On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  5. Apparently Owen sermonized Darwin on the matter regularly, even suggesting to him that such a “production of monsters” presented an “analogy to the production of species.” See Notebook B, entry 161. My subsequent discussion of Owen’s use of monsters is heavily indebted to Richards, “Political Anatomy of Monsters.” For more detailed information on Owen’s complex, and sometimes confusing, theories of transmutation, see Nicolas Rupke, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist (Yale University Press, 1994), and Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors (University of Chicago Press, 1982), as well as Desmond’s The Politics of Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 1989).

  6. See Darwin, Notebook C, no. 86.

  7. This epistemic problem of determining which traits are adaptations and which are simply inherited as neutral continues to trouble some contemporary intellectuals. Jerry Fodor, “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings,” London Review of Books 18 (October 2007), for example, engages in much hand-wringing over the seeming impossibility of settling such a question. He worries that we have no objective criteria for weighing which traits of an organism are selected for as adaptations versus those that simply piggyback onto the selected traits. We have stats to show that curly tails and tame-ness are correlated traits in dog populations; we can ask, Fodor points out, if natural selection is targeting tameness, and curly tails are accidental byproduct correlations, or the other way around. It is interesting that Darwin himself was worried as early as the 1830s about the epistemic implications of his budding theory. I tend to think that Fodor’s worry is rather exaggerated. Even his own example of tameness (or less aggression) versus curly tail seems to resolve relatively easily. Only the most dogged skepticism (oh, the puns keep coming) would fail to acknowledge the relevance of aggression and tameness to survival, and therefore more likely subjects of selection, whereas curly tails comparatively speaking seem to be the proper candidates for free-rider status. The criticism that we don’t have absolute nomological certainty about the relevance of aggression and tameness strikes me as a futile leftover from logical positivism.

  8. Darwin’s cousin and longtime friend William Darwin Fox had a fascination with hybrid animal breeding, and in Notebook D Charles rehearses a whole series of empirical facts drawn from William’s many stories. Hybrids are considered, with special attention to subsequent offspring: dogs bred with wolves, long- and short-necked geese, blue-eyed deaf cats, common and muscovy ducks, and more.

  9. Darwin, Notebook D, nos. 12–18.

  10. Darwin, Notebook E, no. 3 reveals his first application of Malthus’s ideas from An Essay on the Principle of Population to the whole range of organic relations.

  11. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859 edition), chapter 1, “Variation under Domestication.”

  12. For example, French bulldogs, artificially selected for flat faces, often give birth to offspring with severe cleft palate. Man, in his history of animal domestication, has created some Frankenstein creatures. Darwin says that man “often begins his selection by some half-monstrous form; or at least by some modification prominent enough to catch his eye, or to be plainly useful to him.” In this same passage he plays with the Designer metaphor of natural selection. “Can we wonder,” he asks, “that nature’s productions should be far ‘truer’ in character than man’s productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?” Ibid.

  13. Darwin’s gentle argument with the American naturalist Asa Gray is well known as an example of teleological confusion surrounding natural selection. Gray, who was in most regards very helpful to Darwin’s reception in America, nonetheless received a rebuke from Darwin when Gray argued that the Author of nature foreordained the course of evolution. In a letter to Gray, Darwin writes, “If the right variations occurred, and no others, natural selections would be superfluous.” Gray was arguing that far from destroying the “argument from design,” Darwin in fact buttressed it. Cynthia Russett, in Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response 1865–1912 (Freeman, 1976), points out that “Asa Gray was…a very distinguished scientist as well as a convinced Christian. But he was not a professional philosopher, and on the question of Darwin’s relevance to the argument from design he seems to have been quite wrong.”

  14. Darwin’s eventual theory could explain more than just adaptations. For a discussion of the causal pluralism of Darwin’s mature theory, see Stephen T. Asma, “Darwin’s Causal Pluralism,” Biology and Philosophy 11, no. 1 (1996).

  15. The homologous body plans of diverse animals were reinterpreted by Darwin as morphological evidence of common ancestry, not evidence of God’s divine Ideas. Bats, men, moles, and whales share body plans because they have a distant common ancestor, not because a transcendental archetype is instantiated in them. Darwin believed that homologies give us a glimpse into the flesh-and-blood creatures of our phylogenetic past.

  16. For a nice analysis of the various non-Darwinian evolution theories of this time, see Peter Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

  17. Hugo de Vries, Species and Varieties: Their Origin by Mutation (Open Court Publishing, 1904), lecture 19, “Experimental Pedigree Cultures.”

