by Bill Mesler
This was the beginning of Bastian’s fall from grace in the eyes of the X Club. Huxley was appalled to see the argument between Tyndall and Bastian being waged in the Times. Huxley was striving to maintain a united front capable of advancing the evolutionist cause into mainstream Britain, and he believed it dangerous for the scientists he counted as allies to turn on each other in public forums, especially when one of those forums was the most widely read newspaper in Britain. What’s more, Bastian was breaking Huxley’s cardinal rule that scientists should show deference to their more experienced and accomplished colleagues.
Bastian had begun to try Huxley’s patience even before coming into conflict with Tyndall. Early in Bastian’s experimental work, Huxley had taken the young man under his wing. In Bastian, he spotted an opportunity to bring another promising young scientist into the web of influence of the X Club. He had personally watched Bastian conduct his experiments on several occasions to ensure the validity of Bastian’s experimental evidence. But Huxley was concerned when traces of moss, considered too complex to be spontaneously generated, appeared in one of Bastian’s supposedly hermetically sealed and sterile tubes. There was no accounting for their presence. To Huxley, this fact called into question the eventual appearance of microbes in Bastian’s later experiments. As Bastian moved closer to publishing what Huxley knew would be a contentious book, Huxley advised Bastian to delay publication. On a subject as inflammatory as the origin of life, one had to proceed cautiously.
Huxley himself had learned that lesson the hard way. In 1868, he had been examining an old specimen of mud dredged from the Atlantic seafloor when he discovered a curious organic slime growing on its surface. The slime didn’t resemble any known living organism and appeared to have emerged spontaneously in a sterilized sample. Huxley speculated it might be a kind of missing link between living and nonliving matter. He called the slime Bathybius haeckelii, in honor of the German philosopher and evolutionist Ernst Haeckel’s idea that life had begun with a substance the German naturalist Lorenz Oken had named Urschleim (“primordial slime”). In his book The History of Creation, Haeckel had used Oken’s slime to explain the first rung on his proposed evolutionary ladder. But other scientists were not convinced, seeing Bathybius as no more than a common fungus. Huxley sensed that he was precariously close to an Andrew Crosse moment. When Bathybius was finally shown to be nothing more than calcium sulfate precipitated from seawater by the ethanol used to preserve specimens, he promptly ate his leek, recanting in a letter published in Nature and a mea culpa delivered before the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Huxley’s error had been seized upon by opponents of evolution as proof that the whole evolutionary scheme was faulty. The episode taught Huxley the dangers of trying to move too fast, particularly when the evidence was shaky. He had no doubts that life had once arisen in the past, but the very distant past, when conditions on the Earth were very different. He had moved to a position similar to Darwin’s: that the conditions for spontaneous generation were no longer present in the current state of the natural world. Just as Bastian had adopted the name “archebiosis” to describe spontaneous generation, Huxley tried to breathe new life into the concept by giving it a new name. His choice of words was telling. He began calling the process “abiogenesis,” Greek for “nonbiological creation.” The term avoided the connotation of a process ongoing in the present, like the one Aristotle had once imagined. And unlike Bastian’s term “archebiosis,” the term “abiogenesis” left room for doubt that it was the source of all life. Huxley strongly believed that archebiosis was indeed the source of all life, but he felt it was enough simply to imply it. The idea didn’t need to be shoved into people’s faces.
Drawing of Bathybius haekelii as seen under a microscope.
