The Flamingo’s Smile
Page 18
Let us examine the two claims separately. Consider first Oken’s epitome of his belief that all animals form a single series marked by the addition of organs, aphorisms 3067–3072 of his Lehrbuch:
The animal kingdom is only one animal….
The animal kingdom is only a dismemberment of the highest animal, that is, of Man.
Animals become nobler in rank, the greater the number of organs that are collectively liberated or severed from the Grand Animal, and that enter into combination. An animal that, for example, lived only as intestine, would be, doubtless, inferior to one that with the intestine were to combine a skin….
Animals are gradually perfected…by adding organ unto organ….
Each animal ranks therefore above the other; two of them never stand on an equal plane or level.
Animals are distinguished…by the number of their different organs.
But such a simple linear order could not satisfy the soul of a man who believed that every nuance of nature had deep meaning in its union with all other parts. Oken could not leave the amoeba in its pond or the crab on the seashore, for all creatures must be elements of a complex and interconnected harmony, not merely the lower rungs of a ladder. Thus, Oken developed a scheme for crossties; he would classify nature as a web of meaning, not just a line of progress.
Oken felt that he had broken the code of nature’s numerical order in recognizing pervasive cycles of five based upon the organs of sense in their own ascending sequence: feeling, taste, smell, hearing, and sight. Driven by his romantic vision of living matter yearning for perfection along simple paths bursting with meaning, Oken found ascending circles of five everywhere, from the grandest scale of all animals to the smallest of human races.
He arranged the entire animal kingdom in a rising cycle of five, reflecting the successive addition (or perfection) of sensory organs. “The animal classes,” he wrote, “are virtually nothing else than a representation of the sense organs…. They must be arranged in accordance with them.” Invertebrates, fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals, or feeling, taste, smell, hearing, and sight. I shall not burden this essay with Oken’s forced and specious arguments for these fanciful correspondences. Recalcitrant, complex nature behaves very badly whenever we try to force such simple schemes upon her (consider, for example, the difficulty of identifying mammals with sight, when the lower class of birds contains species with vision more acute than any mammal’s). I shall simply cite Oken’s rationale.
Strictly speaking, there are only 5 animal classes: Dermatozoa, or the Invertebrata; Glossozoa, or the Fishes, as being those animals in whom a true tongue makes for the first time its appearance; Rhinozoa, or the Reptiles, wherein the nose opens for the first time into the mouth and inhales air; Otozoa, or the Birds, in which the ear for the first time opens externally; Ophthalmozoa, or the Thricozoa [mammals], in whom all the organs of sense are present and complete, the eyes being moveable and covered with two palpebrae or lids.
As for the large, so for the small. Oken even managed to portray the conventional racist ordering of human groups by his sensory analogy, although he didn’t even attempt a rationale for his choices:
The skin-man is the black, African
The tongue-man is the brown, Australian-Malayan
The nose-man is the red, American
The ear-man is the yellow, Asiatic-Mongolian
The eye-man is the white, European.
But how can nature move in cycles regulated by organs of sense and, at the same time, along a single path of progress governed by the addition of organs? We need an image, an analogy, and a chart.
Image: The object that moves up the path of progress is not a striding creature, but a rolling circle with five spokes marked feeling, taste, smell, hearing, and sight. Each time a spoke touches the ground, it deposits a creature representing its level of sensory advance along the path of progress. When the highest spoke of sight finally reaches the ground, a new and smaller wheel starts rolling again, depositing creatures along the same sensory sequence.
Analogy: Several theories of history in Western thought manage to unite ideas of continuous progress with cyclical repetitions. In the sixteenth-century glass of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, a powerful figure of Jonah, belched forth from the whale’s belly, overlies an image of Christ rising from the tomb—for both men came to life again on the third day in extremis. Christian history moves inexorably forward, but the New Testament replays the Old, and God’s meaning lies revealed in the repetition.
Chart: The following chart shows four cycles of five-part sensory wheels: all animals, all mammals, the highest group of mammals, and the highest species of the highest group. For Oken, these identifications with sense organs and specification of five-part wheels at all scales throughout nature did not represent an artificial system constructed to aid memory or facilitate recall, but a discovery of nature’s underlying reality. He expected practical results from his correspondences. He tried, for example, to arrange the mineral and vegetable world in five-part wheels as well. Since our medicines are made of chemicals and plants, the correct correspondences will specify proper treatments. We might cure Africans with the plants of feeling, Caucasians, with plants of sight.
REPRINTED FROM NATURAL HISTORY.
If once the genera of Minerals, Plants and Animals come to stand correctly opposite each other, a great advantage will accrue therefrom to the science of Materia Medica; for corresponding genera will act specifically upon each other.
I admire the sweep and coherence of Oken’s vision, but I’ll descend to the realm of sound and be a monkey’s uncle if it says anything much about nature.
