Descartes' Bones

by Russell Shorto

  He patiently went back through all of the main flaws he had found in the theory. Then he returned to the matter of Descartes’ skull. Perier, he charged, had misread Baillet. Baillet had indeed described Descartes as having a head “a bit bigger in relation to the trunk,” but he had also said that Descartes’ body was “smaller than average.” The net result could easily have been a smallish skull. As to the portrait by Hals, it was an excellent portrait, and while it showed a man with a rather large head in relation to his body, there was no way of relating it to other heads. “If this is not the head of Descartes,” Gratiolet added of the skull, with a poke at his adversaries’ intelligence-based argument, “then it could be that of his ignorant brother.”

  IT IS NOT ENTIRELY coincidental that, in the same week that Gratiolet countered the cranial capacity arguments of his colleagues in the Anthropology Society, off the coast of South Carolina American gun batteries opened fire on one of their own bases, Fort Sumter. Dating to the colonial period, slavery, race, and ideas of inherent racial differences had formed at the core of American society; during the same period, modernist ideas of racial equality were simmering. The tensions reached one climax with the attack on Fort Sumter, which signaled the beginning of the American Civil War. If racism was part of the American social fabric, it was also engrained in European intellectual life, and in the program of science as it developed. But modernity—going back to the seventeenth century and some of the “radical Enlightenment” figures who first made the connection between a commitment to reason and social equality—also seemed to have in it the possibility of working its way out of such dark corners.

  For the record, mainstream science today has concluded that not only is there no appreciable correlation between race and intelligence, and no correlation between brain size and intelligence, but there is little genetic basis for the very idea of race. The dispersal of humanity and its division into various groups happened so recently, on an evolutionary time line, that racial differences are little more than skin deep. Variations beyond what the eye perceives, such as in intellectual capacity, involve a large percentage of the total number of genes and would require a far longer period of time to come about. J. Craig Venter, the geneticist whose company, Celera Genomics, became a private competitor to the Human Genome Project, put it this way to the New York Times: “Race is a social concept, not a scientific one.”

  Nevertheless, the impulses behind “cranial capacity,” facial angle, and other literal forms of racial profiling are still with us. The best-selling 1994 book The Bell Curve, in the process of examining links between intelligence and economic standing, delved into possible links between intelligence and race, and its success suggested great pools of sympathy for such an argument. The psychologist J. Philippe Rushton promotes an updated form of the race-and-intelligence theory that he characterizes on his Web site in this way: “In new studies and reviews of the world literature, I consistently find that East Asians and their descendants average a larger brain size, greater intelligence, more sexual restraint, slower rates of maturation, and greater law abidingness and social organization than do Europeans and their descendants who average higher scores on these dimensions than do Africans and their descendants.”

  Rushton is not in the scientific mainstream, but James Watson—who won the Nobel Prize for codiscovering the structure of DNA—is. In 2007, Watson avowed a clear connection between race and intelligence, which he believes society refuses to acknowledge out of fear of political incorrectness. Watson said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really.” He also wrote that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”

  In response, other members of the scientific establishment chastised or ridiculed the seventy-nine-year-old Watson for being on this point, as one scientist put it, “out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically.” In What Is Intelligence? (2007), sociologist James Flynn analyzed intelligence tests and concluded that racial and ethnic differences in test scores—Africans tend to score lower than Western Europeans, for example—correlate with a society’s familiarity with the principles of abstraction. Such tests, in other words, measure not necessarily pure intelligence but modern intelligence, the kind that expects us to critically analyze product labels and political speeches—and, for that matter, test scores. Steadily, over the course of a century, methodologies for linking race and intelligence have been tested and found wanting. That process might be said to have begun with Gratiolet’s challenge to Broca. In a small way, Descartes’ skull helped debunk bad science.

  The immediate battle between Broca and Gratiolet ended with no certainty—with both sides believing they were right. But during the course of the debate—in fact, in the very meeting at which Gratiolet responded to Perier—Broca brought something new to the table. His attention had been diverted from the subject of big brains by a remarkable patient he had seen in his hospital rounds the week before, who had died shortly thereafter. The fifty-one-year-old man had been unable to speak for the previous twenty-one years, as it turned out as a result of contracting syphilis. Broca immediately devoted himself fully to this case, for speech was a basic part of human mental functioning and he felt sure that such a thorough loss must leave a mark on the brain. He performed the autopsy, removed the brain, and located a lesion on the left frontal lobe in a fold called the inferior frontal gyrus. This region, he quickly concluded, controlled speech.

  Later work would show that he was basically right. The case study of “Tan” (the pseudonym used for the patient by Broca, after the only syllable the man had uttered) has become a touchstone in the history of science. The brain region Broca identified—now known as Broca’s area—has been the focus of a great deal of research in neuroscience and speech disorders.

