I
here begin a short series of essays about the mid-twentieth-century
paleontologist and science writer Loren Eiseley. Does anyone remember him?
The
thing I remember most about him was something that I cannot find on the web. He
had a Saturday morning program, right in the middle of the cartoons, in which
he provided tours of the Smithsonian museum. It was usually their natural
history collections, something he knew a lot about, but I remember one of the
programs was about the paintings of George Catlin, which depicted Native
American life before the tribes were conquered and degraded by Europeans and
later by white Americans. I was particularly struck by the (to me) new concept
of biodiversity. So many species! I had started a bird list, and I knew there
were lots of species of plants as well. But millions? I imagined that every
species of organism in the world had its own sheet of paper, all of them
gathered together in a filing cabinet at the Smithsonian, and that the
deep-voiced Loren Eiseley had the key to it.
Eiseley
wrote many, many essays, mostly about his feelings in response to scientific
discoveries. Each essay was insightful, and a few of them were masterpieces,
about which I write in the next few entries.
One
of Eiseley’s insights was that each organism understands only a small part of
the real universe. One of Eiseley’s favorite examples was the garden spider. He
could walk right up and look at it. It ignored him, because its universe
consisted of the insects that landed on its web and finding a mate. To the
spider, Eiseley the man was inconceivable. Another example was the “inner
galaxy” of white blood cells, which gave their lives to protect us from infection,
but they did not even know they were inside of a human body. Maybe our view of
reality is as limited by our biology as the views, if they can be so called, of
spiders and white blood cells.
Science
helps us understand ourselves, but our understanding is always determined
largely by our cultural context. That is, we use scientific facts to portray
ourselves the way our culture sees us.
As Eiseley wrote in The Inner Galaxy, “In one [historical] period
angels hover over our birth, in the following time we are planetary waifs, the
product of a meaningless and ever-altering chemistry. We exchange haloes in one
era for fangs in another. Our religious and philosophical conceptions change so
rapidly that the theological and moral exhortations of one decade become the
wastepaper of the next epoch. The ideas for which millions yielded up their
lives produce only bored yawns in a later generation.” This happens, whether we
see ourselves as created or as the products of evolution.
Eiseley
wrote at a time when the scientific as well as the popular conception of
evolution was very different from what it is today. For example, he wrote about
Boskop Man, which he considered to be a separate lineage from ours, but one in
which brain growth and the reduction of facial features—that is, becoming more
childlike as adults—had occurred as a separate evolutionary experiment. We
consider our pedomorphic species to have the assurance of success; but an
entirely separate lineage of humans was even more pedomorphic than we are,
bigger-brained than anyone alive today, and became extinct. Nice insight, but
it is no longer considered valid; Boskop people were simply a population of
modern humans related to the South African San people.
The
dominant view was that evolution leads inevitably upward. If, as many believed
at the time Eiseley wrote, evolution was about the improvement of species, then
this view followed directly. But an individual view of natural selection now
shows us that people who are most successful at getting their genes propagated
will become more common, even if this causes the society or species to
degrade. Eiseley, not considering the ascendency of evil people and the decline
of human societies to be consistent with evolution, came up with a different
word, a word that never caught on: involution. Human society, he seemed
to believe, operated contrary to evolution.
One
of the things that Eiseley hated the most was the “deliberate blunting of
wonder.” Many scientists did this, by assuming the natural world was only the
operation of physical laws. But so did many religious people, who saw the world
as merely a stage for the battle between God and the devil; many political
leaders, who saw the world as an opportunity for power; and commercial
interests, who saw the world as mere resources. If any word can describe
Eiseley’s writings, it is wonder.
His
was some of the most beautiful science writing, even if it is not technically
correct. It is not surprising that he edited a literary journal (PrairieSchooner) before he
became a professional paleontologist. Here is an example, from The Firmament
of Time:
“Since
the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger
reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous
thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever
to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that
caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses,
but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret
of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real:
the thread of life.”
Eiseley
got a fair amount of criticism at the time he wrote. This bothered but did not
stop him. After all, today, who is remembered most: Eiseley, or his critics?
More entries on Loren Eiseley to follow.
