The Non-Primordial Ocean Depths: More Thoughts from Loren Eiseley

In previous essays, I have written about things I learned from reading essays by Loren Eiseley, a science writer who is now largely forgotten. In his essay The Great Deeps, Eiseley told the story of how nineteenth-century scientists believed that the bottoms of the oceans, many miles deep, contained the ancestors of all life forms. That is, life evolved at the bottom of the ocean, then moved up into the light. Some of them, such as Ernst Haeckel and Thomas Henry Huxley, believed that the entire ocean bottom was covered with a layer of protoplasm that was an intermediate between life and non-life. Huxley even gave it a scientific name, in honor of Haeckel: Bathybius haeckelii. The biggest oceanographic expedition up to that time, the voyage of the Challenger, was intended to discover the ancestors of all life forms at the bottom of the sea.

They were very disappointed. They found that the deep waters contained very few life forms. Not only that, but Bathybius turned out to not be protoplasm at all but a chemical precipitate formed by the process of preserving marine specimens with alcohol. Huxley quietly admitted he was wrong and went on with his life.

In retrospect, this should not have been surprising. If the entire ocean bottom was covered with a living slime (which they also called the Urschleim, or primordial slime), what did it eat? Almost all food comes from photosynthesis, of which there is none in the deep sea. The only food in the deep sea comes from the slow rain of dead stuff falling from the surface.

Instead, life began in shallow waters. These are the places where cells are happy living by themselves. They can stay moist and absorb all the molecules and sunlight that they need. As life continued to evolve, it invaded the land. As it did so, it had to take the oceans with it. To do this, they needed multicellular structures that maintained homeostasis (regulated conditions) within their bodies, thus keeping the inside cells as happy as they had been in the shallow seas. The leaves of trees have chloroplasts, which make their food; nearly everything else of which a tree consists is a structure that helps keep the chloroplasts happy. The same is true for your cells. Your skin, your kidneys, your heart all help to keep your inner cells close to equilibrium.

Life moved into the deep waters, not up from them. That is, the deep waters do not have primordial life; they have life that has moved into them from the shallow waters. That is why so many of the deep sea animals, such as squids and angler-fishes, are clearly the evolutionary descendants of higher life forms from the surface waters.

(National Geographic photo)

Eiseley wrote at a time before the deep sea vents were discovered. How he would have been thrilled to find out that, in some of the deepest waters, life is abundant. Microbes live by oxidizing the hydrogen sulfide from volcanic eruptions. Giant worms live by hosting these microbes inside their cells. A whole food chain of crabs and clams and such like live there. But all of these life forms are descendants of animals that live in the surface waters and on the seashore. This exciting discovery would have only proved his point more clearly than he knew. He died about the time these vents were discovered.

What scientists once confidently assumed was primordial turns out to be derived.

Why You Are Not a Prairie Dog: More Insights from Loren Eiseley

I have recently been reading essays by Loren Eiseley, a paleontologist of the middle twentieth century. His books, such as The Firmament of Time and The Immense Journey, were considered epics of popular science writing at the time they were published. Many of his essays are very well-written, and I recommend him to any of you who like classic nature writing.

One of his essays, The Slit, is about a time in which he went down into a cavern and dug out a mammal skull from shortly after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Primates, the order to which humans and other apes belong, started to diversify right after the dinosaurs became extinct. One of the directions that they diversified was into arboreal forms, living in the trees. And that is where most of them still are, except for baboons and people. Another direction was to live by burrowing in the ground out in the newly-spreading grasslands. These primates eventually became extinct. Why? It was probably because of another order of mammals that was evolving and diversifying at the same time: rodents, which includes prairie dogs and ground squirrels. [Here is a photo I took of a prairie dog in the Badlands of South Dakota in 2000.]

Very early in the Cenozoic Era, it was not clear which direction mammalian evolution might take. Out in open prairies, both primates and rodents diversified. But the rodents were more successful, driving the burrowing primates to extinction. Had things ended up just slightly differently, primates might have been primarily burrowing animals, rather than leaping around in trees. And humans might not have evolved.

