The Faber Book of Science

by John Carey

  Was Paul Kammerer the victim of a similar hoax, or was he himself the perpetrator? In any case, when someone applied India ink to (or perhaps injected it into) the feet of several of Kammerer’s frogs, the career of one of the most respected of Viennese biologists was brought to an inglorious end.

  Kammerer was the last great champion of a theory of evolution called Lamarckism. In this view, named for the French naturalist Jean Lamarck [see p. 58], acquired traits are somehow passed on to descendants: when giraffes stretched their necks to nibble high leaves, their offspring were born with longer necks. Darwin himself was a Lamarckian. Modern genetics discards this theory, replacing it with the Mendelian view that natural selection operates on variations produced by random mutations.

  In 1910 Lamarckism was still the ‘establishment’ view, but the new Mendelian theory was rapidly gaining ground. Eager to defend the older theory (he had written a book about it called The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics), Kammerer devised a simple experiment with a species of frog known as the ‘midwife toad.’

  Most toads mate in water. To keep a firm grip on the female’s slippery body, the male toad develops dark ‘nuptial pads’ on his feet. The male midwife toad, which mates on land, lacks such pads. Kammerer’s scheme was to force midwife toads to copulate under water for several generations, then see if they develop nuptial pads. It was a stupid experiment, because, had it succeeded, Mendelians would have explained it as no more than a revival of a genetic blueprint. Nothing so complicated as a nuptial pad could have developed in just a few generations.

  But Kammerer went ahead with his plan and soon reported it to be a huge success. The black pads had indeed appeared. The news was sensational, especially in Russia where Lamarckism then completely dominated biology. Russian scientists were so impressed that they offered Kammerer a post at the University of Moscow.

  No sooner had Kammerer accepted this offer than it was discovered that his toad specimens had been crudely faked. It was the biggest science scandal of the decade. Kammerer blamed it all on an assistant, but nobody believed him. In 1926, at age 46, he took a pistol and shot himself through the head.

  Kammerer continued to be a great hero in the Soviet Union throughout the period when Joseph Stalin and the plant-breeder Trofim Lysenko, both enthusiastic Lamarckians, saw to it that Mendelian geneticists were banished to Siberia. Now that Lysenko is dead and Soviet genetics has gone Mendelian, it is hard to find a biologist anywhere in the world who takes Lamarckism seriously.

  Source: Martin Gardner, Science Good, Bad and Bogus, London, Oxford University Press, 1983. Copyright Martin Gardner 1981.

  Unnatural Nature

  Lewis Wolpert is Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine at University College, London. In The Unnatural Nature of Science (1992), from which this extract is taken, he argues that scientific ideas almost always run counter to common sense.

  The physics of motion provides one of the clearest examples of the counter-intuitive and unexpected nature of science. Most people not trained in physics have some sort of vague ideas about motion and use these to predict how an object will move. For example, when students are presented with problems requiring them to predict where an object – a bomb, say – will land if dropped from an aircraft, they often get the answer wrong. The correct answer – that the bomb will hit that point on the ground more or less directly below the point at which the aircraft has arrived at the moment of impact – is often rejected. The underlying confusion partly comes from not recognizing that the bomb continues to move forward when released and this is not affected by its downwards fall. This point is made even more dramatically by another example. Imagine being in the centre of a very large flat field. If one bullet is dropped from your hand and another is fired horizontally from a gun at exactly the same time, which will hit the ground first? They will, in fact, hit the ground at the same time, because the bullet’s rate of fall is quite independent of its horizontal motion. That the bullet which is fired is travelling horizontally has no effect on how fast it falls under the action of gravity…

  Science also deals with enormous differences in scale and time compared with everyday experience. Molecules, for example, are so small that it is not easy to imagine them. If one took a glass of water, each of whose molecules were tagged in some way, went down to the sea, completely emptied the glass, allowed the water to disperse through all the oceans, and then filled the glass from the sea, then almost certainly some of the original water molecules would be found in the glass. What this means is that there are many more molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the sea. There are also, to give another example, more cells in one finger than there are people in the world. Again, geological time is so vast – millions and millions of years – that it was one of the triumphs of nineteenth-century geology to recognize that the great mountain ranges, deep ravines and valleys could be accounted for by the operation of forces no different from those operating at present but operating over enormous periods of time. It was not necessary to postulate catastrophes.

