by Peter Watson
The fruit fly may have been an unromantic specimen, but scientifically it turned out to be perfect, especially after Morgan noticed that a single white-eyed male suddenly occurred among thousands of normal red-eyed flies. This sudden mutation was something worth getting to the bottom of. Over the next few months, Morgan and his team mated thousands and thousands of flies in their laboratory at Columbia University in New York. (This is how the ‘fly room’ got its name.) The sheer bulk of Morgan’s results enabled him to conclude that mutations formed in fruit flies at a steady pace. By 1912, more than twenty recessive mutants had been discovered, including one they called ‘rudimentary wings’ and another that produced ‘yellow body colour.’ But that wasn’t all. The mutations only ever occurred in one sex, males or females, never in both. This observation, that mutations are always sex-linked, was significant because it supported the idea of particulate inheritance. The only physical difference between the cells of the male fruit fly and the female lay in the ‘X body’. It followed, therefore, that the X body was a chromosome, that it determined the sex of the adult fly, and that the various mutations observed in the fly room were also carried on this body.27
Morgan published a paper on Drosophila as early as July 1910 in Science, but the full force of his argument was made in 1915 in The Mechanism of Mendelian Inheritance, the first book to air the concept of the ‘gene.’28 For Morgan and his colleagues the gene was to be understood ‘as a particular segment of the chromosome, which influenced growth in a definite way and therefore governed a specific character in the adult organism’. Morgan argued that the gene was self-replicating, transmitted unchanged from parent to offspring, mutation being the only way new genes could arise, producing new characteristics. Most importantly, mutation was a random, accidental process that could not be affected in any way by the needs of the organism. According to this argument, the inheritance of acquired characteristics was logically impossible. This was Morgan’s basic idea. It promoted a great deal of laboratory research elsewhere, especially across the United States. But in other long-established fields (like palaeontology), scientists were loath to give up non-Mendelian and even non-Darwinian ideas until the modern synthesis was formed in the 1940s (see below, chapter 20).29 There were of course complications. For example, Morgan conceded that a single adult characteristic can be controlled by more than one gene, while at the same time a single gene can affect several traits. Also important was the position of a gene on the chromosome, since its effects could occasionally be modified by neighbouring genes.
Genetics had come a long way in fifteen years, and not just empirically, but philosophically too. In some senses the gene was a more potent fundamental particle than either the electron or the atom, since it was far more directly linked to man’s humanity. The accidental and uncontrollable nature of mutation as the sole mechanism for evolutionary change, under the ‘indifferent control of natural selection,’ was considered by critics – philosophers and religious authorities – as a bleak imposition of banal forces without meaning, yet another low point in man’s descent from the high ground he had occupied when religious views had ruled the world. For the most part, Morgan did not get involved in these philosophical debates. Being an empiricist, he realised that genetics was more complicated than most eugenicists believed, and that no useful purpose could be achieved by the crude control techniques favoured by the social Darwinist zealots. Around 1914 he left the eugenics movement. He was also aware that recent results from anthropology did not support the easy certainties of the race biologists, in particular the work of a colleague whose office was only a few blocks from Columbia University on the Upper West Side of New York, at the American Museum of Natural History, located at Seventy-ninth Street and Central Park West. This man’s observations and arguments were to prove just as influential as Morgan’s.