Another insight I got from reading Eiseley was a possible contributing factor to human intelligence. Our big brains require a lot of oxygen, therefore a lot of blood vessels. Why did our lineage, starting with the amphibians, have such well-oxygenated brains? The answer might be that amphibians evolved not just in shallow water, not just in shallow fresh water, but in shallow fresh anoxic water, so that extra blood vessels were required to keep even their small brains alive. It was this extra vascularization that made the evolution of intelligent terrestrial vertebrates possible.

To me, this was an excellent example of how the slightest change in the course of events can make a huge difference in the evolutionary outcome.

Loren Eiseley and the Fifth Planet

I here continue to write about Loren Eiseley.

One of the finest pieces of nature writing was Eiseley’s essay, The Fifth Planet. Here is the idea. The asteroid belt used to be a planet, between Mars and Jupiter, a planet usually called Phaeton, that was somehow pulverized. Not being an astronomer, I have no idea if this idea is still taken seriously, though online sources dismiss this theory. But it would explain why meteorites, many of which are stray asteroids, are either metallic, like a planet’s core, or volcanic, like a planet’s surface.

But one astronomer, named Williams, took this theory even further. He believed that this planet would not only have had a core and a volcanic surface but would have had sedimentary rocks and maybe fossils. That is, he believed that a meteorite might fall sometime which contained a fossil bone. He was, therefore, an astronomical bone hunter. Most astronomers dismissed him. After all, on Earth, only an infinitesimally small portion of the rock is sedimentary. To find a meteorite with sedimentary rock, one would have to examine perhaps trillions of meteorites. Williams’s response: let’s get started. And to do so, Williams recruited as many citizen-scientists as possible, to track down these meteorites.

His passion went further. Williams thought that, if the vanished planet had life, then life must be almost everywhere in the universe. This would change our whole view of reality. It would mean that we do not live in a lonely universe.

Eiseley centered his essay on the fate of a rural sheep farmer, one of the citizen-scientists Williams recruited. The dry western deserts and grasslands are among the best places to see and locate meteorites in North America. The farmer absorbed the passion and made it his own. He gathered every bit of information he could about meteorites, filling his farmhouse with disorganized sheets of paper. But he eventually gave up the vision and burned his papers. Perhaps part of the reason was that he finally realized how great the odds were against finding an extraterrestrial bone fossil. But it was also the fact that the nuclear age destroyed his optimism about life in general.

Had Eiseley, or Williams, or the farmer, known about the Mars meteorite discovered in 1984 in Antarctica, and studied a few years later, they might have had more, or less, confidence in extraterrestrial life. The ALH84001 meteorite contained structures that might have been what on Earth would be called bacteria. Life, but not bones. Perhaps, then, complex life is vanishingly rare in the universe, even if there are bacteria-like forms all over the place. Perhaps Simon Conway Morris was right about evolution producing “inevitable humans in a lonely universe”.

This essay was one of the best pieces of science writing largely because it began and ended with the life of the rural farmer, who embraced a theory then had to dismally surrender it. The essay was not about the vanished planet, or the astronomer. It was about an ordinary man to whom science could be a source of inspiration and of pessimism. Readers want to read about the human side of science. As a science writer, I have to keep this in mind.

Does Anyone Remember Loren Eiseley?

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.

The Scientific Method and Reincarnation: The Bridey Murphy Story

I ran across a book that my late mother-in-law had: The Search for Bridey Murphy, by Morey Bernstein, published in 1956.

Bernstein was a businessman who became interested in hypnosis and all of the many medical benefits it could potentially confer. But his interests went beyond this. He was interested in age regression, in which the person who is hypnotized not only remembers early childhood, but relives it. The memories of early childhood, even infancy, are stored away in the brain, some hypnotists claim, and can be unleashed.

If a subject is hypnotically regressed to infancy, he or she may be able to describe sensations and memories from infancy, in words, even though they could not talk during infancy. This brings up an interesting question. How could one determine whether the subject is actually re-living infancy? Bernstein said that, when a subject is regressed back into infancy, their reflexes actually change. Infants and young children have the Babinski reflex, but older children and adults do not.  During age regression, the hypnotist can get the subject to actually change from the adult reflex to the infant reflex. This would be strong evidence of the effectiveness of age regression. I do not know how good the evidence is, having read about it only in this book.

