Finally, in 1980, scientists in California at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory converted a tiny little bit of the rare pink metal, bismuth, into gold.59 They shot ions of carbon and neon at extraordinary speeds against the bismuth, knocking out minute fragments to produce gold, which in turn was extracted into ether, washed with hydrochloric acid, and plated thinly onto platinum. The entire procedure cost about $10,000. It produced a nearly negligibly small quantity of gold, equivalent then to less than a penny, about one billionth of one cent. Thus the alchemists' old dream was undermined by the discovery that it cost much more money to make gold than to dig it from the earth. Worse, making gold cost more than just buying it at a store.
Still, as chemists had anticipated decades earlier, the monetary value of the energy released in a transmutation is immensely greater than the value of gold.60 Of course, the “transmutation” of the chemists was not the same as the alleged transmutations of the alchemists. Similar, but not the same. Yet the early alchemists would have been pleased with what scientists did find: immensely valuable elements that glow and have spectacular properties that act at a distance to energize or destroy, and the ability to convert elements into one another. As in the writings of Basil Valentine, there are poisons that can be used as medicine. Reflecting on the nature of science, Marie Curie once wrote “A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician, he is also a child placed before natural phenomena, which impress him like a fairy tale.”61
Thus ends the story on transmutation which I set out to tell, from the legendary Pythagoras to the meticulous chemists. But let me add an afterthought. In the end, the alchemists' gold surprisingly was found not by a chemist but by a writer. As was hoped and desired, eventually the “Philosopher's Stone” did generate unimaginable wealth. But it was not from a glittering red powder or an actual piece of metal, it turned out to be the idea itself, the ink on paper. The key to wealth was not literally a stone, instead it was words, like on this page this ink: the Philosopher's Stone.
In 1995, an unknown writer in Edinburgh, Scotland, finished a manuscript titled Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. After numerous rejections, it was published in 1997, and then it quickly made its author, Joanne Rowling, very, very rich. It began a series of books that became the fastest selling books in history. They earned their author hundreds of millions of dollars, far surpassing the wealth ever earned through writing by any author on Earth. It made her richer than the Queen of the United Kingdom. Anyone who has read such books can see that they're fun, good, but why the unprecedented scope of the success? Are Rowling's stories so immensely superior to most everything ever written in human history? I did not think so, so this puzzle stood in my mind for years. I called it “the Harry Potter problem.”
Was it just a coincidence that the original title of this book involved the Philosopher's Stone? (I say the original title just because in the United States it was re-titled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, because of the publisher's belief that the title would not be as effective in America.) Many readers immediately liked it, but why so many millions? In 2009, someone emphasized to me that those stories borrow a lot of material, images, and myths from older stories. A lot, “it's all in there, everything.” Even the Stone. Then it hit me: that's it, by incorporating many of the most outstanding elements of good old stories, the author made a work that could well provide rich mythical images that were otherwise lacking in readers' lives. Maybe Rowling's books thoroughly conveyed the uplifting power of myths, secrets of the ancients, to readers who were practically starved for myths. This idea seemed striking because it matched an issue that was raised years ago, by the inspirational scholar Joseph Campbell, who analyzed the value of myths. He complained that because classic myths are nowadays seldom taught and told, people are losing their way, losing their connection to meaningful epic experiences of the past. “Our society today is not giving us adequate mythic instruction of this kind, and so young people are finding it difficult to get their act together.”62 Storybooks that revive such myths are helpful. And the apparent and unnecessary rupture between sciences and myths is a related problem to solve. There, the study of chemistry should begin with alchemy, with myths.
5
Darwin's Missing Frogs
MANY old books claim that when Charles Darwin visited the Galápagos Islands, he was inspired to think about evolution by seeing variations in finches' beaks. Most people believed that species were as unchangeable as the chemical elements. Just as no metallurgist could ever make gold, fish or lizards could never become birds. As the story goes, Darwin changed all that when he theorized the “Transmutation of Species.” Allegedly, he found that each species of finch belonged to a particular island and had developed distinct feeding habits that matched their evolving beaks, for cracking small or big seeds or for eating insects. That's what many people still think, and so, one of the most widely reproduced pictures in history is that of Darwin's finches.
However, in sterling historical studies, Frank J. Sulloway of Harvard University showed that, really, Darwin was hardly influenced by finches and scarcely observed their feeding habits.1 He did not correlate their diets and beaks; in fact, Darwin collected too few specimens to determine whether any finch species was unique to each island. He did not even keep track of where he picked up every specimen. Really, no finch species was unique to any one island. Unfortunately, some teachers and writers remain unaware of Sulloway's historical findings.2
The popular myth that the Galápagos finches crucially inspired Darwin to think about evolution arose because in the second edition of his Voyage of the Beagle he added one sentence about finches: “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.”3 But that brief comment was foreign to Darwin's travel books and thousands of research notes; there is no evidence that it represented his thoughts during his voyage in 1835.4 When he added that comment, in 1845, he had already believed in evolution for eight years. Yet the finches acquired fame partly because editions of his Voyage include an illustration of finches that, together with the quoted sentence, created the illusion that Darwin construed the finches as compelling evidence for evolution. Actually, Darwin's observations of finches were so scant that his thoughts on them were inconclusive guesswork—so much that he did not refer to the Galápagos finches in his Notebooks on Transmutation or use them as evidence for evolution in his Origin of Species of 1859.
