Natural Acts

by David Quammen

  Marais concluded: “The termitary is a separate composite animal at a certain stage of development, and lack of automobility alone differentiates it from other such animals.” It is, he added, “an example of the method in which composite and highly developed animals like the mammals came into being.” That is, in the deep past, at some simpler phase of their evolutionary history, by amalgamation. This is his personal argument, remember, not mammalian or termite phylogeny as presented by more reliable authorities.

  Marais’s termite studies appeared, beginning in 1923, as a series of short articles in various Afrikaans newspapers and in a magazine called Die Huisgenoot. A final and definitive article was published by Die Huisgenoot in 1925. Written in Afrikaans, it would have been intelligible only to Boers, Dutchmen, and anyone who spoke a version of Dutch, such as Flemings.

  Maurice Maeterlinck, an eminent European playwright and Nobel Prize winner, happened to be a Fleming. Evidently he saw the 1925 article. The following year Maeterlinck published a book titled The Life of the White Ant, expropriating the detailed observations of Eugène Marais, and his terminology, and his theory about termite amalgamation. The book was a success. Marais got no acknowledgment. He hadn’t the money to press a lawsuit.

  Downward spirals of morphine, self-pity, anger, depression. Nine years passed, and then a woman in London, Winifred de Kok, began translating Marais’s own termite pieces into English for their eventual publication as The Soul of the White Ant. She corresponded with Marais, and the letters to her tell us most of what we know about his inner life. He seemed to take new hope. He seemed buoyant for the first time in years. He was finally to have vindication. In one letter he wrote: “You see that your kindly enthusiasm has infected me!…The thought of reaching a bigger public intrigues me.”

  Five months later he put a shotgun to his head and fired.

  What are we to make of such a man, such a life, such a set of lives? Robert Ardrey has called him “the purest genius that the natural sciences have seen in this century.” Well, no. The works left behind by Eugène Marais don’t begin to support that claim. What, then?

  As a newspaperman, he ruined himself by excessive and caustic candor.

  As a lawyer, he was a good poet, or at least an influential one. As a poet, he was not Wallace Stevens. I once spent a day in the New York Public Library with several scarce old collections of his poems, and the stuff seemed to me pretty terrible. Maybe it was the translations. Maybe not.

  As a descriptive naturalist, he was, at his best, wonderful. But even The Soul of the White Ant is a badly flawed book, with patches of metaphysical gobbledegook and lame guesses and non sequiturs mixed in among the wonders.

  As a theorist of insect and primate evolution, he was, I think, more than a little brilliant and more than a little nuts.

  So what’s the bottom line? There is none. It’s a reductive concept, bottom line, and Eugène Marais—less even than most humans—just can’t be thus reduced. He does not lend himself to categorization, easy dismissal, unreserved adulation, or summary assessment of any sort.

  Except maybe this. As an amalgamation of many individual lives, that polymorphic phenomenon to which adhered the name Eugène Marais was one exotically complex jellyfish. He was a man of parts. But he was something much more than the sum of them.

  The Man with the Metal Nose

  A GOOD FRIEND OF MINE CLAIMS, among other matters of wild and ornery personal ethic, that he chooses his friends strictly by smell. I’m not sure what this says about my personal odoriferousness, but I do understand, and endorse, his point in principle: The ineffable qualities are the ones that count, not the objective characteristics that can be captured in an introduction or on a résumé or during two hours’ conversation over cocktails. Those qualities will answer the more crucial questions upon which friendship is based, such as Would this person instinctively step between me and a charging elephant? or Can I trust him to borrow a book without turning the page corners down? And the nose, being humanity’s most under-developed sensory organ, is perhaps the only apt emblem for our groping and sniffling efforts to register the ineffable. Which is why I can’t stop wondering about one particular nose that occupies an intriguingly prominent place in the history of scientific inquiry.

  It was an artificial one, this nose, a prosthesis made of gold and silver alloy. It was worn by an aristocratic Danish astronomer of the sixteenth century, a portly and sybaritic man named Tycho Brahe, who had lost his own God-given schnozzle in a duel. History does not record whether the replacement was held in position by a leather thong (like that curiously similar one worn by Lee Marvin in the movie Cat Ballou), or if not, then how. We do know that all his life Tycho carried a small snuffbox full of ointment with which, like one of those people compulsive about Chapstick, he kept his metal nose constantly lubricated. There is likewise no testimony as to what purpose this cold piece of technology might have served. The surviving portraits of Tycho suggest that its role was not to support eyeglasses. Did it smell? Did it run? Could it be turned up disdainfully? Was it often out of joint? We’ll never know. Tycho himself, with or without his peculiar nose, would probably be forgotten by history if it weren’t for two important considerations. The second of these was a set of notebooks full of numbers, and we’ll come to them in a moment. The first was a galactic event of large magnitude.

