This is a useful analytical frame for thinking about the relationship between the fossil and interpretations that produced its enigmatic qualities; it is not an argument against scientific realism. Each approach is culturally situated. The conodont workers needed to approach their subject as realists and believe that material truth was accessible. This was an essential component in the performances necessary for separating truth from non-truth. But these performances were affected by spatial and temporal structures and disruptions that had broad implications for how the material fossil was perceived. We shall now turn to these.
THE SPATIAL DYNAMICS OF INTERPRETATION
The plurality of knowledge in the conodont community offered some protection from erroneous ideas and gave the field some consistency of thinking. While bizarre solutions to the problem of the animal's identity would still surface with surprising regularity, these most often came from outsiders caught up in the mythology. Nevertheless, the conodont research community remained tiny and potentially vulnerable. It was this that permitted Walter Gross to silence a generation when he demonstrated, apparently conclusively, that the conodont fossils could not be teeth. Given his authority in the more fully developed field of fish paleontology, and his exceptional conodont material, along with the novelty, rigor, and logic of his study, other conodont workers were rendered powerless to contest the change he imposed on their worldview. For more than a decade, the nature of the animal and the functioning of the tiny tooth-like objects were hardly discussed. This mind shift led to, and was further helped by, the erasing of a deeply embedded technical language drawn from the study of teeth, which had been used to describe the conodont fossils for more than a century. To retain these terms was now considered unscientific. Then, in the 1970s, paleontology acquired a new intellectual liberalism that in turn produced arguments suggesting that the fossils could be teeth after all. With further research the idea gained support, and at a conference in 2006, Dick Aldridge told his audience to stop beating around the bush and start referring to the fossils as “teeth.”
It is difficult to conceive of Gross's assertion as paradigmatic because the identity of animal itself was not central to conodont science. The assertion was a “truth” that had to be accommodated but could also simply be ignored. It was possible to do this because the culture producing conodont science manifested itself in ongoing social relations rather than concrete institutions. “When we look at how people experience and negotiate authenticity through objects,” Sian Jones notes, “it is the networks of relationships between people, places and things that appear to be central, not the things in themselves.”16
This social adaptability meant Gross's inconvenient truth was negotiated in exactly the same way workers dealt with changes to their discipline in general and inconsistencies introduced by geographical variations in practice. The doing of conodont science, like the doing of paleontology, was never constant or uniform. In the sparsely populated United States of the 1930s, conodont science developed differently in Chicago (and Illinois), Washington D.C., and Missouri. And each of these centers developed an engagement with the fossil that was different from that present in Göttingen. At each center particular individuals played a critical shaping role: Croneis in Chicago, Ulrich in Washington, Branson in Missouri, and Stadtmüller in Göttingen. In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States supported two kinds of paleontology, both interested in the conodont fossils but distributed unevenly across the nation. And in what was still a small and well-connected paleontological community, it was possible for the likes of Ted Branson to assume the role of geological Baron of Missouri and thus exert a degree of control over the local scientific culture and the participants engaged within it.17 Each group tackled these fossils according to intellectual resources, preferences, biases, and ambitions available locally; each formed a distinct “interpretive community.”18 Repeatedly conodont science produced these important, geographically specific cultures that had a profound effect on the development of the science: the University of Iowa in the 1940s and 1950s, Ohio State University in the 1960s, the University of Marburg from the 1950s to the 1970s, and the “British school,” centered on universities in the English Midlands in the 1980s and 1990s.
In Europe, national cultures shaped the engagement. Here language configured separation and collaboration. British conodont veteran Ronald Austin, for example, recalls being required to take French as a subsidiary subject at university, and this determined his collaborations on the Continent in later life. Austin found meeting colleagues in Eastern Europe, then behind the Iron Curtain, extraordinarily expensive and effectively discouraged. In the Soviet Union, a much smaller and largely self-contained conodont research group had developed. With the rise of English as a global scientific language, particularly after 1990, non English speakers became increasingly disadvantaged. Thus language alone ensured that at no point was conodont studies ever an even playing field, and in the 1960s there were frequent appeals for translations of key works. Few workers, for example, could read Pander's book in its original German and had instead to rely upon an American translation, which in subtle ways incorporated mid-twentieth-century thinking.
These geographical inconsistencies within the field were accompanied by changing ideas about the nature of paleontological science in general, particularly after World War II. The drive then was to make the study of fossils more rigorous, sophisticated, and biological. Young workers who entered the science at this time were more than ready for this injection of new ideals; they wanted nothing less than a new paleontology. In the early 1970s, when geology as a whole was embracing big theory, paleontologists again reinvented their science, liberating practitioners to engage more fully in pure reason. In the 1980s, the emergence of planetary thinking took this reasoning to new heights and the imaginings of conodont workers became wonderfully bold and grand. Paleontology had always been a science that opened up rich possibilities for the imagination, but it took time for the imagination to find an appropriate role in legitimate interpretation.
