Bully for Brontosaurus

by Stephen Jay Gould

  T. Barbour, former director of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (where I now sit composing this piece), and J. C. Phillips emphasized this point in reviewing Thayer’s book in 1911:

  Acquiescence in Mr. Thayer’s views throws a pall over the entire subject of animal coloration. Investigation is discouraged; and we find jumbled together a great mass of fascinating and extremely complicated data, all simply explained by one dogmatic assertion. For we are asked to believe that an animal is protectively clothed whether he is like his surroundings, or whether he is very unlike them (obliteratively marked) or…if he falls between these two classes, there is still plenty of space to receive him.

  Teddy Roosevelt addressed the same issue with more vigor in a letter to Thayer on March 19, 1912 (just imagine any presidential candidate taking time out to pursue natural history more than a month after the New Hampshire primary—oh, I know, campaigns were shorter then):

  There is in Africa a blue rump baboon. It is also true that the Mediterranean Sea bounds one side of Africa. If you should make a series of experiments tending to show that if the blue rump baboon stood on its head by the Mediterranean you would mix up his rump and the Mediterranean, you might be illustrating something in optics, but you would not be illustrating anything that had any bearing whatsoever on the part played by the coloration of the animal in actual life…. My dear Mr. Thayer, if you would face facts, you might really help in elucidating some of the problems before me, but you can do nothing but mischief, and not very much of that, when conducting such experiments.… Your experiments are of no more real value than the experiment of putting a raven in a coal scuttle, and then claiming that he is concealed.

  Contemporary (and later) accounts of Thayer’s debacle rest largely upon a red herring, concealed in more than the sunset, that will not explain his failure and only reinforces a common and harmful stereotype about the intrinsic differences among intellectual styles. In short, we are told that Abbott Thayer ultimately failed because he possessed an artist’s temperament—good for an initial insight perhaps, but with no staying power for the hard (and often dull) work of real science.

  Such charges were often lodged against Thayer, and with undoubted rhetorical effect, but they represent a dangerous use of ad hominem argument with anti-intellectual overtones. Thayer may have laid himself open to such ridicule with a passionate temperament that he made no effort to control in a more formal age. John Jay Chapman, the acerbic essayist, wrote of Thayer (admittedly in a fit of pique when his wife, at his great displeasure, decided to study art in Thayer’s studio):

  Thayer by the way, is a hipped egoist who paints three hours, has a headache, walks four hours—holds his own pulse, wants to save his sacred light for the world, cares for nobody, and has fits of dejection during which forty women hold his hand and tell him not to despair—for humanity’s sake.

  But is such passion the exclusive birthright of artists? I have known many scientists equally insufferable.

  Thayer’s scientific critics also raised the charge of artistic temperament. Roosevelt wrote, in a statement that might have attracted more attention in our litigious age: Thayer’s misstatements “are due to the enthusiasm of a certain type of artistic temperament, an enthusiasm also known to certain types of scientific and business temperaments, and which when it manifests itself in business is sure to bring the owner into trouble as if he were guilty of deliberate misconduct.” Barbour and Phillips argued that “Mr. Thayer, in his enthusiasm, has ignored or glossed over with an artistic haze…. This method of persuasion, while it does appeal to the public, is—there is no other word—simple charlatanry however unwitting.” Barbour and Phillips then defended the cold light of dispassionate science in a bit of self-serving puffery:

  [Our statements] are simply the impressions made upon open-minded observers who have no axe to grind, and who have no reason to take sides on the question, one way or another. They have been written in a friendly spirit, and we hope they will be received in the same way.

  Do friendly spirits ever accuse their opponents of “simple charlatanry”?

  The charge of artistic temperament may be convenient and effective, especially since it appeals to a common stereotype—but it won’t wash. The facile interpretation that scientists wouldn’t give Thayer a hearing because he was an “outsider” won’t work either—for contemporary accounts belie such charges of territoriality and narrowness. Even though Thayer made such strong claims—quoted above—for scientists’ incompetence in a domain accessible only to artists, naturalists welcomed his insights about countershading and enjoyed both his initial articles and his outdoor demonstrations. E. B. Poulton, one of England’s greatest evolutionists, warmly supported Thayer and wrote introductions to his publications. Frank M. Chapman, great ornithologist and editor of The Auk, wrote in his Autobiography of a Bird Lover:

  As an editor, doubtless my most notable contributions to the Auk’s pages were Abbott Thayer’s classical papers on protective coloration…. I knew little of Thayer’s eminence as an artist. It was the man himself who impressed me by the overwhelming force of his personality. He made direct and inescapable demands on one’s attention. He was intensely vital and lived normally at heights which I reached only occasionally and then only for short periods.

  Thayer’s ultimate failure reflects a more universal tendency, distributed without reference to profession among all kinds of people. Nothing but habit and tradition separate the “two cultures” of humanities and science. The processes of thought and modes of reason are similar—so are the people. Only subject matter differs. Science may usually treat the world’s empirical information; art may thrive on aesthetic judgment. But scientists also traffic in ideas and opinions, and artists surely respect fact.