As Oken constructed his ascending wheels of five in Germany during the decades before Darwin, another taxonomic theory, the quinary system, led many English naturalists to arrange all organisms into different circles of five. The quinary system invites comparison with Oken’s scheme because it also built circles of five at different scales and sought correspondences between organisms at the same position on different circles. It also attempted to resolve the apparent contradiction between linear progress and circular repetition.
The quinary system rests upon a separation between two kinds of similarity: affinity and analogy. Ties of affinity unite forms on the same circle; analogies specify correspondence between circles. For example, William Swainson, a leading British quinarian, justified the following circle of vertebrates in 1835. We recognize fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals as five groups of common anatomical design. But how can they represent both an ascending pathway and a closed circle of five? Swainson argues that we must unite each pair by an intermediate form showing ties of affinity—fish to amphibian by the tadpole, amphibian to reptile by the adult frog, reptile to bird by the flying pterodactyl, bird to mammal by the duck-billed platypus, and mammal back to fish by the largest agent of natural transport, whales. Since whales connect the highest mammals to the lowest fish, the path of progress curves back on itself and forms a circle. “Nature herself,” Swainson proclaimed, “describes the mighty circle and pronounces it complete.”
REPRINTED FROM NATURAL HISTORY.
The circle of vertebrates can then be united with other circles at both smaller and larger scales by ties of analogy linking groups in similar positions. (I must confess that Swainson’s arguments seem as forced as Oken’s. The quinarians never presented rigorous criteria for why certain relationships should be called affinity and others analogy. One gets the uncomfortable feeling that they constructed their preferred circles beforehand and then invented ad hoc justifications for affinities and analogies so ordained—although the method supposedly worked the other way round, building circles and correspondences from raw data of affinity and analogy.) For example, Swainson arranged all animals into a circle of Radiata (echinoderms and their kin), Acrita (protozoans and other “simple” creatures), Testacea (mollusks), Annulosa (segmented worms, insects, and crustaceans), and Vertebrata. The supposed ties of analogy
to the vertebrate circle seem a bit contrived, to say the least: mammals with vertebrates as the most perfect of each circle; fish with radiates because both are exclusively aquatic, “not one species in either group having yet been discovered upon the land” Amphibia with Acrita because both (get this) “however dissimilar in other respects are remarkable for changing their shapes more than any other of the aberrant types in either circle” reptiles with mollusks because both serpents and snails lack feet and crawl on their bellies; and birds with Annulosa because insects fly too.
I was disappointed to discover that the article on Swainson in the historians’ bible, the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (called the DSB by all pros), follows the old tradition, criticized earlier in this essay, of dismissing superseded systems as pathetically foolish in the light of modern knowledge:
His indefatigable pursuit of natural history and conscientious labor on its behalf deserve to be remembered as a set-off against the injury he unwittingly caused by his adherence to the absurd quinary system…. This extraordinary theory was pertinaciously held by Swainson throughout his zoological career and it certainly impaired much of his work.
Oken and Swainson were severely and legitimately criticized in their own terms. (I have tried to raise some of these arguments by exposing the fanciful criteria used to establish circles of five and to draw analogies between them.) But they were not fools or madmen, and their systems were not absurd. Oken and Swainson ranked highly among the best natural historians of Europe, and their numerical systems of taxonomy were popular and serious contenders among contemporary schemes for ordering nature.
Rigid numerical systems only become absurd in the later light of evolution, for their respectability hinges upon theories favored for the causes of nature’s order. If God placed species on earth (as Swainson believed), then he might have acted with a numerical precision displaying the rigor and harmony of his thoughts. If simple laws, rather than accidents of history, establish the sequence of organisms (as Oken held), then numerical order might arise among animals just as the periodic table regulates chemical elements. Numerology in taxonomy may be dismissed as absurd mysticism today, but in Oken and Swainson’s time, this approach embodied a reasonable result of defensible theories about the causes of nature’s order. Swainson put it right on the line when he inferred from quinary order both God’s existence and his special concern for us:
When we discover evident indications of a definite plan, upon which all these modifications have been regulated by a few simple and universal laws, our wonder is as much excited at the inconceivable wisdom and goodness of the SUPREME by whom these myriads of beings have been created and are now preserved, as at the mental blindness and perverted understanding of those philosophers, falsely so called, who would persuade us, that even Man, the last and best of created things, is too insignificant for the special care of Omnipotence.
Darwin destroyed the rule of five forever because he removed its rationale by reconstructing nature. His agent of destruction was not evolution itself. I can imagine evolutionary theories (indeed some have been proposed) so committed to foreordination by simple laws or directing intelligences that numerical order might still emerge from rigidly predictable process. Darwin’s exterminating angel was, simply, history. Evolution does not unroll according to simple laws specifying necessary results. It follows the vagaries of history. Its pathways are twisted and churned by changing environments, from minor shifts in temperature and precipitation to the rise of mountain chains, the growth of glaciers, the drift of continents, and even (probably) the impact of comets or asteroids. Evolution cannot achieve engineering perfection because it must work with inherited parts available from previous histories in different contexts: the panda’s “thumb” is a clumsy, detached wrist bone, pressed into service because the true first digit became committed to other functions during ancestral life as a conventional carnivore; we suffer the pain of aching backs and the annoyances of hernias because large four-footed creatures of our lineage were not really made to walk on their toes—four legs good, two legs not so good.
