The Wizard and the Prophet2

by Charles C. Mann

  A deft politician, Swaminathan called his new variety Sharbati Sonora—Sharbati is a celebrated traditional wheat variety from Madhya Pradesh. He introduced it with fanfare in 1967, emphasizing that Sharbati Sonora had been created by Indian scientists for Indian families in an Indian atomic-research facility. The variety turned out to be vulnerable to rust. Nonetheless, Swaminathan had removed the foreign red tint from the Green Revolution. By crossbreeding Sharbati Sonora with other local varieties, Swaminathan was later able to develop rust-resistant cultivars that seemed wholly Indian. This was the wheat that transformed Indian agriculture, the methodological cousin of the rice that became entangled with the social conflicts witnessed by Boyce and Hartmann.

  As early as 1968, Swaminathan warned about smallholders’ penchants for overusing fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation water. As evidence of the ecological downsides of the Green Revolution accumulated, Swaminathan asked for increases in farmer training. By 1996 he was calling for a new transformation: changing the Green Revolution to an “evergreen revolution.” The goal was to combine high technology with “traditional ecological prudence.” Genetic engineering would create new varieties that needed less water and fertilizer and could tolerate salty soils. Farmers would install electronic monitors in their fields to monitor crop growth and ensure proper management of chemicals and water. Computers would combine the readings with weather data and crop-simulation models to produce individualized recipes for farmers to maximize their yields.

  The critics weren’t appeased—they had grown suspicious of the whole enterprise. They no longer gave much credence to the notion that the discoveries of laboratory white-coats would benefit ordinary people. Somebody like Swaminathan might view his work as a course correction in the long-run effort to improve agriculture for the common good, but the critics saw it as more of the same—a mad effort to make up for a disaster by doubling down on the methods that had caused it.

  Agriculture was but one portion of a larger issue. As the philosopher Robert Crease puts it, the scientific enterprise studies phenomena—atoms, clouds, organisms, planets—by transferring them from the world we live in, with all of its confusion and sentiment, into a special workshop, a place where they can be reduced to abstract, measurable quantities and manipulated in a controlled manner. This method of working is incredibly powerful. It discovered the laws of electricity and created antibiotics and built the atom bomb and invented X-rays and generated techniques to harvest and store energy from the sun and wind. But it is also risky, as another philosopher, Edmund Husserl, observed in the 1930s. (His work didn’t appear in English until decades later, under the forbidding title The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.) The air in the scientific workshop is so clean and bracing and the results of researchers sequestering themselves inside so satisfying that they lose their bearings. They don’t want to leave the workshop. They prefer to live in its world of abstraction, separate as angels from the messiness of life. Or, worse, the findings of the workshop seem so luminous and clear, so like beacons of truth, they forget that the workshop is a special place within the world and begin to think that it is above the rest of life and should control it. And here, Husserl said, lies peril, because the people outside the workshop will come to detest and disbelieve the people within its privileged walls.

  Like Vogt, Borlaug was caught up in the clash between the workshop and the world. Farmers in India and Mexico thought of their wheat in terms of how they experienced it—as a plant that was (or wasn’t) easy to grow and harvest, as grain that made flour with certain qualities, as the source of bread that, eaten daily, conveyed a statement about their lives, as a set of smells and tastes and colors, as a storehouse of memory and identity. Borlaug had taken this wheat into the workshop of science. There, in effect, he reduced wheat to a series of numbers: plant height, degree of rust resistance, spikelet number, flowering date, and so on. He measured these numbers in an effort to maximize another number: the weight of harvestable wheat. All of this was totally normal scientific procedure. And it worked—he created varieties of wheat that were resistant to multiple types of rust and yielded two or three times more grain.

  But what was left out was the color of the bran, the texture of the grain, the pleasure of having several different types of flour, or, more important still, the relationship of the farmers to their land, and to each other, and the structure of power in a community or a nation. And then there was the omnipresence of greed. Borlaug was like a physicist who figures out how something should work on an idealized frictionless plane and then is startled when it doesn’t function in the same way in the real world of hills and valleys.

  Scientists say that because the workshop has found that A is true the world should do B. But people in the world notice that when scientists go into the workshop they strip their objects of study of everything but a few measurable quantities, and then the people object that what was stripped away was worthy, even essential. They see the scientists unable to understand the resistance to following course B as condescending aliens who don’t share their values—and, all too often, they are correct. Why would you listen to people who have no idea what you consider important? Writing in the 1930s, Husserl believed that the ensuing rejection of expertise led to an embrace of the irrational and, ultimately, to the Nazis. Surely it has played a role in the rejection of scientific claims about genetically modified organisms, nuclear power, soil depletion, and climate change.

  Vogt was saying that science, or at least ecology, dictated reaching into the most intimate aspects of people’s lives. Borlaug was saying much the same thing. Both were doing it in the name of the future. And they were bewildered and hurt when the world of the present pushed back. It haunted their later days. They had laid out a path based on science as they understood it—a logical consequence of scientific rules. But people weren’t heeding it. They weren’t grateful. They behaved as if they thought they were exempt from the rules.

