Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Ordinarily, the answer would be no. The fossils would talk back, just as Opabinia told Harry Whittington, “I have no legs under my carapace,” while Anomalocaris exclaimed, “That jellyfish Peytoia is really my mouth.” But the Burgess animals said little to Walcott, for two basic reasons—thereby casting his shoehorn as a striking example of ideological constraint. First, his preconceptions were strong, rooted as they were at the heart of his social values and the core of his temperament. Second—a reason so ridiculously simple and obvious that we might pass it by in our search for “deeper” meanings—the fossils didn’t respond because Walcott never found time to converse with them. A life can be stretched only so far. Administrative burdens did eventually undo Walcott as a working scientist. He simply never found time to study the Burgess specimens. Walcott published four preliminary papers in 1911 and 1912. His associate Charles E. Resser brought out Walcott’s posthumous notes in 1931. In between, for the last fifteen years of his busy life, Walcott published monographs on Burgess sponges and algae, but nothing more on the complex animals of the world’s most important fossil fauna.

  The first reason (strong preconceptions) provides an underpinning for the message of this book; the second reason (administrative burden) is idiosyncratic to Walcott. Yet I begin my discussion with Walcott’s idiosyncrasy, for we must understand how he failed to listen before we mount the record of his own song.

  Since administrators are usually recruited from the ranks of successful researchers as they reach mid-life, Walcott’s story of intensely conflicting demands, and consequent internal stress, echoes a pervasive and honest refrain heard from the helm of scientific institutions. Administrators are chosen because they understand research—meaning that they both love the work and do it well. The story is as old as Walcott’s beloved Cambrian mountains. You begin with a promise to yourself: I won’t have as much time for research, but I will be more efficient. Others have fallen by the wayside, but I will be different; I will never abandon my research; I will keep working and publishing at close to full volume. Slowly, the perverseness of creeping inevitability takes over. Research fades. You never abandon the ideal, or the original love. You will get back to it, after this term as director, after retirement, after.… Sometimes, you really do enjoy an old age of renewed scholarship; more often, as in Walcott’s case, death intervenes.

  Walcott amazes me. His administrative burdens were so extraordinarily heavy, yet he did continue to publish throughout his later life. His complete bibliography (in Taft* et al., 1928) lists eighty-nine items between 1910, the year of his first report on the Burgess Shale, and 1927, when he died. Fifty-three of these are primary, data-based technical papers. They include major works in taxonomy and anatomy, some written in his busiest years—a hundred pages on Cambrian brachiopods in 1924, eighty on Cambrian trilobites in 1925, a hundred on the anatomy of the trilobite Neolenus in 1921. But the Lord’s limit of twenty-four hours a day still grievously restricted Walcott’s hopes and plans. Most research did shift to the back burners. The most prominently simmering pot held the fossils of the Burgess Shale. Walcott’s guilt at their neglect, and his anticipatory joy in finally returning to his favorite fossils, form a persistent theme in his correspondence. I think that Walcott was consciously saving the Burgess specimens as a primary focus for his years in retirement. But he died with his boots on at seventy-seven.

  The whole familiar process, in all its inevitable movement from youthful idealism to elderly resignation, can be traced with unusual thoroughness in the Walcott archives (figures 4.1 and 4.2). On June 2, 1879, the young Walcott, seeking his first job with the U.S. Geological Survey, wrote to the great geologist Clarence King:

  I am willing to do any work that I am able to do that will be of most service. My desire is to pursue stratigraphical geology including collecting and invertebrate paleontology.… I desire to make this my life work.… I sincerely hope that I may have a trial and then remain or not as my work may decide.

  4.1. Charles Doolittle Walcott as a handsome young man of twenty-three. Taken in 1873.

  4.2. A photographic portrait of Walcott made about 1915. There are many such portraits in the Smithsonian archives, but I particularly like this one because it seems to show so well both Walcott’s strength and great sadness during these years of family tragedy.

  King replied positively, and with kindness, on July 18:

  I have given [you] a place at the bottom of the ladder, it will be for you to mount by your own strength.… Nothing will give me greater pleasure than to record your work as good.

  Walcott’s work was better than good, and he rose steadily. By 1893, now near the top of Survey personnel, and firmly committed to a lifetime program of empirical work on older Paleozoic rocks, Walcott refused a teaching job at the University of Chicago in order to continue his research without encumbrance. He expressed his regrets to the preeminent Chicago geologist and administrator T. C. Chamberlin: “As you well know, my desire and ambition is to complete the work on the older Paleozoic formations of the continent and to give to geologists the means of classifying and mapping them.”

  But in the very next year, 1894, administration called to curtail his work from within. In a letter to his mother, Walcott expressed the conflicting feelings that would haunt him for the rest of his life—pride in recognition, and an urge to serve well, coupled with anxiety about the loss of time for research:

  10/25/94

  Dear Mother

  It seems almost strange to me that I am in charge of this great Survey. It is an ever present reality but I have not looked forward to it and still feel the strong desire to resume my old work. I am glad it came to me while you were still with us and I hope that you will live to see the Survey prosper under my administration.

