Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes

by Stephen Jay Gould

  This resolution pleased me because the tale of the 1913 letter never made much sense. If Dawson had actually found a skull piece of Piltdown 2 in 1913, then why did he re-report it in his first explicit letter about Piltdown 2 on January 9, 1915? I recognize, of course, that this resolution leaves us with another interesting mystery—namely, what ever happened to the thin frontal fragment described in the 1913 letter? For it is never mentioned again so far as I know, and it forms no part of the Piltdown lode. I have no idea, and know no source of potential evidence. I would conjecture, however, that Dawson showed it to Smith Woodward, and that they judged it to be just what Dawson had suggested—a descendant of Piltdown, in fact a fragment from a modern skull—and therefore paid no further attention to it. Perhaps, for once, Smith Woodward didn’t fall, and Dawson chose not to press his luck.

  I do, of course, recognize that one could still construct, from the 1913 letter correctly interpreted, a scenario for Teilhard’s exoneration: Dawson told Teilhard about the 1913 fragment; Teilhard knew at the time that it had nothing to do with a second site coeval with Piltdown 1; he also knew that it did not come from the site of Piltdown 2 that he had visited with Dawson in 1913; he forgot all this later, remembered that something else had been found somewhere in 1913, and confused this information with the later find of Piltdown 2. But this degree of special pleading makes a weak and conjectural case. It is surely no stronger than the simpler and related claim that I discussed and rejected in the original article—that Teilhard saw only the site of Piltdown 2, but misremembered forty years later and thought that Dawson had told him about the fossils as well.

  THE NATURE OF TEILHARD’S LIFE AT ORE PLACE

  Under the classical rubric of “opportunity,” several critics familiar with Jesuit life have charged that Teilhard was so restricted by the rules of his seminary that he could not have spent sufficient private time with Dawson to hatch and execute such a plot.

  Karl Schmitz-Moorman, editor of the excellent facsimile edition of Teilhard’s technical works, raised two arguments on this theme (Teilhard Newsletter, vol. 14, July, 1981; Ms. Lukas reiterates them in a related article in the same issue, as did Thomas M. King, S.J. of Georgetown University in a private communication to me). First, Schmitz-Moorman argues, strict Jesuit rules kept Teilhard virtually confined to quarters or chaperoned by other Jesuits when outside—in other words, no opportunity for private plotting:

  Teilhard was always under supervision when he was working in the field during the seminary years. The same was true for his life inside the seminary. Doors could be opened at any time and superiors could step in to see how the students were getting on. Rules were very strict, [p. 3]

  Second, Schmitz-Moorman reminds us that Teilhard was not a frequent visitor to the actual site of Piltdown 1: “When Teilhard left England in the summer of 1912 to begin his studies in Paris, he had been only once to Piltdown” (p. 3). He also excavated there with Dawson and Smith Woodward twice during August, 1913. Ore Place, Teilhard’s seminary, was located some forty miles from Piltdown 1.

  I must reject the premise of the second argument and the claim of the first. “In order to have taken part in the Piltdown hoax,” Schmitz-Moorman argues, “Teilhard would have had to make many visits to Uckfield in East Sussex” (p. 3)—the site of Piltdown 1. But why? Must all conspirators pull the trigger itself? I have never charged Teilhard with putting the actual bits in the ground; I have always assumed that Dawson played this role. There were so many other things to do—getting, breaking, and doctoring specimens just for starters.

  Schmitz-Moorman’s first argument reminds me of Casey Stengel’s immortal distinction between general categories and specific cases. (When asked why he blew the Mets’s first draft choice on a particularly inept catcher, Stengel remarked: “If you don’t have a catcher, you’re likely to have a lot of passed balls.”) Same problem (in reverse) with Schmitz-Moorman. I do not doubt his generality about life in Jesuit seminaries. But the specific record for Ore Place indicates that Teilhard had more than enough freedom to work with Dawson. First of all, his own letters (see bibliography) speak of a frequency and range of excursions far in excess of what the general rules would allow. Second, the standard biography of Teilhard (Teilhard de Chardin by Claude Cuénot, p. 12) states:

  Thanks to the liberal attitude of the Rector at Hastings, Teilhard was allowed to go more frequently on scientific walks and excursions, finding specimens to offer to the British Museum or the Museum at Hastings. He had now advanced beyond the amateur class, and was manifesting a clear bent towards the paleontology of the vertebrates.