  A further example of where intuition usually fails, probably because of the scale, is provided by imagining a smooth globe as big as the earth, round whose equator – 25,000 miles long – is a string that just fits. If the length of the string is increased by 36 inches, how far from the surface of the globe will the string stand out? The answer is about 6 inches, and is independent of whether the globe’s equator is 25,000 or 25 million miles long.

  Source: Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science, London, Faber and Faber, 1992.

  Rags, Dolls and Teddy Bears

  The English psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott (1896–1971) is best known for his theory of ‘transitional objects’. These are often bits of rag or soft toys to which the child becomes attached and which, Winnicott argues, play a vital role in reconciling it to the outside world – a role later taken over by art, religion and other sources of ‘illusion’.

  In common experience one of the following occurs, complicating an auto-erotic experience such as thumb-sucking:

  (i) with the other hand the baby takes an external object, say a part of a sheet or blanket, into the mouth along with the fingers; or

  (ii) somehow or other the bit of cloth is held and sucked, or not actually sucked; the objects used naturally include napkins and (later) handkerchiefs, and this depends on what is readily and reliably available; or

  (iii) the baby starts from early months to pluck wool and to collect it and to use it for the caressing part of the activity; less commonly, the wool is swallowed, even causing trouble; or

  (iv) mouthing occurs, accompanied by sounds of ‘mum-mum’, babbling, anal noises, the first musical notes, and so on.

  One may suppose that thinking, or fantasying, gets linked up with these functional experiences.

  All these things I am calling transitional phenomena. Also, out of all this (if we study one infant) there may emerge some thing or some phenomenon – perhaps a bundle of wool or the corner of a blanket or eiderdown, or a word or tone, or a mannerism – that becomes vitally important to the infant for use at the time of going to sleep, and is a defence against anxiety, especially anxiety of depressive type. Perhaps some soft object or other type of object has been found and used by the infant, and this then becomes what I am calling a transitional object. This object goes on being important. The parents get to know its value and carry it round when travelling. The mother lets it get dirty and even smelly, knowing that by washing it she introduces a break in continuity in the infant’s experience, a break that may destroy the meaning and value of the object to the infant.

  I suggest that the pattern of transitional phenomena begins to show at about four to six to eight to twelve months. Purposely I leave room for wide variations.

  Patterns set in infancy may persist into childhood, so that the original soft object continues to be absolutely necessary at bed-time or at time of loneliness or when a depressed mood threatens. In healt
h, however, there is a gradual extension of range and interest, and eventually the extended range is maintained, even when depressive anxiety is near. A need for a specific object or a behaviour pattern that started at a very early date may reappear at a later age when deprivation threatens.

  This first possession is used in conjunction with special techniques derived from very early infancy, which can include or exist apart from the more direct auto-erotic activities. Gradually in the life of an infant teddies and dolls and hard toys are acquired. Boys to some extent tend to go over to use hard objects, whereas girls tend to proceed right ahead to the acquisition of a family. It is important to note, however, that there is no noticeable difference between boy and girl in their use of the original ‘not-me’ possession, which I am calling the transitional object.

  As the infant starts to use organized sounds (‘mum’, ‘ta’, ‘da’) there may appear a ‘word’ for the transitional object. The name given by the infant to these earliest objects is often significant, and it usually has a word used by the adults partly incorporated in it. For instance, ‘baa’ may be the name, and the ‘b’ may have come from the adult’s use of the word ‘baby’ or ‘bear’.