  Step outside on a summer night and look off toward the northeastern part of the sky. Not far below the Little Dipper you’ll see the constellation Cassiopeia, easily recognizable in the shape of a W. Back in early November of 1572, when Tycho Brahe was still a young amateur stargazer of twenty-five, a bright new star appeared suddenly in that constellation. Flaring into view, it shone with more brilliance than any other star, more brilliance than the planet Venus, so brightly that it could be seen even during daylight. Furthermore, it gleamed from a spot where, just a week earlier and throughout the centuries before, no star at all had ever been visible. This phenomenon posed a serious philosophical problem in the late sixteenth century, when Aristotelean cosmology as sanctioned by the Catholic Church decreed that the upper celestial spheres—everything out there beyond the moon—were absolutely immutable. On the fourth day of Genesis, God had created the lights in the firmament, and that was that. Now suddenly here was a big new dot of fire flaunting its power in Cassiopeia. The star attracted attention and concern, not just among astronomers and theologians. It was a popular event of mythic resonance. And it made the reputation of Tycho Brahe.

  Tycho wasn’t the first knowledgeable watcher to spot the new star, but he noticed it for himself one night before the news had gone public, and it left him agape. Over the next sixteen months, while the star changed color and rapidly dimmed, he performed a continuous sequence of very precise measurements, using a fine sextant he had crafted from walnut wood (the best available technology at the time, given that telescopes hadn’t yet been invented). Those measurements allowed him to speak of this new star more authoritatively than anyone else in Europe. It was immobile relative to Cassiopeia, Tycho reported; it was not in the sublunary atmosphere but far beyond, amid the other stars; it was not a comet lacking a tail, as some thought, but a true star. Tycho’s book, De Nova Stella, made him internationally famous. He had charted all apparent aspects of the star with surpassing accuracy; but he had no idea what the heck it was.

  Today we know: a supernova explosion. Only five such events have been visible from Earth during the past thousand years, and of those, Tycho’s in 1572 was the fourth. What it signified was that, some thousands of years earlier at a very great distance, a gigantic star (much larger than our sun) had come to the end of its life span—the hydrogen nuclei at its core all “burned” by fusion to form helium nuclei, and the helium further fused into still bigger nuclei. The star had then fallen into a terminal sequence of convulsions, alternately expanding and contracting, gravitational compaction seething down against rising internal pressures, which led to a final cataclysmic thermonuclear ex
plosion. That explosion flashed out perhaps a billion times brighter than the normal intensity of the same star during its previous life. And the flash, having traveled across all the light-years of distance between, eventually reached retinas on Earth from the direction of Cassiopeia. Then, by 1574, it was gone. No one knew why. Not even Tycho Brahe.

  But Tycho, having so faithfully measured and plotted the thing, was now a national hero in Denmark. The king gave him his own island, as well as lavish financial support with which to construct a great astronomical observatory that would be Tycho’s private scientific demesne. Tycho built a castle in Gothic Renaissance style, with spires and gables and cornices, and at the apex an onion dome topped by a gilt vane in the shape of Pegasus. There were guest rooms and aviaries and fountains, formal gardens and neat orchards laid out within a perimeter wall, fish ponds, English mastiffs to stand guard, a paper mill, a print shop for his publications, and from ceiling to floor in the main workroom an oversized mural of Tycho himself. He called the place Uraniborg. The various chambers and towers he furnished with all the best astronomical instruments a king’s money could order up: sextants of walnut, quadrants of brass and steel, armillary spheres ornamented with his own portrait, triquetrums and azimuth circles and astrolabiums—who knows what they all did. In this setting Tycho commanded his many assistants, threw grand parties for visiting nobility, rubbed ointment on his metal nose, and tossed scraps of meat to his attending dwarf, Jeppe, who served as official court fool. Tycho, in other words, was not a scientist in the ascetic vein.

  But during the next twenty years at Uraniborg he also performed the most precise and potentially useful collection of continuous astronomical observations that mankind up to that date had achieved. Where other astronomers (including most recently Copernicus) had been casual and sporadic about their observations, Tycho was thorough, punctilious, indefatigable. Where others had tracked the planets with only their unaided eyes, or occasionally a primitive sextant, Tycho devised his ingenious new instruments. Where others watched for a few nights or a few months, then went inside to dream up more or less misguided theories, Tycho kept watch relentlessly for over two decades, all the while recording his careful notes. The large quarto volumes containing those notes were his treasure. His contribution to science lay in recognizing that serious astronomy required data-gathering of such precision and continuity, and in marshaling the financial resources, the elaborate equipment, the patience, to make it possible. But again, as with the star of 1572, Tycho never knew what he had.

  He was not persuaded by the Copernican theory of celestial organization (which had been published quietly about fifty years earlier) and was dissatisfied with the old Ptolemaic view. So in 1588 Tycho announced his own version. Earth, according to him, was stationary in space, as Ptolemy had thought. The other planets, he said, moved in uniform circular motion around the sun. And the sun in turn orbited, pulling its satellites along, in a great graceful circle around Earth. This Tychonic system supposedly explained all the complex planetary motions that Tycho’s sky-watching over the years had so accurately mapped. It was mathematically sweet and theologically acceptable. Its only drawback was that it was wrong.

