectures from Agassiz on all aspects of natural history. William James, among the lucky six, certainly appreciated the value of Agassiz’s formidable intellect and pedagogical skill. He wrote to his father: “I am getting a pretty valuable training from the Prof, who pitches into me right and left and makes me [own] up to a great many of my imperfections. This morning he said I was ‘totally uneducated.’”
But James maintained his critical perspective, while Shaler became an acolyte and then an epigone. James wrote:
I have profited a great deal by hearing Agassiz talk, not so much by what he says, for never did a man utter a greater amount of humbug, but by learning the way of feeling of such a vast practical engine as he is…. I delight to be with him. I only saw his defects at first, but now his wonderful qualities throw them quite in the background…. I never saw a man work so hard.
Was James “smarter” than Shaler? Does their difference in renown today reflect some basic disparity in amount of intellectual power? This is a senseless question for many reasons. Intelligence is too complex and multifaceted a thing to reduce to any single dimension. What can we say? Both men had certain brilliance, but they used their skills differently. Shaler was content to follow Agassiz throughout his career, happy to employ his formidable intellect in constructing an elaborate rationale for contemporary preferences, never challenging the conservative assumptions of his class and culture. James questioned Agassiz from day one. James probed and wondered, reached and struggled every day of his life. Shaler built pretty buildings to house comfortable furniture. Intelligence or temperament; brains or guts? I don’t know. But I do know that oblivion was one man’s reward, enduring study and respect the other’s.
As a dramatic illustration of the difference, consider James’s critique of Shaler’s “probability argument” for God’s benevolence from the fact of human evolution. James read Shaler’s
The Individual
, and wrote a very warm, though critical, letter to his dear friend. He praised “the gravity and dignity and peacefulness” of Shaler’s thoughts, but singled out the probability argument for special rebuttal.
James points out that the actual result of evolution is the only sample we have. We cannot compute a “probability” or even speak in such terms. Any result in a sample of one would appear equally miraculous when you consider the vast range of alternative possibilities. But something had to happen. We may only talk of odds if we could return to the beginning, list a million possible outcomes, and then lay cold cash upon one possibility alone:
We never know what ends may have been kept from realization, for the dead tell no tales. The surviving witness would in any case, and whatever he were, draw the conclusion that the universe was planned to make him and the like of him succeed, for it actually did so. But your argument that it is millions to one that it didn’t do so by chance doesn’t apply. It would apply if the witness had preexisted in an independent form and framed his scheme, and then the world had realized it. Such a coincidence would prove the world to have a kindred mind to his. But there has been no such coincidence. The world has come but once, the witness is there after the fact and simply approves…. Where only one fact is in question, there is no relation of “probability” at all. [James’s letter is reprinted, in full, in
The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
, 1909.]
Old, bad arguments never die (they don’t fade away either), particularly when they match our hopes. Shaler’s false probability argument is still a favorite among those who yearn to find a cosmic rationale for human importance. And James’s retort remains as brilliant and as valid today as when he first presented the case to Shaler. We could save ourselves from a lot of current nonsense if every devotee of the anthropic principle (strong version), every fan of Teilhard’s noosphere, simply read and understood James’s letter to Shaler.
James then continues with the ultimate Darwinian riposte to Shaler’s doctrine of cosmic hope and importance. Human intellect is a thing of beauty—truly awesome. But our evolution need not record any more than a Darwinian concatenation of improbabilities:
I think, therefore, that the excellence we have reached and now approve may be due to no general design, but merely to a succession of the short designs we actually know of, taking advantage of opportunity, and adding themselves together from point to point.
Which brings us back to Mr. Eli Grant. (I do hope, compassionate reader, that you have been worrying about this poor man’s fate while I temporized in higher philosophical realms.) The young Shaler tried to cover his ass by exposing Grant’s. Obviously, he succeeded, but what happened to the poor janitor, left to take the rap?
This story has a happy ending, based on two sources of evidence: one inferential, the other direct. Since Agassiz never found out, never saw the note, and since Mr. Hartt, like Godot, never arrived, we may assume that Grant’s zealous accident eluded Agassiz’s watchful eye. More directly, I am delighted to report that I found (in yet another drawer) a record book for the Department of Invertebrate Paleontology in 1887. Mr. Eli Grant is still listed as janitor.
Was Mr. Grant meant to survive because he did? Does his tenure on the job indicate the workings of a benevolent and controlling mind? (Why not, for I can envisage 100 other scenarios, all plausible but less happy.) Or was Mr. Grant too small to fall under God’s direct providence? But if so, by what hubris do we consider ourselves any bigger in a universe of such vastness? Such unprofitable, such unanswerable questions. Let us simply rejoice in the happy ending of a small tale, and give the last word to William James, still trying to set his friend Shaler straight:
What if we did come where we are by chance, or by mere fact, with no one general design? What is gained, is gained, all the same. As to what may have been lost, who knows of it, in any case?
Postscript: A Letter from Jimmy Carter
I had heard many stories of Jimmy Carter’s personal kindness, and I had long admired him as the most intellectual of presidents since Roosevelt (the competition has not been too fierce of late). But I was delighted and surprised (to the point of shock) when I received a call, late one afternoon, from a woman who said, in a strong southern accent: “Please hold the line; President Carter would like to speak with you.” My first reaction, undoubtedly impolitic, was to blurt out: “President Carter who?” (I did think of Jimmy, but his tenure had ended nearly ten years ago and I didn’t realize that certain titles, like diamonds and sainthood, are forever.) She replied with more than a hint of indignation: “Former president Jimmy Carter of the United States.” I allowed that I would hold.
He came on the line a minute later. My first reaction was surprise that the voice sounded so much like that of our president from 1977 to 1980. My second reaction was to chastise myself for such incredible stupidity since it was, after all, Mr. Carter on the line—and people do tend to sound like themselves (even basically competent folks can be mighty dimwitted when flustered). My third reaction was to wonder why, in heaven’s name, he was calling me. So I listened and soon found out. Carter said that he had read and enjoyed several of my books. He then read of my bout with cancer in the preface to
The Flamingo’s Smile
. He wanted, in this light, to express his best wishes for my health but hesitated to call, lest I might be too ill to be disturbed. So he phoned my publishers, found out that my next book was in production, and that I had recovered. Feeling, therefore, that he would not be intruding, he had decided to call—simply to express his good wishes and his hopes for my continued good health.
What a lovely man, and what a gracious and kind act. I sent him, as a most inadequate expression of thanks, a copy of the book,
Wonderful Life
, when it appeared a few months later. Not long thereafter, I received a letter in reply:
I had a chance to read
Wonderful Life
while traveling to Kenya, Sudan, and Ethiopia recently. Rosalynn and I were spending three weeks mediating between the Ethiopian government and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front.… You may or may not be familiar with the horrendous wars in those countries. Between negotiating sessions, I found your book to be thoroughly enjoyable—perhaps your best so far.
But Carter then voiced a major criticism, quite disabling if valid. I argue in
Wonderful Life
that human evolution would almost surely not occur again if we could rewind the tape of life back to the early history of multicellular animals (erasing what actually happened of course) and let it play again from an identical starting point (too many initial possibilities relative to later survivors, with no reason to think that survivors prevailed for reasons of superiority or any other version of predictability, and too much randomness and contingency in the pathways of life’s later history). But Carter made a brilliant riposte to this central claim of my book.