Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Consider, in closing, how the two men treated Plato, the greatest of all intellectual Gods. Dana simply revered his name and his concept of a permanent realm of idealized perfection. Darwin delighted in challenging the master—in showing how simply, and how elegantly, the new evolutionary view could interpret and explain some of the great mysteries and arcana of the ages. Just one comment, privately penned in one of Darwin’s youthful notebooks, after he returned to London on the Beagle, captures this fundamental difference between Darwin’s flexibility and Dana’s immobility. With one line, Darwin cuts through two thousand years of traditional interpretation for innate concepts of the human brain. They are not, he nearly shouts for joy, manifestations of Platonic absolutes transmitted from the ideal realm of archetypes, but simple inheritances from our past:

  Plato says in Phaedo that our “imaginary ideas” arise from the preexistence of the soul, and are not derivable from experience. Read monkeys for preexistence!

  6

  A SEAHORSE FOR ALL RACES

  RICHARD OWEN, ENGLAND’S GREATEST ANATOMIST, AWAITED WITH KEEN anticipation the monthly installments of Charles Dickens’s latest novel, Our Mutual Friend. Owen needed no special reason to join his countrymen in reading the serialized work of England’s most beloved writer. But Owen did have a personal stake in the new book, for Dickens had shaped the character of Mrs. Podsnap for his scientific friend: “A fine woman for Professor Owen, quantity of bone, neck and nostrils like a rocking-horse, hard features, majestic head-dress in which Podsnap has hung golden offerings.”

  Our Mutual Friend appeared in full form in 1865. In the same year, perhaps in specific gratitude, but perhaps only to acknowledge their general friendship, Owen inscribed a copy of his newly published Memoir on the Gorilla to “Charles Dickens, Esq. from his friend the Author.” I regard my ownership of this copy as a rare and precious privilege. Dickens made no annotations, but a bookplate on the cover, presumably inserted as a come-on for a sale after Dickens’s death in 1870, does prove that Owen’s friend kept and shelved the book: “From the library of Charles Dickens, Gadshill Place, June 1870.” The friendship of Owen and Dickens blossomed within that bastion of Victorian connectivity among males of good breeding or accomplishment (sometimes even both): club life. They met most frequently at the Athenaeum—the major London club for intellectuals, and including both Darwin and Huxley as members. The Athenaeum still exists and still excludes women from several of its spaces. Traditions and memories, both good and bad, die hard. I was once shown the very spot on the main staircase where Dickens and Thackeray almost came to blows.

  In our current consciousness, gorillas have become familiar, if continually fascinating. But in Owen’s day, mystery and novelty increased the allure of these largest apes. Chimpanzees had been known for more than a century (the London physician Edward Tyson had written a classic monograph on chimp anatomy in 1699), while Dutch ships had brought orangutans back from Indonesian colonies. But the gorilla, though featured in numerous legends, did not prove its existence to scientists until 1846, when Thomas Savage, an American missionary, obtained some skulls in Gabon. Owen, who had published many papers on the anatomy of other apes and monkeys, narrowly lost the race for priority in identifying and naming the gorilla, when the French anatomist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and the American physician Jeffries Wyman barely beat him into print.

  But Owen, as chief of natural history at the British Museum, had maximal access to new specimens. In 1851, he received the first complete skeleton to reach England, followed in 1858 by a nearly full-grown male preserved in spirits. In 1861, the Museum purchased a collection of skins for mounting and exhibition, including females, males, and juveniles shot by the explorer Paul B. du Chaillu. Owen, therefore, possessed both the skills and the material to become the first great scientific expert on gorillas—and he accepted the challenge in many publications, culminating in his 1865 monograph.

  Owen had the skin, muscles, and bones, but knowledge of behavior and ecology still depended upon unconfirmed reports of African travelers. Du Chaillu himself tended to skepticism. He regarded gorillas as mostly herbivorous (correct, as we now know), despite numerous reports of frightening carnivory. Owen writes in 1865:

  Mr. Du Chaillu, however, states that he examined the stomachs of the Gorillas killed by himself and his hunters, and “never found traces there of aught but berries, pine-apple leaves, and other vegetable matter.” The Gorilla is a huge feeder, as its vast paunch, protruding when it stands upright, shows.

