Gutenberg and Printing: A View from Strasbourg

 Strasbourg, France, where I now live, is justly proud of Johannes Gutenberg (about 1406-1468), who invented the printing press. He was born in Mainz, nearby in what is now Germany, and returned to it later, but his crucial first steps in developing the printing press were taken in Strasbourg, where a statue and a plaza commemorate him. I have posted a YouTube video, from Strasbourg, France, about Gutenberg.

One would think that Gutenberg’s idea for a printing press would have been a flash of insight that everyone would have immediately appreciated. But he did his initial work as a sideline and without funding from other people, as far as we know. His main work seems to have been as a goldsmith, polishing gems, and making mirrors. He got his idea for the printing press from another kind of press: the wine-press, which removed juice from grapes. Perhaps if he had just stuck to his polishing and mirrors, or had gone into the wine-press business, he might have had fewer financial setbacks. At least, the return on investment was very slow. His few major investors sued him. But, if Gutenberg had not persisted, the world would not have had what is now widely considered one of its most important inventions.

As a result of the printing press, ideas could now be publicized through a large number of copies, rather than copied by hand or by meticulous engravings that were affordable only for illustrations. Gutenberg developed an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that could be melted and re-used. The greater number of copies allowed the written ideas to spread more widely and gain a recognition that they would not otherwise have had, or had only after a long delay.

 

Some examples of such ideas, themselves changing the course of history, are depicted on panels on the Gutenberg monument. One of them shows the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, with a Gutenberg press squarely and symbolically in the middle of the Continental Congress. Copies of the Declaration then spread around the world, where they stirred the ideas of liberty and democracy more than any handwritten document could have done.

Another example is the idea of emancipation of slaves and the end of the institution of slavery. Were it not for the printing press, relatively few people would have been aware of how cruel a system slavery was. Anti-slavery documents stirred the hearts of good people and embarrassed those who owned or profited from slavery. This plaque graphically depicts the cruelty of slavery.

 

Another example is education. The ideas and works of all kinds of intellectuals, from Descartes to Kant to Mozart to Milton to Newton, might have been lost had it not been for the printing press making their creations widely available. As the plaque shows, it was almost entirely white male creators who benefited from this, but the spread of knowledge was a process which, once started, could not be restrained.

Who knows what great ideas might be lost even today because, even if published, go unnoticed. How much worse it would be had there been no way to publish them. This shows the important role that chance plays in evolutionary adaptation (in this case, cultural evolution).

Evolutionary Altruism and Human Genealogies

This is a letter I mailed to Tiya Miles, a Harvard professor, minority activist, and novelist, regarding her most recent novel, Cherokee Rose. I wrote on paper to her academic address, since she must be flooded with emails.

Dear Tiya Miles,

My name is Stan Rice. I am an emeritus professor of biology at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. I am the author of five popular science books about evolution, botany, and scientific thinking. I have also had a long scholarly interest in Cherokee history, due to my tribal membership, but I have no credentials in Cherokee or Native studies. I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed reading your novel, Cherokee Rose. I immediately recognized the James Vann character. It is a story that needed to be told.

The irresistible lure of family history, of mixed racial ancestry, has recently been an important part of my life as it was for one of your main characters, Jinx, and I assume for you also. Like Jinx, my interest in Native ancestry exploded long after the death of the last person who knew much about it, my mother. I remembered and wrote down everything my mother told me about our family’s past, but I did not seek further information from her. She was not interested in asking her Cherokee father about our family history either. She and all her siblings, long after the deaths of my Cherokee grandfather (the last one to speak Cherokee) and white grandmother, wished that they had asked them about everything they knew. I have reconstructed an historical framework and filled in the rest with imagination. As with you and Jinx, my ancestry is a major part of my identity today.

Human interest in ancestry is somewhat hard to explain from my scientific point of view. My evolution books deal with the evolution of altruism. My Ph.D. advisor was on the faculty of Harvard University, your institution. Among evolutionary biologists, altruism extends in primarily one direction, forward—an animal helping its offspring and indirect descendants—and is proportional to the degree of genetic relatedness. Parents care about offspring because they have a genetic relatedness of one-half, and their nieces and nephews because they have a genetic relatedness of one-fourth. Against this background, why should anyone care about ancestors? My Cherokee genes are 17/256, just a smidgin’ over one-sixteenth. Which is, biologically, nothing. My fascination with the story of Cherokee experiences, and the nearly universal interest in genealogies, are inexplicable from the biological viewpoint. This is one reason, of many, that I not only liked your novel but strongly identified with Jinx.