  NATURE OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DAWSON AND TEILHARD

  Peter Costello, an independent researcher in Dublin and author of a forthcoming book about Piltdown, found previously unpublished letters from Teilhard to Dawson in the archives of the British Museum (Natural History). Costello (1981, see bibliography) published one of the letters, suggesting that its tone provided a refutation of my hypothesis. I quote the entire letter and Costello’s interpretation. Teilhard wrote to Dawson on July 10, 1912:

  Dear Mr. Dawson,

  I am sorry to tell you that it is impossible for me to go to Lewes, next week, because I have to start from Hastings on Tuesday! I hope, nevertheless, that we will again dig together the Uckfield’s gravel: next year, I am likely to study Natural History in France, and to spend my holidays in England. If so, I will surely do my best to see you. Until I give you my definitive address, you can write to me at: ‘Château de Sarcenat, par Oreines, Puy-de-Dôme.’

  I am very thankful to you for your kindness towards me during this last four years. Lewes will certainly be one of my best remembrances of England, and you may be sure that I shall often pray God to bless the Castle Lodge [Dawson’s residence].

  Yours sincerely,

  P. Teilhard

  Costello concludes (1981, pp. 58–59):

  I suggest that this farewell letter, so touching in its expression of thanks, demonstrates (as do the others in the series), that the relationship between Dawson and Teilhard was one of mentor and pupil and that no conspiracy existed between them.

  I do not see how this letter speaks either for or against my case. If one has been seeing too many old-style gangster movies and develops a peculiarly cardboard view of conspiracies, then I suppose that each participant might have to be slimy, unregenerate, utterly unkind, and devoid of any admirable quality. But I rather suspect that conspirators are not so far from a cross section among all of us. I do not see why they should not show loyalty to each other, pay thanks for kindnesses rendered, and even show deference to large differences in age and experience. Must conspirators be equals? Have no “mentor and pupil” ever plotted together? Shall we exonerate Teilhard because he and Dawson weren’t on a first-name basis in formal, just post-Edwardian England? The letter is touching and it does reflect Teilhard in an admirable light. People are complex, with faults and virtues aplenty. I have always argued that Teilhard’s virtues outweighed the major fault I have tried to identify.

  Costello implies (in the statement quoted above) that his evidence is multiple and that “others in the series” confirm the tone of his quoted letter. Perhaps I did not search assiduously enough in the British Museum archives, but I could find only one other letter from Teilhard to Dawson, a short and uninformative piece of June 21, 1912, simply telling Dawson of his imminent departure and urging a visit to select fossils from Teilhard’s collection for the British Museum. In other words, I think that Costello has quoted everything he has.

  But I also made some discoveries of my own about the relationship between Dawson and Teilhard as reflected in letters of the British Museum archives. If the archives contain a paucity of Teilhard’s letters, they are rich in Dawson’s—and these letters belie Costello’s chief claim that Dawson and Teilhard had only a passing and formal acquaintance. The high density of references to Teilhard in Dawson’s letters (mostly to Smith Woodward) points both to a strong relationship betw
een the two men and, especially, to a particular solicitude on Dawson’s part towards Teilhard.

  Consider, for example, a series of letters from Dawson to Smith Woodward in 1915, after Teilhard had left for the front. On March 9, Dawson writes: “I enclose a P.C. from Teilhard at the French front. He, no doubt, would be glad of any little bits of literature which you can send him.” On April 3, he states: “Teilhard has now been moved to near the back of the English line in Flanders. He says he is all right ‘body and mind’.” And on July 3, in the same letter that reported the “discovery” of the Piltdown 2 molar, Dawson announced: “Teilhard wrote yesterday—he is quite well and in a quiet spot at present.” (Unfortunately, no one has uncovered any of this correspondence between Dawson and Teilhard. I, for one, would dearly love to know what it contained). I submit that this degree of contact indicates a level of friendship and mutual concern far greater than that allowed by my critics. Limited contact is as crucial to their case as this demonstrated bond is to mine.

