Bully for Brontosaurus

by Stephen Jay Gould

  I had never read Camper’s original definition of the facial angle or his own recommendations for its use and meaning. Neither had most of the nineteenth-century craniometricians who established the facial angle as a primary instrument of scientific racism (Camper’s posthumous work has always been rare and difficult to obtain). I am no longer surprised when the study of a neglected original shows, as in this case, that later interpretations departed from an author’s own intentions. Such stories cannot rank as news; they fall into the category of “dog bites man.” And besides, maybe the later readings were correct and the initial proposal wrong—good insights for bad reasons are legion in the world of intellect.

  The story of Camper’s own interpretation of his facial angle is interesting for another reason. The archaeology of knowledge assumes greatest importance when it seeks new insights from our past. By cultural heritage and proven reliability, we approach problems in a set of stereotyped ways and often assume (following the cardinal sin of pride) that our modern conventions exhaust the domain of possible inquiry. We should study the past for the simplest of reasons—to increase our “sample size” in modes of thought, for we need all the help we can get. Camper’s own rationale is instructive because it departs fundamentally from the sociology and a conceptual basis of modern scientific-inquiry into human variability. We should recover and understand Camper’s reasoning both to pay proper respect to a fine thinker and to expand our own sense of possibility.

  Camper did not define the facial angle as a device for ranking races or nations by innate worth or intellect. He did not even approach the problem of human variability with motives that we would now recognize as scientific. In Camper’s day, anthropology did not exist as a discipline; science had not been defined, either as a word or as a separate domain of knowledge. Scholars often worked simultaneously in areas now walled off into separate faculties of universities. Such “cross-disciplinary” work seemed neither odd nor prodigious to eighteenth-century thinkers.

  Camper was a professor of anatomy and medicine, but he was also an accomplished artist, good enough to win admission to the Painter’s Academy during a long visit to England (1748 to 1750). Camper defined his facial angle with the requisite precision of geometry and the quantitative preferences of science, but his motive lay in the domain of art. (He saw no contradiction, and neither should we.) We may now return to the issue of the black Magus and to Camper’s own statement about his intentions.

  Camper tells us right at the outset of his treatise that his desire to quantify human variation first arose in response to a minor annoyance with Western painting. He had studied the black Magus in many classical paintings and noted that, while his color matched the hues of Africa, his face almost always displayed the features of European whites—a kind of Renaissance minstrel show with whites in blackface. (Since few Africans then lived in Europe, Camper reasoned that most artists had used white models, faithfully copying the facial features of a European and then painting the figure black.)

  Camper wanted to prevent such errors by establishing a set of simple guidelines (lengths and angles) to define the chief characters of each human group. His treatise devotes more space to differences between old and young than to disparity among races or nations—for Camper was also distressed that the infant Jesus had often been drawn from an older model (no photographic surrogates to keep a baby’s image still in Camper’s day).

  Yet Camper did not locate his immediate motive for the facial angle in descriptive anthropology of actual humans, but in a much loftier problem—no less than the definition of beauty itself. Like so many of his contemporaries, Camper believed that the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome had reached a height of refinement never since repeated and perhaps not even subject to recapture. (This is a difficult concept to grasp in the light of our later cultural preference for progress as a feature of technological history—old must mean inferior. But our forebears were not so encumbered, and ideas of a previous golden age, surpassing anything achieved since, had great power and attraction. The Renaissance [literally, rebirth] received its name from this conviction, and its heroes were trying, or so they thought, to recapture the knowledge and glory of antiquity, not to create novel improvements in art or architecture.)

  Camper was obsessed with a particular issue arising from this reverence for antiquity. We can all agree, he states, that the great sculptors of ancient Greece achieved a beauty and nobility that we have not been able to match in our new art or often even to duplicate in simple attempts to copy ancient statues. One might take the easy route out of this dilemma and argue that Phidias and his brethren were just good copyists and that the people of ancient Greece surpassed all modern folk in beauty and proportion. But Camper had evidence against this proposition, for he noted that the few Greek attempts at actual portraiture (on coins, for example) showed people much like ourselves, warts and all. Moreover, the Greeks had made no secret of their preference for idealization. Camper quotes Lysippus’s desire “not to represent men as they are, but as they present themselves to our imagination.” “The ideal of Antique Beauty,” Camper writes, “does not exist in nature; it is purely a concept of the imagination.”

  But how shall we define this ideal of beauty? Camper traces the sorry attempts by poets, artists, and philosophers throughout the centuries. He notes that, in the absence of a firm criterion, each field has tried to fob off the definition by analogy—poets exemplify beauty by reference to art; artists by reference to poetry. Explicit attempts often foundered in nonsense, as in this example from 1584: “Beauty is only beautiful by its own beauty,” a motto that inspired Camper’s appropriate riposte, “Can there be a greater absurdity?”

  And yet, Camper argues, we all agree about the beauty of certain objects, so some common criterion must exist. He writes:

  A beautiful starry sky pleases everyone. A sunrise, a calm sea, excites a sensation of pleasure in all people, and we all agree that these phenomena convey an impression of beauty.

