Bully for Brontosaurus

by Stephen Jay Gould

  5. The consummation. As prophecy relates, the thousand-year reign of Christ will terminate with a final battle between the just and the forces of evil led by the giants Gog and Magog. Thereafter, the bodies of the just shall ascend to heaven, those of the damned shall sink in the other direction—and the earth’s appointed role shall be over. This time a comet shall make a direct hit—no more glancing blows for diurnal rotation or near misses for floods—and knock the earth either clear out of the solar system or into an orbit so elliptical that it will become, as it was in the beginning, a comet.

  Our conventional, modern reading of Whiston as an impediment to true science arises not only from the fatuous character of this particular reconstruction but also, and primarily, from our recognition that Whiston invoked the laws of nature only to validate a predetermined goal—the rendering of biblical history—and not, as modern ideals proclaim, to chart with objectivity, and without preconception, the workings of the universe. Consider, for example, Whiston’s reverie on how God established the laws of nature so that a comet would instigate a flood just when human wickedness deserved such a calamity.

  That Omniscient Being, who foresaw when the degeneracy of human nature would be arrived at an unsufferable degree of wickedness…and when consequently his vengeance ought to fall upon them; predisposed and preadapted the orbits and motions of both the comet and the earth, so that at the very time, and only at that time, the former should pass close by the latter and bring that dreadful punishment upon them.

  Yet such an assessment of Whiston seems singularly unfair and anachronistic. How can we justify a judgment of modern taxonomies that didn’t exist in the seventeenth century? We dismiss Whiston because he violated ideals of science as we now define the term. But, in Whiston’s time, science did not exist as a separate domain of inquiry; the word itself had not been coined. No matter how we may view such an enterprise today, Whiston’s mixture of natural events and scriptural traditions defined a primary domain at the forefront of scholarship in his time. We have since defined Whiston’s New Theory as a treatise in the history of science because we remain intrigued with his use of astronomical arguments but have largely lost both context for and interest in his exegesis of millennarian prophecy. But Whiston would not have accepted such a categorization; he would not even have recognized our concerns and divisions. He did not view his effort as a work of science, but as a treatise in an important contemporary tradition for using all domains of knowledge—revelations of Scripture, history of ancient chronicles, and knowledge of nature’s laws—to reconstruct the story of human life on our planet. The New Theory contains—and by Whiston’s explicit design—far more material on theological principles and biblical exegesis than on anything that would now pass muster as science.

  Moreover, although Whiston later achieved a reputation as a crank in his own time, he wrote the New Theory at the height of his conventional acceptability. He showed the manuscript to Christopher Wren and won the hearty approval of this greatest among human architects. He then gave (and eventually dedicated) the work to Newton himself, and so impressed Mr. Numero Uno in our current pantheon of scientific heroes that he ended up as Newton’s handpicked successor at Cambridge.

  In fact, Whiston’s arguments in the New Theory are neither marginal nor oracular, but preeminently Newtonian in both spirit and substance. In reading the New Theory, I was particularly struck by a feature of organization, a conceit really, that most commentators pass over. Whiston ordered his book in a manner that strikes us as peculiar (and ultimately quite repetitious). He presents the entire argument as though it could be laid out in a mathematical and logical framework, combining sure knowledge of nature’s laws with clear strictures of a known history in order to deduce the necessity of cometary action as a primary cause.

  Whiston begins with the page of Postulata, or general principles of explanation cited previously. He then lists eighty-five “lemmata,” or secondary postulates derived directly from laws of nature. The third section discusses eleven “hypotheses”—not “tentative explanations” in the usual, modern sense of the word, but known facts of history assumed beforehand and used as terms in later deductions. Whiston then pretends that he can combine these lemmas and facts to deduce the proper explanation of our planet’s history. The next section lists 101 “phaenomena,” or particular facts that require explanation. The final chapter on “solutions” runs through these facts again to supply cometary (and other) explanations based on the lemmas and hypotheses. (Whiston then ends the book with four pages of “corollaries” extolling God’s power and scriptural authority.)

  I call this organization a conceit because it bears the form, but not the substance, of deductive necessity. The lemmas are not an impartial account of consequences from Newton’s laws but a tailored list designed beforehand to yield the desired results. The hypotheses are not historical facts in the usual sense of verified, direct observations but inferences based on a style of biblical exegesis not universally followed even in Whiston’s time. The solutions are not deductive necessities but possible readings that do not include other alternatives (even if one accepts the lemmas and hypotheses).

  Still, we must not view Whiston’s New Theory as a caricature of Newtonian methodology (if only from the direct evidence that Newton himself greatly admired the book). The Newton of our pantheon is a sanitized and modernized version of the man himself, as abstracted from his own time for the sake of glory, as Whiston has been for the sake of infamy. Newton’s thinking combined the same interests in physics and prophecy, although an almost conspiratorial silence among scholars has, until recently, foreclosed discussion of Newton’s voluminous religious writings, most of which remain unpublished. (James Force’s excellent study, William Whiston, Honest Newtonian, 1985, should be consulted on this issue.) Newton and Whiston were soul mates, not master and jester. Whiston’s perceived oddities arose directly from his Newtonian convictions and his attempt to use Newtonian methods (in both scientific and religious argument) to resolve the earth’s history.