BASTIAN’S BOOK, The Beginnings of Life, posed a challenge for Huxley. Rank-and-file evolutionists were inspired by Bastian’s attempt to explain the beginning of evolution, but his anticreationist language frightened religious moderates, threatening to undermine Huxley’s attempts to bring these moderates into the evolutionary fold. One of those who could see the overwhelming scientific evidence for Darwin’s theory but was repulsed by its implications for his religious belief was the American mathematician George Barnard, the president of Columbia University in New York. Barnard had read Bastian’s Beginnings and found himself swayed by its reasoning. Yet he still felt compelled to reject all of evolutionary theory because of what it meant to his spiritual beliefs. In an otherwise unremarkable paper that he authored about the germ theory of disease, Barnard meandered into his thoughts about the challenges that evolution and spontaneous generation posed to his own personal religious beliefs. It amounted to one of the most eloquent defenses of faith against reason ever written:
We are told, indeed, that the acceptance of these [evolutionary] views need not shake our faith in the existence of an Almighty Creator. It is beautifully explained to us how they ought to give us more elevated and more worthy conceptions of the modes by which He works His will in the visible creation. We learn that our complex organisms are none the less the work of His hands because they have been evolved by an infinite series of changes from microscopic forces of light and heat and attraction acting on brute mineral matter. . . . It is indeed a grand conception which regards the Deity as conducting the work of His creation by means of those all-pervading influences which we call the forces of nature; but it leaves us profoundly at a loss to explain the wisdom or the benevolence which brings every day into life such myriads of sentient and intelligent beings, only that they may perish on the morrow of their birth. But this is not all. If these doctrines are true, all talk of creation or methods of creation becomes absurdity; for just as certainly as they are true, God himself is impossible . . . if, in my study of nature, I find the belief forced upon me that my own conscious spirit . . . is but a mere vapor, which appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away forever, that is a truth . . . for which I shall never thank the science which has taught it me. Much as I love truth in the abstract, I love my hope of immortality still more; and if the final outcome of all the boasted discoveries of modern science is to disclose to men that they are more evanescent than the shadow of the swallow’s wing upon the lake . . . give me then, I pray, no more science. Let me live on, in my simple ignorance, as my fathers lived before me, and when I shall at length be summoned to my final repose, let me still be able to fold the drapery of my couch about me, and lie down to pleasant, even though they be deceitful dreams.
As Tyndall and Bastian continued to debate the merits of germ theory, their argument increasingly revolved around the question of spontaneous generation. The important point was whether Pasteur had, in fact, proved the existence of airborne germs. Tyndall began trying to undermine Bastian’s results by seizing upon Huxley’s low appraisal of Bastian as an experimenter. The argument became personal for Tyndall. In his eyes, what Huxley saw as poor experimental standards were a deliberate misrepresentation of results. Pasteur, goaded on by Tyndall, threw the weight of his reputation at Bastian. A July 1877 letter from Pasteur to Bastian revealed not only the depth of Pasteur’s passion on the issue, but the combative spirit that belied the Frenchman’s well-cultivated benevolent image: “Do you know why it is so important to me to fight and defeat you? It is because you are one of the main adherents to a medical doctrine that I consider extremely harmful to the art of healing, the doctrine of the spontaneity of all disease.”
Huxley largely stayed out of the fray, but many of his subordinates joined in with relish. Some of the most aggressive criticism of Bastian came from the young zoologist Ray Lankester, who would go on to become one of the most influential evolutionists of the early twentieth century. In a vicious review of The Beginnings of Life in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, Lankester called Bastian a “mesmerized victim of delusions . . . such delusions form a very interesting psychological study, and it is only when we have obtained a proper conception
of Dr. Bastian as an abnormal psychological phenomenon that we can hope rightly to appreciate the whole of statements made in his book.”‡ The savagery of the attacks on Bastian that emerged from the Darwinist camp perplexed many in the larger world of evolutionary science, particularly those observing from other countries.