  The object is affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated.

  It must never change, unless changed by the infant…

  It is not forgotten and it is not mourned. It loses meaning, and this is because the transitional phenomena have become diffused, have become spread out over the whole intermediate territory between ‘inner psychic reality’ and ‘the external world as perceived by two persons in common’, that is to say, over the whole cultural field.

  At this point my subject widens out into that of play, and of artistic creativity and appreciation, and of religious feeling, and of dreaming, and also of fetishism, lying and stealing, the origin and loss of affectionate feeling, drug addiction, the talisman of obsessional rituals, etc.

  Winnicott’s caution to mothers against washing the transitional object, and his tracing of adult personality defects to breaks in the child’s relationship with the object, may be relevant to the case of the poet Philip Larkin, who recalls in a letter (13 July 1959):

  My earliest toys were teddy bear, dog (‘Rags’) & rabbit, but only the last named meant anything to me. It sat on the table at meals, until one day it fell with its ears in the mint sauce. It was hung out many days to sweeten, & washed & scented, but I never felt the same about it.

  Source: D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, London, Tavistock Publications, 1971 (copyright, D. W. Winnicott).

  The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

  Dr Oliver Sacks was born in London in 1933, and educated in Oxford, California and New York, where he is Professor of Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. His studies of bizarre neurological disorders are modern classics, raising profound questions about the mind and self-identity. Awakenings, which recounted the ‘time-machine’ effect of L-Dopa on patients who had for years been locked in a trance-like state following sleeping-sickness (encephalitis lethargica), was made into a feature film. This extract is from the tide essay of his 1985 collection.

  Dr P. was a musician of distinction, well-known for many years as a singer, and then, at the local School of Music, as a teacher. It was here, in relation to his students, that certain strange problems were first observed. Sometimes a student would present himself, and Dr P. would not recognize him; or, specifically, would not recognize his face. The moment the student spoke, he would be recognized by his voice. Such incidents multiplied, causing embarrassment, perplexity, fear – and, sometimes, comedy. For not only did Dr P. increasingly fail to see faces, but he saw faces when there were no faces to see: genially, Magoo-like, when in the street, he might pat the heads of water-hydrants and parking-meters, taking these to be the heads of children; he would amiably address carved knobs on the furniture, and be astounded when they did not reply. At first these odd mistakes were laughed off as jokes, not least by Dr P. himself. Had he not always had a quirky sense of humour, and been given to Zen-like paradoxes and jests? His musical powers were as dazzling as ever; he did not feel ill – he had never felt better; and the mistakes were so ludicrous – and so ingenious – that they could hardly be serious or betoken anything serious. The notion of there being ‘something the matter’ did not emerge until some three years later, when diabetes developed. Well aware that diabetes could affect his eyes, Dr P. consulted an ophthalmologist, who took a careful history, and examined his eyes closely. ‘There’s nothing the matter with your eyes,’ the doctor concluded. ‘But there is trouble with the visual parts of your brain. You don’t need my help, you must see a neurologist.’ And so, as a result of this referral, Dr P. came to me.

  It was obvious within a few seconds of meeting him that there was no trace of dementia in the ordinary sense. He was a man of great cultivation and charm, who talked well and fluently, with imagination and humour. I couldn’t think why he had been referred to our clinic.

  And yet there was something a bit odd. He faced me as he spoke, was oriented towards me, and yet there was something the matter – it was difficult to formulate. He faced me with his ears, I came to think, but not with his eyes. These, instead of looking, gazing, at me, ‘taking me in’, in the normal way, made sudden strange fixations – on my nose, on my right ear, down to my chin, up to my right eye – as if noting (even studying) these individual features, but not seeing my whole face, its changing expressions, ‘me’, as a whole. I am not sure that I fully realized this at the time – there was just a teasing strangeness, some failure in the normal interplay of gaze and expression. He saw me, he scanned me, and yet …

  ‘What seems to be the matter?’ I asked him at length.

