Applause burst forth on all sides. In the twinkling of an eye she had turned on her heel and was going up the stage, presenting the nape of her neck to the spectators’ gaze, a neck where the golden red hair showed like some animal’s fell. Then the plaudits became frantic.
The experiment proceeds, her nature (feral, manipulative) remains constant; only the stimuli and buffers change, the lovers and venues vary. At the end of the book, after she has been exposed to a repertoire of environmental stress (age, disease, death), Nana dies of syphilis. A bellicose crowd marches under her windows at the Grand Hotel screaming “On to Berlin” as the Franco-Prussian War begins. Nana fades away, along with the Second Empire of Napoleon III: “On the bed lay stretched a gray mass, but only the ruddy chignon was distinguishable and a pale blotch which might be the face.”
Zola described the faith of a nineteenth-century realist, in a passage that remains as pertinent to experimental biology as to the art of the novelist:
The novelist is equally an observer and an experimentalist. The observer in him gives the facts as he has observed them . . . then the experimentalist appears and introduces an experiment, that is to say, sets his characters going in a certain story so as to show . . . the machinery of his intellectual and sensory manifestations, under the influences of heredity and environment, such as physiology shall give them to us.
Perhaps that’s the machinery novels would still be exposing had novelists remained in touch with experimental science. And perhaps the FDA might send people to watch the influence of heredity and the environment on henna applied directly to the forehead.
Science Fictions
9.
Swift-Boating Darwin: Alternative and Complementary Science
I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for a grandfather.
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1860)
AMERICAN SCIENTISTS BREATHED A COLLECTIVE SIGH of relief in December 2005 after Judge John Jones III ruled against teaching intelligent design (ID) in the classrooms of science. “The overwhelming evidence is that Intelligent Design is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism and not a scientific theory,” Jones declared in his 139-page decision, issued in Dover, Pennsylvania. “It is an extension of the Fundamentalists’ view that one must either accept the literal interpretation of Genesis or else believe in the godless system of evolution. . . . The evidence presented in this case demonstrates that [intelligent design] is not supported by any peer-reviewed research, data or publications.” But Dover isn’t over.
Proponents of ID stubbornly refused to give up their campaign: “A thousand opinions by a court that a particular scientific theory is invalid will not make that scientific theory invalid,” claimed Richard Thompson of the Thomas More Law Center, a group long devoted to Swift-boating Charles Darwin. The center had previously boasted that when ID had been inserted into the Dover science curriculum, “Biology students in this small town received perhaps the most balanced science education regarding Darwin’s theory of evolution than any other public school student in the nation.” Robert Crowther, director of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank, so to speak, complained in a letter to the New York Times that Judge Jones’s decision “asserts the factually false claim that ID proponents haven’t published peer reviewed papers. A number of peer reviewed papers and books are listed on the Discovery Institute website at www.discovery.org/csc.” William Dembski, a mathematician and Fellow of the Discovery Institute, insisted to the Times, “I think the big lesson is, let’s go to work and really develop this theory and not try to win this in the court of public opinion . . . the burden is on us to produce.” Demski, you’ve got a heck of a job to do.
The website of the Discovery Institute reveals that the “peer reviewed” evidence for ID consists of four articles. Each presents a theoretical argument that fails the test of experimental validation. Each has appeared in a publication devoted to pure speculation: the occasional Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington; the thrice-yearly Italian/Indian review Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum; the yearly Dynamical Genetics; or the every-other-year Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Design & Nature. We can conclude that active investigators of ID do not stoop to frequent or rapid publication. Nor does prestige dictate their choice of venue. Online HighWire Press, where seventy of the highest cited journals have been archived since 1948, lists Darwin’s “natural selection” in 271 titles; almost all are experimental accounts. “Intelligent design” appears in the title of but a single effort, a conjectural review published in the Journal of Theological Studies. Alas, ID loses out to another system of alternative science: “Mesmer” or “Mesmerism” appears in 20 titles: each is devoid of experimental promise.
ALTHOUGH ID CLEARLY LACKS SUPPORT in the literature of experimental biology, intelligent design remains a powerful notion that is no longer limited to extreme fundamentalists. ID may be coming soon to a science classroom in your neighborhood. At least ten states have legislation pending that would declare ID an alternative, or complementary, view to Darwinian evolution. And while Darwin’s “theory” of evolution is as well accepted by scientists as the heliocentric theory of Galileo and the gravitational theories of Newton, it’s easy to see why true believers resist the facts of common descent and natural selection. As Judge Jones decided, Darwinian evolution clearly contradicts “the literal interpretation of Genesis,” and resolving that contradiction is difficult at best.