Franz Boas was born in Minden in northwestern Germany in 1858. Originally a physicist-geographer, he became an anthropologist as a result of his interest in Eskimos. He moved to America to write for Science magazine, then transferred to the American Museum of Natural History in New York as a curator. Small, dark-haired, with a very high forehead, Boas had a relaxed, agreeable manner. At the turn of the century he studied several groups of native Americans, examining the art of the Indians of the north Pacific Coast and the secret societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, near Vancouver. Following the fashion of the time for craniometry, he also became interested in the development of children and devised a range of physical measurements in what he called the ‘Cephalic Index.’30 The wide diversity of Boas’s work and his indefatigable research made him famous, and with Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, he helped establish anthropology as a respected field of study. As a consequence he was called upon to record the native American population for the U.S. Census in 1900 and asked to undertake research for the Dillingham Commission of the U.S. Senate. This report, published in 1910, was the result of various unformed eugenic worries among politicians – that America was attracting too many immigrants of the ‘wrong sort,’ that the ‘melting pot’ approach might not always work, and that the descendants of immigrants might, for reasons of race, culture, or intelligence, be unable or unwilling to assimilate.31 This is a not unfamiliar argument, even today, but in 1910 the fears of the restrictionists were rather odd, considered from this end of the century. Their anxieties centred upon the physical dimensions of immigrants, specifically that they were ‘degenerate’ stock. Boas was asked to make a biometric assessment of a sample of immigrant parents and children, an impertinence as controversial then as it would be scandalous now. With the new science of genetics making waves, many were convinced that physical type was determined solely by heredity. Boas showed that in fact immigrants assimilated rapidly, taking barely one or at most two generations to fall in line with the host population on almost any measure you care to name. As Boas, himself an immigrant, sharply pointed out, newcomers do not subject themselves to the traumas of emigration, an arduous and long journey, merely to stand out in their new country. Most want a quiet life and prosperity.32
Despite Boas’s contribution, the Dillingham Commission Report – eighteen volumes of it – concluded that immigrants from Mediterranean regions were ‘biologically inferior’ to other immigrants. The report did not, however, recommend the exclusion of ‘degenerate races,’ concentrating its fire instead on ‘degenerate individuals’ who were to be identified by a test of reading and writing.*33
Given the commission’s conclusions, the second book Boas published that year took on added significance. The Mind of Primitive Man soon became a classic of social science: it was well known in Britain, and the German version was later burned by the Nazis. Boas was not so much an imaginative anthropologist as a measurer and statistician. Like Morgan he was an empiricist and a researcher, concerned to make anthropology as ‘hard’ a science as possible and intent on studying ‘objective’ things, like height, weight, and head size. He had also travelled, got to know several different races or ethnic groups, and was highly conscious that, for most Americans at least, their contact with other races was limited to the American Negro.
Boas’s book begins, ‘Proud of his wonderful achievements, civilised man looks down upon the humbler members of mankind. He has conquered the forces of nature and compelled them to serve him.’34 This statement was something of a lure, designed to lull the reader into complacency. For Boas then set out to question – all but eradicate – the difference between ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ man. In nearly three hundred pages, he gently built argument upon argument, fact upon fact, turning the conventional ‘wisdoms’ of the day upside-down. For example, psychometric studies had compared the brains of Baltimore blacks with Baltimore whites and found differences in brain structure, in the relative size of the frontal and orbital lobes and the corpus callosum. Boas showed that there were equally great differences between the northern French and the French from central France. He conceded that the dimensions of the N
egro skull were closer to those of apes than were the skulls of the ‘higher races,’ but argued that the white races were closer to apes because they were hairier than the Negro races, and had lips and limb proportions that were closer to other primates than were the corresponding Negroid features. He accepted that the average capacity of the skulls of Europeans was 1560 cc, of African Negroes 1405 cc, and of ‘Negroes of the Pacific’ 1460 cc. But he pointed out that the average cranial capacity of several hundred murderers had turned out to be 1580 cc.35 He showed that the ‘primitive’ races were quite capable of nonimpulsive, controlled behaviour when it suited their purposes; that their languages were just as highly developed, once you understood the languages properly; that the Eskimos, for example, had many more words for snow than anyone else – for the obvious reason that it mattered more to them. He dismissed the idea that because some languages did not have numerals above ten, as was true of certain native American tribes, this did not mean that members of those tribes could not count above ten in English once they had been taught to speak it.36
An important feature of Boas’s book was its impressive references. Anthropological, agricultural, botanical, linguistic, and geological evidence was used, often from German and French language journals beyond the reach of his critics. In his final chapter, ‘Race Problems in the United States,’ he surveyed Lucca and Naples in Italy, Spain and Germany east of the Elbe, all of which had experienced large amounts of immigration and race mixing and had scarcely suffered physical, mental, or moral degeneration.37 He argued that many of the so-called differences between the various races were in fact ephemeral. Quoting from his own research on the children of immigrants in the United States, he explained how within two generations at the most they began to conform, even in physical dimensions, to those around them, already arrived. He ended by calling for studies to be made about how immigrants and Negroes had adapted to life in America, how they differed as a result of their experiences from their counterparts in Europe or Africa or China who had not migrated. He said it was time to stop concentrating on studies that emphasised often imaginary or ephemeral differences. ‘The similarity of fundamental customs and beliefs the world over, without regard to race and environment, is so general that race [appears] … irrelevant,’ he wrote, and expressed the hope that anthropological findings would ‘teach us a greater tolerance of forms of civilisation different from our own.’38
Boas’s book was a tour-de-force. He became very influential, leading anthropologists and the rest of us away from unilinear evolutionary theory and race theory and toward cultural history. His emphasis on cultural history helped to fashion what may be the single most important advance in the twentieth century in the realm of pure ideas: relativism. Before World War I, however, his was the only voice advancing such views. It was another twenty years before his students, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict in particular, took up the banner.
