I Have Landed

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Bibliography

  Clinton, W. J. 1994. Memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies. Office of the Press Secretary, 26 April 1994.

  Druse, K., and M. Roach. 1994. The Natural Habitat Garden. New York: Clarkson Potter.

  Gould, S. J. 1991. Exaptation: A crucial tool for an evolutionary psychology. Journal of Social Issues 47(3):43–65.

  Gould, S. J., and R. C. Lewontin. 1979. The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 205:581–98.

  Groening, G., and J. Wolschke-Bulmahn. 1992. Some notes on the mania for native plants in Germany. Landscape Journal 11(2):116–26.

  Jensen, J. 1956. Siftings, the major portion of The Clearing and collected writings. Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour.

  Paley, W. 1802. Natural Theology. London: R. Faulder.

  Smyser, C. A. 1982. Nature’s Design: A Practical Guide to Natural Landscaping. Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Press.

  Wolschke-Bulmahn, J. 1995. Political landscapes and technology: Nazi Germany and the landscape design of the Reichsautobahnen (Reich Motor Highways). Selected CELA Annual Conference Papers, vol. 7. Nature and Technology. Iowa State University, 9–12 September 1995.

  Wolschke-Bulmahn, J., and G. Groening. 1992. The ideology of the nature garden: Nationalistic trends in garden design in Germany during the early twentieth century. Journal of Garden History 12(1):73–80.

  25

  Age-Old Fallacies of Thinking and Stinking

  WE SHUDDER AT THE THOUGHT OF REPEATING THE INItial sins of our species. Thus, Hamlet’s uncle bewails his act of fratricide by recalling Cain’s slaying of Abel:

  O! my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;

  It hath the primal eldest curse upon ’t;

  A brother’s murder!

  Such metaphors of unsavory odor seem especially powerful because our sense of smell lies so deep in our evolutionary construction, yet remains (perhaps for this reason) so undervalued and often unmentioned in our culture. A later seventeenth-century English writer recognized this potency and particularly warned his readers against using olfactory metaphors because common people will take them literally:

  Metaphorical expression did often proceed into a literal construction; but was fraudulent. . . . How dangerous it is in sensible things to use metaphorical expressions unto the people, and what absurd conceits they will swallow in their literals.

  This quotation appears in the 1646 work of Sir Thomas Browne: Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or, Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenents [sic], and Commonly Presumed Truths. Browne, a physician from Norwich, remains better known for his wonderful and still widely read work of 1642, the part autobiographical, part philosophical, and part whimsical Religio Medici, or “Religion of a Doctor.” The Pseudodoxia Epidemica (his Latinized title for a plethora of false truths) became the granddaddy of a most honorable genre still vigorously pursued—exposés of common errors and popular ignorance, particularly the false beliefs most likely to cause social harm.

  I cited Browne’s statement from the one chapter (among more than a hundred) sure to send shudders down the spine of modern readers—his debunking of the common belief “that Jews stink.” Browne, although almost maximally philo-Semitic by the standards of his century, was not free of all prejudicial feelings against Jews. He attributed the origin of the canard about Jewish malodor—hence, my earlier quotation—to a falsely literal reading of a metaphor legitimately applied (or so he thought) to the descendants of people who had advocated the crucifixion of Jesus. Browne wrote: “Now the ground that begat or propagated this assertion, might be the distasteful averseness of the Christian from the Jew, upon the villainy of that fact, which made them abominable and stink in the nostrils of all men.”

  As a rationale for debunking a compendium of common errors, Browne correctly notes that false beliefs arise from incorrect theories about nature and therefore serve as active impediments to knowledge, not just as laughable signs of primitivity: “To purchase a clear and warrantable body of truth, we must forget and part with much we know.” Moreover, Browne notes, truth is hard to ascertain and ignorance is far more common than accuracy. Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, Browne uses “America” as a metaphor for domains of uncharted ignorance, and he bewails our failure to use good tools of reason as guides through this terra incognita: “We find no open tract . . . in this labyrinth; but are oft-times fain to wander in the America and untravelled parts of truth.”

  The Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne’s peregrination through the maze of human ignorance, contains 113 chapters gathered into seven books on such general topics as mineral and vegetable bodies, animals, humans, Bible tales, and geographical and historical myths. Browne debunks quite an array of common opinions, including claims that elephants have no joints, that the legs of badgers are shorter on one side than the other, and that ostriches can digest iron.

  As an example of his style of argument, consider book 3, chapter 4: “That a bever [sic] to escape the hunter, bites off his testicles or stones”—a harsh tactic that, according to legend, either distracts the pursuer or persuades him to settle for a meal smaller than an entire body. Browne labels this belief as “a tenet very ancient; and hath had thereby advantages of propagation. . . . The Egyptians also failed in the ground of their hieroglyphick, when they expressed the punishment of adultery by the bever depriving himself of his testicles, which was amongst them the penalty of such incontinency.”

