The Flamingo’s Smile

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Gosse’s (1857) figure of a hippo’s skull showing the beveled tooth edges (a product of time and wear) necessary for function.

  This could go on forever (it nearly does in the book), but just one more dental example. Gosse, continuing upward on the topographic trajectory of his imaginary journey, reaches an inland wood and meets Babirussa, the famous Asian pig with upper canines growing out and arching back, almost piercing the skull:

  In the thickets of this nutmeg grove beside us there is a Babiroussa; let us examine him. Here he is, almost submerged in this tepid pool. Gentle swine with the circular tusk, please to open your pretty mouth!

  A Babirussa skull from Gosse (1857) showing implied time in wear of the molars and growth of the arched canines.

  The pig, created by God but an hour ago, obliges, thus displaying his worn molars and, particularly, the arching canines themselves, a product of long and continuous growth.

  I find this part of Gosse’s argument quite satisfactory as a solution, within the boundaries of his assumptions, to that classical dilemma of reasoning (comparable in importance to angels on pinpoints and Adam’s navel): “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Gosse’s answer: “Either, at God’s pleasure, with prochronic traces of the other.” But arguments are only as good as their premises, and Gosse’s inspired nonsense fails because an alternative assumption, now accepted as undoubtedly correct, renders the question irrelevant—namely, evolution itself. Gosse’s circles do not spin around eternally; each life cycle traces an ancestry back to inorganic chemicals in a primeval ocean. If organisms arose by acts of creation ab nihilo, then Gosse’s argument about prochronic traces must be respected. But if organisms evolved to their current state, Omphalos collapses to massive irrelevance. Gosse understood this threat perfectly well and chose to meet it by abrupt dismissal. Evolution, he allowed, discredited his system, but only a fool could accept such patent nonsense and idolatry (Gosse wrote Omphalos two years before Darwin published the Origin of Species).

  If any choose to maintain, as many do, that species were gradually brought to their present maturity from humbler forms…he is welcome to his hypothesis, but I have nothing to do with it. These pages will not touch him.

  But Gosse then faced a second and larger difficulty: The prochronic argument may work for organisms and their life cycles, but how can it be applied to the entire earth and its fossil record—for Gosse intended Omphalos as a treatise to reconcile the earth with biblical chronology, “an attempt to untie the geological knot.” His statements about prochronic parts in organisms are only meant as collateral support for the primary geological argument. And Gosse’s geological claim fails precisely because it rests upon such dubious analogy with what he recognized (since he gave it so much more space) as a much stronger argument about modern organisms.

  Gosse tried valiantly to advance for the entire earth the same two premises that made his prochronic argument work for organisms. But an unwilling world rebelled against such forced reasoning and Omphalos collapsed under its own weight of illogic. Gosse first tried to argue that all geological processes, like organic life cycles, move in circles:

  The problem, then, to be solved before we can certainly determine the question of analogy between the globe and the organism, is this—Is the life-history of the globe a cycle? If it is (and there are many reasons why this is probable), then I am sure prochronism must have been evident at its creation, since there is no point in a circle which does not imply previous points.

  But Gosse could never document any inevitable geological cyclicity, and his argument drowned in a sea of rhetoric and biblical allusion from Ecclesiastes: “All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full. Unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.”

  Secondly, to make fossils prochronic, Gosse had to establish an analogy so riddled with holes that it would make the most ardent mental tester shudder—embryo is to adult as fossil is to modern organism. One might admit that chickens require previous eggs, but why should a modern reptile (especially for an antievolutionist like Gosse) be necessarily linked to a previous dinosaur as part of a cosmic cycle? A python surely does not imply the ineluctable entombment of an illusory Triceratops into prochronic strata.

  With this epitome of Gosse’s argument, we can resolve the paradox posed at the outset. Gosse could accept strata and fossils as illusory and still advocate their study because he did not regard the prochronic part of a cycle as any less “true” or informative than its conventional diachronic segment. God decreed two kinds of existence—one constructed all at once with the appearance of elapsed time, the other progressing sequentially. Both dovetail harmoniously to form uninterrupted circles that, in their order and majesty, give us insight into God’s thoughts and plans.

  The prochronic part is neither a joke nor a test of faith; it represents God’s obedience to his own logic, given his decision to order creation in circles. As thoughts in God’s mind, solidified in stone by creation ab nihilo, strata and fossils are just as true as if they recorded the products of conventional time. A geologist should study them with as much care and zeal, for we learn God’s ways from both his prochronic and his diachronic objects. The geological time scale is no more meaningful as a yardstick than as a map of God’s thoughts.

  The acceptance of the principles presented in this volume…would not, in the least degree, affect the study of scientific geology. The character and order of the strata;…the successive floras and faunas; and all the other phenomena, would be facts still. They would still be, as now, legitimate subjects of examination and inquiry…. We might still speak of the inconceivably long duration of the processes in question, provided we understand ideal instead of actual time—that the duration was projected in the mind of God, and not really existent.

  Thus, Gosse offered Omphalos to practicing scientists as a helpful resolution of potential religious conflicts, not a challenge to their procedures or the relevance of their information.