At the same time that Boas was studying the Kwakiutl Indians and the Eskimos, archaeologists were also making advances in understanding the history of native Americans. The thrust was that native Americans had a much more interesting culture and past than the race biologists had been willing to admit. This came to a head with the discoveries of Hiram Bingham, an historian with links to Yale.39
Born in Honolulu in 1875, Bingham came from a family of missionaries who had translated the Bible into some of the world’s most remote languages (such as Hawaiian). A graduate of Yale, with a Ph.D. from Harvard, he was a prehistorian with a love of travel, adventure, exotic destinations. This appetite led him in 1909 to Peru, where he met the celebrated historian of Lima, Carlos Romero, who while drinking coca tea with Bingham on the verandah of his house showed him the writings of Father de la Calancha, which fired Bingham’s imagination by describing to him the lost Inca city of Vilcabamba.40 Although some of the larger ancient cities of pre-Columbian America had been recorded in detail by the Spanish conquerors, it was not until the work of the German scholar Eduard Seler in the late 1880s and 1890s that systematic study of the region was begun. Romero kept Bingham enthralled with his account of how Vilcabamba – the lost capital of Manco Inca, the last great Inca king – had obsessed archaeologists, historians, and treasure hunters for generations.
It was, most certainly, a colourful tale. Manco Inca had taken power in the early sixteenth century when he was barely nineteen. Despite his youth, he proved a courageous and cunning opponent. As the Spanish, under the Pizarra brothers, made advances into the Inca lands, Manco Inca gave ground and retreated to more inaccessible hideouts, finally reaching Vilcabamba. The crunch came in 1539 when Gonzalo Pizarra led three hundred of ‘the most distinguished captains and fighting men’ in what was by sixteenth-century standards a massive assault. The Spaniards went as far as they could on horseback (horses had become extinct in America before the Spanish arrived).41 When they could go no farther as a mounted force, they left their animals with a guard and advanced on foot. Crossing the Urumbamba River, they wound their way up the valley of the Vilcabamba to a pass beyond Vitcos. By now, the jungle was so dense as to be all but impassable, and the Spaniards were growing nervous. Suddenly they encountered two new bridges over some mountain streams. The bridges were inviting, but their newness should have made Pizarro suspicious: it didn’t, and they were caught in an ambush. Boulders cascaded down on them, to be followed by a hail of arrows. Thirty-six Spaniards were killed, and Gonzalo Pizarro withdrew. But only temporarily. Ten days later, with a still bigger party, the Spaniards negotiated the bridges, reached Vilcabamba, and sacked it. By then, however, Manco Inca had moved on. He was eventually betrayed by Spaniards whose lives he had spared because they had promised to help him in the fight against Pizarro, but not before his cunning and courage had earned him the respect of the Spaniards.42 Manco Inca’s legend had grown over the intervening centuries, as had the mystery surrounding Vilcabamba. In fact, the city assumed even greater significance later in the sixteenth century after silver was discovered there. Then, in the seventeenth century, after the mines had been exhausted, it was reclaimed by the jungle. Several attempts were made in the nineteenth century to find the lost city, but they all failed.