  Browne prided himself on using a mixture of reason and observation to achieve his debunking. He begins by trying to identify the source of error—in this case a false etymological inference from the beaver’s Latin name, Castor, which does not share the same root with “castration” (as the legend had assumed), but derives ultimately from a Sanskrit world for “musk”; and an incorrect interpretation of purposeful mutilation from the internal position, and therefore near invisibility, of the beaver’s testicles. He then cites the factual evidence of intact males, and the reasoned argument that a beaver couldn’t reach his own testicles even if he wanted to bite them off (and thus, cleverly, the source of common error—the external invisibility of the testicles—becomes the proof of falsity!).

  The testicles properly so called, are of a lesser magnitude, and seated inwardly upon the loins: and therefore it were not only a fruitless attempt, but impossible act, to eunuchate or castrate themselves: and might be an hazardous practice of art, if at all attempted by others.

  Book 7, chapter 2 debunks the legend “that a man hath one rib less than a woman”—”a common conceit derived from the history of Genesis, wherein it stands delivered, that Eve was framed out of a rib of Adam.”(I regret to report that this bit of nonsense still commands some support. I recently appeared on a nationally televised call-in show for high school students, where one young woman, a creationist, cited this “well-known fact” as proof of the Bible’s inerrancy and evolution’s falsity.) Again, Browne opts for a mixture of logic and observation in stating: “this will not consist with reason or inspection.” A simpie count on skeletons affirms equality of number between sexes (Browne, after all, maintained his “day job” as a physician and should have known). Moreover, reason provides no argument for assuming that Adam’s single loss would be propagated to future members of his sex:

  Although we concede there wanted one rib in the sceleton of Adam, yet were it repugnant unto reason and common observation, that his posterity should want the same [in the old meaning of “want” as “lack”]. For we observe that mutilations are not transmitted from father unto son; the blind begetting such as can see, men with one eye children with two, and cripples mutilate in their own persons do come out perfect in their generations.

  Book 4, chapter 10—“That Jews Stink”—is one of the longest, and clearly held special importance for Dr. Browne. He invokes more-elaborate arguments, but follows the same procedure used to dispel less noxious myths—citation of cont
ravening facts interlaced with more general support from logic and reason.

  Browne begins with a statement of the fallacy: “That Jews stink naturally, that is, that in their race and nation there is an evil savor, is a received opinion.” Browne then allows that species may have distinctive odors, and that individuals surely do: “Aristotle says no animal smells sweet save the pard. We confess that beside the smell of the species, there may be individual odors, and every man may have a proper and peculiar savor; which although not perceptible unto man, who hath this sense but weak, is yet sensible unto dogs, who hereby can single out their masters in the dark.”

  In principle, then, discrete groups of humans might carry distinctive odors, but reason and observation permit no such attribution to Jews as a group: “That an unsavory odor is gentilitous or national unto the Jews, if rightly understood, we cannot well concede, nor will the information of Reason or Sense induce it.”

  On factual grounds, Browne asserts, direct experience has provided no evidence for this noxious legend: “This offensive odor is no way discoverable in their Synagogues where many are, and by reason of their number could not be concealed: nor is the same discernible in commerce or conversation with such as are cleanly in apparel, and decent in their houses.” The “test case” of Jewish converts to Christianity proves the point, for even the worst bigots do not accuse such people of smelling bad: “Unto converted Jews who are of the same seed, no man imputeth this unsavory odor; as though aromatized by their conversion, they lost their scent with their religion, and smelt no longer.” If people of Jewish lineage could be identified by smell, the Inquisition would greatly benefit from a sure-fire guide for identifying insincere converts: “There are at present many thousand Jews in Spain . . . and some dispensed withal even to the degree of Priesthood; it is a matter very considerable, and could they be smelled out, would much advantage, not only the Church of Christ, but also the Coffers of Princes.”

  Turning to arguments from reason, foul odors might arise among groups of people from unhealthy habits of diet or hygiene. But Jewish dietary laws guarantee moderation and good sense, while drinking habits tend to abstemiousness—“seldom offending in ebriety or excess of drink, nor erring in gulosity or superfluity of meats; whereby they prevent indigestion and crudities, and consequently putrescence of humors.”

  If no reason can therefore be found in Jewish habits of life, the only conceivable rationale for a noxious racial odor would lie in a divine “curse derived upon them by Christ . . . as a badge or brand of a generation that crucified their Salvator.” But Browne rejects this proposal even more forcefully as a “conceit without all warrant; and an easie way to take off dispute in what point of obscurity soever.” The invocation of miraculous agency, when no natural explanation can be found, is a coward’s or lazy man’s escape from failure. (Browne does not object to heavenly intervention for truly great events like Noah’s flood or the parting of the Red Sea, but a reliance upon miracles for small items, like the putative racial odor of unfairly stigmatized people, makes a mockery of divine grandeur. Browne then heaps similar ridicule on the legend that Ireland has no snakes because Saint Patrick cast them out with his rod. Such inappropriate claims for a myriad of minor miracles only stifles discussion about the nature of phenomena and the workings of genuine causes.)

