From my own point of view, I had treated Walcott with fairness and abiding respect (I will even confess to a feeling of awe when I contemplate his accomplishments). I had tried to ferret out his biases and prejudices, but these, to me, mark his humanity, not his failing as a scientist. (Moreover, a key part of the Burgess drama—Walcott’s great and interesting error of the shoehorn—must be explicated, for basic reasons of historical truth, in terms of his constraining biases). But from the standpoint of Clark’s generation, and from the heart of his beautiful vision, such talk can only degrade the work of a great scientist—for science gathers information in objective respect for nature’s factuality, and Walcott was a great and hyperproductive empiricist.
Clark unified his wonderful talk with a metaphor that he wove skillfully in and around his narrative of Walcott’s remarkable accomplishments. When Walcott was young, and limited by restricted resources to local travel for collection of trilobites around his native town of Utica, New York, he rode (in Clark’s metaphor) on a bicycle. When he joined the Geological Survey, he could collect his data “and put them on a rail, on a freight car.” And then, “when he became director of the survey, he was given a locomotive and as many freight cars as he wanted. He filled them up, one after the other, bringing them back to Washington.”
Clark continually referred to his metaphor as “a fantasy,” but I cannot imagine a more appropriate summary for his noble vision of science. Think of all the components. A railway line runs in a definite direction, as science moves towards an external truth. Freight cars bear the factual goods that form the content of the enterprise. The locomotive, propelled by its own steam, represents the proper scientist hauling his booty from nature down the highway of truth.
Clark’s metaphor even provided an image for the aspect of Walcott’s career that he could not depict in a thoroughly positive light—restricted time for scientific work, and no time at all for the Burgess Shale, as a consequence of administrative burdens.
On one of his railroad trips, fairly late in life, he didn’t notice an open switch in front of him. The locomotive tripped the open switch; the cars all behind followed off the main line into the wilderness. And there they stayed for a number of years…. Nothing more was done on the wonderful collection that he found.
Walcott’s locomotive (his drive and persona) continued forward as his administrative activities, but he had left his freight cars, full of scientific facts, on the sidings.
Science, for Clark, does move inexorably forward towards truth, but progress can be stalled by externalities. The freight cars remained on the sideline for nearly fifty years, until a “young fellow” came along and said: “I know what’s wrong with the fossils from the Burgess Shale, and I think I will have a crack at them.” (Harry Whittington began his Burgess work in his late fifties and continued into his seventies. As I approach that magic mid-century mark, I note with delight that some colleagues might still call me a “young fellow” even ten years from now.) So Whittington went back to pick up Walcott’s freight cars and to continue down the straight and narrow road to truth: “He said, well, we have to get those cars on their way; so he jumped aboard the locomotive, backed up, and got the whole train onto the main track.”
What a remarkable antithesis of interpretation for the same basic story. What I had read as a deep (and fascinating) conceptual error, permanently constraining and born of ideological commitments, was, for Clark, merely a pause (however unfortunate) in the inexorable progress of scientific knowledge.
I could simply end by defending my own reading, while expressing respect for Clark, but I would not dare such a conclusion for two reasons. First, we need mythology, in the admirable sense of universal and inspirational legend (not the pejorative connotation of falsehood)—and Clark’s vision of science is mythology in the best and noblest meaning. Second, who can say that my historiography is “right” and his “wrong.” They are both faithful to the factual record, and they both offer insight. I will defend my account as a best telling for themes of motivation, social context, and interplay of fact and theory in the history of ideas.
But my themes do not exhaust the content of science; and, as I listened to Clark, I realized that I had left something out in my choice of focus. Clark kept emphasizing the immensity of Walcott’s empirical work—his massive multivolumed monographs on fossils and strata. (At the conclusion of his talk, Clark held up Walcott’s weighty, two-volume treatise on Cambrian brachiopods as an epitome of his excellence and zeal. Clark then ended his talk with a stunning one liner: “Believe it or not; [Walcott’s] middle name was Doolittle.”) And I realized that I had virtually excluded this part of Walcott from my account. Oh, I mentioned his voluminous empiricism, but almost as a side comment. How could I do such a thing—a side comment for work that, by sheer volume of time and effort, had consumed most of Walcott’s professional life (even if his Burgess error will stand as his paramount mark upon intellectual history).