  18. “The struggle for life and natural selection are manifestly inadequate to give even the slightest indication of an explanation of this case. It is simply impossible to imagine the causes that might have produced such a character. The only way out of this difficulty is to assume that it has arisen at once, in its present apparently differentiated and very variable condition, and that, being quite uninjurious and since it does not decrease the fertility of the race, it has never been subjected to natural selection, and so has saved itself from destruction.” De Vries continues the argument by extrapolating to other normal plant morphologies: “But if we once grant the probability of the origin of the ‘Nepaul-barley’ by a sudden mutation, we obviously must assume the same in the case of the Helwingia and other normal instances. In this way we gain a further support for our assertion, that even the strangest specific characters may have arisen suddenly.” Lecture 22, “Taxonomic Anomalies.”

  19. My discussion of Goldschmidt is informed by Michael R. Dietrich, “Richard Gold-schmidt: Hopeful Monsters and Other Heresies,” Nature Reviews: Genetics 4 (January 2003). Also see Stephen Jay Gould’s introduction to a reissue of Goldschmidt’s The Material Basis of Evolution (Yale University Press, 1982).

  20. The neo-Darwinians were strenuously reasserting Darwin’s gradualist micromutation theory, reformulating it as a part of the new population genetics. The idea of a steady stream of tiny mutations fit nicely with the emerging statistical methods of quantitative genetics, whereas qualitative jumps, such as Goldschmidt’s hopeful monsters, did not. The major players of the neo-Darwinian synthesis were Julian Huxley, Theodo-sius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, George Gaylord Simpson, J. B. S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright. Simpson and Goldschmidt, in particular, argued with each other in their respective writings.

  21. Quotes of Pere Alberch are taken from his watershed article, “The Logic of Monsters: Evidence for Internal Constraint in Development and Evolution,” Geobios, memoire special, no. 12 (1989).

  22. Alberch approvingly refers back to the teratological work of his predecessors, such as the Geoffroys, in this case of the three-headed monster.

  23. My discussion of Gould’s example is drawn from his article “Eight Little Piggies,” collected in his book Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History (Norton, 1993).

  24. Using his logic of monsters, Alberch showed how the developmental construction of limbs consists of three fundamental processes: branching (the development of two series from one), segmentation (repetition of the same element), and condensation (fusion between elements). A forelimb, for example, builds outward from the shoulder to the fingers and involves a branching construction, pursuant to the humerus, of the ulna and radius. Further branching builds the wrist bones, and then th
e digits are composed by segmentation. See Neil Shubin and Pere Alberch, “A Morphogenetic Approach to the Origin and Basic Organization of the Tetrapod Limb,” in Evolutionary Biology, vol. 20, edited by Max Hecht, Bruce Wallace, and Sir Ghillean T. Prance (Plenum Publications, 1986).

  25. To be more precise, the penultimate, rather than the ultimate, digit is built first and then forward to the first digit, and back one.

  26. Moreover, when animal populations have lost digits, like the horse, they seem to have lost them (morphologically speaking) in the same reverse sequence.

  27. Notice that Alberch’s logic of development does not give us some absolutely necessary sequence of inevitable body plans; after all, we know that fossil tetrapods can have five, six, seven, or even eight digits. But it does give us a fundamental internal constraint system that can be turned on for longer or shorter periods and thereby provide predictable morphological consequences.

  28. A close reading of Gould suggests, however, that this “vindication” is more of a rhetorical device, helping raise awareness for a historically ignored area of study (development). Gould redefines “hopeful monster” in a way that keeps it under the umbrella of Darwinism, and therefore confusingly uses the term differently than Goldschmidt. In his article “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” Natural History 86 (June/July 1977), Gould argues that small changes in the embryological “constraint systems” (such as the timing mutation to stop or continue digit building) can produce large morphological transformations in the adult, and possibly macro-evolutionary pathways.

  29. See Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff, “Evolving Evolution,” New York Review of Books 53, no. 8 (2006).

  30. The same question regarding discrete form and matter was raised at the organismal level of biology. Technically, every cell can make the whole organism, in the sense that it contains all the information code. But although each cell has the entire recipe, its job is to specialize and build and maintain something quite particular (muscle, bone, blood, etc.). We might have expected that cells would have only information on a need-to-know basis, like a foot soldier who gets only a part of the overall tactical plan. In fact, they have the entire plan inside them, but chemical gatekeepers are rationing out very limited parts of the total information.

  31. My description of Scott Holley’s work is drawn from his public lecture “Fish ‘n Clocks: How the Vertebral Column Is Segmented in Zebrafish Embryogenesis,” delivered on December 6, 2007, as part of the Science and Mathematics Colloquium Series, Columbia College, Chicago. For a more technical articulation of his recent work, see his essay “The Genetics and Embryology of Zebrafish Metamerism,” Developmental Dynamics 236 (2007).

  32. Zebra fish make great models because their process of vertebral construction takes only about twenty-five hours to complete, whereas the same development in humans takes six weeks. Add to this the fact that zebra fish are transparent and therefore easy to observe in terms of internal development.