I spent my life ignoring the question of Cherokee freedmen. But I know firsthand about Cherokee hostility toward Blacks. Both sides of my family, especially the Cherokee side, was strongly racist toward Blacks. I was fortunate to have escaped this influence, as far as I am aware. I think this attitude is changing in the Cherokee tribe. I heard Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., whom you seem to have met, give a presentation at a little rural library in Oklahoma (before I moved to France). He had just discovered that one of his ancestors was a freedman. His message was that Cherokees need to face up to the fact that some of our ancestors were slave owners. (Mr. Hoskin is the kind of positive and empathetic leader our tribe has not had since Chief Wilma Mankiller.) My sixth great grandmother, Nancy Ward, one of the most famous Cherokees in history, was apparently the first Cherokee to own slaves. As I understand, she was a little unclear on the Southern concept of slavery; she did not abuse her slaves or treat them as chattel, but as employees who could not quit their jobs. Which does not alter the facts of the case. For me, the plot of your novel (about freedmen) is a personal one.

I have written, separately, to your assistant (as per your website request) to ask if you might be interested in writing a jacket endorsement of my upcoming book, Forgotten Landscapes, about the Native American transformation of the “wild” landscape of North America. I hope this request is forwarded to you. But even if you do not have time to look at my book, I wanted you to know that I, as an informed reader, appreciated your novel not just because of its superior fictional qualities but from a personal space in my heart.

A Humorous Interlude

Come on, admit it, you are ready for a little humor. I promise it won’t take long. And it is relevant to what I have recently written.

I tried and tried to be a great composer. But it was frustrating, because I learned just enough about music to recognize how great the Great Composers were (are?) and how I would never match them. If I had worked on composition all my life, I might have been the late twentieth century equivalent of Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf. Never heard of him? That’s my point.

I recently wrote an essay (August 9) about genius. Humor is a kind of genius. One kind of comedic genius I envy is stand-up comedy. You have to come up with something really funny, with essentially no time for preparation.

Here are a couple of examples of great ripostes that I could have made, but didn’t think of them until it was too late.

I was an incoming freshman at Santa Barbara in 1975, which was, I think, very early in the Anthropocene Epoch. Departments with low enrollments recruited students by having tours during orientation week. I visited the geography department. While I was there, a student (I hope not a graduate student) was practicing his presentation in front of a paper map. When he saw us clueless freshmen walk past, he turned to us, and pointed to the map. “This is a map.”

If I’d been a comedic genius, I might have said, “Oh, really? Is that what they teach you here? Wow, maybe if I’m a geography major I will be as smart as you someday.” But, of course, I didn’t think of this response until decades later.

I was teaching a university botany lab one time about ten years ago. I had the students taste different foods that they, in their rural Oklahoma dietetic narrowness, had probably never tasted. One of them was seaweed. One student in the class clearly considered himself too good to be in the class. He should have dropped it and taken something more interesting to him, like a correspondence course in shit-kicking. He swaggered in, a half hour late, with a smirk on his face. The others had tasted the seaweed. I had him taste it, too.

"Tastes like shit," he said to the silent class.

If I'd been a comedic genius, I might have said, “How do you know?” But of course I didn’t think of it until long afterwards.

Genius requires a lot of neural connections. I have a lot of them. But they have to work fast also. They have to work like monkeys jumping around. Mine sometimes work more like naked mole rats, bringing up a brilliant insight from deep underground just before it decomposes.

Happiness is Fill in the Blank

I’ve been looking through a dull but well-intentioned book from 1937, 101 of the World’s Greatest Books. That is, five to ten page summaries of them. They were the ones you would expect from the era which continued with Great Books of the Western World, whose numerous volumes filled many library shelves even in small towns because teachers and librarians thought these were the books that everyone ought to know about to be considered educated. Great novels, epic stories, great scholarly works, great plays, great works of philosophy, almost all of which were outdated even in 1937. I wasn’t expecting much, not having much interest in the classical authors (Dante was especially silly), but just in case I missed something, I wanted to check.

Rather than to discuss the summaries of the “great” philosophers, which would lull you to sleep, I have chosen one narrow question: What is happiness?

Aristotle answered this question in a prolonged and painful contemplation of the obvious. His was the doctrine of the golden mean, which says that happiness is where you have enough, but not too much, of everything, from wealth to strength. Is there anyone who didn’t already know this? Some people act as if the right amount of sexual pleasure is as much as possible, but even they get worn out once in a while, and they will probably admit this. Some people act as if the right amount of sexual pleasure is none at all, not even accidental thoughts of sex. They are not happy, protestations notwithstanding. But the vast majority of humans already live by the doctrine of the golden mean. I certainly do.

While the golden mean seems obvious, there are lots of people who say that happiness is different for every person. Let me cite, rather than a philosopher, the mid-century musician Ray Coniff, whose song said that “Happiness is different things to different people” (“To a beatnik, it’s a beard, beard, beard…”) In the 1960s, when as a little kid I was absorbing television, I heard the tobacco corporation version: “To a landlord, it’s a great big rent, to a smoker, it’s a Kent.” (I’ve never heard this song on the radio since the 1960s. I assume the tobacco company bought the rights to the original song and is hoarding them.)