  After two decades at Uraniborg, where Tycho was a greedy and irresponsible landlord to the island’s peasants, putting himself gradually into disfavor with the new Danish king, those munificent cash subsidies ended. So the astronomer felt obliged to pack up his gear and his entourage and leave. He went shopping across Europe for another royal patron willing to support him in similar high style, and two years later he found one: Rudolf II, king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor. Tycho settled into a new castle just outside Prague, on the River Iser. Again there was money enough to pay for lordly living and a staff of assistants, among whom now was a twenty-nine-year-old German who had already earned modest recognition as an astronomer in his own right. This man’s name was Johannes Kepler, and he had some ideas about celestial organization himself.

  Kepler had abandoned everything to join Tycho in Prague for a single ulterior reason: He hungered to see the data in those precious notebooks. But Tycho let him go hungry, assigning Kepler to some demeaning lesser chores while refusing to share information with him as a colleague. Then, in October 1601, Tycho Brahe suddenly died. And Kepler got hold of the notebooks.

  Within eight years, using Tycho’s data, Johannes Kepler had formulated and published two laws that for the first time accurately explained the dynamics of our solar system, and thereby began the modern age in astronomy. The laws were as simple, once recognized, as they had been inscrutable before. First, said Kepler, the planets (including Earth) travel around the sun not in circles but in ellipses, great oval orbits with the sun nearer one end. Second, each planet moves not at uniform speed but at a velocity that changes according to its distance from the sun. Today those statements might seem unexceptional. But in 1609, how many minds could have guessed that God would design a universe using ovals and irregular motion?

  Something more was at work here than just astronomical training, hard thinking, and Tycho Brahe’s data. What else? In many of the great scientific discoveries there seems to have been an additional mode of perception that took up in the shadowy zone where pure rationality ended, a further faculty that helped point the way to a revolutionizing insight. The word “intuition” is sometimes applied but, like a paper label on a bottle, only obscures what’s inside. Arthur Koestler, in his intriguing book on the early astronomers, calls it “sleep-walking.” Einstein spoke in his own case of “the gift of fantasy.” As a young man of twenty-three, Isaac Newton suddenly glimpsed his law of gravity in little more time than an apple would take to fall from a tree (though the literal falling-apple anecdote seems to have been apocryphal). Alfred Russel Wallace got the idea of evolution by natural selection (though that wasn’t his term) with the same suddenness, during an attack of fever, after Charles Darwin had labored over the same question methodically for years. Watson and Crick found the structure of DNA using Tinkertoys, youthful cockiness, and someone else’s x-ray crystallographs—crystallographs that until then had not been correctly interpreted. In each of these entries upon the ineffable, something more was at work than mere cerebration.

  Likewise with Johannes Kepler. He shaped his inherited Tychonic data into a vision of cosmological order that was ingeniously simple, drastically unorthodox, and true. But Tycho himself, evidently, just didn’t have the nose for it.

  Animal Rights and Beyond

  DO NONHUMAN ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS? Should we humans feel morally bound to exercise consideration for the lives and well-being of individual members of other animal species? If so, how much consideration, and by what logic? Is it permissible to torture and kill? Is it permissible to kill cleanly, without prolonged pain? To abuse or exploit without killing? For a moment, don’t think about whales or wolves or the California condor; don’t think about the cat or the golden retriever with whom you share your house. Think about chickens. Think about laboratory monkeys and then think about laboratory rats and then think also about laboratory frogs. Think about scallops. Think about mosquitoes.

  It’s a tangled question that, in my view, isn’t well suited to straight answers. Some people would disagree, judging the matter simply enough settled, one way or the other. Of course they have rights. Of course they don’t. I say beware any such absolute certitude. Some folks would even—this late in the evolution of human sensibility—call it a frivolous question, a time-filling diversion for emotional hemophiliacs and cranks. Women’s rights, gay rights, now for Christ’s sake they want ANIMAL rights. Notwithstanding the ridicule, the strong biases on each side, it is a serious philosophical issue, important and tricky, with almost endless implications for the way we humans live and should live on this planet.

  Philosophers of earlier ages, if they touched the subject at all, were likely to be dismissive. Thomas Aquinas declared emphatically that animals “are intended for man to make use of them, either by killing or in any othe
r way whatever.” Descartes held that animals are merely machines. As late as 1901, a moral logician named Joseph Rickaby, a Jesuit, declared: “Brute beasts, not having understanding and therefore not being persons, cannot have any rights. The conclusion is clear.” But maybe no, not quite so clear. Recently, just during the past decade, professional academic philosophers have at last begun to address the matter more open-mindedly.

  Two thinkers in particular have been influential: an Australian named Peter Singer, an American named Tom Regan. In 1975, Singer published a book titled Animal Liberation, which stirred the debate among his colleagues and is still treated as a landmark. Eight years later Tom Regan published The Case for Animal Rights, a more thorough and ponderous opus that took position as a sort of companion piece to the Singer book. In between there came a number of other discussions of animal rights, including a collection of essays edited jointly by Singer and Regan. Despite the onetime collaboration, Peter Singer and Tom Regan represent two distinct schools of thought. They reach similar (not identical) conclusions about the obligations of humans to other animals, but the moral logic is very different, and possibly also the implications. Both men have produced some formidable work and both, to my simple mind, show some glaring limitations of vision.