  With love,

  Charlie

  Thereafter, the theme of conflict between administrative duties and research desires came to dominate Walcott’s thoughts. By 1904, while still leading the Geological Survey and before discovering the Burgess, Walcott was already lamenting a massive loss of time for research. On June 18, 1904, he wrote to the geologist R. T. Hill:

  The only personal ambition that I have or have had, that would influence me greatly, is the desire to complete the work on the Cambrian rocks and faunas, which was begun many years ago and which has practically been laid aside for several years past. I hope to give a little time to it this summer, and to do what I can from time to time to complete it. If circumstances were such that I could do it wisely I would most gladly turn over all administration to someone else, and take up my work where I left it in 1892.

  Three years later, Walcott assumed his final post, as secretary of the Smithsonian. At the end of this decade, he found the Burgess Shale. Circumstances then conspired, with Walcott’s active encouragement, despite his laments, to augment his public responsibilities continuously, and to rob time from any serious or protracted study of the Burgess fossils.

  The archives present a panoply of vignettes, glimpses of the multifarious, largely trivial, but always time-consuming daily duties of a chief administrator. He acted on behalf of friends, proposing Herbert Hoover for membership in the American Philosophical Society in 1917. He encouraged colleagues, writing to R. H. Goddard in 1923: “I trust that your work on the ‘rocket’ is advancing in a satisfactory manner and that in due time you will reach a practical solution of all the problems connected with it.” He promoted the welfare of scientists, writing to the chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1926 to argue that researchers should receive free railroad passes “in the same category as persons exclusively engaged in charitable or eleemosynary work.” He endured endless demands for bits and pieces of his day, as when chief Smithsonian anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička asked for extra time in 1924 to make some forgotten measurements:

  About a year ago when I had the pleasure of measuring you for the records of the National Academy, I did not take the measurement of the hand, foot and a few other parts. Since th
en, as the result of the analysis of my records on the Old Americans, it has appeared that the dimensions of these parts are of very considerable interest.… I should be very grateful if, on an occasion, you would stop in my laboratory for two or three minutes to permit me to take these remaining measurements.

  But I found nothing more symbolic, yet so immediately practical, than this affidavit submitted to a bank in 1917 in order to verify a change in his signature: “I enclose herewith the affidavit that you wish. I used to sign my name Chas. D. Walcott. I now use only the initials, as I find it takes too much time to add in the extra letters when there is a large number of papers or letters to be signed.”

  If these “ordinary” pressures of high administration were not enough to derail research, the decade of 1910 to 1920—spanning his field studies of the Burgess Shale—was full of draining family tragedy for Walcott, as he lost his second wife and two of his three sons (figure 4.3). His son Charles junior died of tuberculosis in 1913, after Walcott had tracked down and evaluated every sanitarium, every rest, dietary, or medical cure, then promoted in the name of hope or quackery. Another son, Stuart, was shot down in an air battle over France in 1917. Walcott wrote to his friend Theodore Roosevelt, who had lost a brother in similar circumstances:

  Stuart, who was in the Western High School in Washington with your brother Quentin, is resting on a hillside in the Ardennes, having been shot down under almost identical circumstance as Quentin, in an air battle with the Huns. He and the two men he brought down are buried at the same place, and a well built cross placed over Stuart’s grave bearing his name and the date. When the Huns left they burned and destroyed all the nearby peasant cottages, thus illustrating in the one case their sentimental side and in the other the brute in their nature.

  As mentioned previously, Walcott’s wife Helena was killed in a train crash in 1911, and his daughter Helen was then sent to Europe, to recover from the shock on a grand tour in the company of a chaperone named Anna Horsey. Walcott maintained almost daily contact with the pair, often stepping in to make “appropriate” paternal decisions to guard a beautiful and naive daughter against the perils of impropriety. Walcott’s frequent interventions were much appreciated by Ms. Horsey. For example, on June 18, 1912, she wrote: “Your letter has made her realize how objectionable it is for women to smoke. I have told her so often but she thinks I am hopelessly old fashioned.” But Ms. Horsey continued to worry. Writing from Paris on July 17, 1912, she warned. “Her beauty is so striking … but unless her craving for men’s admiration and attention and her extravagant dressing is checked systematically for some time to come, it may lead to great unhappiness.” And, in a letter from Italy, she declared: “It truly is not safe. Helen is full of fun and desire for adventure—all girls are at 17—and she is innocent and ignorant and might be induced to meet [men] outside, just for a lark. In Italy, this would be dangerous.”

  4.3. The entire Walcott family in Provo, Utah, in 1907. Standing, from left to right: Sidney, age fifteen; Charles junior, age nineteen; Charles, age fifty-seven; Helena, age forty-two; Stuart, age eleven. Sitting: Helen, age thirteen.