  The prewar correspondence of Dawson and Smith Woodward shows a similar pattern. Six letters between October 1909 and October 1911 mention Teilhard and his work in collecting fossils. The pace picks up following Dawson’s first notice of the Piltdown skull to Smith Woodward on February 14, 1912. Six more letters mention Teilhard between then and November 21, 1912.

  I believe, on this point and others, that all my critics have used a peculiar style of argument amounting to an a priori refusal to consider my case seriously—that is, Costello, Lukas, and Schmitz-Moorman all argue that I must be wrong because the written record provides no direct evidence for conspiracy. Costello wrote to me (September 4, 1981): “Nowhere can one read anything that suggests they were plotting together.” Lukas writes (1981 in bibliography, p. 426): “According to his letters, both published and unpublished, to family and friends, Teilhard’s relationship to Dawson was anything but close.” And further on: “Before the Piltdown adventure began Teilhard and Dawson seem to have met only four times.”

  But surely, if any principle regulates conspiracy, we may state that plotters do not generally write extensive, contemporary accounts of their deeds (later confessions for profit or expiation notwithstanding). If Teilhard and Dawson were plotting, their machinations would certainly not have appeared in letters to parents and friends, or in preserved letters to each other. To identify conspiracy, one must search for implicit pattern behind the stated record, not for explicit contemporary confessions.

  Thus, in conclusion, I believe that no strong arguments have been raised against my case and that, in one area, I have bolstered my account by recognizing the extent of Dawson’s concern for Teilhard as expressed in his letters to Smith Woodward. Moreover, for all the criticism of my first strong point (the letters to Oakley), my detractors have been conspicuously silent about my second strong argument (Teilhard’s pattern of silence concerning Piltdown in his extensive publications on human evolution). The more I think about this, the more it becomes, in Alice’s immortal words, “curiouser and curiouser.”

  Since writing the original article, another small point, making Teilhard’s silence even more puzzling, has come to my attention. When Peking man was discovered, its cranium was reconstructed incorrectly to yield a capacity lying, like Piltdown’s, in the modern human range. This unleashed a flurry of commentary about the relationship between Piltdown and Peking. Now Teilhard was in China where he was contributing (as a geologist) to the original Peking finds. He was the only one there with personal knowledge of Piltdown. Yet, so far as I can tell, he said nothing at all. His own mentor, Marcellin Boule, published a paper comparing the Peking and Piltdown crania. It included long quotations from Teilhard about the geology of the Peking site, but not a word from him about the crania.

  Again I repeat, if Teilhard considered the Piltdown material to be genuine, the skull1 provided his strongest direct evidence for the postulate that he held most dear and that motivated all his work on man’s spiritual evolution—multiple parallel lineages ascending toward the domination of spirit over matter. And he never mentioned Piltdown beyond a half-dozen quick, unavoidable, and almost embarrassed references. Why?

  Lest readers think that all speculation on Piltdown has gone against Teilhard’s involvement of late, I add that Dr. L. Harrison Matthews, one of the grand old men of British zoology (see essay 11) and a personal acquaintance of nearly everyone involved in the original case, has published his novel-length reconstruction in the New Scientist (see bibliography). He sees the necessity of Teilhard’s involvement, but develops a highly complicated scenario in which Dawson begins the hoax alone, Teilhard then recognizes what Dawson is doing and, to let Dawson know and warn him off any future hoaxing, Teilhard manufactures, plants, and finds the canine himself. The war then intervenes, Dawson dies, and Teilhard is backed into a corner of silence. I welcome this basic insight that Teilhard cannot be excluded, but regard his case as too complex in that most difficult of ways—to be right, each of two dozen unsubstantiated events must break exactly in Harrison Matthews’s way. I continue to urge the simpler view—that Teilhard worked with Dawson at least from 1912 until he left for the front.