  Owen reports the lurid stories that du Chaillu heard from local people:

  Mr. Du Chaillu also adduces the testimony of the natives, that, when stealing through the gloomy shades of the tropical forest, they become sometimes aware of the proximity of one of these frightfully formidable Apes by the sudden disappearance of one of their companions, who is hoisted up into the tree, uttering, perhaps, a short choking cry. In a few minutes he falls to the ground a strangled corpse. The Gorilla, watching his opportunity, has let down his huge hind hand, seized the passing Negro by the neck with vise-like grip, has drawn him up to higher branches, and dropped him when his struggles had ceased.

  But Owen also reports Du Chaillu’s personal dubiety: “There is no doubt the Gorilla can do this, but that he does it I do not believe.”

  Du Chaillu’s book of 1861 precipitated one of the greatest fracases in the contentious world of Victorian science. Many naturalists accused du Chaillu of fabricating tales; some suggested that he had never even visited the habitat of gorillas, but merely bought material shot by others. (Du Chaillu, for example, had written a dramatic account of shooting a large, enraged, and charging male—but the skin, shipped to Owen in London, bore no bullet holes in front.) Debate also raged on du Chaillu’s claim for personal observation of a stunning habit that has defined our image of male gorillas ever since—pounding on the chest to display threat or anger. Owen reports the claim:

  When so pursued as to be driven to stand at bay, the Gorilla, like the Bear, raises himself on his hind feet, with his powerful arms and hands free for the combat. In this predicament Mr. Chaillu affirms that the creature “offers defiance by beating his breast with his huge fists, till it resounds like a bass-drum.”

  In deference to both sides at once, and maintaining all options in the face of doubt, Owen then commented:

  There is nothing in the structure of the Gorilla, save the size and depth of the chest, to suggest or accord with this peculiar action. Nor, were the dog as rare a beast, is there anything in its anatomy that would have suggested, to one who had never seen it alive, its occasional habit of running on three legs. In statements of this kind by a traveller, it is neither wise to discredit nor implicitly to believe; but one may acquiesce, and wait the report of succeeding observers whose attention has been directed to the original statement.

  Most lurid legends turn out to be wrong, but du Chaillu was vindicated, and male gorillas do pound their chests, just like King Kong (but more in bluff than in prelude to battle). In fact, though du Chaillu did not emerge as a paragon of accuracy, he did fare well in the great debate, and he and his mentor Owen clearly won both a palm of victory and the right to thump.

  As a curious footnote, du Chaillu’s supporters also included a man so hostile to Owen, both for irreconcilable views and opposite personalities, that I doubt they ever again shared a common platform: England’s most eloquent naturalist, Thomas Henry Huxley. Although Huxley found du Chaillu’s book full of unintentional errors based on “imperfectly kept notes” and “a rather vivid imagination,” he honored du Chaillu’s courage in visiting dangerous and inaccessible places, and he found the explorer’s accounts generally reliable. (Huxley later backed off in supporting du Chaillu, for he rankled at the mileage accruing to his enemy Owen, and just couldn’t bear to act as an aide de camp.)

  Strange bedfellows do not only inhabit political hotels; science also spawns odd allegiances. Huxley and Owen could work together on du Chaillu’s
behalf because both needed information about gorillas to pursue their own disparate campaigns—based in large part on attempts to slaughter each other.

  Owen published his major work on gorillas in the 1865 monograph given to Dickens, and in his Rede lecture of May 1859, ironically published in the same year as Darwin’s Origin of Species, for Darwin’s book would so recast the debate to Owen’s disadvantage—“On the classification and geographical distribution of the Mammalia, to which is added an appendix ‘On the Gorilla,’ and ‘On the extinction and transmutation of Species.’” Huxley featured gorillas in his finest and most influential publication, a landmark in the history of scientific prose: “Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature,” a series of lectures originally given to working men in 1860 and 1862. (Admission supposedly required proof of blue-collar status, but legend proclaims that Karl Marx managed to sneak in!)

