A Brief History of Creation (13 page)

In 1781, two years before Needham died, he penned a letter to a sympathetic French philosopher. As he explained the motivations that lay behind his experiments on spontaneous generation, he came very close to what might be characterized as regret. Preformation and the existence of germs, he believed, had never rested on firm scientific ground. These ideas simply
weren't supported by the available evidence. Inevitably, natural philosophy would lead to new solutions to the problem of the origin of life. Needham's experiments were an attempt to provide a theory that could fill the void after preformation was proved wrong. He felt he had reconciled the mechanistic Newtonian world in a way that preserved a role for a creator God.

In fact, Needham had done the opposite. And in the coming century, the argument over the spontaneous generation of microscopic life would be at the center of an increasingly contentious debate that broke out of the insular realm of those devoted to natural philosophy and into society at large.

*
Malebranche's concept anticipated, in ways he could not have understood, the idea of genetic inheritance. In a sense, the information for making potentially infinite generations of apple trees
is
contained in a single apple seed.

†
As humankind's understanding of living things increased exponentially during the eighteenth century, a Cartesian perspective of living organisms became harder to deny—even to some preformationists. The Genevan naturalist Charles Bonnet would echo Descartes when he wrote that “even the tiniest fibril can be imagined as infinitely minute Machines with functions of their own. The whole Machine, the great Machine, therefore is the result of grouping a prodigious number of ‘machinules' whose actions are concurrent or converge.” Bonnet's understanding of the organizational nature of life—machines composed of ever-smaller machines—wouldn't be out of place in the twenty-first century. Yet Bonnet was also a staunch advocate of preformation.

‡
In 1998, biologist Daniel Martinez discovered another amazing fact about Trembley's polyp: it does not age, because its stem cells have the capacity to regenerate, forever. Unlike most animals, the hydra is, in theory at least, immortal.

§
Thomas Jefferson was one of many influenced by
Natural History
. The future president of the United States was bothered, though, by Buffon's characterization of the wildlife of the Americas—in Buffon's imagining, a land of swamps and bogs—as “inferior.” Jefferson devoted the longest chapter of his only book,
Notes on the State of Virginia
, to rebutting Buffon's claim. In 1785, when Jefferson visited Paris, he took time to dine with Buffon at his home. He managed to sway the French naturalist, who removed any references to the inferiority of the American animals from subsequent printings of
Natural History
.

¶
While in Berlin, Voltaire also found time to write a short story centered on a 120,000-foot-tall alien named Micromegas. The alien was a little like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver, except he traveled from planet to planet by “acquaintance with the laws of gravitation.” He finds the Earth filled with “fools, knaves and miserable wretches.” A philosopher tells him of “100,000 madmen of our species wearing hats, killing 100,000 other animals wearing turbans.” Eponymously titled “Micromegas,” it is considered by many to be the first work of science fiction ever written.

#
As a teenager, Frederick tried unsuccessfully to flee the Prussian court with a man presumed to be his lover, Hans Hermann von Katte. His brutish father made Frederick watch von Katte's beheading. Frederick was then married off, though he and his wife saw each other only officially, and only once a year.

A VITAL FORCE

Oh! But it is all proved . . . read the book. It is impossible to contradict anything in it. You understand, it is all science; it is not like those books in which one says one thing and another the contrary, and both may be wrong. Everything is proved
.

—BENJAMIN DISRAELI,
Tancred
, 1847

 

T
HE MANSION OF FYNE COURT
was set deep in the sparsely populated Quantock Hills of county Somerset, in southwest England. From high points nearby, a person could take in a fine view of the surrounding countryside. On a clear day, one could even see Glastonbury Tor, the cone-shaped green hill that the ancient Britons once called
Ynys yr Afalon
, likely the fabled “Isle of Avalon” of Arthurian legend. Yet the mansion itself was set on oddly low ground, covered on three sides by dense forests in a valley that was no more than a gash between the hills. No right-minded architect would have chosen such a spot, a visitor once remarked, for it was as if “the soil on which it had been built suddenly sunk one fine morning.”

To the north of Somerset County, coal mining was uprooting the forests, fueling the steam engines of the first great industrial revolution. But the Quantocks were largely spared. The woodlands were still filled with unusually tall oaks and firs, the ground covered by wildflowers and ferns. The poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge had spent summers nearby. It was where Coleridge composed two of the most famous poems in the English language:
Kubla Khan
and
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
.

But in the unusually brutal winter of 1836, Fyne Court looked less like
a preserve of England's rural past and more like a vision of an extraordinary future. At the top of each tree nearest the house, a long metal pole had been placed. From each of these, a third of a mile of copper wires were strung like Christmas lights. They crept from the bases of the trees toward the house, all converging on a single open window on the first floor, in the organ room. There, the wires made their way haphazardly past shelves stocked with vials of mysterious, multicolored liquids, until they reached a giant electric battery through which passed enough current to kill twenty men. The device bore a warning, written large and in Latin:
Noli Me Tangere.
Do not touch me.

The owner of the house, Andrew Crosse, didn't use the organ room much for entertaining. Crosse was a bit of a recluse, in his fifties and living the quiet life of a country aristocrat. His days were spent leisurely managing his lands and the tenant farmers who paid him rents, leaving him plenty of time to pursue his real interests. Crosse was known as a “scientist,” a word that was only just replacing “natural philosopher” in the English vernacular. Electricity was his first passion, and he had by then earned a strong reputation for his work in the field. Interest in his work had even drawn a visit to Fyne Court from the president of the Royal Society.