  In his last public comment on Piltdown, Kenneth Oakley, who died on November 2, 1981, wrote a letter to the New Scientist (published posthumously on November 12, 1981) stating his disagreement with Harrison Matthews. I do not know what opinion he held of my case at the time of his death. After my original article, he wrote, by invitation, a letter to The Times (London) stating that, in the absence of definite proof, Teilhard should be given the benefit of the doubt. (Were I a judge, and this a legal proceeding with standards so necessarily different from historical inquiry, I would have to concur. Of my original article, one close friend remarked that I had established the grounds for an indictment, but not for a conviction.) I have also seen statements from a private letter in which Oakley, arguing from the 1913 letter of Dawson to Smith Woodward, rejects my first claim based on the letters between Teilhard and Oakley, but explicitly does not state a belief in Teilhard’s innocence. (I have already indicated why I think the 1913 letter is irrelevant to my case.) It is a matter of record among several of Oakley’s close friends that he long maintained private suspicions of Teilhard’s active involvement in at least some aspect of the case.

  I bring this up because some critics have charged me with dishonesty in imputing a more favorable view to Oakley than he actually held. I can only state that I sent a copy of the original article to Oakley before it was published, asking directly if I had represented him accurately and if he approved my attribution. He wrote to me (on June 6, 1980): “I read straight through your paper without finding anything (of any importance) which I would wish you to alter.”

  As a final comment, I must express mixed feelings two years after the original article. I am delighted to find my hypothesis strong and undiminished (admittedly in my biassed view) by a series of searching and intensely negative commentaries. On the other hand, I confess that I held secret hopes, nurtured perhaps by my own overly heroic view of life. I hoped that some old man would come down off a mountain or out of a monastery bearing a yellowed document of confession from Teilhard. Or that some trusted friend would open a bank vault and make public the “letter to be read either at the 100th anniversary of my death or when someone figures out my involvement in Piltdown.” Nothing like this has happened. No good arguments have been raised against me, but I must admit that nothing of great consequence has turned up in my favor either. I began the first essay that I wrote on Piltdown (reprinted in The Panda’s Thumb) before I was much interested in Teilhard’s role, with the words: “Nothing is quite so fascinating as a well-aged mystery.” And so Piltdown remains, though I might add that nothing would be quite so satisfying as a definitive resolution.

  18 | Our Natural Place

  WHEN LINNAEUS SOUGHT to classify all of life in 1758, he called his great work the Systema Naturae, the “System of Nature.” Biologists of all subsequent generation
s have flooded the scientific literature with alternative, but equally comprehensive, systems. The content changes, but the passion for building systems remains. Our urge to make sense of the complexity that surrounds us, to put it all together, overwhelms our natural caution before such a daunting task.

  A curious irony infects this tradition of building comprehensive systems in biology. Biologists present their systems either as necessary truths of superior logic or as ineluctable conclusions drawn from unrivaled powers of observation—in other words, as objective renderings of nature, heretofore unappreciated. In fact, these systems share only one common property—and it is neither objectivity nor superior wisdom. They are, at base, attempts to resolve a (perhaps the) cardinal question of intellectual history: What is the role and status of our own species, Homo sapiens, in nature and the cosmos?

  Systems follow one of two strategies in their attempt to make sense of “man’s place in nature,” to use T. H. Huxley’s phrase. One strategy, the “picket fence” in my terminology (see essay 12 in The Panda’s Thumb), devises a pervasive order for the rest of nature, but separates humans alone with a brand of superiority. Thus, Charles Lyell envisaged a world ever churning and changing, but always remaining the same—replacement without improvement. Only man, a recent imposition of moral perfection upon a stable world, broke the pattern of change without progress. A. R. Wallace attributed all features of organisms to the molding power of natural selection—except for one product of divine inspiration: the human brain.

  The second strategy takes an opposite tack in pursuit of the same goal—a placement within nature that will make some sense of our lives. This strategy argues for no separation between man and nature at all. These theories of continuity can proceed in either direction, and I shall discuss one recent example of each as representatives of a long tradition of flawed argument. The first view—I shall call it zoocentric—builds general principles from the behavior of other animals and then subsumes humans completely into the rubric because we are, after all and undeniably, animals too. The second view—I shall call it anthropocentric—tries to subsume nature in us by viewing our peculiarities as the goal of life from the start.