How could animals evolve along the tortuous pathways of history and arrange themselves neatly into circles of five? Numerical precision cannot regulate taxonomy because life unfolds in time. Evolution records a complex, irrevocable history; its pathways were not preordained by simple rules or commanding intelligences.
But life regulated by history still has order—firm, ineluctable, definite, testable pattern. Its order is the topology of its proper metaphor—the tree of life. Its order is genealogy, connection by branching and descent. Swainson described the biological world correctly before he went too far:
Had the order of nature been so irregular that we had found she created some birds with four feet, others with two, and some with none; or that, like the fabulous griffin, there were creatures half quadruped, half bird; or, if insects had been found with the feet of quadrupeds, and the toes of birds; in short, had such compounds in the animal world existed, the foundations of natural history, as a science, could never have been laid.
Darwin then found the reason for order and changed our world forever:
Something more is included in our classification than mere resemblance. I believe that something more is…propinquity of descent,—the only known cause of the similarity of organic beings.
4 | Trends and Their Meaning
14 | Losing the Edge
I WISH TO PROPOSE a new kind of explanation for the oldest chestnut of the hot stove league—the most widely discussed trend in the history of baseball statistics: the extinction of the .400 hitter. Baseball aficionados wallow in statistics, a sensible obsession that outsiders grasp with difficulty and ridicule often. The reasons are not hard to fathom. In baseball, each essential action is a contest between two individuals—batter and pitcher, or batter and fielder—thus creating an arena of truly individual achievement within a team sport.
The abstraction of personal achievement in other team sports makes comparatively little sense. Goals scored in basketball or yards gained in football depend on the indissoluble intricacy of team play; a home run is you against him. Moreover, baseball has been played under a set of rules and conditions sufficiently constant during our century to make comparisons meaningful, yet sufficiently different in detail to provide endless grist for debate (the “dead ball” of 1900–1920 versus the “lively ball” of later years, the introduction of night games and relief pitchers, the invention of the slider, the changing and irregular sizes of ball parks, nature’s own versus Astroturf).
No subject has inspired more argument than the decline and disappearance of the .400 hitter—or, more generally, the drop in league-leading batting averages during our century. Since we wallow in nostalgia and have a lugubrious tendency to compare the present unfavorably with a past “golden era,” this trend acquires all the more fascination because it carries moral implications linked metaphorically with junk foods, nuclear bombs, and eroding environments as signs of the current decline and impending fall of Western civilization.
Between 1901 and 1930, league-leading averages of .400 or better were common enough (nine out of thirty years) and achieved by several players (Lajoie, Cobb, Jackson, Sisler, Heilmann, Hornsby, and Terry), and averages over .380 scarcely merited extended commentary. Yet the bounty dried up abruptly thereafter. In 1930 Bill Terry hit .401 to become the last .400 hitter in the National League; and Ted Williams’s .406 in 1941 marked the last pinnacle for the American League. Since Williams, the greatest hitter I ever saw, attained this goal in the year I was born (and I am, alas, no spring chicken), only three men have hit higher than .380 in a single season: Williams again in 1957 (.388, at age thirty-nine, with my vote for the greatest batting accomplishment of our era), Rod Carew (.388 in 1977), and George Brett (.390 in 1980). Where have all the hitters gone?
League averages for our century
American League
National League
1901–1910
.251
.253
1911–1920
.259
.257
1921–1930
.286
.288
1931–1940
.279
.272
1941–1950
.260
.260
1951–1960
.257
.260
1961–1970
.245
.253
1971–1980
.258
.256
Two rather different kinds of explanation have been traditionally offered. The first, naïve and moral, simply acknowledges with a sigh that there were giants on the earth in those days. Something in us needs to castigate the present in the light of an unrealistically rosy past. In researching the history of misconduct, for example, I discovered that every generation (at least since the mid-nineteenth century) has imagined itself engulfed in a crime wave. Each age has also witnessed a shocking decline in sportsmanship. Similarly, senior citizens of the hot stove league, and younger fans as well (for nostalgia may have its greatest emotional impact on those too young to know a past reality directly), tend to argue that the .400 hitters of old simply cared more and tried harder. Well, Ty Cobb may have been a paragon of intensity and a bastard to boot, and Pete Rose may be a gentleman by comparison, but today’s play is anything but lackadaisical. Say what you will; monetary rewards in the millions do inspire single-minded effort.