  ‘Nothing that I know of,’ he replied with a smile, ‘but people seem to think there’s something wrong with my eyes.’

  ‘But you don’t recognize any visual problems?’

  ‘No, not directly, but I occasionally make mistakes.’

  I left the room briefly, to talk to his wife. When I came back Dr P. was sitting placidly by the window, attentive, listening rather than looking out. ‘Traffic,’ he said, ‘street sounds, distant trains – they make a sort of symphony, do they not? You know Honegger’s Pacific 231?’

  What a lovely man, I thought to myself. How can there be anything seriously the matter? Would he permit me to examine him?

  ‘Yes, of course, Dr Sacks.’

  I stilled my disquiet, his perhaps too, in the soothing routine of a neurological exam – muscle strength, co-ordination, reflexes, tone … It was while examining his reflexes – a trifle abnormal on the left side – that the first bizarre experience occurred. I had taken off his left shoe and scratched the sole of his foot with a key – a frivolous-seeming but essential test of a reflex – and then, excusing myself to screw my ophthalmoscope together, left him to put on the shoe himself. To my surprise, a minute later, he had not done this.

  ‘Can I help?’ I asked.

  ‘Help what? Help whom?’

  ‘Help you put on your shoe.’

  ‘Ach,’ he said, ‘I had forgotten the shoe’, adding, sotto voce, ‘The shoe? The shoe?’ He seemed baffled.

  ‘Your shoe,’ I repeated. ‘Perhaps you’d put it on.’

  He continued to look downwards, though not at the shoe, with an intense but misplaced concentration. Finally his gaze settled on his foot: ‘That is my shoe, yes?’

  Did I mis-hear? Did he mis-see?

  ‘My eyes,’ he explained, and put a hand to his foot. ‘This is my shoe, no?’

  ‘No, it is not. That is your foot. There is your shoe.’

  ‘Ah! I thought that was my foot.’

  Was he joking? Was he mad? Was he blind? If this was one of his ‘strange mistakes’, it was the strangest mistake I had ever come across.

  I helped him on with his shoe (his foot), to avoid further complication. Dr P. himself seemed untroubled, indifferent, maybe amused. I resu
med my examination. His visual acuity was good: he had no difficulty seeing a pin on the floor, though sometimes he missed it if it was placed to his left.

  He saw all right, but what did he see? I opened out a copy of the National Geographic Magazine, and asked him to describe some pictures in it.

  His responses here were very curious. His eyes would dart from one thing to another, picking up tiny features, individual features, as they had done with my face. A striking brightness, a colour, a shape would arrest his attention and elicit comment – but in no case did he get the scene-as-a-whole. He failed to see the whole, seeing only details, which he spotted like blips on a radar screen. He never entered into relation with the picture as a whole – never faced, so to speak, its physiognomy. He had no sense whatever of a landscape or scene.

  I showed him the cover, an unbroken expanse of Sahara dunes.

  ‘What do you see here?’ I asked.

  ‘I see a river,’ he said. ‘And a little guest-house with its terrace on the water. People are dining out on the terrace. I see coloured parasols here and there.’ He was looking, if it was ‘looking’, right off the cover, into mid-air and confabulating non-existent features, as if the absence of features in the actual picture had driven him to imagine the river and the terrace and the coloured parasols.

  I must have looked aghast, but he seemed to think he had done rather well. There was a hint of a smile on his face. He also appeared to have decided that the examination was over, and started to look round for his hat. He reached out his hand, and took hold of his wife’s head, tried to lift it off, to put it on. He had apparently mistaken his wife for a hat! His wife looked as if she was used to such things.

  I could make no sense of what had occurred, in terms of conventional neurology (or neuropsychology). In some ways he seemed perfectly preserved, and in others absolutely, incomprehensibly devastated. How could he, on the one hand, mistake his wife for a hat and, on the other, function, as apparently he still did, as a teacher at the Music School?