  ONE FUTURE

  [ TEN ]

  The Edge of the Petri Dish

  Special People

  On June 30, 1860, Samuel Wilberforce, D.D., thirty-sixth Bishop of Oxford, attended the thirtieth annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Oxford University. Countless students have been taught that during the meeting Wilberforce attacked evolution, setting off an impromptu debate that became a “tipping point” in the history of thought. I was one of those students. The debate, my biology professor explained, was the opening salvo of the war between Science and Religion—and Religion lost. My textbook backed him up. Wilberforce’s anti-evolution assault, it said, was swept aside by researchers’ “careful and scientific defense.” In a flourish unusual in an undergraduate text, it boasted that the pro-evolution arguments “neatly lifted the Bishop’s scalp.” That day the forces of empirical knowledge had beaten back the armies of religious ignorance.

  None of this is accurate. There was no real debate that day in Oxford. Nor was there a clear victor, still less a scalping. Not that many people were paying attention; the debate was not mentioned by a single London newspaper. Still, it was important, though the quarrel was less between scientific theory and religious faith than between two conceptions of humankind’s place in the cosmos. And far from being an enduring victory for rationality over faith, the debate inaugurated a conflict that continues to the present day, and is as much about the past as it is about the future.

  In 1860 science was not assumed to be inaccessible to ordinary people; the attendees at the Advancement of Science meeting included many ordinary, middle-class Britons as well as Oxford students and faculty. The crowd packed a hall at the university’s new museum, standing in aisles and doorways. In that jammed, sweltering space, the subject on attendees’ minds was On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. Published just seven months before, the book had created a public uproar, dividing educated Britons into pro- and anti-evolution camps.

  Wilberforce’s
friends believed him to be an obvious candidate to lead the charge against Darwin. Ambitious, witty, and politically connected, the fifty-four-year-old cleric had a reputation for such smooth and convincing oratory that his detractors mocked him as “Soapy Sam.” His allies were sure that an eloquent public condemnation from him would deal a severe blow to Darwinism.

  As the bishop may have known, another audience member was poised for a counterstrike: Thomas Henry Huxley, almost twenty years Wilberforce’s junior but already known as much for his vehement defense of Darwin, a friend, as for his contributions to comparative anatomy. A poor boy who had never been able to finish his university degree, Huxley had risen to a full professorship through ambition, brilliance, and dogged work. Prickly and quick to take offense, he enjoyed a good, vicious fight with plenty of character assassination.

  In the version of events retailed in my college class, the bishop spoke for half an hour, his theatrical, booming voice filling the hall with Darwinism’s supposed flaws. Much of the audience was delighted; every barb drew cheers and approving laughter. Goaded, perhaps, by the crowd, the bishop closed his peroration with the kind of snide jab that he would never have used in the pulpit. Turning to Huxley with a saponaceous smile, he asked grandly whether it was “through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey.”

  Huxley (my professor said) was delighted by this sally. He whispered to a neighbor, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands”—a line, fittingly enough, from Scripture. Then he stood. No, Huxley said, he would not be ashamed to have an ape for an ancestor, but he would be ashamed “to have sprung from one who prostituted the gifts of culture and eloquence to the service of prejudice and of falsehood.”

  Like the rest of my class, I chuckled when I heard this exchange. But I couldn’t fathom why it counted as a victory for science. I understood that the bishop had overstepped by intimating that one of Huxley’s grandparents had been sexually involved with an animal. Huxley had used this gaffe as an opening to strike back with an even more direct personal swipe. But neither man had said anything substantive about evolution. How could this be an advance for rational thinking?

  Both Darwin and Wilberforce had lives marked by sorrow, Darwin losing two infants and his adored ten-year-old daughter to disease, Wilberforce losing not only an infant and an adult son but also his wife, who had just given birth to the couple’s sixth child. But grief pushed them in opposite directions. Darwin was unable to reconcile the fact of his daughter’s painful death with the idea of a just cosmos ruled by a benevolent deity. Even before her death he had been moving away from the faith of his youth; it was gone forever by the day of the funeral. In On the Origin of Species, the word “God” appears only once, incidentally.

  For his part, the bishop tried to peer beyond the “paroxysms of convulsive anguish” caused by his wife’s death to see healing in God, “the smiter of my soul.” Ultimately, he came to believe that the loss of his wife—the “utter darkening of my life, which can never be dispelled”—was in fact “a call to a different mode of life…a more severe, separate, self-mortifying course.” He prayed that her death would “kill in me all my ambitious desires and earthly purposes, my love of money and power and places.” Purified by grief, he would become a warrior for Christianity.