  It may be a little easier to look back, on the nineteenth century, for example, to appreciate that useful and destructive approaches to problems—good and bad science—are always taking place simultaneously. Gall theorized the localization of brain functions while also promising to tell your fortune by reading bumps on your head. Cuvier laid the foundations of modern biology at the same time as he was engaging in lurid studies to prove black people were cousins of orangutans. Happily for Broca’s reputation, his discovery of an area of the brain devoted to speech, rather than his work trying to relate brain size to intelligence, would become his claim to fame. Beyond that, the discovery of Broca’s area was the first clear proof of the localization of brain functions. In one go, Gall was partially vindicated, science had advanced, and the materialists counted a score for their side. Of course, that score was in a game whose rules would continue to be challenged.

  After Broca’s death in 1880, his body was in turn subjected to a collegial autopsy. A thoughtful associate had the idea to etch his name—P. BROCA—onto the brain itself, on the inferior frontal gyrus—Broca’s area. His brain then took up residence in the collection that he himself had amassed. That collection was eventually merged with the bone collection of the French Anthropology Museum, where Broca’s brain joined the skull of Descartes.

  Habeas Corpus

  F YOU HAD ASKED AN INHABITANT OF EARLY-twentieth-century Cleveland or London or Stuttgart to name the most modern city in the world, chances are the answer would have been Paris. Partly the belief was based on demeanor or sensibility: there was the café society, the commitment to discussion and debate, to art, to literature, to food and wine, and of course the open and knowing attitude toward sex. But demeanor was built on infrastructure; in Paris, more than almost anywhere else, steel and concrete and electrical currents had been put to use to provide a foundation on which m
odern life—longer, healthier, more comfortable and expansive and reflective than what previous generations could have hoped for—could base itself. The 1900 Olympics gave the wider world a window onto what a city could be. Visitors found a city in which the ancient past sat side by side with the future. The wide boulevards that Baron Haussmann had pressed through two generations earlier gave the city an open, contemporary feel. Paris had a subway, electric street lamps, elevators, a sewer system so modern and efficient people took boat tours in it.

  A symbol of the city’s modernity could be found at every major intersection: a wide-faced clock, high up on an ornate wrought-iron pole, its Roman numerals readable at night thanks to the lamp that topped it. Punctuality was to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries what standardized units of measurement were to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth and what computers would be to the late twentieth. It brought people into line with one another. Life regularized and became more orderly. These clocks were considered a modern marvel the world over because people knew that if the one at the place St.-Sulpice registered exactly twelve noon, the ones at the Trocadero and the place Vendôme and on the Ile de la Cité showed precisely the same time. The mechanism behind this magic was air. A central clock was connected to a machine that compressed hundreds of discrete charges; when the clock struck a new minute, the air bursts pumped out through miles of tubing each to their corresponding clock, where the thrust of pressure clicked off the next minute.

  A little before eleven o’clock on the morning of January 21, 1910, the clocks of Paris stopped. Savage rains had fallen for weeks, and during the night the Seine had spilled over its banks, flooding streets and basements. The central clock room was inundated. Around the same time the clocks stopped, the street lamps went out and the subway cars came to a halt. The rain continued. In the poor areas in the east, neighborhoods became lakes, and the pressure from the water caused hundreds of buildings to collapse. Whole streets caved in from the weight. Outside the Gare St.-Lazare, water filling the underground train tunnels sent the street heaving upward, flinging pedestrians. All told, one million people had to flee their homes. Hospitals had to be evacuated. The Palais de Justice and the Prefecture of Police were flooded, hampering official efforts to deal with the catastrophe. Water poured into the basement of the Louvre, and curators scrambled to save artworks.

  For more than two years the city struggled to right itself. State-of-the-art steam pumps were placed at strategic spots and drainage sewers were built to capture overflow waters in the event of future flooding, but in January 1912, with much of the city still largely stricken from the great flood of 1910, more torrential rains came, destroying the new sewers and submerging the city all over again. If, as Descartes had had it, the forces of modernity were dedicated to overcoming nature, with the floods of 1910–12 nature seemed to have struck back decisively; it was as though modernity itself had collapsed.

  During the flood of 1910, the waters on the southern bank of the Seine had engulfed the quai d’Austerlitz, swept down the rue Buffon, and inundated the anthropological galleries of the Museum of Natural History, filling its rooms to a height of one and a half meters. The river had coursed through the collections of artifacts built up by the likes of Georges Cuvier, Pierre-Paul Broca, and Franz Joseph Gall and carried off skulls and femurs and rib cages on a grim tide. Like many other institutions, the museum took a long while to recover. By the fall of 1912, its galleries and storage spaces were still being renovated and many of the artifacts in its collections were stacked in piles.