Lives are too rich, too multifaceted for encompassing under any one perspective (thank goodness). I am no relativist in my attitude towards truth; but I am a pluralist in my views on optimal strategies for seeking this most elusive prize. I have been instructed by T. H. Clark and his maximally different vision. There may be no final answer to Pilate’s inquiry of Jesus (John 18:37), “What is truth?”—and Jesus did remain silent following the question. But wisdom, which does increase with age, probes from many sides—and she is truly “a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her.”
Touching Walcott via the minimum of one intermediary. Courtesy of Redpath Museum: McGill University.
16 | Counters and Cable Cars
SAN FRANCISCO, October 11, 1989:
In a distinctive linguistic regionalism, New Yorkers like me stand “on line,” while the rest of the nation waits patiently “in line.” Actually, I spend a good part of my life trying to avoid that particular activity altogether, no matter what preposition it may bear. I am a firm supporter of the Yogi Berra principle regarding once fashionable restaurants: “No one goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”
Consequently, in San Francisco this morning, I awoke before sunrise in order to get my breakfast of Sears’s famous eighteen pancakes (marvel not, they’re very small) before the morning crush of more amenable hours rendered the restaurant uninhabitable on Berra’s maxim. Then out the door by 7:30 to the cable car stop at Union Square for a ride that thrills me no less in middle life than on my first trip as a boy. What moment in public transportation could possibly surpass that final steep descent down Russian Hill? (For a distant second and third in America, I nominate the Saint Charles streetcar of New Orleans, last of the old-time trolley lines, as it passes by the antebellum houses of the Garden District, and the Staten Island Ferry, only a nickel in my youth and the world’s most distinguished cheap date, as it skirts the Statue of Liberty by moonlight.) I travel during the last minutes of comfort and accessibility. By 9:00 A.M., long lines of tourists will form and no one will want to ride anymore.
We paleontologists are driven, almost by professional definition, to an abiding respect for items and institutions that have prevailed and prospered with integrity in an unending sea of change (although I trust that we can also welcome, even foster, intellectual innovation). I love Sears restaurant with its familiar, uniformly excellent and utterly nonyuppie breakfast menu. And I adore those Victorian cars with their wooden seats and their distinctive sounds—the two-clang signal to move, the hum of the cable perpetually running underground, the grasp of the grip as it takes hold to pull the passive car along.
As I ride, I ponder a psychological puzzle that has long intrigued me: Why does authenticity—as a purely conceptual theme—exert such a hold upon us? An identical restaurant with the same food, newly built in the San Francisco segment of a Great Cities Theme Park, would supply me with nothing but calories; a perfect replica of a cable car, following an even hillier route in Disneyland, would be a silly bauble.
Au
thenticity comes in many guises, each contributing something essential to our calm satisfaction with the truly genuine. Authenticity of object fascinates me most deeply because its pull is entirely abstract and conceptual. The art of replica making has reached such sophistication that only the most astute professional can now tell the difference between, say, a genuine dinosaur skeleton and a well-made cast. The real and the replica are effectively alike in all but our abstract knowledge of authenticity, yet we feel awe in the presence of bone once truly clothed in dinosaur flesh and mere interest in fiberglass of identical appearance.
If I may repeat, because it touched me so deeply, a story on this subject told once before in these volumes (Essay 12 in The Flamingo’s Smile): A group of blind visitors met with the director of the Air and Space Museum in Washington to discuss greater accessibility, especially for the large objects hanging from the ceiling of the great atrium and perceptible only by sight. The director asked his guests whether a scale model of Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, mounted and fully touchable, might alleviate the frustration of nonaccess to the real McCoy. The visitors replied that such a solution would be most welcome, but only if the model were placed directly beneath the invisible original. Simple knowledge of the imperceptible presence of authenticity can move us to tears.