Bingham could not resist Romero’s story. When he returned to Yale, he persuaded the millionaire banker Edward Harkness, who was a member of the board of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, a friend of Henry Clay Frick and John Rockefeller, and a collector of Peruvian artefacts, to fund an expedition. In the summer of 1911 Bingham’s expedition set out and enjoyed a measure of good fortune, not unlike that of Arthur Evans at Knossos. In 1911 the Urumbamba Valley was being opened up anyway, due to the great Amazonian rubber boom. (Malaya had not yet replaced South America as the chief source of the world’s rubber.)43 Bingham assembled his crew at Cuzco, 350 miles southeast of Lima and the ancient centre of the Inca Empire. The mule train started out in July, down the new Urumbamba road. A few days out from Cuzco, Bingham’s luck struck. The mule train was camped between the new road and the Urumbamba River.44 The noise of the mules and the smell of cooking (or the other way around) attracted the attention of a certain Melchor Arteaga, who lived alone nearby in a run-down shack. Chatting to members of Bingham’s crew and learning what their aim was, Arteaga mentioned that there were some ruins on the top of a hill that lay across the river. He had been there ‘once before.’45 Daunted by the denseness of the jungle and the steepness of the canyon, no one felt inclined to check out Arteaga’s tip – no one, that is, except Bingham himself. Feeling it was his duty to follow all leads, he set out with Arteaga on the morning of 24 July, having persuaded one other person, a Peruvian sergeant named Carrasco, to accompany them.46 They crossed the roaring rapids of the Urumbamba using a makeshift bridge of logs linking the boulders. Bingham was so terrified that he crawled across on all fours. On the far side they found a path through the forest, but it was so steep at times that, again, they were forced to crawl. In this manner they climbed two thousand feet above the river, where they stopped for
lunch. To Bingham’s surprise, he found they were not alone; up here there were two ‘Indians’ who had made themselves a farm. What was doubly surprising was that the farm was formed from a series of terraces – and the terraces were clearly very old.47 Finishing lunch, Bingham was of two minds. The terraces were interesting, but no more than that. An afternoon of yet more climbing was not an attractive proposition. On the other hand, he had come all this way, so he decided to go on. Before he had gone very far, he realised he had made the right decision. Just around the side of a hill, he came upon a magnificent flight of stone terraces – a hundred of them – rising for nearly a thousand feet up the hillside.48 As he took in the sight, he realised that the terraces had been roughly cleared, but beyond them the deep jungle resumed, and anything might be hidden there. Forgetting his tiredness, he swiftly scaled the terraces – and there, at the top, half hidden among the lush green trees and the spiky undergrowth, he saw ruin after ruin. With mounting excitement, he identified a holy cave and a three-sided temple made of granite ashlars – huge stones carved into smooth squares or rectangles, which fitted together with the precision and beauty of the best buildings in Cuzco. In Bingham’s own words, ‘We walked along a path to a clearing where the Indians had planted a small vegetable garden. Suddenly we found ourselves standing in front of the ruins of two of the finest and most interesting structures in ancient America. Made of beautiful white granite, the walls contained blocks of Cyclopean size, higher than a man. The sight held me spellbound…. Each building had only three walls and was entirely open on one side. The principal temple had walls 12 feet high which were lined with exquisitely made niches, five high up at each end, and seven on the back. There were seven courses of ashlars in the end walls. Under the seven rear niches was a rectangular block 14 feet long, possibly a sacrificial altar, but more probably a throne for the mummies of departed Incas, brought out to be worshipped. The building did not look as though it had ever had a roof. The top course of beautifully smooth ashlars was left uncovered so that the sun could be welcomed here by priests and mummies. I could scarcely believe my senses as I examined the larger blocks in the lower course and estimated that they must weigh from ten to fifteen tons each. Would anyone believe what I had found? Fortunately … I had a good camera and the sun was shining.’49