  Camper therefore decided to abandon the overarching attempts that had always devolved into nonsense and to concentrate instead on something specific that might be defined precisely—the human head.

  Again he argues (incorrectly, I think, but I am explicating, not judging) that common standards exist and that, in particular, we all agree about the maximal beauty of Grecian statuary:

  We will not find a single person who does not regard the head of Apollo or Venus as possessing a superior Beauty, and who does not view these heads as infinitely superior to those of the most beautiful men and women [of our day].

  Since the Greek achievement involved abstraction, not portraiture, some secret knowledge must have allowed them to improve the actual human form. Camper longed to recover their rule book. He did not doubt that the great sculptures of antiquity had proceeded by mathematical formulas, not simple intuition—for proportion and harmony, geometrically expressed, were hallmarks of Greek thought. Camper would, therefore, try to infer their physical rules of ratios and angles: “It is difficult to imitate the truly sublime beauty that characterizes Antiquity until we have discovered the true physical reasons on which it was founded.”

  Camper therefore devised an ingenious method of inference (also a good illustration of the primary counterintuitive principle that marks true excellence in science). When faced with a grand (but intractable) issue—like the definition of beauty—don’t seek the ultimate, general solution; find a corner that can be defined precisely and, as our new cliché proclaims, go for it. He decided to draw, in profile and with great precision, a range of human heads spanning nations and ages. He would then characterize these heads by various angles and ratios, trying to establish simple gradations from what we regard as least to most pleasing. He would then extrapolate this gradient in the “more pleasing” direction to construct idealized heads that exaggerate those features regarded as most beautiful in actual people. Perhaps the Greeks had sculpted their deities in the same manner.

 
With this background, we can grasp Camper’s own interpretation of the facial angle. Camper held that modern humans range from 70 degrees to somewhere between 80 and 90 degrees in this measure. He also made two other observations: first, that monkeys and other “brutes” maintained lower angles in proportion to their rank in the scale of nature (monkeys lower than apes, dogs lower than monkeys, and birds lower than dogs); second, that higher angles characterize smaller faces tucked below a more bulging cranium—a sign of mental nobility on the ancient theme of more is better.

  Having established this range of improvement for living creatures, Camper extrapolated his facial angle in the favorable direction toward higher values. Voilà. He had found the secret. The beautiful skulls of antiquity had achieved their pleasing proportions by exaggerating the facial angle beyond values attained by real people. Camper could even define the distinctions that had eluded experts and made for such difficulty in attempts to copy and define. Romans, he found, preferred an angle of 95 degrees, but the ancient Greek sculptors all used 100 degrees as their ideal—and this difference explains both our ease in distinguishing Greek originals from Roman copies and our aesthetic preference for Greek statuary. (Proportion, he also argued, is always a balance between too little and too much. We cannot extrapolate the facial angle forever. At values of more than 100 degrees, a human skull begins to look displeasing and eventually monstrous—as in individuals afflicted with hydrocephalus. The peculiar genius of the Greeks, Camper argued, lay in their precise understanding of the facial angle. The great Athenian sculptors could push its value right to the edge, where maximal beauty switches to deformity. The Romans had not been so brave, and they paid the aesthetic price.)

  Thus, Camper felt that he had broken the code of antiquity and offered a precise definition of beauty (at least for the human head): “What constitutes a beautiful face? I answer, a disposition of traits such that the facial line makes an angle of 100 degrees with the horizontal.” Camper had defined an abstraction, but he had worked by extrapolation from nature. He ended his treatise with pride in this achievement: “I have tried to establish on the foundation of Nature herself, the true character of Beauty in faces and heads.”

  This context explains why the later use of facial angles for racist rankings represents such a departure from Camper’s convictions and concerns. To be sure, two aspects of Camper’s work could be invoked to support these later interpretations, particularly in quotes taken out of context. First, he did, and without any explicit justification, make aesthetic judgments about the relative beauty of races—never doubting that Nordic Europeans must top the scale objectively and never considering that other folks might advocate different standards. “A Lapplander,” he writes, “has always been regarded, and without exception throughout the world, as more ugly than a Persian or a Georgian.” (One wonders if anyone had ever sent a packet of questionnaires to the Scandinavian tundra; Camper, in any case at least, does not confine his accusations of ugliness to non-Caucasians.)

  Second, Camper did provide an ordering of human races by facial angle—and in the usual direction of later racist rankings, with Africans at the bottom, Orientals in the middle, and Europeans on top. He also did not fail to note that this ordering placed Africans closest to apes and Europeans nearest to Greek gods. In discussing the observed range of facial angles (70 to 100 degrees in statues and actual heads), Camper notes that “It [this range] constitutes the entire gradation from the head of the Negro to the sublime beauty of the Greek of Antiquity.” Extrapolating further, Camper writes:

  As the facial line moves back [for a small face tucked under bulging skull] I produce a head of Antiquity; as I bring it forward [for a larger, projecting face] I produce the head of a Negro. If I bring it still further forward, the head of a monkey results, more forward still, and I get a dog, and finally a woodcock; this, now, is the primary basis of my edifice.