But Bernstein wanted to take age regression back further—not just back to infancy, but back before birth. Just keep going...back into a previous lifetime. If hypnotized subjects had true memories of past lifetimes, this would prove reincarnation. But how can the hypnotist know whether the memories are true, and are of past lifetimes? This brings us to some interesting points about the scientific method.

It is not enough just to dismiss spiritualist assertions on the grounds of inherent absurdity. The most famous agnostic, the inventor of the word agnostic, Thomas Henry Huxley, made this point. What Huxley did was to give spiritualism a chance, after which he (along with E. Ray Lankester) showed that at least the spiritualist seances that he attended were, in fact, hoaxes. He concluded this, rather than assuming it. And he knew this did not prove all spiritualist experiences were hoaxes.

First, consider bias. Bernstein tried very hard to prove that he was not biased. He openly admits that he started off completely agnostic about religious concepts. That is, he claims that his discoveries convinced him despite, not because of, his initial bias. Further, he was rich enough from his business, he did not need to pull a hoax to get rich. These two preconditions are helpful, but do not eliminate the possibility of bias. Some evangelical Christian apologists (most famously Josh McDowell, author of Evidence that Demands a Verdict in which he claims to prove Christian doctrine) say that they started off as atheists and were converted by the evidence that they found. However, despite his lack of initial bias, McDowell definitely developed a bias later. And even though Bernstein was rich enough to not need a hoax, there are plenty of rich people who cannot keep themselves from trying to get richer by unethical means. But at least Bernstein made an effort to begin in an unbiased fashion.

One thing that greatly reduced the chance of bias is that there were independent fact-checkers. This did not completely eliminate the chance of error, however; journalists are looking for an exciting story (even back then, if it bleeds, it leads) and would prefer the reincarnation conclusion over fraud or delusion.

Second, consider how one can evaluate the quality of the evidence of a past life obtained from a hypnotized person. Perhaps the strongest evidence would be if the person provided details that the person could not possibly know. (This is a condition that is nearly impossible to satisfy today. Everyone has a world of information at their fingertips. Give me a little time, and access to the internet, and I could make up a convincing fake story that I am a reincarnated Viking. But in the pre-internet days, this evidence was much harder to get and thus more meaningful.)

Bernstein hypnotized a woman he called Ruth Simmons (she was actually Virginia Tighe), who was born in Iowa in the twentieth century. When he regressed her back before her birth, she revealed that she had been an Irish woman Bridey (Bridget) Murphy who was born in 1798 and died in 1864. She did, indeed, reveal a lot of details that seemed convincing. She even started talking with an Irish brogue during the hypnotic sessions, something she could not do normally. Are you convinced yet? She said that she could dance the “Morning Jig” when she was alive in Ireland. Bernstein gave her a post-hypnotic suggestion: that, upon awakening, she should dance the jig for the observers. And she did. Are you convinced yet? The woman also gave geographical details that a twentieth-century American would almost certainly not know about Ireland (actually, Northern Ireland), including the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in the nineteenth century. Are you convinced yet?

The Bridey Murphy story became a sensation after it was published in a newspaper in 1954 and as a book in 1956. It seemed like everyone was talking about it. People with a spiritual (but not fundamentalist Christian) inclination were swept up into believing it. Materialistic people subjected it to ridicule. Even Donald Duck’s uncle McScrooge made fun of it. In her copy, my mother-in-law wrote down the address of the Bridey Murphy Discussion Group of Peoria, which met in Marquette Heights in nearby Pekin, Illinois.

[This is a photo from a movie adaptation.]

The book was rushed into print with too little fact-checking to even satisfy the author. But there was plenty of fact-checking afterward. And here is where the scientific method gets interesting. During the intense discussion, there were two competing hypotheses: that Ruth Simmons was making it all up, either as fraud or delusion, vs. Ruth Simmons really was remembering her past life as Bridey Murphy. (And she even had a vague memory, it seems, of dying as a baby in New Amsterdam, which is today New York, over a century earlier than Bridey Murphy.)