  The grand Darwinian debate on evolution may have defined the broad subject of these volumes by Huxley and Owen, but their own excruciatingly bitter personal confrontation about apes and humans forms the controlling subtext for all these documents—and one cannot understand these works today without some background in “the great hippocampus debate.” (Victorian scientists did pursue activities other than contentious argument, although the three altercations that act as pillars of this essay do form a totality—du Chaillu’s gorilla rhubarb and the Huxley-Owen hippocampus rumpus as stalking-horses for the grandest of underlying issues, Darwin’s brouhaha on the origin of species.)

  I write this essay to memorialize the centenary of Huxley’s death (1825–1895). The hippocampus debate has always been depicted as Huxley’s greatest and absolutely unalloyed victory. I am also an unabashed Huxley fan, as illustrated by numerous essays in this series. As a fierce defender of evolution (“Darwin’s bulldog” in the cliché), and the greatest prose stylist in the history of British science (though one might argue for a tie with D’Arcy Thompson’s Growth and Form), Huxley almost has to be my personal hero. Nonetheless, and following the antihagiographical bent of these essays, I choose the hippocampus debate to memorialize Huxley because I believe that the story has not been fairly told—and that, at one crucial point agonizingly relevant to current concerns, Owen developed an important and valued argument against a baleful implication of Huxley’s generally admirable stance.

  Many advantages accrue to the victors of any dispute, military or cerebral—and chronicling rights must rank among the greatest of perks. In short, the winners write history. How would we interpret the Trojan War if our main account had been written by Hector’s bard; and how would future generations view the history of evolutionary theory if Duane Gish and Henry Morris (our most vociferous modern creationists) cornered the market for written descriptions?

  Richard Owen (1804–1892) was the greatest anatomist and paleontologist of his age. His accomplishments were legion, both in range and excellence (including an early monograph on the chambered nautilus; the initial description of the oldest fossil bird, Archaeopteryx; a series of crucial papers on the moas, extinct giant ground birds of New Zealand; the first description of South American fossil mammals brought back by Darwin from his Beagle voyage; coining of the name “dinosaur,” followed by volumes of accurate work on fossil reptiles of all ages). As a pillar of establishment science (and an intimate of Queen Victoria and nearly everyone else who mattered), Owen also wielded substantial power in the service of zoology, particularly in his long and successful campaign to establish a separate building for natural history within the British Museum. (Owen served as first director, and his edifice still stands, vigorously functioning in South Kensington as both a great monument of Victorian architecture and one of the most important scientific museums in the world.)

  But Owen ran afoul of the ultimate victors in Victorian natural history—Darwin’s circle. He was, to say the least, not a consistently nice man. He tended to be almost obsequiously genial and accommodating to those more powerful than himself, but arrogant and dismissive toward juniors and underlings, the folks who eventually “grow up” and write later histories! He was not opposed to evolutionary ideas, despite later legends constructed by Darwinian chroniclers, though he strongly disliked Darwin’s materialistic version of biological change.

  The ever-genial Darwin wrote a most uncharacteristic assessment in his Autobiography, thus illustrating the off putting power of Owen’s personality:

  I often saw Owen, whilst living in London, and admired him greatly, but was never able to understand his character and never became intimate with him. After the publication of the Origin of Species be became my bitter enemy, not owing to any quarrel between us, but as far as I could judge out of jealousy at its success. Poor Dear Falconer [a paleontological colleague], who was a charming man, had a very bad opinion of him, being convinced that he was not only ambitious, very envious and arrogant, but untruthful and dishonest. His power of hatred was certainly unsurpassed. When in former days I used to defend Owen, Falconer often said, “You will find him out some day,” and so it has passed.