  The idée fixe is a common intellectual fault of all professions, not a characteristic failure of artists. I have often written about scientists as single-mindedly committed to absurd unities and false simplifications as Thayer was devoted to the exclusivity of concealing coloration in nature. Some are charming and a bit dotty—such as old Randolph Kirkpatrick, who thought that all rocks were made of single-celled nummulospheres (see Essay 22 in The Panda’s Thumb, 1980). Others are devious and more than a bit dangerous—such as Cyril Burt, who fabricated data to prove that all intelligence resided in heredity (see my book The Mismeasure of Man).

  Abbott Thayer had an idée fixe; he burned with desire to reduce a messy and complex world to one beautiful, simple principle of explanation. Such monistic schemes never work. History has built irreducible complexity and variety into the bounteous world of organisms. Diversity reigns at the superficial level of overt phenomena—animal colors serve many different functions. The unifying principles are deeper and more abstract—may I suggest evolution itself for starters.

  Postscript

  Abbott H. Thayer extended his flamingo theory ever further than I had realized. Historian of science Sharon Kingsland, who wrote an excellent technical article on “Abbott Thayer and the Protective Coloration Debate” in 1978 (and who therefore would have made my own work ever so much easier had I known of her prior efforts), sent me a 1911 note by Thayer triumphantly announcing a new genre of paintings with backgrounds made from the actual skins of animals supposedly concealed by their colors and markings. Thayer wrote, including flamingos of course:

  The public will soon be astonished when I show them a dawn picture made out of the entire skin of one of these birds [flamingos] simply “mosaicked” into the sky of a painting of one of their lagoons. I am now making such a picture. I have already nearly finished a picture of a Himalayan gorge made wholly of the skins of Monaul pheasants; and another one of a New Hampshire snow scene similarly done with magpies. Artists are positively amazed by both of them.

  On a more practical and positive note, I learned from my correspondents that Thayer’s views on concealment were far more important in the history of naval camouflage than I had realized or that the biological literature ha
d recorded. I received two fascinating letters from Lewis R. Melson, USNR. He wrote:

  Many years ago, I was summarily ordered to assume the responsibility for directing the efforts of the U.S. Navy’s Ship Concealment and Camouflage Division, relieving the genius who had guided this effort throughout World War II, Commander Dayton Reginald Evans Brown. Dayton had perfected the camouflage patterns employed on all naval ships and aircraft throughout the war. In his briefing of what I could expect in directing the continuation of his work, I found his theories and designs were based upon Abbott H. Thayer’s earlier work in the field of concealment and camouflage…. Despite whatever everyone thought and thinks about Thayer’s theories, both his “protective coloration” and “ruptive” designs were vital for concealing ships and aircraft.

  Melson continued:

  All naval concealment and camouflage is designed for protection against the horizon in the case of shipping and either for concealment against a sea or sky background, again at long ranges, for aircraft. [Note from my essay how much of Thayer’s work involved “disappearance” of an image seen against the sky or horizon.] Thayer’s “protective coloration” designs were outstanding for aircraft, light undersides and dark above [as fish, seen from below by their predators, tend to display]. Ship concealment for temperate and tropical oceans employed the “protective coloration” designs, while “ruptive” or “disruptive” designs worked best against polar backgrounds.

  Melson also taught me some history of camouflage during the two world wars. Despite our later and fruitful use in World War II, the U.S. Navy had originally rejected Thayer’s proposal during World War I. However, Thayer had greater success in Britain, where his designs proved highly valuable during the First World War. Melson wrote:

  Thayer’s suggestions…called for very light colored ships using broken patterns of white and pale blue. The intent of this pattern was to blend the ship against the background at night and in overcast weather. In the high northern latitudes surrounding the British Isles with its frequent storms, fogs, and long periods of darkness, these patterns proved very successful. HMS Broke was the first ship so painted and it was rammed twice by sister ships of the Royal Navy, whose captains protested that they had been unable to see Broke.

  Melson ended his letter with a fine affirmation of potential interaction between pure and applied science:

  Thanks again for the article on Thayer. It will join my mementos of those heady days when we were able to contribute bits and pieces to the world of science and engineering.

  15 | Petrus Camper’s Angle

  I REMEMBER WATCHING Toscanini, a little old man made even smaller on the tiny screen of our first television set. I understood nothing of classical music when I was nine, but Toscanini’s intensity nearly moved me to tears—a man older than my grandfather and scarcely bigger than me, drawing such concerted sound from his players. I remember how he stepped off the podium after each piece and mopped his brow with a handkerchief.

  Classical music had little currency in those days just before the long-playing record. In television’s only other foray into this arcane world, we could watch the annual Christmas presentation of Menotti’s opera Amahl and the Night Visitors. Amahl, the young cripple with a passion for embellishment, tells his mother that two kings are outside, requesting entry to their humble cottage. She chides him, laments his disinclination to speak truly, and sends him to the door again. Amahl returns to admit that, indeed, two kings do not stand outside. His mother rejoices, but Amahl proclaims: “There are three kings…and one of them is black.”