But I’m afraid that not only creationists or evangelists have questioned the experimental basis of science. The notion that there are alternative or complementary systems of medicine other than those based on the laws of physics and chemistry has swept not only daytime television, but also captured the hearts and minds of our legislatures and our elite universities and found a home on the campus of the National Institutes of Health. On an early web display, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine explained why it is funding work based on Ayurvedic notions of animal magnetism:
This vital energy or life force is known under different names in different cultures, such as qi in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), ki in the Japanese Kampo system, doshas in Ayurvedic medicine, and elsewhere as prana, etheric energy, fohat, orgone, odic force, mana, and homeopathic resonance.
While the Center is now called the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine, its interest in vital energy and the “life-force” remains undiminished. Sadly, our current tolerance of homeopathic, chiropractic, Ayurvedic, holistic, crystal-based, or aroma-driven modes of healing has helped to clear the way for the alternative or complementary science of intelligent design. Once advocates of folk-based remedies persuaded the public that there are alternative or complementary explanations of what ails us, why not accept faith-based alternative or complementary explanations for how we came about? If the laws of chemistry and physics like the ideal gas law need not apply to medicine, why should we rely on the laws of evolution such as that of natural selection or the Hardy–Weinberg equation?
We live in an open, diverse society, disdainful since the 1960s of the hard facts of science. That disdain has both intellectual and religious origins: the intellectual roots are chiefly French, the religious roots American. On the one hand, the best and the brightest among us have been tutored in what Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times called the “Hubris of the Humanities.” We have breathed the air of a postmodern era in which melancholic disciples of Michel Foucault proclaim “the end of our great faith in Progress.” On the other hand, American science teachers in evangelical schools teach students that God created the world in six twenty-four-hour days.
No wonder that only 40 percent of Americans believe in evolution and that only 13 percent know what a molecule is. There are more who preach metaphysics than physics (49,230 clergy versus 16,680 physicists) in our country.
THE DOVER DECISION WAS A LANDMARK for those who value fact over faith in t
he realm of science; happily, there have been other such moments. Two public exhibitions (that happened to coincide with the Dover decision) reminded me of episodes as important to the life of science as that ruling by Judge Jones. The American Museum of Natural History mounted a comprehensive and compelling show on the life, work, and everyday impact of Charles Darwin. Illustrating Theodosius Dobzhansky’s aphorism that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution, the exhibition attracted crowds of every age and hue in New York, and traveled to acclaim in Chicago, Toronto, and London.
Simultaneously, France celebrated 250 years of “Light and the Enlightenment” in a splendid exhibition at Nancy that served to illustrate Denis Diderot’s argument that one can’t traffic in metaphysics or morality without understanding the facts of natural science. It was organized by Jean-Pierre Changeux, the dazzling polymath of the Collège de France and our century’s best friend of reductive science. The exhibit featured original texts, scientific artifacts, prints, and masterly paintings that documented the triumph of scientific light and reason over the forces of “obscurantisme” (the “Endarkenment”). Exhibits ranged from Newton’s spectrum to Mme du Châtelet’s equations to modern images of nerve conduction. It was good to see that in December 2005 the galleries at Nancy were as packed as the corridors in Manhattan or that courtroom in Dover.
THE DARWIN SHOW IN NEW YORK called attention to the famous “monkey debate” at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on June 30, 1860. The great debate began with a two-hour-long address by Professor John William Draper of the Medical Department of New York University, invited as the major American champion of Darwinist thought. Thomas Huxley remembered Dr. Draper at the debate as “of course bringing in a reference to the Origin of Species which set the ball rolling.” The details of what followed are controversial, but one exchange is engraved in the story of evolution.
Bishop Samuel Wilberforce—a premature televangelist and equivocal success as a mathematician—spoke next and taunted Huxley by asking if it was on his grandmother’s or his grandfather’s side that he was descended from apes. Huxley famously replied, “I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for a grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he had no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.”
CHANGEUX’S EXHIBIT AT NANCY DISPLAYED AN EARLIER MEMENTO of a similar setback for the forces of unreason. This was the report of a royal commission appointed by Louis XVI to look into the activities of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815). Mesmer had intruded his notion of “animal magnetism” into the highest level of French society. His doctrines leaned heavily on the Swedenborgian notion that matter is a subset of mind, a notion antithetical to the teachings of the philosophes and the French Academy itself. As Robert Darnton pointed out, there was a disturbing connection between the rise of mesmeric belief and the end of the Enlightenment in France. Mesmer taught that disease resulted from various obstacles to the flow of a magnetic “fluid” or vital energy in the body. In a mesmeric session, patients sat about in circular tubs and communicated the “fluid” by means of a rope looped about them all and by linking hands to form a mesmeric “chain.” Soft music, played on wind instruments, a pianoforte, or a glass harmonica, reinforced the waves of ethereal energy that “entranced” the patient.