  I have, over the years, written many essays to defend maligned figures in the traditional history of science. I usually proceed, as I have so far with Whiston, by trying to place an unfairly denigrated man into his own time and to analyze the power and interest of his arguments in their own terms. I have usually held that judgment by modern standards is the pitfall that led to our previous, arrogant dismissal—and that we should suppress our tendency to justify modern interest by current relevance.

  Yet I would also hold that old arguments can retain a special meaning and importance for modern scientific debates. Some issues are so broad and general that they transcend all social contexts to emerge as guiding themes in scientific arguments across the centuries (see my book Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle for such a discussion about metaphors of linear and cyclical time in geology). In these situations, old versions can clarify and instruct our current research because they allow us to tease out the generality from its overlay of modern prejudices and to grasp the guiding power of a primary theme through its application to a past world that we can treat more abstractly, and without personal stake.

  Whiston’s basic argument about comets possesses this character of instructive generality. We must acknowledge, first of all, the overt and immediate fact that one of the most exciting items in contemporary science—the theory of mass extinction by extraterrestrial impact—calls upon the same agency (some versions even cite comets as the impacting bodies). Evidence continues to accumulate for the hypothesis that a large extraterrestrial object struck the earth some 65 million years ago and triggered, or at least greatly promoted, the late Cretaceous mass extinction (the sine qua non, of our own existence, since the death of dinosaurs cleared ecological space for the evolution of large mammals). Intensive research is now under way to test the generality of this claim by searching for evidence of similar impacts during other episodes of mass extinction. We await the results with eager anticipation.

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bsp; But theories of mass extinction do not provide the main reason why we should pay attention to Whiston today. After all, the similarities may be only superficial: Whiston made a conjecture to render millennarian prophecy; the modern theory has mustered some surprising facts to explain an ancient extinction. Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality. No, I commend Whiston to modern attention for a different and more general cause—because the form and structure of his general argument embody a powerful abstraction that we need to grasp today in our search to understand the roles of stability, gradual change, and catastrophe in the sciences of history.

  Whiston turned to comets for an interesting reason rooted in his Newtonian perspective, not capriciously as an easy way out for the salvation of Moses. Scientists who work with the data of history must, above all, develop general theories about how substantial change can occur in a universe governed by invariant natural laws. In Newton’s (and Whiston’s) world view, immanence and stability are the usual consequences of nature’s laws: The cosmos does not age or progress anywhere. Therefore, if substantial changes did occur, they must be rendered by rapid and unusual events that, from time to time, interrupt the ordinary world of stable structure. In other words, Whiston’s catastrophic theory of change arose primarily from his belief in the general stability of nature. Change must be an infrequent fracture or rupture. He wrote:

  We know no other natural causes that can produce any great and general changes in our sublunary world, but such bodies as can approach to the earth, or, in other words, but comets.

  A major intellectual movement began about a century after Whiston wrote and has persisted to become the dominant ideology of our day. Whiston’s notion of stability as the ordinary state of things yielded to the grand idea that change is intrinsic to the workings of nature. The poet Robert Burns wrote:

  Look abroad through nature’s range

  Nature’s mighty law is change.

  This alternative idea of gradual and progressive change as inherent in nature’s ways marked a major reform in scientific thinking and led to such powerful theories as Lyellian geology and Darwinian evolution. But this notion of slow, intrinsic alteration also established an unfortunate dogma that fostered an amnesia about other legitimate styles of change and often still leads us to restrict our hypotheses to one favored style falsely viewed as preferable (or even true) a priori. For example, the New York Times recently suggested that impact theories be disregarded on general principles:

  Terrestrial events, like volcanic activity or change in climate or sea level, are the most immediate possible cause of mass extinctions. Astronomers should leave to astrologers the task of seeking the causes of earthly events in the stars [editorial, April 2, 1985].

  Perhaps they will now grant this paleontologist equal power of judgment over their next price increase.

  The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change. Whiston’s model of stability, punctuated now and then by changes of great magnitude that induce new steady states, did not possess the generality that he or Newton supposed. But neither does Lyellian gradualism explain the entire course of our planet’s history (and Lyell will have to eat his words about Whiston, just as the editors of the Times must now feast on theirs about the theory of mass extinction by extraterrestrial impact). Whiston’s general style of argument—change as an interruption of usual stability—is on the ascendancy again as a worthy alternative to a way of thinking that has become too familiar, too automatic.