  But Browne then caps his case against the proposition “that Jews stink” with an even stronger argument based on reason. The entire subject, he argues, makes no sense because the category in question—the Jewish people—does not represent the kind of entity that could bear such properties as a distinctive national odor.

  Among the major fallacies of human reason, such “category mistakes” are especially common in the identification of groups and the definition of their characters—problems of special concern to taxonomists like myself. Much of Browne’s text is archaic, and strangely fascinating, therefore, as a kind of conceptual fossil. But his struggle with errors of categories in debunking the proposition “that Jews stink” interleaves a layer of modern relevance, and uncovers a different kind of reason for contemporary interest in the arguments of Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

  Browne begins by noting that traits of individuals can’t automatically be extended to properties of groups. We do not doubt that individuals have distinctive odors, but groups might span the full range of individual differences, and thereby fail to maintain any special identity. What kind of group might therefore qualify as a good candidate for such distinctive properties?

  Browne argues that such a group would have to be tightly defined, either by strict criteria of genealogy (so that members might share properties by heredity of unique descent) or by common habits and modes of life not followed by other people (but Browne had already shown that Jewish lifestyles of moderation and hygiene disproved any claim for unsavory national odor).

  Browne then clinches his case by arguing that the Jewish people do not represent a strict genealogical group. Jews have been dispersed throughout the world, reviled and despised, expelled and excluded. Many subgroups have been lost by assimilation, others diluted by extensive intermarriage. Most nations, in fact, are strongly commingled and therefore do not represent discrete groups by genealogical definition; this common tendency has been exaggerated among the Jewish people. Jews are not a distinct hereditary group, and therefore cannot maintain such properties as a national odor:

  There will be found no easie assurance to fasten a material or temperamental propriety upon any nation; . . . much more will it be difficult to make out this affection in the Jews; whose race however pretended to be pure, must needs have suffered inseparable commixtures with nations of all sorts . . . It being therefore acknowledged that some [Jews] are lost, evident that others are mixed, and not assured that any are distinct, it will be hard to establish this quality [of national odor] upon the Jews.

  In many years of pondering over fallacious theories of biological determinism, and noting their extraordinary persistence and tendency to reemerge after presumed extirpation, I have been struck by a property that I call “surrogacy.” Specific arguments raise a definite charge against a particular group—that Jews stink, that Irishmen drink, that women love mink, that Africans can’t think—but each specific claim acts as a surrogate for any other. The general form of argument remains perennially the same, always permeated by identical fallacies over the centuries. Scratch the argument that women, by their biological nature, cannot be effective as heads of state and you will uncover the same structure of false inference underlying someone else’s claim that African Americans will never form a high percentage of the pool of Ph.D. candidates.

  Thus, Browne’s old refutation of the myth “that Jews stink” continues to be relevant for our modern struggle, since the form of his argument applies to our current devaluings of people for supposedly inborn and unalterable defects of intelligence or moral vision. Fortunately (since I belong to the group), Jews are not taking much heat these days (though I need hardly mention the searing events of my parents’ generation to remind everyone that current acceptance should breed no complacency). Following Browne’s strategy, any particular version of this general claim can be debunked with a mixture of factual citation and logical argument. I shall not go through the full exercise here, lest this essay become a book. But I do wish to emphasize that Browne’s crowning point in refuting the legend “that Jews stink”—his explication of category mistakes in defining Jews as a biological group—also undermines the modern myth of black intellectual inferiority, from Jensen and Shockley in the 1960s to Murray and Herrnstein and The Bell Curve in the 1990s.

  The African American population of the United States today cannot be identified as a genealogical unit in the same sense that Browne’s Jews lacked inclusive definition by descent. As a legacy of our ugly history of racism, anyone with a visually evident component of African ancestry belongs to the category of “black” even though many persons so designated can trace their roots to substantial, often majori
tarian, Caucasian sources as well. (An old “trick” question for baseball aficionados asks: “What Italian American player hit more than forty home runs for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1953”? The answer is “Roy Campanella,” who had a Caucasian Italian father and a black mother, but who, by our social conventions, became identified as black.)

  (As a footnote on the theme of surrogacy, explanations of the same category mistake for blacks and Jews often follow the same prejudicial form of blaming the victim. Browne, though generally and refreshingly free of anti-Jewish bias, cites a particularly ugly argument in explaining high rates of miscegenation between Jews and Christians—the supposed lasciviousness of Jewish women and their preference for blond Christian men over swarthy and unattractive Jews. Browne writes: “Nor are fornications infrequent between them both [Jewish women and Christian men]; there commonly passing opinions of invitement, that their women desire copulation with them rather than their own nation, and affect Christian carnality above circumcised venery.” American racists often made the same claim during slavery days—a particularly disgraceful lie in this case, for the argument functions primarily to excuse rapists by blaming the truly powerless. For example, Louis Agassiz wrote in 1863: “As soon as the sexual desires are awakening in the young men of the South, they find it easy to gratify themselves by the readiness with which they are met by colored [half-breed] house servants . . . This blunts his better instincts in that direction and leads him gradually to seek more spicy partners, as I have heard the full blacks called by fast young men.”)