Reason struck back when the king appointed two commissions to investigate these practices. Dr. Guillotin (of the blade) headed one group of four prominent doctors from the Faculty of Medicine. The other commission was headed by Ambassador Benjamin Franklin (of the lightning) and boasted five members of the Academy of Sciences, including Bailly (of Jupiter) and Lavoisier (of oxygen). The commissioners spent weeks listening to descriptions of mesmeric theory and observing how its patients fell into fits and trances. They found false a report that being mesmerized through a door caused a woman patient to have a crisis. In Franklin’s garden at Passy, a “sensitive” patient was led to each of five trees, one of which had been mesmerized. As the chap hugged each in turn to receive the vital fluid, he fainted at the foot of the wrong one. At Lavoisier’s house, four normal cups of water were held before a mesmerized woman; the fourth cup produced convulsions, yet she calmly swallowed the mesmerized contents of a fifth, which she believed to be plain water. The commissioners concluded that there was no vital fluid. I’m reminded of Danny Kaye chanting in The Court Jester, “The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true!”
The verdict at Dover reminds us that the facts of evolution, no less than the laws of chemistry and physics, are the brew that is true.
10.
Spinal Irritation and the Failure of Nerve
IN NOVEMBER 1864, THE AUTUMN BETWEEN Gettysburg and Appomattox, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard Medical School, traveled to New York by train. He was accompanied on his journey from Boston by Julia Ward Howe, then at the peak of her fame for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Mrs. Howe recalled that they did not stop talking for the entire journey and that never had she been more vastly entertained. Holmes and she were coming to the Century Association to read appropriate verses at the seventieth birthday celebration of William Cullen Bryant. All three, Holmes, Howe, and Bryant, were of broad sanguine temperament and good humor; they were also old friends. Bryant was not only an abolitionist and an enthusiast of Central Park but also a celebrated man of letters who edited the New York Evening Post. And he was the lay leader of the Homeopathic Society.
Holmes was remarkably cordial that evening at the Century and recited his usual quota of immediately amusing, if easily forgettable, quatrains. The next day’s accounts of the occasion do not mention whether Bryant remembered that Dr. Holmes was the leading opponent of homeopathic practice in the United States. In Holmes’s pamphlet Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions (1842) he had referred to Bryant’s homeopathy as “a mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, imbecile credulity, and of artful misrepresentation.” But the evening went well, presumably because a good dinner and a goodlier number of drinks can cause the lion to lie down with the lamb, even if the lamb won’t get a good night’s sleep.
Holmes had become Bryant’s equal in literary renown by 1864; for almost a decade he had been featured in the Atlantic Monthly, America’s most prestigious journal of arts and letters, where he had ample opportunity to temper his wisdom with a smile. He used almost every genre of humor to fill his monthly pieces, collected in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, resorting often to the lowliest of them all, the pun. Holmes had himself complained in The Autocrat that “people who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.” (His own puns seem battered indeed. He had few regrets that his ancient family home in Cambridge was to be razed to provide new buildings for Harvard. He called it a case of “justified homicide.” He saluted John L. McAdam, inventor of the paving process, as one of the seven wonders of the modern world: “The Colossus of Roads.”)
But his sanguine spirit served him well during the years of war. Despite his unhappy trip to the field to collect his wounded son, despite the deaths of many of his former students, he remained a convinced patriot and propagandist for the Union cause. Lincoln’s Democratic opponents thought the doctor a bit laughable, and his son was sometimes embarrassed by his father’s armchair militancy. On September 13, 1863, Henry Livermore Abbot, a Copperhead comrade of young Holmes, reported home his battlefield opinion that young Captain Ho
lmes “is a student rather than a man of action.” He added, “His father, of course, one can’t help despising.” That sentiment was not surprising in a family of Copperheads. One week after the Emancipation Proclamation, Abbot had written home, “The president’s proclamation is of course received with universal disgust, particularly the part which enjoins officers to see that it is carried out.” Dr. Holmes had earned such enemies well. He responded to them in his own good-natured way in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table:
“If a fellow attacked my opinions in print, would I reply?” asks the Autocrat. “Not I. Do you think I don’t understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called the hydrostatic paradox controversy?”—which enigmatic phrase he explained thus: “If you had a bent tube, one arm of which was the size of a pipe-stem and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Thus discussion equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, and the fools know it.”
The Autocrat’s sanguine temperament also protected him from the Jamesian postwar failure of nerve. He remained as skeptical as he’d been before Fort Sumter and maintained the upbeat conviction that folly would by and large yield to reason. When next he came to New York he took aim at an opponent that had not surrendered at Appomattox: quackery. Dr. Holmes appeared before the graduating class of Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1871. He began his talk by explaining the difference between the junior and senior members of the profession: the young doctor knows the rules, the older doctor knows the exceptions. He went on to warn the young graduates against the nostrums and “specifics” that passed for therapy in their century. Holmes’s next targets were homeopathy, bleeding, and cupping. He advised the young physician to beware the homeopath and his clients:
The Fevers of Reason Page 7