Still the legend spread, partly through the book Darwin's Finches by David Lack, published in 1947. In the Galápagos Islands, Lack extensively collected and analyzed data on the finches that showed that evolutionary processes could account for such species and varieties as well as their beaks, habits, and geographical locations. But along the way, Lack seemed to attribute some of those scientific findings to Darwin himself.5 Textbooks decorated by pictures of finches echoed such claims. Lack's brilliant insight, that the finches' beaks could be understood as evolutionary adaptations, was substantiated by Robert Bowman in 1961.6 Thus the insight that is routinely attributed to Darwin in the 1830s was only established scientifically more than a century later.7
Why did the legend spread? Why did the story about the finches propagate so widely? Sulloway argued that perhaps the story about the finches spread because it matched the format of traditional hero myths: a man departs from home on a bold adventure, encounters and overcomes hardships, and returns with a deep truth. Another reason is that the picture of four species of finches often seemed attractive as the only illustration in Darwin's books that could be construed as a portrayal of evolution, and the story of discovery evolved as a fitting complement.
Nowadays, science textbooks continue to highlight the imagery of finches, and authors finesse the story by noting that Darwin saw the finches but that only later did they turn out to be great examples of evolution. Other writ
ers speculate about factors that “may have been” of decisive importance. For example, Stephen Jay Gould argued that perhaps five years of arguing against his ship's authoritarian captain led Darwin to turn toward materialism and evolution: “Who knows what ‘silent alchemy’ might have worked upon Darwin's brain during five years of insistent harangue.”8 The question is, what really led Darwin to evolution? We can tell the history fairly, if briefly, and explain it by highlighting a neglected story about reptiles and frogs in hell.
In his book of 1691, Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, John Ray argued that the parts of all animals are perfectly fitted to their use because God is good. Thus natural science lent support to theology. People believed that God had created the Garden of Eden as a beautiful and harmonious place where every being fit comfortably in its particular environment. Similarly, for cold places, God created furry animals, while in any desert, there were placed appropriate animals as well. Moreover, some plants and animals were perfectly suited for one another, showing clear evidence of the Designer's plan. For example, some plants have seeds bearing little hooks, and by snagging onto animals' fur, they get transported to distant places, thus disseminating beyond the spaces that are already crowded by other plants.
In the early 1800s, in Paris, Georges Cuvier studied vertebrates. Like most people, he believed that all species were created at the same time, all coexisting with one another. He too believed that species remained constant over time, unchanged. Yet some naturalists, such as Jean Lamarck, believed that all species evolved progressively over time. Many people ridiculed such ideas. Yet naturalists found increasingly various odd fossils that did not seem to correspond to any known creature. People dismissed such anomalies by assuming that such creatures were alive somewhere in the vast continents.
Yet Cuvier also pieced together some bizarre old bones that constituted what seemed to be monstrous kinds of elephants: the Siberian wooly mammoth and the American mastodon. Problem: if such huge animals lived somewhere, then travelers or hunters should have encountered them; yet nobody had reported any such sightings. Such bones and other bizarre fossils seemed to imply that the world used to have a different kind of population in the distant past. Therefore, Cuvier acknowledged that he had been wrong—not all animals coexisted at the same time. He conjectured that the ancient population of creatures was replaced at some point by a modern population of species.
But another problem arose: geologists increasingly found older layers of sedimentary rocks bearing distinct kinds of fossils. It seemed that each geological period had its own distinctive animal population. And the more ancient the layers, the more bizarre the fossils. Rather than two distinct populations in Earth's history, there seemed to be a varied sequence. Many species were no longer alive. What horrible disasters could kill all the animals of a kind?
Cuvier conjectured that major catastrophes had caused extinction. He argued: “Numberless living beings have been victims of these catastrophes; some have been destroyed by sudden floods, others have been laid dry in consequence of the bottom of the sea being instantaneously elevated. Their races even have become extinct, and have left no memorial of them except some small fragments which the naturalist can scarcely recognize.”9
There were more problems. Fossils found in Europe showed animals that presently did not live in Europe, while the older sedimentary rocks did not seem to contain fossils of species currently living in Europe. Accordingly, Cuvier conjectured that the past catastrophes, which had caused fossil deposits, were localized in particular continents. And so, animal species that survived, in Europe for example, had emigrated from the zones of upheaval. If animals currently in Europe had originated elsewhere, then we would expect to find fossils of European animals in other continents. But no such fossils were found.