The people who wanted to prove Simmons was making it all up pointed to supposed errors in the facts she recited. But her defenders showed, in every case it seems, that the story was credible. The places she mentioned, and the terms she used, the customs to which she referred, were not inaccurate for the time and place, even when they could not be verified. In a few instances, Bridey seemed to be exaggerating in order to make her husband seem more prominent than he was. She claimed he was a barrister (the highest grade of lawyer), but that he managed accounts for stores, something that only the lowest grade of accountants did. But this may have enhanced the credibility of her account: she was telling—and exaggerating—her life experience, not a mere story.

Besides, someone pointed out, the Bridey Murphy story is, by itself, too boring to be a fabrication. After all, everyone wants to be a reincarnated king, not a serf or something. But Bridey was just a woman who got married, never had kids, and died at age 66 after falling down the stairs. The only interesting thing in her story was that she was in a mixed marriage (she was Protestant, her husband Catholic).

Bernstein provided long transcripts of the tape-recorded hypnosis sessions in the book. In session after session, he asked the same questions, such as what her husband’s name was. One’s eyes start to glaze over. But this repetition was actually quite valuable. They proved that the woman was not just making it up as she went along. The information was deep inside her brain, and came out the same way every time. Even a good liar would have a hard time keeping a consistent story for six sessions of hypnotism. Also, for this reason, it was clearly not a delusion.

In the competition between the fraud/delusion hypothesis and the reincarnation hypothesis, the latter easily won.

This is where it really gets interesting. New evidence emerged. (Don’t you just hate it when that happens? New facts can destroy a nice story.) When Ruth Simmons was growing up in Chicago, an old Irish woman lived across the street. Her name was Bridey Murphy Corkell. The hypothesis that turned out to be true was a third hypothesis not previously considered: that Ruth had learned the story very well from this woman, even learned her accent, and even learned the jig, and then forgot where or even that she had heard it. This is a now-well-established phenomenon known as cryptomnesia, or hidden memory.

There have been other famous cases of possible cryptomnesia from the world of creative arts. The difference between cryptomnesia and plagiarism is whether the person knows that they are recycling the work of another artist. George Harrison of Beatles fame may have plagiarized My Sweet Lord from another musical group (this was the interpretation of the court in the ensuing lawsuit), or he may genuinely have mistaken his memory of the melody for his own creation. This apparently also happened to Umberto Eco, author of Name of the Rose.

In a way, every creative person has a gnawing fear that he or she will unwittingly steal ideas from someone else. I write books; how can I possibly know if I stole an idea from a book that I read maybe forty years ago? I would need a list of every book I have read since I graduated from high school. What kind of nerd would keep a list like that? Me, that’s who. My complete list now contains 1,411 titles, the last of which is The Search for Bridey Murphy. I can always scan the list before sending a final fiction manuscript to a publisher. This does not guarantee that I did not steal a plot from a forgotten movie or an episode of Perry Mason. (In the latter case, I have also kept a list of the Perry Mason episodes I have watched. I used one for an endnote in my most recent book. God, I am such a nerd.) I steal plots from the Bible all the time, but I am aware of what I am doing.

It gets even more complicated. Someone may absorb an idea from the surrounding culture and mistakenly think it is his or her own. This is called a Zeitgeist (a German word for “time ghost”). Science writer Loren Eiseley (Darwin’s Century) famously said that Charles Darwin got the idea for natural selection from Edward Blyth, without realizing it, because it was an idea already floating around in scholarly culture. Probably nobody believes this anymore, since all of Darwin’s contemporaries seemed genuinely surprised at Darwin’s creative hypothesis. Darwin thought of natural selection a long time before Alfred Russel Wallace, but he worried himself sick that it would look to the world as if he had stolen Wallace’s idea. Fortunately, Wallace happily acknowledged Darwin’s priority.

None of this proves that reincarnation does not exist. It just means that evidence, like that of Bridey Murphy, is not good enough.

The scientific way of thinking can help us understand almost anything better than other ways of thinking. This even includes reincarnation.