I think we all, regardless of philosophy or religion, know that there must be some universals to happiness (except among psychopaths). And, I maintain, many of these universals match the behaviors and feelings produced in our species by evolution. We can only be truly happy when we can honestly feel we are doing the right things with our lives—that is, altruism. We actually enjoy being good (up to a point), and having allies rather than having only enemies and competitors. And having a sense of purpose—which is also the product of evolution—and not just disconnected events.

Happiness is, therefore, not just whatever rings our bells, or floats our boats, or tickles our fancy, or verbs our object. It is a product of evolution, just like language and toenails and the cockles of your heart.

Where New Adaptations Come From

 I posted a video in which I explain where new evolutionary adaptations, and cultural innovations, come from. I filmed the video in Strasbourg, which has many old villages crammed together, such as Hoenheim (where I live) and Bischeim and even one called Souffelweyersheim.

Here is how I learned the process of natural selection. A new mutation appears, then if it is a good one, natural selection favors it. It starts off very rare—only one individual carries it—and ends up common, maybe even going to fixation (completely replacing the other versions of the gene). This is the way I taught it, and the way I wrote about it in my Encyclopedia of Evolution.

But the reality is more complicated, as is usually the case in science. If the mutation appears in a large population, say, a million organisms, then it is extremely rare—one in a million. No matter how good it is, it can get lost by random events before it has a chance to get selected. It has virtually no chance.

But suppose the large population, a million individuals, consists of small interconnected populations, maybe a hundred each. If the mutation occurs in one of them, it has a chance of becoming common, maybe even going to fixation. One chance in a hundred. Then if it spreads to another population, it has another one chance in a hundred to go to fixation. If this happens a hundred times, the new mutation now has ten thousand chances out of a million to be successful.

This is the shifting balances theory of Sewall Wright, who was one of the most important figures in the modern theory of evolution. He was publishing books right up until his death almost at age 100. New adaptations get started in small populations. That is the only way they have a ghost of a chance of succeeding. This is how natural selection must work.

Cultural evolution works the same way, but with ideas instead of genes. Suppose somebody got a great new idea in Hoenheim (or even Souffelweyersheim!). In a small village, the idea might have a chance to spread. If it becomes common in Hoenheim, it might become common in Strasbourg as well. And from there it might have a chance of success in Paris. (This may be unlikely, since Parisians consider themselves the cultural center of the universe, and Strasbourg, to them, is unspeakably provincial.) And from Paris, maybe the world. But the new idea popping up in Paris would get swamped out by all the other ideas in Paris.

This is not the whole story because, of course, Paris consists of lots of small populations, local neighborhoods and arrondissements. A big new idea in the 49^th arrondissement might spread to the 5^th.

One of the major examples of a cultural innovation starting in a place considered provincial is the printing press. Johannes Gutenberg perhaps had to start in an out of the way place—in fact, it was Strasbourg, where I now live. He did not start in Paris or Vienna.

 

The Evolution of Genius

There are geniuses among us. Some of you might be geniuses. But since it is impossible to define what a genius is, few of us can ever know who is or is not a genius. I will just share some insights, from the evolutionary point of view.

First, what genius is not. It is not just intelligence. I am intelligent, as seen from the outside, but when I am being intelligent, as when I am writing, I can see myself from the inside: I am paddling like crazy, like a dog trying to not drown in a flood of stupidity around me.

But for a real genius, everything comes almost without thinking. Mozart would fit anybody’s idea of a genius. He could write the most exquisite music without even having to think about it; in his own words, he wrote music “as the sows piss.” This certainly does not describe anything I do.

Second, genius shows up in the details. I can think of some musical examples. Consider the Nutcracker ballet by Pyotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsy. It is full of delightful melodies, which millions of people know. The ballet is performed hundreds of times around the world at Christmas. I heard that The Nutcracker performance is what keeps a ballet troupe in the black for the season. It may be the most successful ballet in human history.

But that is not what makes it a work of genius. I do not have a score to the Nutcracker, nor can I navigate the online public domain fragments, but I will tell you where to find the music I have in mind. It is in the Danses de Poupées Mecaniques. The magician Drosselmeyer has brought three mechanical dolls for Clara. A lot of skill is required for the three ballet performers since they must all have graceful yet jerky movements that make them seem like robots. The middle one is a woman dancing a waltz, although, this being Tchaikovsky, it is hemiola, with three-quarter time sounding like three-two time. It is not One two three One two three but is One two Three one Two three. It is an exquisite and seldom remembered melody. Right at the end, when the strings repeat the melody one more time, there is a gentle wavering of two flutes. This is the detail that makes it a work of genius. I heard it several times over the years, but never noticed it until my grandkids made me play a video clip of it over and over and over and over.