To put the argument to rest, Tyndall eventually decided to do something that was, as a physicist, a departure for him. He devised a biological experiment, one he hoped would discredit Bastian’s work. He knew the key would be tackling the problem of airborne contamination, the same problem that had once led Pasteur to his swan-necked flask design. Tyndall’s solution was to create an environment filled with what he called “optically pure air.” He constructed a test-tube cabinet with a clear-glass viewing window. The sides and bottom of the cabinet were coated with a sticky syrup of glycerin. It acted like a modern-day lint roller, and eventually all the dust—and presumably Pasteur’s airborne germs—stuck to the sides and bottom. In his cabinet, he tested different solutions for signs of spontaneous generation. But he didn’t get the results he had expected. Some of his tubes did, in fact, grow microorganisms. In trying to determine why, Tyndall hit upon something that seemed to unravel the long, contradictory history of research into spontaneous generation ever since van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microbes. Tyndall identified heat-resistant spores that could survive intense temperatures, which came to be known as Cohn’s spores after the German bacteriologist Ferdinand Cohn. Tyndall went on to devise a method for killing the spores by repeated heating, known as tyndallization, a process that is still commonly used.
Tyndall’s discovery explained the appearance of microbial life in Bastian’s test tubes: they were simply the offspring of heat-resistant spores that had survived Bastian’s attempts at sterilization. The movement of germs through air came to be accepted by the medical community, as was the germ theory of disease. Bastian, who never could quite bring himself to eat his leek, saw his star descend in the scientific community where he had once showed such promise. He never wavered in his belief that spontaneous generation was a common, repeatable phenomenon, a belief that was almost universally abandoned by the scientific community in the wake of Tyndall’s experiments. Though Bastian retained a great deal of respect among physicians, he was seldom again taken seriously in the larger world of science. The Royal Society refused to publish any more of his papers.
In Bastian’s later years, when he turned to the private practice of medicine, he struggled financially as well, though he never quite reached the depths Lamarck had fallen to. Through it all, he continued to write books, well into the twentieth century, on his ideas regarding the origin of life. None were much more than a rehashing of his first. What little attention they garnered was not positive. An editorial in the Lancet that followed one of his last publications betrayed just how far he had fallen even in the eyes of the partisan world of medicine: “To our mind the position is quite unchanged, and we ourselves still remain unconvinced, save, of course, of the courage and good faith of Dr. Bastian.”
Bastian represented the last gasp of the old Aristotelian idea that spontaneous generation was a normal, commonplace occurrence. But the idea that life could emerge from nonlife was not forgotten. With the exception of those who subscribed to the idea that life had been “breathed by the Creator into a few forms or one,” for evolutionists, Huxley’s concept of abiogenesis remained the only possible answer to the question of how life came to exist on Earth. Despite his own belief that abiogenesis was likely naturally possible only under the very different conditions that prevailed on the early Earth, Charles Darwin never lost hope that the process could be duplicated in a laboratory. In an 1882 letter to the Scottish geologist Daniel Mackintosh, Darwin wrote, “Though no evidence worth anything has as yet, in my opinion, been advanced in favour of a living being, being developed from inorganic matter, yet I cannot avoid believing the possibility of this will be proved some day.”
Among the biggest obstacles in proving such a hypothesis was a lack of the most basic knowledge about the early planet. Scientists suspected that the Earth had been different when it was young, but they could not begin to appreciate just how great those differences might have been. Though the concepts of geological change espoused by geologists like Lyell seemed radical at the time, they did not even approach the truth of just how much the Earth’s atmosphere and geological composition had changed across the eons. Nor did anyone understand just how long the Earth—and life on it—had been around. The answer would have shocked them.
* Five years later, FitzRoy, beset by financial troubles, would commit suicide by cutting his throat with a razor.
† X Club members were instrumental in beginning two scientific publications—first the Natural History Review and then the Weekly Reader—to which the membership contributed most of the articles. Both struggled economically, but eventually a third publication stuck: the journal Nature, published by Alexander Macmillan, a friend of Huxley’s who was famous for his “tobacco parties,” which were like an ongoing book club centered around Darwinism and other aspects of evolutionary theory. Huxley penned the first article in the inaugural issue, and other X Club members contributed heavily. With a readership of nearly 450,000, Nature is today perhaps the most influential scientific periodical in the world.
‡ In private, it was Lankester’s sanity that worried Huxley. Huxley wrote to a friend that “there is what we call ‘a screw loose’ about him. I don’t know exactly what screw it is, but there is something unstable about him” (Strick, Sparks of Life, 101).