  On the wall of Preservation Hall in New Orleans hangs a tattered and greasy sign, but the most incisive I have ever seen. It gives a price scale for requests by the audience to the aged men of the band who play jazz in the old style:

  Traditional Requests

  $1

  Others

  $2

  The Saints

  $5

  Preservation Hall guards against too frequent repetition of the most familiar with the usual currency of our culture—currency itself. Scholars must seek other, more active tactics. We must have gadflies—and historical figures may do posthumous service—to remind us constantly that our usual preferences, channels, and biases are not inevitable modes of thought. I nominate William Whiston to the first rank of reminders as godfather to punctuational theories of change in geology.

  Funny, isn’t it? Whiston longed “to be in that number, when the Saints go marching in” in fact, he wrote the New Theory largely to suggest that cometary impact would soon usher in this blessed millenium. Yet he is now a soul mate to those who wish to hear a different drummer.

  8 | Evolution and Creation

  26 | Knight Takes Bishop?

  I HAVE NOT THE SLIGHTEST doubt that truth possesses inestimable moral value. In addition, as Mr. Nixon once found to his sorrow, truth represents the only way to keep a complex story straight, for no one can remember all the details of when he told what to whom unless his words have an anchor in actual occurrence.

  Oh, what a tangled web we weave,

  When first we practice to deceive!

  Yet, for a scholar, there is nothing quite like falsehood. Lies are pinpoints—identifiable historical events that can be traced. Falsehoods also have motivations—points of departure for our ruminations on the human animal. Truth, on the other hand, simply happens. Its accurate report teaches us little beyond the event itself.

  In this light, we should note with interest that the most famous story in all the hagiography of evolution is, if not false outright, at least grossly distorted by biased reconstruction long after the fact. I speak of Thomas Henry Huxley’s legendary encounter with the bishop of Oxford, “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce, at the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in His Lordship’s own see.

  Darwin had published the Origin of Species in November 1859. Thus, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science met at Oxford in the summer of 1860, this greatest of all debates received its first prominent public airing. On Saturday, June 30, more than 700 people wedged themselves into the largest room of Oxford’s Zoological Museum to hear what was, by all accounts, a perfectly dreadful hour-long peroration by an American scholar, Dr. Draper, on the “intellectual development of Europe considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin.” Leonard Huxley wrote, in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley:

  The room was crowded to suffocation…. The very windows by which the room was lighted down the length of its west side were packed with ladies, whose white handkerchiefs, waving and fluttering in the air at the end of the Bishop’s speech, were an unforgettable factor in the acclamation of the crowd.

  The throng, as Leonard Huxley notes, had not come to hear Dr. Draper drone on about Europe. Word had circulated widely that “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce, the silver-tongued bishop of Oxford, would attend with the avowed purpose of smashing Mr. Darwin in the discussion to follow Draper’s paper.

  The story of Wilberforce’s oration and Huxley’s rejoinder has been enshrined among the half-dozen greatest legends of science—surely equal to Newton beaned by an apple or Archimedes jumping from his bath and shouting “Eureka!” through the streets of Syracuse. We have read the tale from comic book to novel to scholarly tome. We have viewed the scene, courtesy of the BBC, in our living rooms. The story has an “official version” codified by Darwin’s son Francis, published in his Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, and expanded in Leonard Huxley’s biography of his father. This reconstruction has become canonical, copied from source to later source hundreds of times, and rarely altered even by jot or tittle. Consider just one of countless retellings, chosen as an average and faithful version (from Ruth Moore’s Charles Darwin, Hutchinson, 1957):

  For half an hour the Bishop spoke savagely ridiculing Darwin and Huxley, and then he turned to Huxley, who sat with him on the platform. In tones icy with sarcasm he put his famous question: was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from an ape?…At the
Bishop’s question, Huxley had clapped the knee of the surprised scientist beside him and whispered: “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands.”…[Huxley] tore into the arguments Wilberforce had used…. Working himself up to his climax, he shouted that he would feel no shame in having an ape as an ancestor, but that he would be ashamed of a brilliant man who plunged into scientific questions of which he knew nothing. In effect, Huxley said that he would prefer an ape to the Bishop as an ancestor, and the crowd had no doubt of his meaning.

  The room dissolved into an uproar. Men jumped to their feet, shouting at this direct insult to the clergy. Lady Brewster fainted. Admiral Fitzroy, the former Captain of the Beagle, waved a Bible aloft, shouting over the tumult that it, rather than the viper he had harbored in his ship, was the true and unimpeachable authority….

  The issue had been joined. From that hour on, the quarrel over the elemental issue that the world believed was involved, science versus religion, was to rage unabated.

  We may list as the key, rarely challenged features of this official version the following claims:

  1. Wilberforce directly bearded and taunted Huxley by pointedly asking, in sarcastic ridicule, whether he claimed descent from an ape on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side.

  2. Huxley, before rising to the challenge, mumbled his famous mock-ecclesiastical sarcasm about the Lord’s aid in his coming rhetorical victory.