  Amidst these extraordinary personal tragedies, the regular affairs of family and business also ate into Walcott’s time. He worked with millions invested in the Telluride Power Company, while advising a local bank about the importance of limited credit for his son:

  My son, B. S. Walcott, is a freshman at Princeton. He has an allowance and up to date has been accustomed to paying his bills promptly. I would not, however, credit him or any other boy for more than 30 days, and then only to a limited amount. The effect of credit is bad on the boy and apt to lead to complications.

  How could the Burgess Shale possibly have fitted into this caldron, this madhouse of imposed and necessary activity? Walcott needed his summers in the Canadian Rockies for collecting—if only as therapy. But he could never find time for scientific study of the specimens in Washington. A telling indication of Walcott’s own growing realization of his predicament may be found in the most revealing set of letters on the Burgess fossils themselves—his correspondence with his former assistant Charles Schuchert, then professor at Yale and one of America’s leading paleontologists. In 1912, Walcott was embroiled in committee work, but anticipated only a minor delay in studying some trilobites that Schuchert had sent:

  As to the trilobites, I will not express an opinion until I have a chance to study the whole group next week. I have been so busy with Congressional Committees and other matters the past 10 days that there has been very little opportunity for research.

  By 1926, he had admitted defeat, and put off into an indefinite future something far less time-consuming than the study of specimens—the consideration of an argument raised by Schuchert about the anatomy of trilobites: “Someday when I get time I will look over your comments about the structure of trilobites. At present, I am too busy with administrative work.”

  Several statements from the end of Walcott’s life well illustrate his conflicts, his hopes, and the inevitability of his failure to study the Burgess fossils properly. On January 8, 1925, he told the French paleontologist Charles Barrois that he was slowly shedding administrative roles in order to study the Burgess fossils:

  I hope to take up a considerable group of Burgess Shale fossils of great interest, which have not yet been published. Over 100 drawings and photographs have been prepared. They would have been published before this if it had not been for the time given to administrative duties and matters connected with our scientific organization. I am about through with the latter, as I gave my address as retiring president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on 12/29, and am also out of the Council of the National Academy. I am planning to resign as a member of the Board of three organizations that are carrying on most interesting and valuable work, but I think my duty to them has been done.

  On April 1, 1926, in a letter to L. S. Rowe, Walcott combined his genuine love for research with the canonical, but I think disingenuous, claim that administration was neither enjoyed nor deemed important (relative to scholarship), but only done from sense of duty. (I do not believe that most people are sufficiently self-sacrificial to spend the best years of a life on something that they could put aside with no loss of respect, but only of power. The ethos of science requires that administration be publicly identified as done for duty, but surely most people in such roles take pleasure in their responsibility and influence):

  I would derive the greatest happiness from being able to go on with my research work up to the point of placing on record the data which I have been gathering for the past 15 years in the mountains of the West.… Administrative duties have not been unpleasant or disappointing, but I regard them as a passing incident, and not serious work, although of course at times one is called upon to put his best efforts into the solution of the questions that arise.

  A week later, he wrote to David Starr Jordan, the great ichthyologist who had served as president of Stanford University, and had been more successful than Walcott in shedding administrative burdens:

  You were a wise man to free yourself from administrative duties. I hope to do so in due time and be free to do some of the things that I have been dreaming of for the past 50 years. It has been a pleasure to dream of them in the past, and every hour that I can get in my laboratory for work is a delight.

  On September 27, 1926, Walcott took some action to implement this dream. He wrote to Andrew D. White:

  I wish very much to have a talk with you in re Smithsonian Institution and my withdrawing from all executive and administrative work May 1, 1927—when I will have completed 20 years active service as Secretary. Henry, Baird, and Langley died in office but I do not think it is wise for the Smithsonian Institution or for me to go on. I have writing to do that will take all my energy up to 1949.… What fun it would be to watch the evolution of democracy up to 1950. Just now I am not looking ahead beyond 1930. I was told I might pass on at 26, again at 38 and 55 bu
t being of an obdurate temperament I declined.

  Charles Doolittle Walcott died in office on February 9, 1927. His remaining, heavily annotated notes on Burgess fossils were published in 1931.

  THE DEEPER RATIONALE FOR WALCOTT’S SHOEHORN

  Walcott’s failure to give his Burgess fossils adequate scrutiny left him free to interpret them along the path of least resistance. Virtually unconstrained by the truly odd anatomy of his specimens, Walcott read the Burgess Shale in the light of his well-established view of life—and the fossils therefore reflected his preconceptions. Since Walcott was such a conservative stalwart—an archtraditionalist not by jerk of the knee but by deep and well-considered conviction—he becomes the finest symbol that I have ever encountered for the embodiment of conventional beliefs.*

  To unravel the mystery of the shoehorn, we need to consider Walcott’s traditionalism at three levels of increasing specificity—the general cast of his political and social beliefs, his attitude toward organisms and their history, and his approach to the particular problems of the Cambrian.