CONFLICT AND CHIVALRY
These spatial and temporal disruptions of conodont science were further affected by the science's treatment of the individual. I have already said that individualism manifested itself in a constellation of beliefs that made the science both adaptable and capable of living with unknowns, difficulties, and errors. This individualism was actively encouraged when a student began his or her doctorate studies. At this moment the student was allocated a geological resource (a set of field sites within a geographically defined area), a subject (a particular group of fossils and rocks), a period of geological time (such as the Upper Devonian), and particular questions and methodologies. This level of management was necessary to prevent students coming into competition with one another. The aim was to create an environment in which a student could thrive and thus pass the examination without having to confront personal rivalries; it served to keep things rational and objective.19 However, it sometimes happened that two students, from different universities, found themselves on the same patch. Frank Rhodes, for example, wanted his student, Ronald Austin, to study some important rock sequences in Yorkshire, but Austin found that territory occupied and moved his research to a field site near Bristol. In this geographical, paleontological, and geological space – uncontaminated by earlier work and free from rivalries – Austin forged his scientific identity. Like the names of most conodont workers, his became inextricably connected to a period of geological time, a specific place and a style of study. To say a worker's name was to implicitly communicate these things.
This territorial division, which is pervasive in paleontology for these very good reasons, configures scientific performances in particular way as each individual can argue they possess their own unique and situated knowledge – their core knowledge. And while this territorialization ensures that the science maximizes its intellectual reach, it also ensures that truth is argued not from within a shared material resource, bu
t with each worker possessing his or her own particular resources. At first sight this appears anti-competitive in what is an agonistic field. This is, however, an effective means to develop and test conflicting views. For example, while it was possible for several groups to hold different opinions based on the fossil animals that appeared in Scotland in the 1980s, only one of those groups actually possessed these specimens. This meant that interpretations of the group in possession were tested against interpretations based on material of another kind. The test was, in effect, to see if ideas triangulated across a range of objects and sites. There is, then, in this division of labor, a peculiar balance between the agonistic and communal necessities of the science that was achieved through a tight control over its material things: both the individual possession of particular fossils and rocks and the science's more general views on the morality and ethics of that possession. If Sweet recalls that almost everyone debated their points in a civilized and friendly fashion, it is because so much was in place to protect an individual's science and thus his or her identity. It prevented arguments becoming personal. It was only when identities were challenged, such as when a scientist's taxonomic children came under assault, that real animosities broke out.
Some workers, however, simply avoided arguments. They never saw the defense of a point of view as central to their contribution, preferring instead the creative moment of invention. Klaus Müller believed that he and Lindström were not fighters. They would publish but not crusade. A few, however, and most notably Aldridge and his various collaborators, played the game more completely. They constructed a military campaign to change minds within the conodont research community and beyond by winning a succession of scientific arguments. They possessed unique material, produced radical interpretations, and saw far reaching significance in their discoveries. These factors permitted them to develop (relatively) large and powerful research teams. It gave them access to grants and made them the authors of choice for writing the new orthodoxy in encyclopedias, yearbooks, and magazines. But these workers were not simply interested in imposing a view; they valued, and grew strength from, the battle. They believed that debate was vital and that the tests of opponents would ultimately produce better science. Indeed, the doubting of others shaped the course their research was to take. They strengthened their arguments by recruiting talented individuals, which expanded and diversified the mental processing and permitted obscure topics to be explored and new methods to be deployed. These research groups acquired communal strength, permitting them to experiment with risk and make rapid advances in their research programs. However, those on the outside became only too aware of how uneven things had become; a whole army of mainly British workers was now developing a shared view while those who contested it were lone workers lacking the same level of resource. Eventually, this led to the formation of a political confederation of opponents holding no single shared view other than a belief that the British school was wrong on certain key points.
FASHION AND FORGETTING
Taken as a whole this unevenness in this global research culture – the geographical clusters, the individualism, the linguistic barriers, the research teams, the access to particular technologies and fossils – made progress uneven. During the 1950s and early 1960s, for example, German workers advanced an understanding of Devonian conodonts more rapidly than their colleagues in the United States. They benefited from a shared mission, individual competition, local inspiration, new technologies, better rock sequences, and raw talent and ambition. These things catalyzed research in a Germany recovering from the war.
But concerted effort of this kind was rare, and the conodont research community remained sufficiently small for individuals to continue to have considerable impact. Polish worker Hubert Szaniawski's finely argued evidence for arrow worms, for example, altered the visual apparatus of a number of his contemporaries for a period of time, influencing the direction their research took. The actions of a single individual could inject adrenalin into a particular strand of research, causing it to preferentially advance.
These shifts in interpretation inevitably made some earlier ideas redundant. Occasionally, this involved outright rejection – as happened with all the failed explanations for the conodont animal – but often ideas simply slipped into the backwaters without a fight.
Repeatedly the conodont workers started out along a particular path that seemed to offer progress but before the end was reached – before the once-imagined definitive result had been delivered – those on the path were drawn into new things. This occurred because at the moment when particular questions were asked and the map of progress was drawn up, the features on that map were composed of things already within view. Consider, for example, the 1950s advocates for a new ecological approach to study. They drew upon a few pioneering studies that showed the potential for this kind of research. But as the conodont ecologists voyaged forward, they soon hit seas disrupted by new ecological, global, and planetary theories. They looked again at their map and saw that the features marked upon it were not those imagined in 1955. They needed a new ship and new map, and a new direction in which to voyage. It was not simply that the expenditure of effort in this field had entered a phase of diminishing returns, but that changes around that field of research had diminished its value.