We also respect an authenticity of place. Genuine objects out of context and milieu may foster intrigue, but rarely inspiration. London Bridge dismantled and reassembled in America becomes a mere curiosity. I love to watch giraffes in zoo cages, but their jerky, yet somehow graceful, progress over the African veld provokes a more satisfying feeling of awe.
Yet, until today, I had not appreciated the power of a third authenticity of use. Genuine objects in their proper place can be devalued by altered use—particularly when our avid appetite for casual and ephemeral leisure overwhelms an original use in the honorable world of daily work.
Lord knows, being one myself, I have no right to complain about tourists mobbing cable cars. Visitors have an inalienable right to reach Fisherman’s Wharf and Ghirardelli Square by any legal means sanctioned and maintained by the city of San Francisco. Still, I love to ride incognito at 7:30 A.M. with native San Franciscans using the cable car as a public conveyance to their place of work—Asian students embarking on their way to school as the car skirts by Chinatown, smartly dressed executives with their monthly transit passes.
But I write this essay because I experienced a different, unanticipated, and most pleasant example of authenticity of use in Sears this morning. (I could not have asked for a better context. The Bay Area, this week, is experiencing a bonanza in authenticity of place—as the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants prepare for the first single-area World Series since 1956, when the seventh and last “subway series” of ten glorious childhood years in New York, 1947 to 1956, produced Don Larsen’s perfect game and the revenge of my beloved Yankees for their only defeat, the year before, by the Dodgers in their true home in Brooklyn. Think what we would lose if, in deference to October weather and a misplaced sense of even opportunity, the World Series moved from the home cities of full season drama to some neutral turf in balmy Miami or New Orleans.)
I have always gone to Sears with other people and sat at a table. This time I went alone and ate at the counter. I had not known that the counter is a domain of regulars, native San Franciscans on their way to work. One man gets up and says to the waitress, “Real good, maybe I’ll come back again sometime.” “He’s in here every morning,” whispers the waitress to me. Another man takes the empty seat, saying “Hi, honey” to the woman on the next stool. “You’re pretty early today,” she replies. “The works!” he says, as the waitress passes by. “You got it,” she replies. A few minutes later, she returns with a plate of pancakes and a dish of scrambled eggs. But first she slides the eggs off the plate onto a napkin, blotting away the butter. “No good for him,” she explains. He begins a discussion on the relative merits of cloth napkins and paper towels in such an enterprise. Good fellowship in authenticity of use; people taking care of each other in small ways of enduring significance.
As I present talks on evolutionary subjects all around America, I can be sure of certain questions following any speech: Where is human evolution going? What about genetic engineering? Are blacks really better at basketball? (Both the dumb and the profound share this character of inevitability.) I must rank the ecological question high on the list of perennial inquiries. It is usually asked with compassion, but sometimes with pugnacity: Why do we need to save all these species anyway?
I know the conventional answers rooted in practicality. I even believe them: You never know what medical or agricultural use might emerge from species currently unknown or ignored; beneficial diversity of gene pools in cultivated species can often be fostered by interbreeding with wild relatives; interconnectedness of ecological webs may lead to dire and unintended consequences for “valued” species when “insignificant” creatures are rubbed out. Still, I prefer to answer with an ethical, more accurately a viscerally aesthetic, statement espoused by nearly all evolutionary biologists as a virtual psychic necessity for choosing to enter the field in the first place: We relish diversity; we love every slightly different way, every nuance of form and behavior—and we know that the loss of a significant fraction of this gorgeous variety will quench our senses and our satisfactions in any future meaningfully defined in human terms (potential recovery of diversity several million years down the road is too abstract and conjectural for this legitimately selfish argument—see Essay 2). What in the world could possibly be more magnificent than the fact that beetle anatomy presents itself in more than half a million separate packages called species?