  I remembered this line when I started to visit art museums much later and soon realized that Menotti had been following an old tradition, not making a modern plea for racial harmony. One of the Magi is always depicted as a black man. This traditional iconography is not biblical, but a later interpretation. The gospel writers do not even specify the number of wise men who saw the star in the east and came to worship. Some early sources cite up to twelve, but the number soon stabilized at three. Later, this trio received names—Balthazar, Melchior, and Gaspar, first specified in a sixth-century mosaic in Ravenna—and then, symbolic interpretations. As these allegories moved from the specific to the general, the portrayal of one Magus as black stabilized. The three were first seen as kings of Arabia, Persia, and India, then (by the Venerable Bede, for example) as symbols for the three great continents of Africa, Europe, and Asia, and finally, as representatives of the three major human races: white, yellow, and black.

  I was reminded of this iconographical tidbit recently as I read one of the classic works of physical anthropology—the historical beginning of scientific measurement of the human skull. Petrus Camper, Dutch anatomist and painter, was born in Leiden in 1722. He studied both art and science, then trained as a midwife before receiving his degree as a physician. (Men may be mid-wives. The name refers to a person, male or female, who stays with [mit, as in modern German] a woman [wif] during birth—so the female end of the etymology refers to the mother, not the attendant.) In 1755, he became a professor of anatomy in Amsterdam and spent the rest of his comfortable life alternating between his country home and his professional duties in Amsterdam and Groningen. Camper, who discovered the air spaces in bird bones and studied the hearing of fishes and the croaking of frogs, was revered as one of the great intellects of Europe during his own lifetime. The busy life that such attention brings, made even more hectic by the political career that he forged during his later years, left Camper little time to write and publish his scientific studies. At his death in 1789, he left his major work on the measurement of human anatomy in manuscript. His son published this posthumous document in 1791, both in the original Dutch and in French translation. (I read the French, an edition printed in Utrecht, presumably by typesetters who didn’t know the language, and so full of errors that I almost decided it might be easier to learn Dutch and work from the other version.)

  This work bears an extended title, both characteristic of the age and expressive of the contents: Physical dissertation on the real differences that men of different countries and ages display in their facial traits; on the beauty that characterizes the statues and engraved stones of antiquity; followed by the proposition of a new method for drawing human heads with the greatest accuracy. Camper’s treatise is remembered today for one primary achievement—the definition of the so-called facial angle, the first widely accepted measurement for comparing the skulls of different races and nationalities. Camper’s facial angle is the traditional beginning of craniometry, or the science of measuring human skulls, a major subdiscipline of physical anthropology.

  Illustration from Camper’s original work showing increasing value for the facial angle of (left to right) an ape, an African, and a Grecian head. NEG. NO. 337249. COURTESY DEPARTMENT OF LIBRARY SERVICES, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.

  The human skull may be divided into two basic components: the vault of the cranium itself and the face in front. Camper’s facial angle sought to specify the relationship between these two parts. Camper first drew a line connecting the ear opening with the base of the nose (the so-called horizontal, or “h-k” on his illustration of an African head). He then constructed another line joining the most forward projection of the upper jaw (the bottom of the upper lip in living heads, usually the edge of the incisor teeth on skulls) with the most protruding point of the brow above the eyes (“h-n” on his African head), and called ever since the facial line. Camper then defined the facial angle as the intersection of the horizontal (his basis of reference) with the facial line (roughly, the forward slant of the face).

  In a general way, the facial angle measures the relative flatness versus forward extension of the face. A low value means that the jaws extend far in front of the cranial vault, giving the entire skull a sloping appearance. A high value indicates a flat face with jaws projecting no farther forward than the brow itself. When a facial angle exceeds 90 degrees, the vault of the cranium projects farther forward th
an the underlying jaws.

  The facial angle soon became the first widely accepted tool for quantitative comparison of human skulls. It spawned an immense literature, a host of proposals for slight improvements based on different criteria, and a bevy of instruments designed to measure this fundamental aspect of human life. Camper’s angle became the first quantitative device for establishing invidious comparisons, based on inherent distinctions, among human races. The early craniometricians reported that African blacks possessed the lowest facial angles (farthest forward projection of the jaws), with Orientals in the middle, and Europeans on top, with facial angles sometimes approaching 90 degrees. Since apes had facial angles even lower than blacks, and since the facial angles for ancient statues of Greek deities exceeded those of all living Europeans, the smooth ascent from monkey to majesty seemed assured. Historian John S. Haller writes:

  The facial angle was the most extensively elaborated and artlessly abused criterion for racial somatology…. By 1860 the facial angle had become the most frequent means of explaining the graduation of species. Like the Chain of Being, the races of man consisted of an ordered hierarchy in which the Hottentot, the Kaffir, the Chinaman, and the Indian held a specific position in the order of life.