Crosse's other interest was something that had intrigued him since he was a teenager: the natural formation of crystals. He thought the two subjects connected, that electricity might offer a clue to the question of how crystals were formed in nature. He began trying to form crystals by running electric currents through various pieces of stone, sometimes for weeks at a time. He thought that one day it would be possible to use electricity to create any kind of mineral, even gold or diamonds. The theory had gained him a measure of notoriety.

Crosse's latest experiment involved running an electric current into an airtight glass jar that contained a stone from Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that had destroyed the Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and a solution of finely powdered flint and potassium carbonate. Every morning for the previous two weeks, he had donned the velvet smoking jacket he always wore in his lab and headed downstairs to check for results.

One morning, Crosse finally saw something that intrigued him.
Perched atop his rock were tiny white specks. Over the next four days, he dutifully returned each morning to find the specks growing ever larger. On the fourth day, he was stunned to see in place of one of the specks a tiny white insect situated just above the liquid. As the days passed, more appeared. They were, he scribbled excitedly in his journal, the “perfect insect.” In the years to follow, Crosse's experiment would be cited as proof of spontaneous generation, as well as invoking comparisons to strange experiments conducted by the Italian Luigi Galvani, who had seemingly proved the existence of some kind of electrical life force. The experiment would also make Crosse, for a brief period of time, one of the more famous men in the British Empire, as well as one of the most vilified.

O
NE MIGHT DESCRIBE
the history of science as being shaped like an hourglass. Before the nineteenth century, science had always been largely a pastime practiced only by wealthy intellectuals, or those maintained by wealthy patrons. Its inaccessibility was not unlike that of the modern age, in which science is largely the exclusive purview of an educated elite we call scientists. But for a remarkable period during the nineteenth century, it became a pastime for nearly all walks of society. Particularly in the country at the center of the industrial revolution, Great Britain, science was discussed and debated in newspapers, at the dinner table, and even in working-class pubs and radical journals. A century earlier, few people would have had the opportunity to hear of experiments like Andrew Crosse's. Even fewer would have cared. By the middle of the nineteenth century, virtually everybody knew about the latest scientific trends, and no one seemed to be without an opinion.

This democratization of science was due largely to the advent of the steam-powered printing press. The business of printing was exploding. Paper prices tumbled to historic lows, and publishers saw mass publication as the wave of the future. Newspapers and periodicals popped up everywhere. Literacy, in turn, began reaching levels that had been unimaginable for most of human history.

As soon as Andrew Crosse's story found its way onto the pages of one
of these new local newspapers, it didn't take long for it to spread nearly everywhere. Practically overnight, the quiet, unassuming man from Broomfield became a nineteenth-century version of a tabloid celebrity, the subject of drawing-room conversations throughout Britain and abroad. He became the scientist who created “life in a laboratory,” and not just some invisible microbe. Crosse had supposedly proved the doctrine of spontaneous generation by creating a living, visible creature. His experiment was something that was beginning to pique the interest of wide segments of the public, the kind of thing the sensationalizing newspapermen of the day could use to sell papers.

Two books, in particular, were crucial in shaping the way Crosse's story was received. One was an immensely popular science book that appeared seven years after Crosse's experiment and held up his insects as proof of the creation of life purely through the laws of nature followed by a transformative process that led to more complex forms of life.

The other was a novel that had been published nearly twenty years before Crosse's experiment, one that whetted the public's thirst for new explanations of the mysteries of life. It had been conceived of on the shores of Lake Geneva, where a teenage girl had spent a rainy afternoon penning one of the most enduring works of fiction ever written.

I
N THE SUMMER of 1816
, eighteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft and her soon-to-be husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, traveled to Switzerland to visit the writer Lord Byron.
^*
Shelley hoped to cultivate the more established Byron as a friend and mentor. While at Byron's villa on Lake
Geneva, the group had planned a sightseeing expedition into the Swiss Alps, but heavy rains forced a change in their plans. Instead, they spent a legendary evening sharing German ghost stories. Byron challenged each in the group to write a story of their own. Only Mary and the English writer John William Polidori took up the challenge by writing novels. Published in 1819, Polidori's book,
The Vampyre
, was a classic in its own right, spawning a literary vampire craze that never really ended. But Wollstonecraft's novel had even greater and longer-lasting impact.

By the time of its publication, Mary Wollstonecraft had become Mary Shelley, and her book had a title:
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus
. The critics hated the book almost as much as the public adored it. What made Shelley's story unique—and so compelling—was the centrality of science. Her Dr. Frankenstein did not simply create a monster. He created a living creature from nonliving material, life from nonlife, just as Andrew Crosse was later supposed to have done. The book was, in a sense, a modern creation myth, one that reflected new ideas about the laws that govern life. And these ideas sprang from the science and skepticism of the time. It was a tale that could not have been written by the old German writers whose ghost stories were told that rainy day in Switzerland. Some have argued that it was the first science fiction novel.

In a preface to the 1831 edition of
Frankenstein
, Mary Shelley described the inspiration behind the story. Her plot stemmed from a conversation between Lord Byron and her husband about the experiments concerning spontaneous generation conducted by a “Dr. Darwin”—a description that has tended to confuse later readers. The Darwin she was referring to was Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a larger-than-life character known as much for his brilliance as a scientist as for his eccentricities. He once famously turned down King George III's invitation to become royal physician. Corpulent and crippled by a childhood affliction with polio, Erasmus Darwin nonetheless fathered fourteen children by two wives and a governess, and scandalously prescribed sex as a cure for hypochondria.