  (Our deprecations never cease. The French word for woodcock—bécasse—also refers to a stupid woman in modern French slang.)

  I will not defend Camper’s view of human variation any more than I would pillory Lincoln for racism or Darwin for sexism (though both are guilty by modern standards). Camper lived in a different world, and we cannot single him out for judgment when he idly repeats the commonplaces of his age (nor, in general, may we evaluate the past by the present, if we hope to understand our forebears).

  Camper’s comments on racial rankings are fleeting and stated en passant. He makes no major point of African distinctions except to suggest that artists might now render the black Magus correctly in painting the Epiphany. He does not harp upon differences among human groups and entirely avoids the favorite theme of all later writings in craniometric racism—finer scale distinctions between “inferior” and “superior” Europeans. His text contains not a whiff or hint of any suggestion that low facial angles imply anything about moral worth or intellect. He charges Africans with nothing but maximal departure from ideal beauty. Moreover, and most important, Camper’s clearly stated views on the nature of human variability preclude, necessarily and a priori, any equation of difference with innate inferiority. This is the key point that later commentators have missed because we have lost Camper’s world view and cannot interpret his text without recovering the larger structure of his ideas.

  We now live in a Darwinian world of variation, shadings, and continuity. For us, variation among human groups is fundamental, both as an intrinsic property of nature and as a potential substratum for more substantial change. We see no difference in principle between variation within a species and established differences between species—for one can become the other via natural selection. Given this potential continuity, both kinds of variation may record an underlying and basically similar genetic inheritance. To us, therefore, linear rankings (like Camper’s for the facial angle) quite properly smack of racism.

  But Camper dwelt in the pre-Darwinian world of typology. Species were fixed and created entities. Differences among species recorded their fundamental natures. But variation within a species could only be viewed as a series of reversible “accidents” (departures from a species’ essence) imposed by a variety of factors, including climate, food, habits, or direct manipulation. If all humans represented but a single species, then our variation could only be superficial and accidental in this Platonic sense. Physical differences could not be tokens of innate inferiority. (By “accidental,” Camper and his contemporaries did not mean capricious or devoid of immediate import in heredity. They knew that black parents had black children. Rather, they argued that these traits, impressed into heredity by climate or food, had no fixed status and could be easily modified by new conditions of life. They were often wrong, of course, but that’s not the point.)

  Therefore, to understand Camper’s views about human variability, we must first learn whether he regarded all humans as members of one species or as products of several separate creations (a popular position known at the time as polygeny). Camper recognized these terms of the argument and came down strongly and incisively for human unity as a single species (monogeny). In designating races by the technical term “variety,” Camper used the jargon of his day to underscore his conviction that our differences are accidental and imposed departures from an essence shared by all; our races are not separated by differences fixed in heredity. “Blacks, mulattos, and whites are not diverse species of men, but only varieties of the human species. Our skin is constituted exactly like that of the colored nations; we are therefore only less black than they.” We cannot even know, Camper adds, whether Adam and Eve were created white or black since transitions between superficial varieties can occur so easily (an attack on those who viewed blacks as degenerate and Adam and Eve as necessarily created in Caucasian perfection):

  Whether Adam and Eve were created white or black is an entirely indifferent issue without consequences, since the passage from white to black, considerable though it be, operates as easily as that from black to white.

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nbsp; Misinterpretation may be more common than accuracy, but a misreading precisely opposite to an author’s true intent may still excite our interest for its sheer perversity. When, in order to grasp this inversion, we must stretch our minds and learn to understand some fossil systems of thinking, then we may convert a simple correction to a generality worthy of note. Poor Petrus Camper. He became the semiofficial grandpappy of the quantitative approach to scientific racism, yet his own concept of human variability precluded judgments about innate worth a priori. He developed a measure later used to make invidious distinctions among actual groups of people, but he pressed his own invention to the service of abstract beauty. He became a villain of science when he tried to establish criteria for art. Camper got a bad posthumous shake on earth; I only hope that he met the right deity on high (facial angle of 100 degrees, naturally), the God of Isaiah, who also equated beauty with number and proportion—he “who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span.”

  16 | Literary Bias on the Slippery Slope

  EVERY PROFESSION has its version: Some speak of “Sod’s law” others of “Murphy’s law.” The formulations vary, but all make the same point—if anything bad can happen, it will. Such universality of attribution can only arise for one reason—the principle is true (even though we know that it isn’t).

  The fieldworker’s version is simply stated: You always find the most interesting specimens at the very last moment, just when you absolutely must leave. The effect of this phenomenon can easily be quantified. It operates weakly for localities near home and easily revisited and ever more strongly for distant and exotic regions requiring great effort and expense for future expeditions. Everyone has experienced this law of nature. I once spent two weeks on Great Abaco, visiting every nook and cranny of the island and assiduously proving that two supposed species of Cerion (my favorite land snail) really belonged to one variable group. On the last morning, as the plane began to load, we drove to the only unexamined place, an isolated corner of the island with the improbable name Hole-in-the-Wall. There we found hundreds of large white snails, members of the second species.