Stranger things were buried in the rocks. Cuvier identified fossil remains of giant lizards, larger than elephants. William Buckland found the fossil remains of another monstrously large reptile, which he called “Megalosaurus” in 1824. Other large extinct reptiles emerged, and by 1841, Richard Owen proposed the term “Dinosauria” for such creatures. There seemed to be an age in the history of Earth when reptiles large and small dominated the land. Scarcely any mammals seemed to exist at that time, whereas in human history, mammals are the predominant predators on land. The age of mammals was preceded by an age of reptiles, and in deeper layers of rock, geologists found that previously there had been an age of fish and invertebrates, where there were no fossils of mammals or reptiles at all. Moreover, at even older layers of sedimentary rock, they found not even fossils of fish, but only of stranger, smaller beings. Why were there no human remains in the older layers of Earth? Naturalists speculated that maybe the temperatures and other conditions in the early Earth were not yet fit for humans.
In the late 1820s, the young Charles Darwin studied to become an Anglican clergyman. But he became increasingly interested in studying nature. At Cambridge, he studied William Paley's Natural Theology of 1802 and became impressed by how well the parts of animals suit their functions, showing God's benevolent and intelligent design.10 He had also learned, from his professor Adam Sedgwick, that major catastrophes had deformed and reshaped the surface of Earth, killing many past species.
In 1831, at the age of twenty-two, Darwin had the opportunity to travel in a voyage around the world on His Majesty's Ship, the Beagle. Its main mission was to survey the coasts of South America. He would be able to explore and study many exotic places and species, and he would provide company for the ship's young captain, Robert FitzRoy, since the captain was not supposed to socialize with his underlings. FitzRoy wanted company also because he feared that the isolation of a long voyage could drive him insane. He worried that he might have inherited the insanity of an uncle who had killed himself. FitzRoy was well educated in the sciences; he even followed the study of physiognomy, that a person's facial features correspond to their character. When he met Darwin, they got along very well, although FitzRoy, whose nose was long, thin and aquiline, doubted whether Darwin's rather thick nose implied the necessary energy and determination for the long voyage.11 Still, he extended the offer, and Darwin accepted to join the journey.
The HMS Beagle sailed along the coast of South America, carrying out a detailed geographical survey of the coasts. Often the ship docked, and Darwin studied the animals in various regions. Traveling southward, he was impressed by how particular species of animals were replaced by similar but distinct variations and species. For example, a large species of flightless birds, the rhea, occupied much territory, and farther south, a distinct species of rhea shared the territory with the northern kind. Even farther south, the southern rhea were present, but there were none of the northern kind. Their territories overlapped, but why did one species of rhea give way to the other?
Later, traveling in the Pampas region, Darwin found the impressive fossil remnants of a huge armored animal. It resembled the small armadillos of South America. He also found the ancient skull of a toothy rodent as big as a hippopotamus. the bones of an “ant eater” as big as a horse, and bones that seemed to belong to a mastodon. He increasingly sensed how much extinction had obliterated species. How to explain it?
Darwin collected hundreds of samples of unusual and bizarre specimens and analyzed the soils and geological formations of the continent. For reading during the trip, FitzRoy had gifted him a copy of Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell, published in 1830. At Cambridge, Darwin had learned that ancient major catastrophes had shaped the world. But Lyell denied any such catastrophes and argued instead that ordinary environmental processes—rain, wind, rivers, erosion, earthquakes, and volcanoes—had gradually shaped all land. Lyell contended that progress in geology was made mainly by scientists who cited only known causes rather than speculating about hypothetical spectacular events. He praised the ancient Pythagoras, who according to the poet Ovid (ca. 8 CE) allegedly declared: “Nature, the renewer of all things, continually changes ever
y form into some other shape…. I have seen what had been solid earth become salt waves, and I have seen dry land made from the deep; and, far away from ocean, seashells strewn.”12 Lyell claimed that the Pythagorean doctrines confirmed “a principle of perpetual and gradual revolution inherent in the nature of our terrestrial system,” and he noted that Pythagoras, had he applied such ideas to geology, would be further admired—just as astronomers admire him as an ancient Copernicus.13 Lyell's theory was later construed as a key development that led to Darwin's evolution, and therefore, one writer gifted the credit to the ancient wise man: “By Pythagoras, who resided for more than twenty years in Egypt, these ideas were introduced to the Greek philosophers, and from that time ‘Catastrophism’ found a rival in the new doctrine which we shall see has been designated under the names of ‘Continuity,’ ‘Uniformitarianism’ or ‘Evolution.’”14
Lyell believed that the rate of all natural changes was absolutely uniform through time. To explain rock formations, even the most extraordinary mountains, canyons, and cliffs, he appealed only to observable intensities of natural processes. Therefore, he acknowledged, such processes must have acted for immense periods of time. Strangely, atop some of the Cordillera Mountains, Darwin found fossils of seashells and maritime beings. While some might have imagined that spectacular catastrophes had uplifted such soils out of the ocean, Lyell required that such matter had gradually risen over millions of years.
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