NO VESTIGE OF A BEGINNING
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?
—BOOK OF JOB, 34:4–7
THE PLANET EARTH was created on October 23, 4004 BC, sometime in the afternoon. That is, at least, what the majority of people in the West believed right up into the nineteenth century. Most might not have given an exact date. That was the work of Irish archbishop James Ussher, who, in his 1650 book Annals of the Old Testament, was able to nail it down precisely from the available references in the Bible. Nevertheless, most people believed the Earth was very young. They also believed, as Voltaire had believed, that the geography and geology of Earth had not changed much since the dawn of creation.
Yet, as many natural philosophers considered the Earth more carefully, and as human beings dug deeper beneath its surface, they began to realize that the geology of the Earth is like a history book. In canyons and mountains, in deserts and rivers, observers could see the long, slow processes of change that had formed the Earth’s varied terrain. During his trip to the Nile, Herodotus speculated about the vast quantities of black sediment—the kemet—that had collected along the riverbanks. He figured it had taken many thousands of years for the delta to form. A thousand years after Herodotus, Arab scholars in the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere wondered about the fossils of sea creatures in rocks found in the desert. These told them that water had once flowed over those long, arid stretches of sand, and vanished long, long ago.
By the late seventeenth century, geological clues had led European observers of the natural world to challenge the biblical account of creation. A Scottish geologist by the name of James Hutton, observing the slowness of geological change in the Scottish highlands, imagined the Earth was so old that it showed “no vestige of a beginning.” In France, Buffon came up with an age based on scientific reasoning alone. His attempt grew out of a remarkable hypothesis of how the solar system came to be formed, a concept in some ways not too different from that held by modern astronomers. Planets, Buffon believed, were created by the collision of large, astral, rocky bodies. Our solar system was formed by a comet colliding with the sun, which would have left the Earth initially very hot. This event, he imagined, was followed by a long process of cooling that still hadn’t ceased. Buffon rather ingeniously assumed he could measure the age of the Earth by figuring out just how long it took rocks to cool. By conducting experiments in which he hea
ted and cooled iron spheres, Buffon eventually came up with an estimate of 74,832 years.* For his troubles, the Vatican threatened Buffon with excommunication. He contritely issued an apology and, with a wink, continued using the figure in his later writings.
Buffon’s measurement was scientific, but it wasn’t very accurate. By the early twentieth century, scientists envisioned an Earth that was billions of years old, so old that Buffon’s estimate of about seventy-five thousand years would be much closer to Archbishop Ussher’s than to the more modern estimates. This new understanding of how truly old the Earth was, and how much it likely had changed since its beginning, would have a huge impact among scientists who were still searching for answers to the great puzzle Darwin had left unsolved, that of the origin of life.
THE START OF THE twentieth century saw an explosion of scientific advancement in the Western world. In physics, Albert Einstein published his “quadfecta” of papers that, among other things, paved the way for the development of quantum mechanics and introduced the world to his special theory of relativity. A Belgian Roman Catholic priest named Georges Lemaître proposed the Big Bang theory to explain the origin of the universe. The German chemist Fritz Haber devised an industrial synthesis of ammonia, leading to manufactured fertilizer that fueled an agricultural revolution and an unprecedented population explosion. The same chemical process was used to make the explosives that fueled the carnage of two world wars.
Yet despite remarkable technological progress in nearly every field of science, the subject of the origin of life had languished in the West. In the decades following the rejection of Henry Bastian’s experiments on spontaneous generation, the question no longer attracted the greatest minds in science. School textbooks often presented the matter as having been closed by Louis Pasteur, whose experiments they said conclusively proved that life could never have sprung from nonlife. Most of the world’s most important evolutionists recognized that abiogenesis had probably occurred sometime in the Earth’s ancient past. But until the early twentieth century, they had very little idea what that ancient Earth looked like, or even how ancient it was.