In this way, once-fashionable ideas about the fossil drifted out of sight, joined by those ideas rejected by new knowledge or ideas that were never promoted or defended or had only lasted while their proponents remained alive. While certain classic studies by Christian Pander and a few others persisted beyond the active involvement of the individual, other intellectual positions disappeared with their authors. Each new generation possessed little sentimentality about their predecessors and were never encouraged to historicize the past. All things, old and new, were for them contemporary, to be retained or rejected as that moment seemed to demand.
THE PROGRESS OF TINY THINGS
So what picture of progress can we paint for these enigmatic tiny things? An examination of any textbook on conodonts, or indeed the newsletter that has kept these researchers connected for the past forty years, seems to suggest that knowledge of the conodont fossil emerged through acts of specialization: from questions of biology and taxonomy to the use of these fossils in stratigraphic, evolutionary, ecological, and geographical studies, incorporating new research on fossil associations, animal physiognomy, chemistry, structure, and so on. While there is a degree of truth in this interpretation, we need to understand that these specializations are merely categories through which the field expressed itself and filters through which the individual pursued his or her creativity. These were not discrete subfields operating in relative isolation from one another. Those who manned the scanning electron microscopes in the early 1970s were already established in stratigraphy, taxonomy, and, in varying degrees, animal biology. Intellectually, individuals transgressed those categories into which the science seemed to be divided. The emergence of the animal may have been aided by this focusing of attention, but the conceptual – immaterial – fossils that occupied the conodont worker's mind were never divided in this way; these areas of focus were merely facets in the thinking of each mind.
In this book, my focus has been on the emergence of the animal and, indeed, on showing that it begins to take on aspects of its biological form in activities that had no interest in the animal. It is easy from a cursory view to imagine the history of conodont research as an enigma planted in the soil of ignorance that gave rise to a branching and ever-specializing engagement with the fossil. The structure of this book might, indeed, give grounds for this thinking. But this is an artifact of narrative (applied here and necessary in the communications of the workers themselves) and of imposing a long historical lens. If, however, we fold up our telescope and consider conodont science as a succession of cultural moments, then the manner in which the animal was pieced together seems to echo the way in which the animal itself evolved. Like the animal, the co
nodont workers frequently innovated from the conservative heartland of stratigraphic study around which conodont science was built. This core of practice was something all workers understood and shared, and they knew that it, more than anything else, had given the fossil (and therefore their work) significance. New strands of research would emerge from this conservative core as creative flourishes before entering a period of decline for reasons I have discussed above. One might say that circumstances and resources at one moment permitted a fire to burn, but as with the burning of all things, in time those resources (whether desires, ambitions, individuals, ideas, and so on) diminish. Each of these flourishes seemed to reveal a small aspect of the animal. When the animal was eventually found, it was already in many respects known, and much of this knowing could not have come from the animal specimens themselves.
When the animal finally appeared, its significance was acquired in the reverse of a statement I made earlier in this piece: Now the object had to become scientific before it could become anthropological. Only then could it be clothed in a great history of knowing and mythologizing and united with all manner of memories and so much wondering. Those who possessed the fossils also possessed the scientific authority – at least for a time – and they would state that the world now possessed this singular animal, an animal that was real and material, that could be seen and held. This became a scientific animal objectified in publication. It was, however, as I have already explained, simply one mental response. This animal was never the only animal possessed by the science – the animal that occupied the minds of individual conodont workers always existed in plural. These latter animals had only ever swam and evolved in a sea of thoughts, perhaps coalescing around a number of possibilities but nevertheless “a transitional mass, a coagulation of the unsubstantial, of the not-yet-substantial and yet substance-like…mean and borderline between material and immaterial.” The ambiguities of the fossil, like the speed of a being in rapid movement, prevented the animal from being fully observed or physically or mentally possessed. Workers had to content themselves with incomplete sightings. Another way to think about this is to return to Gombrich's observations on the role of illusion in art. For what we seem to be observing in this enigma is the boundary between artistic and scientific interpretation. Gombrich noted “how much the artist of the Western tradition came to rely upon the power of indefinite forms”: “What we called ‘mental set’ may be precisely that state of readiness to start projecting, to thrust out the tentacles of phantom colors and phantom images which always flicker around our perceptions. And what we call ‘reading’ an image may perhaps be better described as testing it for its potentialities, trying out what fits.” As the storm clouds gather around the British animal, some conodont workers might argue that no fossil has thus far been capable of protecting conodont workers from this artistic engagement, of lifting them out of a world of ambiguity and illusion, out of the thrusting tentacles of phantoms like those that, to return to the metaphor of El Dorado, “seemed to flee before the Spaniards, and to call on them unceasingly.”20
The Great Fossil Enigma Page 42