I have always been especially wary of “soft” and overly pat analogies between biological evolution and human cultural change. (Some comparisons are apt and informative, for all modes of change must hold features in common; but the mechanisms of biological evolution and cultural change are so different that close analogies usually confuse far more than they enlighten.) Nonetheless, aesthetic statements may claim a more legitimate universality, especially when an overt form rather than the underlying mechanism of production becomes the subject of consideration. If you feel aesthetic pleasure in proportions set by the “golden section,” then you may gain similar satisfaction from a nautilus shell or a Greek building despite their maximally different methods and modes of construction. I do, therefore, feel justified in writing an essay on the moral and aesthetic value of diversity both in natural and in human works—and in trying to link the genesis and defense of diversity with various meanings of authenticity.
(Also, if I may make a terrible confession for a working biologist and a natural historian: I grew up on the streets of New York, and I suppose that one never loses a primary affection for things first familiar—call it authenticity of place if you wish. I do think that America’s southwestern desert, in the four corners region around Monument Valley, is the most sublime spot on earth. But when I crave diversity rather than majesty, I choose cities and the products of human labor, as they resist conformity and embody authenticity of object, place, and use. My motto must be the couplet of Milton’s “L’Allegro ed II Penseroso”—from the happy rather than the pensive side:
Towered cities please us then
And the busy hum of men.
Several years ago I visited India on a trip sponsored by Harvard’s Natural History Museum. My colleagues delighted in arising at 4:00 A.M., piling into a bus, driving to a nature reserve, and trying to spot the dot of a tiger at some absurd distance, rendered only slightly more interesting by binoculars. I yearned to be let off the bus alone in the middle of any bazaar in any town.)
Natural diversity exists at several levels. Variety permeates any nonclonal population from within. Even our tightest genealogical groups contain fat people and thin people, tall and short. The primal folk wisdom of the ages proclaims enormous differences in temperament among siblings of a single family
. But the greatest dollop of natural diversity arises from our geographical divisions—the differences from place to place as we adapt to varying environments and accumulate our distinctiveness by limited contact with other regions. If all species, like rats and pigeons, lived all over the world, our planet would contain but a tiny fraction of its actual diversity.
I therefore tend to revel most in the distinctive diversity of geographical regions when I contemplate the aesthetic pleasure of differences. Since I am most drawn to human works, I find my greatest joy in learning to recognize local accents, regional customs of greeting and dining, styles of architecture linked to distinctive times and places. I also, at least in my head if not often enough in overt action, think of myself as a watchdog for the preservation of this fragile variety and an implacable foe of standardization and homogenization.
I recognize, of course, that official programs of urban layout and road building must produce more elements of commonality than a strict aesthetic of maximal diversity might welcome. After all, criteria of design have a universality that becomes more and more pressing at upper limits of size and speed. If you have to move a certain number of cars through a given region at a stated speed, the road can’t meander along the riverbanks or run through the main streets of old market towns. Public buildings and city street grids beg for an optimal efficiency that imposes some acceptable degree of uniformity.
But the sacred task of regionalism must be to fill in the spaces between with a riotous diversity of distinctive local traditions—preferably of productive work, not only of leisure. With this model of a potentially standardized framework for roads and public spaces filled in, softened, and humanized by local products made by local people for local purposes—authenticity of object, place, and use—I think that I can finally articulate why I love the Sears counter and the cable cars in the early morning. They embody all the authenticities, but they also welcome the respectful stranger. (Again, nature and human life jibe in obedience to basic principles of structural organization. Ecological rules and principles—flow of energy across trophic levels, webs of interaction that define the “balance of nature”—have a generality corresponding to permissible uniformity in the framework of public space. But local diversity prevails because different organisms embody the rules from place to place—lions or tigers or bears as predictable carnivores of three separate continents—just as uniquely local businesses should fill the slots within a more uniform framework.)
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