Bully for Brontosaurus

by Stephen Jay Gould

  And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven [Verse 20]…. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after its kind; and it was so [Verse 24]…. And God said, Let us make man in our image [Verse 26].

  Gladstone then caps his argument with the claim still echoed by modern reconcilers: This order, too good to be guessed by writers ignorant of geological evidence, must have been revealed by God to the scribes of Genesis:

  Then, I ask, how came…the author of the first chapter of Genesis to know that order, to possess knowledge which natural science has only within the present century for the first time dug out of the bowels of the earth? It is surely impossible to avoid the conclusion, first, that either this writer was gifted with faculties passing all human experience, or else his knowledge was divine.

  In a closing flourish, Gladstone enlarged his critique in a manner sure to inspire Huxley’s wrath. He professed himself satisfied as to the possibility of physical evolution, even by Darwin’s mechanism. But the spirit, the soul, the “mind of man” must be divine in origin, thereby dwarfing to insignificance anything in the merely material world. Gladstone chided Darwin for reaching too far, for trying to render the ethereal realm by his crass and heartless mechanism. He ridiculed the idea “that natural selection and the survival of the fittest, all in the physical order, exhibit to us the great arcanum of creation, the sun and center of life, so that mind and spirit are dethroned from their old supremacy, are no longer sovereign by right, but may find somewhere by charity a place assigned them, as appendages, perhaps only as excrescences, of the material creation.”

  Ending on a note of deep sadness, Gladstone feared for our equanimity, our happiness, our political stability, our hopes for a moral order, should the festering sore of agnosticism undermine our assurance of God’s existence and benevolence—“this belief, which has satisfied the doubts and wiped away the tears, and found guidance for the footsteps of so many a weary wanderer on earth, which among the best and greatest of our race has been so cherished by those who had it, and so longed and sought for by those who had it not.” If science could now illustrate God by proving that he knew his stuff when he whispered into Moses’ ear, then surely that sore could be healed.

  Huxley, who had formally retired just a few months before, and who had forsworn future controversy of exactly this kind, responded with an article in the December issue of The Nineteenth Century—“The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature.” Obviously pleased with himself, and happy with his return to fighting form, he wrote to Herbert Spencer: “Do read my polishing off of the G.O.M. [Gladstone was known to friends and enemies alike as the “Grand Old Man”]. I am proud of it as a work of art, and as evidence that the volcano is not yet exhausted.”

  Huxley begins by ridiculing the very notion that harmonizing Genesis with geology has any hope of success or intellectual potential to illustrate anything meaningful. He places Gladstone among “those modern representatives of Sisyphus, the reconcilers of Genesis with science.” (Sisyphus, king of Corinth, tried to cheat death and was punished in Hades with the eternal task of repeatedly rolling a large stone to the top of a hill, only to have it roll down again just as it reached the top.)

  Huxley arranged his critique by citing four arguments against Gladstone’s insistence that Genesis specified an accurate “fourfold order” of creation—water population, air population, land population, and man. Huxley wrote:

  If I know anything at all about the results attained by the natural sciences of our time, it is a demonstrated conclusion and established fact that the fourfold order given by Mr. Gladstone is not that in which the evidence at our disposal tends to show that the water, air and land populations of the globe have made their appearance…. The facts which demolish his whole argument are of the commonest notoriety. [Huxley uses “notoriety” not in its current, pejorative meaning, but in the old sense of “easily and evidently known to all.”]

  He then presents his arguments in sequence:

  1. Direct geological evidence shows that land animals arose before flying creatures. This reversal of biblical sequence holds whether we view the Genesis text as referring only to vertebrates (for terrestrial amphibians and reptiles long precede birds) or to all animals (for such terrestrial arthropods as scorpions arise before flying insects).

  2. Even if we didn’t know, or chose not to trust, the geological sequence, we could deduce on purely anatomical grounds that flying creatures must have evolved from preexisting terrestrial ancestors. Structures used in flight are derived modifications of terrestrial features:

  Every beginner in the study of animal morphology is aware that the organization of a bat, of a bird, or of a pterodactyle, presupposes that of a terrestrial quadruped, and that it is intelligible only as an extreme modification of the organization of a terrestrial mammal or reptile. In the same way, winged insects (if they are to be counted among the “air-population”) presuppose insects which were wingless, and therefore as “creeping things,” which were part of the land-population.

  3. Whatever the order of first appearances, new species within all groups—water, air, and land dwellers—have continued to arise throughout subsequent time, whereas Genesis implies that God made all the sea creatures, then all the denizens of the air, and so on.

  4. However we may wish to quibble about the order of animals, Gladstone should not so conveniently excise plants from his discussion. Genesis pushes their origin back to the third day, before the origin of any animal. But plants do not precede animals in the fossil record; and the terrestrial flowering plants specifically mentioned in Genesis (grass and fruit tree) arise very late, long after the first mammals.