  No transcript exists of Wilberforce’s remarks. But he had just written an eighteen-thousand-word takedown of Origin, soon to be published in a prominent literary journal. Most historians believe that in Oxford the bishop simply laid out the criticisms in his review. If so, Huxley faced a challenge, because Wilberforce’s review was far from ignorant. Indeed, Darwin later admitted that it was “uncommonly clever; he picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, & brings forward well all difficulties.” Wilberforce’s facility with scientific argument was unsurprising: the bishop had won a first-class mathematics degree at Oxford and, like Darwin, was a member of the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific body.

  Part of the bishop’s cleverness lay in his decision to attack Darwin mainly on scientific grounds, rather than invoking Christian dogma. From the beginning of his review, Wilberforce targeted Origin’s greatest weakness: the paucity of direct evidence for the evolution of one species from another. If the history of life were filled with these “transmutations,” the bishop reasoned, it must also be filled with in-between beasts, halfway evolved between old and new. Fossils of these in-between creatures should be everywhere. “Yet never have the longing observations of Mr. Darwin and the transmutationists found one such instance to establish their theory.” If evolution was real, where were these intermediate entities?*1

  Only after spending more than fifteen thousand words critiquing the evidence for the existence of evolution did Wilberforce turn to his main concern: natural selection, the proposed mechanism for evolution. At bottom, the concept of natural selection is so simple that Huxley later claimed that his reaction to learning it was “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” Darwin contended that some offspring are, by chance, different from their parents; that some of these random differences—somewhat stronger muscles, say—will be beneficial (others will not be); and that individuals with the favorable variations will have a better chance of reproducing and passing on these favorable variations. In this way, Darwin argued, natural selection ensures that randomly appearing, advantageous features spread through populations. The process ensures that all species continually evolve through time, eventually giving rise, as the changes accumulate, to new species.

  In the closing paragraphs of Origin, Darwin summed up his thoughts with an image: a hillside of untidy foliage that he often walked by. He asked readers to picture this “tangled bank,” as he called it, alive “with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” Although the inhabitants of the hillside—that is, Earth’s living creatures—are “so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, [they] have all been produced by laws acting around us.” The important words here are “all” and “produced.” Living things may look dissimilar to the casual eye, but they are identical on a deeper level—all of them. Each and every one was produced by natural selection, and natural selection will determine its future.

  Each and every one—that would include human beings, wouldn’t it? Here Darwin ducked. Throughout Origin, he sedulously avoided discussing whether his ideas also applied to people—if, that is, Homo sapiens were just another weed on his tangled bank.

  Darwin’s reticence didn’t fool the bishop. If natural selection directs the course of life and people are part of life, Wilberforce wrote in his review, the clear implication is that “the principle of natural selection [applies] to MAN himself.” (Note the sudden burst of capital letters; the bishop was thundering in disapproval.) Human beings, too, must have evolved through natural selection from some previous, not-quite-human species. And this notion, Wilberforce said, is “absolutely incompatible” with a true understanding of the “moral and spiritual condition of man.”

  Human beings, the bishop believed, had been created by God and endowed with a unique spark. But if, as Darwin suggested, people were created by unthinking natural forces, they could not possibly have any high standing. Should Homo sapiens share its nature with all other creatures—should our species be, as Wilberforce facetiously suggested, just a bunch of over-achieving “mushrooms”—we would be, by definition, nothing special.

  As the University College London geographer Simon Lewis has pointed out, Darwin’s argument—that humankind owed its existence to the same processes that gave rise to flatworms and amoebae—was a second, biological Copernican Revolution. The original Copernican Revolution is usually said to have begun in the early sixteenth century, when the Polish-German polymath Nicolaus Copernicus, drawing on data from Arab and Persian geometers and his own examination of the sky, proposed that Earth orbits around the s
un, and not the sun around Earth. Because Earth moved, it could not be, as had been thought, the focal point of the cosmos. The Copernican Revolution, the science historian Dick Teresi has noted, was neither a revolution, in the sense that it occurred over a long time, nor particularly Copernican, in that it was also the product of thinkers other than Copernicus. Still, it had great impact on our conception of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. Earth, our home, was no longer the pivot of existence. It was just a place, one among many, without particular distinction.

  Unlike the first Copernican Revolution, the second happened rapidly and was largely the product of a single mind. But it, too, nudged our species out of the spotlight. “We are not even at the heart of life on Earth,” as Lewis put it. Because humankind owed its existence to the same processes that produced every other organism, Darwin implied, Homo sapiens was a species like any other species. This new Copernican Revolution was what had attracted Wilberforce’s ire.

  To the bishop, there was a fundamental line between human beings and all other creatures. Naturally, he described that difference in Christian terms: people had souls, animals did not; people were endowed by God with the capacity for change and redemption, animals were not. But Wilberforce’s view can be put in broader, more general terms, which do not depend on religious belief: Homo sapiens has an inner flame of creativity and intelligence that allows it to burn down barriers that would trap any other species. Or, more succinctly: human beings are not wholly controlled by the natural processes that control all other creatures. We are not simply another species.