  Elsewhere, meanwhile, business was being conducted as usual, and September 23 was an ordinary day at the Academy of Sciences. The members received a report on a species of fresh water shrimp that lived in Lake Tanganyika, a work on paleontology, and a description of an astronomical device that would aid in determining the positions of stars. It might be expected that the most noteworthy item on the agenda would have been the reception of a publication analyzing the rainfall and flow of water in the previous two years. Instead, what got notice—not just in the chamber but in the press and all over the city—was an obscure volume that had recently been published in Sweden, a copy of which was on this day formally received by the academy: The Correspondence between Berzelius and C.-L. Berthollet (1810–1822). In poring through the pages of letters that the two chemists of a century earlier had exchanged, one of the members stopped short at the letter in which Berzelius noted that he had recently discovered the skull of René Descartes and sent it to the academy.

  “Great turmoil, the 23rd of September last, at the Academy of Sciences!” began a report prepared by René Verneau, staff anthropologist at the Museum of Natural History, in which he tried to describe the ruckus that ensued after this arcane bit of information came out. With the passage of time, the fact that Cuvier had exhibited the skull for his fellow scientists had apparently faded from the institutional memory. Was it true, members wanted to know, that the skull of the great Descartes had been entrusted to the academy? If so, where was it?

  After a flurry of orders and some days of searching in the various institutions that were affiliated with the academy, positive news came from the Museum of Natural History. Paperwork showed that the skull had been entrusted into the museum’s keeping by Cuvier himself. The information was followed by an awkward admission: the museum was not at present able to locate the item in question.

  At this, the matter turned into a news story. Reporters visited the museum and found piles of bones, unlabeled and unattended since the flood. Piecing together cause and effect, they wrote stories speculating that the skull of the intellectual father of the French nation had been swept away by the remorseless waters of the Seine. To make matters worse, the museum hadn’t even known the item was missing. “This communication arouses definite emotion,” said the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires. The Gazette de France waxed historical:

  One knew that the great philosopher died in Stockholm in 1650 and that his body was removed to Paris for inhumation. But it was not generally known that the body was missing its head. This had been, it seems, preserved, toward what end no one can say, by a Swedish officer. The skull of Descartes, duly labeled, was transmitted to the descendants of the officer and offered later to the Swedish Academy, which sent it to France. And does one find this relic today? It is believed to have been deposited in the museum, but there is no precise information in this regard.

  Verneau felt the pressure that the news accounts generated. “Every hypothesis was allowed, and many publicists hastened to write up sensational articles in which were found the most fantastic assertions,” he later complained. The museum staff conducted a thorough search of its collection. Verneau gathered the dossier on the skull, including Delambre’s report and the rest of the documentation concerning the events of 1821, so that he and his staff were armed with information that would help them identify one skull from among hundreds. And at last an item seeming to correspond with the old reports—a skull missing only its lower jaw, covered with faded writing—was found, apparently in a jumble with other antique human remains, including some items from the Gall collection.

  Within a week of the first news that there was such a thing as a skull of René Descartes in French institutional keeping, the presumed item itself was delivered to the desk of Edmond Perrier, the director of the museum. That same day, Perrier took it to the academy, so that its members, at their September 30 meeting, could see it for themselves. “This was the first time since 1821 that it left our national collections,” Verneau said later, and, still smarting under the accusations of mishandling the object, he added, “and it was back in its place two hours later.”

  So ninety-one years after Cuvier’s dramatic unveiling of the skull before the assembled scientific establishment of the academy, Perrier presented it again in the same room—“with all the respect due to this precious relic.” He proceeded to give the scientists a brief history of the object. It seemed that it had in f
act been on public display for some years, but “we stopped exposing it in our public galleries” because it came to be seen as improper to display the heads of people who had surviving family members. Perrier glossed over the temporary loss of the skull and its rediscovery in a heap of other bones, complaining instead about how since the flood there was no room to store anything properly.

  But the second appearance of the skull at the Academy of Sciences did not end with quiet acceptance of the situation any more than did the first appearance. In fact, it sparked a whole new round of questions that engulfed the city as the skull became the topic du jour in cafés and parlors. “They talked about it . . . in Paris and in the provinces, on both poles and the two hemispheres; there was not another subject of conversation for twenty-four hours,” a Dr. Cabanès wrote a month later in the Gazette medicale de Paris, which was hardly a sensationalist journal. “And this agitation, this tempest . . . about a skull? But it is no ordinary skull but the skull of one of our most illustrious philosophers, . . . the author of the Discourse on the Method, Descartes, no less!”

  The issue was once again authenticity. The experts expressed doubts about the methods and conclusions of their predecessors of the previous century, and ordinary Parisians in turn took the matter seriously as well. If this was indeed the skull of René Descartes, it deserved to be kept as—in the words of the newspaper of record, Le Temps—“ la précieuse relique.” But how did anyone know for certain, the editor of the highbrow journal Æsculape asked, whether “this vessel blackened by time has housed the highest thoughts or if it contained the lowly brain of some humble brewer”? Some sort of panel of experts needed to be called on, a collection of talents that ranged from historical to forensic.