  As a young man, eager to advance, Huxley bridled under Owen’s power—and bided his time. Huxley, twenty years Owen’s junior, often needed letters of recommendation from the purveyor of maximal patronage in natural history. Owen always complied, and with strong words of praise much to Huxley’s advantage, but he always made Huxley wait, and treated him with condescension, if not contempt. Huxley recalled meeting Owen accidentally on the street after two unfulfilled requests for an urgently needed recommendation:

  I was in a considerable rage . . . I was going to walk past, but he stopped me, and in the blandest and most gracious manner said, “I have received your note. I shall grant it.” The phrase and the implied condescension were quite “touching,” so much so that if I stopped for a moment longer I must knock him into the gutter. I therefore bowed and walked off.

  Huxley and company eventually won rights to tell the official story, and they read Owen out of their triumphalist account, or (even worse) depicted him as a pompous fool, and an unwitting agent of their victory. But Owen has found modern defenders among historians out to debunk progressivist accounts of science as continuous advance fueled by saintly advocates of factual truth against infidels mired in social prejudice; Nicolaas A. Rupke’s 1994 biography, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist, provides a splendid account in this corrective mode. Rupke quotes several genuine and warmly enthusiastic accounts of Owen, from many sensible and admirable people (including Charles Dickens). Let us at least acknowledge that Owen was an enormously complex, brilliant, and fascinating man—and that the history of biology in Victorian Britain cannot be told without granting him a long chapter.

  The great hippocampus debate began two years before Darwin published the Origin of Species, and did not invoke natural selection as a central subject. But this most famous Victorian scientific wrangle did engage the primary, and perpetually gut-wrenching subject that Darwinism placed into such sharp focus: the uniqueness of humans among other animals. Are we just improved apes, or something entirely different from all other creatures? Huxley advocated continuity with gorillas; Owen defended sharp separation. The turf of battle, by Owen’s choice and initial proposal, centered upon three structures in the brain. Owen claimed that only humans possessed these features, thus defining our absolute separation from the brute creation. Huxley proved that apes possessed versions of all three structures—sometimes as prominently expressed as in humans—and that Owen’s marks of separation therefore affirmed our evolutionary unity with other primates.

  For the first difference, Owen claimed that only humans possessed a “posterior lobe” of the cerebrum—a backward extension of this traditional location for “higher” mental functions—to cover the cerebellum, or conventional region for control of motor activity. (The accompanying figure from Owen’s 1859 lecture will clarify his claim. Note that the chimp cerebrum [letter A] stops in front of the underlying cerebellum [letter C], but extends to cover the brain’s entire
upper surface in humans. By modern neurological evidence, the traditional attributions of function are as wrong as Owen’s claims for morphological differences, but I cite the older views to situate the debate in its own time. Obviously, if the “higher” cerebrum covered the “lower” cerebellum only in humans, we might measure our mental superiority thereby.)

  Second, Owen stated that only humans possess a posterior cornu in the lateral ventricle. (To explicate this mouthful, ventricles are spaces within the brain, continuous with the central cavity of the spinal cord and formed as the developing brain undergoes complex bending and folding in embryology. Cornu is Latin for “horn”—so the posterior cornu is a horn-shaped rear end to a cavity in the brain.)

  Third and last, Owen claimed that only humans developed a “hippocampus minor”—a ridge on the bottom of the same posterior horn of the lateral ventricle, and produced by a deep inward penetration of an adjacent part of the brain called the calcarine fissure. This “hippocampus minor” is not the same structure as the “hippocampus” itself, an important region of the brain’s old interior, recently identified in a series of elegant experiments as a site for the initial recording of short-term memories, which are then, somehow, transferred to the neocortex for long-term storage. In modern terminology, “hippocampus minor” has been dropped in favor of the earlier name, calcar avis, or “cock’s spur,” in reference to visual similarity with the weapon on a rooster’s leg that potentiated the “sport” of cockfighting. The name hippocampus was originally coined in the sixteenth century by Arantius, a student of Vesalius, because the structure reminded him of a seahorse—Hippocampus in Latin, and the formal name later chosen by Linnaeus to designate the major genus of seahorses.