  33. A simple illustration can be seen in the extremely protracted juvenile traits of humans when compared with other primates, such as chimps. Maximum brain growth for chimps is concluded around one year of age, whereas humans continue until their late teens. The bodily or somatic maturing of an animal can be quite delayed or reduced, especially when compared with phylogenetic relatives, but the sexual maturation of the same animal can seem accelerated by comparison.

  34. See Sean B. Carrol, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo-Devo (Norton, 2005). My quotations are taken from chapter 11.

  CHAPTER 12

  1. In 1962 S. Shachter and J. Singer demonstrated in their paper “Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State” (Psychological Review 69) that an emotion requires both a physiological arousal and a correlate cognition. For example, subjects injected with adrenalin do not automatically have an emotional response to the chemical. However, when the subject is first questioned about a painful event, then the injection will trigger an upsetting emotional response. The cognitive interpretation of, or even just correlation with, physiological arousal is crucial to defining the subsequent felt emotion; the cognitive aspect is not just an epiphenomenon of the chemical. This question of the relationship between cognitive and affective states has an earlier incarnation in the disagreement between William James and Walter Cannon. As Rami Gabriel points out in Affective Reactions in a Prosopagnosic Patient (PhD dissertation, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2007), “William James (1890) argued that the internal changes occur because of an arousing event, and we subsequently interpret these internal feelings as an emotion. Cannon (1929) disagreed claiming that the same changes occur in the internal organs in a range of emotional responses, so it is implausible that one emotion is attached to one particular feeling, furthermore artificial changes brought about by for example, adrenalin do not necessarily produce an emotional feeling.” I am indebted to Dr. Gabriel for steering me to this important debate.

  2. In the 1940s a psychologist named Donald Hebb continued Darwin’s experiments on chimp fear of snakes and showed that infant chimpanzees who had no earlier exposure to snakes were nonetheless terrified of them when first presented. Hebb continued to introduce novel objects and animals to the chimps and discovered something more subtle than just snake phobia. He concluded that chimps had alarmed and frightful responses to any extremely varied morphologies they encountered. When something in their perceptual field jumped out as radically different, it could not be processed by the cognitive categories already in place. As Melvin Konner describes it, “Against the background of knowledge already accumulated by the infant chimps, the new objects were different; they aroused many perceptual schemas or patterns stored in the brain but fitted into none, causing arousal and then fear. The brain was somehow designed to generate fear as the result of such a cognitive mismatch.” See Melvin Konner’s description of Donald Hebb’s, Wolfgang Schleidt’s, and Mary Ainsworth’s experiments in The Tangled Wing (Times Books, 2002), chapter 10.

  3. Noel Carroll’s theorizing about horror can be found in The Philosophy of Horror (Routledge, 1990).

  4. H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (Dover Publications, 1973).

  5. The contrast between fear and angst is articulated in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Blackwell, 1978), part I, chapter 6, “Care as the Being of Dasein.”

  6. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Hackett, 1987), part I, section 27.

  7. For Kant, the sublime is an experience of incoherence that results when reason sets a task for the mind for which it does not have enough power to complete. Looking at the night sky, for example, and trying to envision the expanse of space and time stretching before us is a task that cannot be adequately completed. He contrasts this incoherent magnitude with a different kind of incoherent magnitude, which he calls a monstrous magnitude. He uses monstrous as a technical term to designate an object that contradicts itself, something of a size that renders its own purpose or function impossible. It’s hard to know what he means here, except that he may be thinking of absurd objects, such as staircases that are so monumentally big that no one can climb them. Or perhaps he’s imagining an animal whose head is so large that it cannot move. In this strict definition, Kant’s “sublime” and “monstrous” are both species of incoherence, but with different origins and implications. See Critique of Judgment, part I, section 26.

  8. Schopenhauer’s most formal presentation of this philosophy can be found in his 1819 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, The World as Will and Representation, in two volumes (Dover, 1966). See Bryan Magee’s interesting discussion of Schopenhauer’s influence on subsequent artists in The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford University Press, 1997), part II.

  9. The highly emotional and subjective interests of Expressionist art (of which horror might be seen as a subspecies) manifest the philosophical trajectory I’ve been sketching. The art of human vulnerability and the sense of cosmic fear can be seen in the famous shri
eking face of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893). In addition to painting works called Anxiety and Despair, Munch is reported to have said, “Sickness, insanity, and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.” One finds these artistic tendencies toward terror in earlier works as well, in Bosch, El Greco, and Goya.

  10. The famous line about nature “red in tooth and claw” is from Tennyson’s 1850 poem In Memoriam A. H. H., but it was often applied to Darwinian natural selection. The quote from Thomas Henry Huxley is taken from his 1893 Romanes Lecture and can be found in Darwin: A Norton Critical Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Philip Appleman (Norton, 1979).

  11. As we’ve already seen in our discussion of Plato, among others, the inner monsters of psychology are not really new at all. But it is fair to make a generalization at the level of paradigms and say that the twentieth century is comparatively subjective in its understanding of monsters.