  His son Edmund wrote of the great hopes that Gosse held for Omphalos:

  Never was a book cast upon the waters with greater anticipations of success than was this curious, this obstinate, this fanatical volume. My father lived in a fever of suspense, waiting for the tremendous issue. This “Omphalos” of his, he thought, was to bring all the turmoil of scientific speculation to a close, fling geology into the arms of Scripture, and make the lion eat grass with the lamb.

  Yet readers greeted Omphalos with disbelief, ridicule, or worse, stunned silence. Edmund Gosse continued:

  He offered it, with a glowing gesture, to atheists and Christians alike. This was to be the universal panacea; this the system of intellectual therapeutics which could not but heal all the maladies of the age. But, alas! atheists and Christians alike looked at it and laughed, and threw it away.

  Although Gosse reconciled himself to a God who would create such a minutely detailed, illusory past, this notion was anathema to most of his countrymen. The British are a practical, empirical people, “a nation of shopkeepers” in Adam Smith’s famous phrase; they tend to respect the facts of nature at face value and rarely favor the complex systems of nonobvious interpretation so popular in much of continental thought. Prochronism was simply too much to swallow. The Reverend Charles Kingsley, an intellectual leader of unquestionable devotion to both God and science, spoke for a consensus in stating that he could not “give up the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty years’ study of geology, and believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie.”

  And so it has gone for the argument of Omphalos ever since. Gosse did not invent it, and a few creationists ever since have revived it from time to time. But it has never been welcome or popular because it violates our intuitive notion of divine benevolence as free of devious behavior—for while Gosse saw divine brilliance in the idea of prochronism, most people cannot shuck their seat-of-the-pants feeling that it smacks of plain old unfairness. Our modern Ameri
can creationists reject it vehemently as imputing a dubious moral character to God and opt instead for the even more ridiculous notion that our miles of fossiliferous strata are all products of Noah’s flood and can therefore be telescoped into the literal time scale of Genesis.

  But what is so desperately wrong with Omphalos? Only this really (and perhaps paradoxically): that we can devise no way to find out whether it is wrong—or, for that matter, right. Omphalos is the classical example of an utterly untestable notion, for the world will look exactly the same in all its intricate detail whether fossils and strata are prochronic or products of an extended history. When we realize that Omphalos must be rejected for this methodological absurdity, not for any demonstrated factual inaccuracy, then we will understand science as a way of knowing, and Omphalos will serve its purpose as an intellectual foil or prod.

  Science is a procedure for testing and rejecting hypotheses, not a compendium of certain knowledge. Claims that can be proved incorrect lie within its domain (as false statements to be sure, but as proposals that meet the primary methodological criterion of testability). But theories that cannot be tested in principle are not part of science. Science is doing, not clever cogitation; we reject Omphalos as useless, not wrong.

  Gosse’s deep error lay in his failure to appreciate this essential character of scientific reasoning. He hammered his own coffin nails by continually emphasizing that Omphalos made no practical difference—that the world would look exactly the same with a prochronic or diachronic past. (Gosse thought that this admission would make his argument acceptable to conventional geologists; he never realized that it could only lead them to reject his entire scheme as irrelevant.) “I do not know,” he wrote, “that a single conclusion, now accepted, would need to be given up, except that of actual chronology.”

  Gosse emphasized that we cannot know where God placed his wafer of creation into the cosmic circle because prochronic objects, created ab nihilo, look exactly like diachronic products of actual time. To those who argued that coprolites (fossil excrement) prove the existence of active, feeding animals in a real geological past, Gosse replied that as God would create adults with feces in their intestines, so too would he place petrified turds into his created strata. (I am not making up this example for comic effect; you will find it on page 353 of Omphalos.) Thus, with these words, Gosse sealed his fate and placed himself outside the pale of science:

  Now, again I repeat, there is no imaginable difference to sense between the prochronic and the diachronic development. Every argument by which the physiologist can prove to demonstration that yonder cow was once a foetus in the uterus of its dam, will apply with exactly the same power to show that the newly created cow was an embryo, some years before its creation…. There is, and can be, nothing in the phenomena to indicate a commencement there, any more than anywhere else, or indeed, anywhere at all. The commencement, as a fact, I must learn from testimony; I have no means whatever of inferring it from phenomena.

  Gosse was emotionally crushed by the failure of Omphalos. During the long winter evenings of his discontent, in the January cold of 1858, he sat by the fire with his eight-year-old son, trying to ward off bitter thoughts by discussing the grisly details of past and current murders. Young Edmund heard of Mrs. Manning, who buried her victim in quicklime and was hanged in black satin; of Burke and Hare, the Scottish ghouls; and of the “carpetbag mystery,” a sackful of neatly butchered human parts hung from a pier on Waterloo Bridge. This may not have been the most appropriate subject for an impressionable lad (Edmund was, by his own memory, “nearly frozen into stone with horror”), yet I take some comfort in the thought that Philip Henry Gosse, smitten with the pain of rejection for his untestable theory, could take refuge in something so unambiguously factual, so utterly concrete.