  Huxley then ends his essay with a powerful statement—every bit as relevant today as 100 years ago at its composition—on the proper domains and interactions of science and religion. Huxley expresses no antipathy for religion, properly conceived, and he criticizes scientists who overstep the boundaries and possibilities of their discipline as roundly as he condemns an antiquated and overextended role for the biblical text:

  The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious, fabricated on the one hand by short-sighted religious people, who confound…theology with religion; and on the other by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension.

  The moral precepts for our lives, Huxley argues, have been developed by great religious thinkers, and no one can improve on the Prophet Micah’s statement: “…what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” Nothing that science might discover about the factual world could possibly challenge, or even contact, this sublime watchword for a proper life:

  But what extent of knowledge, what acuteness of scientific criticism, can touch this, if anyone possessed of knowledge or acuteness could be absurd enough to make the attempt? Will the progress of research prove that justice is worthless and mercy hateful? Will it ever soften the bitter contrast between our actions and our aspirations, or show us the bounds of the universe, and bid us say, “Go to, now we comprehend the infinite”?

  Conflicts develop not because science and religion vie intrinsically, but when one domain tries to usurp the proper space of the other. In that case, a successful defense of home territory is not only noble per se, but a distinct benefit to honorable people in both camps:

  The antagonism of science is not to religion, but to the heathen survivals and the bad philosophy under which religion herself is often well-nigh crushed. And, for my part, I trust that this antagonism will never cease, but that to the end of time true science will continue to fulfill one of her most beneficent functions, that of relieving men from the burden
of false science which is imposed upon them in the name of religion.

  Gladstone responded with a volley of rhetoric. He began from the empyrean heights, pointing out that after so many years of parliamentary life he was a tired (if still grand) old man, and didn’t know if he could muster the energy for this sort of thing anymore—particularly for such a nettlesome and trivial opponent as the merely academic Huxley:

  As I have lived for more than half a century in an atmosphere of contention, my stock of controversial fire has perhaps become abnormally low; while Professor Huxley, who has been inhabiting the Elysian regions of science…may be enjoying all the freshness of an unjaded appetite.

  (Much of the fun in reading through this debate lies not in the forcefulness of arguments or in the mastery of prose by both combatants, but in the sallying and posturing of two old game-cocks [Huxley was sixty, Gladstone seventy-six in 1885] pulling out every trick from the rhetorical bag—the musty and almost shameful, the tried and true, and even a novel flourish here and there.)

  But once Gladstone got going, that old spark fanned quite a flame. His denunciations spanned the gamut. Huxley’s words, on the one hand, were almost too trivial to merit concern—one listens “to his denunciations…as one listens to distant thunders, with a sort of sense that after all they will do no great harm.” On the other hand, Huxley’s attack could not be more dangerous. “I object,” Gladstone writes, “to all these exaggerations…as savoring of the spirit of the Inquisition, and as restraints on literary freedom.”

  Yet, when Gladstone got down to business, he could muster only a feeble response to Huxley’s particulars. He did effectively combat Huxley’s one weak argument—the third charge that all groups continue to generate new species, whatever the sequence of their initial appearance. Genesis, Gladstone replies, only discusses the order of origin, not the patterns of subsequent history:

  If we arrange the schools of Greek philosophy in numerical order, according to the dates of their inception, we do not mean that one expired before another was founded. If the archaeologist describes to us as successive in time the ages of stone, bronze and iron, he certainly does not mean that no kinds of stone implement were invented after bronze began.

  But Gladstone came to grief on his major claim—the veracity of the Genesis sequence: water population, air population, land population, and humans. So he took refuge in the oldest ploy of debate. He made an end run around his disproved argument and changed the terms of discussion. Genesis doesn’t refer to all animals, but “only to the formation of the objects and creatures with which early man was conversant.” Therefore, toss out all invertebrates (although I cannot believe that cockroaches had no foothold, even in the Garden of Eden) and redefine the sequence of water, air, land, and mentality as fish, bird, mammal, and man. At least this sequence matches the geological record. But every attempt at redefinition brings new problems. How can the land population of the sixth day—“every living thing that creepeth upon the earth”—refer to mammals alone and exclude the reptiles that not only arose long before birds but also provided the dinosaurian lineage of their ancestry. This problem backed Gladstone into a corner, and he responded with the weak rejoinder that reptiles are disgusting and degenerate things, destined only for our inattention (despite Eve and the serpent): “Reptiles are a family fallen from greatness; instead of stamping on a great period of life its leading character, they merely skulked upon the earth.” Yet Gladstone sensed his difficulty and admitted that while reptiles didn’t disprove his story, they certainly didn’t help him either: “However this case may be regarded, of course I cannot draw from it any support to my general contention.”

  Huxley, smelling victory, moved in for the kill. He derided Gladstone’s slithery argument about reptiles and continued to highlight the evident discrepancies of Genesis, read literally, with geology (“Mr. Gladstone and Genesis,” The Nineteenth Century, 1896).