A similar genius-detail can be found right at the beginning of Hindemith’s Symphony in B flat for band. Few people would rank Hindemith up with Mozart or Tchaikovsky, and I, for one, am not sure. When we rehearsed this piece in band at the University of California in 1977, the director raved on and on about what a genius Hindemith was. Maybe he was right. In the first movement, the trumpets carry a soaring melody (Theme 1). A few minutes later, the oboe introduces Theme 2. But right in the very first measure, just as the trumpets enter with Theme 1, the rest of the band plays just the first five notes of Theme 2. The intervals are correct, but just in the tuba line! Nobody could possibly hear it. Such attention to unseen and unheard detail is something that ordinary composers overlook in their rush to produce something that publishers want.

Third, genius can sometimes work together insights from different realms of thought: music and literature, or literature and science, etc. Leonardo Da Vinci, a genius of both science and art, is everyone’s prime example of this. Isaac Asimov, a biochemist, might have also been an example. He wrote science, fiction, theology, and humor. More often, genius is narrow. Mozart was a genius musician, but who knows if he might have had the rudiments of some other kind of genius. Genius can be narrower yet. John Philip Sousa was a genius in writing band marches; of the best twenty band marches, Sousa probably wrote seventeen of them. He wrote 130 marches, but his operettas, fantasies, overtures, suites, and dances (which add up to 83) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Philip_Sousa] have been largely forgotten. According to a 1952 movie, whenever he tried to write something other than a march, it came out sounding like a march. In the movie, he wrote a love song, “My love is a weeping willow down by the streamside fair…” His wife played piano as he sang. Then she started laughing and played the music as a march, the now famous trio of Semper Fidelis.

Fourth, genius can be agony. One thinks of Beethoven struggling with every detail. In fact, most of the great composers seemed to have mental problems, except apparently Bach and Mendelssohn. If this sounds like I have contradicted my first point, about genius being easy, maybe I have, I dunno. But consider Tchaikovsky again. I have heard that Tchaikovsky loathed, despised, hated the Nutcracker. Maybe not his own music, but the plot seemed utterly stupid to him, even though it was written by an author today revered (Alexandre Dumas). It must be admitted Tchaikovsky was under time pressure, having to write an opera Iolanta at the same time. (I’ve never heard it either.) But it is clear that Tchaikovsky jotted down lines of music perhaps with disdain; “There, they’ll love that,” as he scribbled in the little flute murmurs. But he wrote perfect music even for a piece that he hated. I’m sure that I have given more thought to that little bit of music for the mechanical ballerina than he did. The music Tchaikovsky despised has brought pleasure to hundreds of millions of people.

Genius seems like a supernatural gift. But it evolved. The human brain is capable of astounding complexity, more in some people than others, and usually only after a childhood of mental stimulation. The exact form it takes may be a matter of chance. Some people (often autistic) can remember incredibly long strings of numbers. The extreme complexity of the human brain has a very clear evolutionary advantage. Smart people can read the physical and social landscape and use it to their advantage. They can amaze the other people and become revered, and fecund, leaders of the tribe. They could figure out a lot of things, and even if they knew how they did it, they would not have told anybody. They could out-bamboozle everyone else. They were especially good at getting people to believe them. Their intelligence continually contributed to the collective intelligence of their tribes, of related tribes, and eventually of the whole species.

We, all of us, are the evolutionary descendants of at least some geniuses.

Mutualism all around us

After decades of teaching, writing, and reading about ecology and evolution I thought I had heard everything. But just recently I ran across an example of mutualism that surprised me.

Most vertebrates have lots and lots of parasites inside and outside of our bodies. Birds are no exception. They have it worse than humans because, unlike us, they cannot bathe away the oils, dirt, and parasites that accumulate on their skin, well protected as it is by feathers that are really good at repelling water.

But there are some things that birds do to reduce their parasite loads, besides preening with their beaks. They can expose themselves to environmental chemicals which may kill the parasites.

One example of an environmental chemical is smoke. Many naturalists have observed that birds will gather near a fire and extend their wings, allowing the smoke to get into their feathers. The smoke contains some chemicals that might help to reduce the growth of the parasites.

Another example, which I just read about, is that birds (in this case, a Eurasian jay) can stand near the entrance to an ant’s nest. They extend their wings, thus scaring the soldier ants that guard the entrance. The soldier ants squirt streams of formic acid at the birds, which does not harm them, but may reduce their parasite load.

Notice that this particular ecological interaction does not require that either the birds or the ants know what is happening. Natural and cultural selection reinforce the behavior, not the understanding.