  Postscript

  I have since learned that one of my favorite writers, Jorge Luis Borges, wrote a fascinating short comment on Omphalos (“The creation and P.H. Gosse” in Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952, published in 1964 by the University of Texas Press, Ruth L.C. Simms, translator). Borges begins by citing several literary references to the absence of a navel in our primal parents. Sir Thomas Browne, as a metaphor for original sin, writes in Religio Medici (1642), “the man without a navel yet lives in me” and James Joyce, in the first chapter of Ulysses (what cannot be found in this incredible book!) states, “Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel.” I particularly appreciated the lovely epitome and insight of Borges’s conclusion (though I disagree with his second point), “I should like to emphasize two virtues in Gosse’s forgotten thesis. First, its rather monstrous elegance. Second: its involuntary reduction of a creatio ab nihilo to absurdity, its indirect demonstration that the universe is eternal, as the Vedanta, Heraclitus, Spinoza and the atomists thought.”

  7 | The Freezing of Noah

  TIDBITS OF A DISTANT PAST often reemerge into our present with surprising relevance. After all, human thought and emotion have a universality that transcends time and converts the different stages of history into theaters that provide lessons for modern players.

  I want to tell a tale of twenty years in the history of British geology—roughly 1820 to 1840. The story displays science working at its best. One of Britain’s premier geologists proposed a theory. This clearly formulated statement had roots (as do all theories) in the social position and psychological constitution of its founder. But it was also empirically based and eminently testable. The theory was tested, and it failed. Its two primary supporters recanted forthrightly and later led an effort to formulate different and more adequate explanations for the phenomena that had inspired the original theory.

  In 1823, the Reverend William Buckland (1784–1856), Oxford University’s first “official” geologist, published a scientific treatise with a striking title that reflected its author’s attempt to amalgamate his two professional worlds—religion and geology. He called it Reliquiae diluvianae, or Relics of the Flood. Its subtitle indicated the kind of evidence that Buckland would cite to support his theory about the geological expression of Noah’s debacle: Observations on the Organic Remains Contained in Caves, Fissures, and Diluvial Gravel, and on Other Geological Phenomena Attesting the Action of a Universal Deluge. Buckland’s theory was tested and rejected by geologists who were both creationists and genuine scientists. Noah’s flood has not been an issue among geologists for the past century and a half.

  Those modern fundamentalists who call themselves “scientific creationists” have resurrected Noah and made his flood the linchpin of their system. In fact, they ascribe all fossil-bearing strata to this single event, whereas Buckland, much more sensibly, sought only to identify the uppermost, unconsolidated film of loams and gravels as products of Noah’s universal deluge. The recognition of Noah’s flood as a primary geological agent was specifically mandated in the Arkansas “creation science” law, declared unconstitutional in January 1982. I know no better illustration of the difference between science and pseudoscience than a comparison of Buckland’s rational approach—concrete proposal, test, and rejection—with the dogmatism of fundamentalists.

  Buckland was not the first geologist to propose a “flood theory” linking Noah’s deluge to the evidence of geology, but his new version had the twin virtues of sensibility and testability. The granddaddy of flood theories (and the one now embraced so anachronistically by creationists) had been kicking around for several centuries—the idea that a single flood had produced all, or nearly all, the geological strata. This version was no longer credible by Buckland’s time, and he dismissed it in a single paragraph written in 1836 and still quite sufficient to refute what our moral majoritarians tried to impose upon the children of Arkansas:

  Some have attempted to ascribe the formation of all the stratified rocks to the effects of the Mosaic Deluge; an opinion which is irreconcilable with the enormous thickness and almost infinite subdivisions of these strata, and with the numerous and regular successions which they contain of the remains of animals
and vegetables, differing more and more widely from existing species, as the strata in which we find them are older, or placed at greater depths.

  Other geologists had viewed the Flood as a time of upheaval on the earth’s surface. Old lands foundered, while new continents rose from the oceanic depths—thus explaining the presence of fossil shells on mountaintops. But Buckland recognized that the earth had an ancient history, punctuated sporadically (but often) with episodes of uplift. He needed no recent flood to explain the earth’s topography and the geological contents of its mountains.

  Buckland’s flood was a less eventful, less catastrophic, and much more believable episode. He proposed that floodwaters had risen over continents already in their present positions, buried them for a short period only—“a universal and transient deluge,” in his words—and left as their memorial only a superficial layer of loam and gravel, and a set of topographical features carved by the waters as they rose and fell.

  Reliquiae diluvianae is not a waffling, grandiose theoretical treatise on all effects and causes of the Flood, but a specific empirical study of caves and their associated fauna. Buckland had previously examined a cave at Kirkdale, in Yorkshire, and had won the Royal Society’s Copley Medal for his efforts. Now he expanded his work to other caves in Britain and to a series of caverns and fissures in Germany.

  As his general argument for the importance of caves in attesting to a recent and transient flood, Buckland held that the rising waters had so disturbed all open-air environments that only secluded caves preserved fair evidence for the integrity of antediluvian communities.