  However reprehensible, and indeed contemptible, terrestrial reptiles may be, the only question which appears to me to be relevant to my argument is whether these creatures are or are not comprised under the denomination of “everything that creepeth upon the ground.”

  Contrasting the approved tactics of Parliament and science, Huxley obliquely suggested that Gladstone might emulate the wise cobbler and stick to his last. Invoking reptiles once again, he wrote:

  Still, the wretched creatures stand there, importunately demanding notice; and, however different may be the practice in that contentious atmosphere with which Mr. Gladstone expresses and laments his familiarity, in the atmosphere of science it really is of no avail whatever to shut one’s eyes to facts, or to try to bury them out of sight under a tumulus of rhetoric.

  Gladstone’s new sequence of fish, bird, mammal, and man performs no better than his first attempt in reconciling Genesis and geology. The entire enterprise, Huxley asserts, is misguided, wrong, and useless: “Natural science appears to me to decline to have anything to do with either [of Gladstone’s two sequences]; they are as wrong in detail as they are mistaken in principle.” Genesis is a great work of literature and morality, not a treatise on natural history:

  The Pentateuchal story of the creation is simply a myth [in the literary, not pejorative, sense of the term]. I suppose it to be a hypothesis respecting the origin of the universe which some ancient thinker found himself able to reconcile with his knowledge, or what he thought was knowledge, of the nature of things, and therefore assumed to be true. As such, I hold it to be not merely an interesting but a venerable monument of a stage in the mental progress of mankind.

  Gladstone, who was soon to enjoy a fourth stint as prime minister, did not respond. The controversy then flickered, shifting from the pages of The Nineteenth Century to the letters column of the Times. Then it died for a while, only to be reborn from time to time ever since.

  I find something enormously ironical in this old battle, fought by Huxley and Gladstone a century ago and by much lesser lights even today. It doesn’t matter a damn because Huxley was right in asserting that correspondence between Genesis and the fossil record holds no significance for religion or for science. Still, I think that Gladstone and most modern purveyors of his argument have missed the essence of the kind of myth that Genesis 1 represents. Nothing could possibly be more vain or intemperate than a trip on these waters by someone lacking even a rudder or a paddle in any domain of appropriate expertise. Still, I do feel that when read simply for its underlying metaphor, the story of Genesis 1 does contradict Gladstone’s fundamental premise. Gladstone’s effort rests upon the notion that Genesis 1 is a tale about addition and linear sequence—God makes this, then this, and then this in a sensible order. Since Gladstone also views evolution and geology as a similar story of progress by accretion, reconciliation becomes possible. Gladstone is quite explicit about this form of story:

  Evolution is, to me, a series with development. And like series in mathematics, whether arithmetical or geometrical, it establishes in things an unbroken progression; it places each thing…in a distinct relation to every other thing, and makes each a witness to all that have preceded it, a prophecy of all that are to follow it.

  But I can’t read Genesis 1 as a story about linear addition at all. I think that its essential theme rests upon a different metaphor—differentiation rather than accretion. God creates a chaotic and formless totality at first, and then proceeds to make divisions within—to precipitate islands of stability and growing complexity from the vast, encompassing potential of an initial state. Consider the sequence of “days.”

  On day one, God makes two primary and orthogonal divisions: He separates heaven from earth, and light from darkness. But each category only represents a diffuse potential, containing no differentiated complexity. The earth is “without form and void” and no sun, moon, or stars yet concentrate the division of light from darkness. On the second day, God consolidates the separation of heaven and earth by creating the firmament and calling it heaven. The third day
is then devoted to differentiating the chaotic earth into its stable parts—land and sea. Land then develops further by bringing forth plants. (Does this indicate that the writer of Genesis treated life under a taxonomy very different from ours? Did he see plants as essentially of the earth and animals as something separate? Would he have held that plants have closer affinity with soil than with animals?) The fourth day does for the firmament what the third day accomplished for earth: heaven differentiates and light becomes concentrated into two great bodies, the sun and moon.

  The fifth and sixth days are devoted to the creation of animal life, but again the intended metaphor may be differentiation rather than linear addition. On the fifth day, the sea and then the air bring forth their intended complexity of living forms. On the sixth day, the land follows suit. The animals are not simply placed by God in their proper places. Rather, the places themselves “bring forth” or differentiate their appropriate inhabitants at the appointed times.

  The final result is a candy box of intricately sculpted pieces, with varying degrees of complexity. But how did the box arise? Did the candy maker just add items piece by piece, according to a prefigured plan—Gladstone’s model of linear addition? Or did he start with the equivalent of a tray of fudge, and then make smaller and smaller divisions with his knife, decorating each piece as he cut by sculpting wondrous forms from the potential inherent in the original material? I read the story in this second manner. And if differentiation be the more appropriate metaphor, then Genesis cannot be matching Gladstone’s linear view of evolution. The two stories rest on different premises of organization—addition and differentiation.*