The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Chinese academics raised the possibility of sending these precious objects to the United States for safety. Throughout most of 1941, however, the custodians of the bones dithered, and the decision to export them was not made until shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor in December that year.48 Barely twenty-four hours after the attack, the Japanese in Beijing searched the fossils’ repository. They found only casts. That did not mean, however, that the fossils were safe. What appears to have happened is that they were packed in a couple of footlockers and put in the care of a platoon of U.S. Marines headed for the port of Tientsin. The plan was for the fossils to be loaded on board the SS President Harrison, bound for home. Unfortunately, the Harrison was sunk on her way to the port, and the fossils vanished. They have never been found.

  The Zhoukoudien fossils were vital because they helped clarify the theory of evolution, which at the outbreak of war was in a state of chaos. Throughout the 1930s, the attention of palaeontologists had continued to focus on Zhoukoudien, in China, rather than Java or Africa for the simple reason that spectacular discoveries continued to be made there. In 1939, for example, Franz Weidenreich reported that of the forty or so individuals found in the Zhoukoudien caves (fifteen of whom were children), not one was a complete skeleton. In fact, the great preponderance were skulls, and smashed skulls at that. Weidenreich’s conclusion was dramatic: these individuals had been killed – and eaten. The remains were an early ritualistic killing, a primitive religion in which the murderers had eaten the brains of their victims in order to obtain their power. Striking as these observations were, evolutionary theory and its relation to known fossils was still incoherent and unsatisfactory.49

  The incoherence was removed by four theoretical books, all published between 1937 and 1944, and thanks to these four authors several nineteenth-century notions were finally laid to rest. Between them, these studies created what is now known as ‘the evolutionary synthesis,’ which produced our modern understanding of how evolution actually works. In chronological order, these books were: Genetics and the Origin of Species, by Theodosius Dobzhansky (1937); Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, by Julian Huxley (1942); Systematics and the Origin of Species, by Ernst Mayr (also 1942); and Tempo and Mode in Evolution, by George Gaylord Simpson (1944). The essential problem they all sought to deal with was this:50 Following the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, two of his theories were accepted relatively quickly, but two others were not. The idea of evolution itself – that species change – was readily grasped, as was the idea of ‘branching evolution,’ that all species are descended from a common ancestor. What was not accepted so easily was the idea of gradual change, or of natural selection as an engine of change. In addition, Darwin, in spite of the tide of his book, had failed to provide an account of speciation, how new species arise. This made for three major areas of disagreement.

  The main arguments may be described as follows. First, many biologists believed in ‘saltation’ – that evolution proceeded not gradually but in large jumps; only in this way, they thought, could the great differences between species be accounted for.51 If evolution proceeded gradually, why wasn’t this reflected in the fossil record; why weren’t ‘halfway’ species ever found? Second, there was the notion of ‘orthogenesis,’ that the direction of evolution was somehow preordained, that organisms somehow had a final destiny toward which they were evolving. And third, there was a widespread belief in ‘soft’ inheritance, better known as the inheritance of acquired characteristics, or Lamarckism. Julian Huxley, grandson of T. H. Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog,’ and the brother of Aldous, author of Brave New World, was the first to use the word synthesis, but he was really the least original of the four. What the others did between them was to bring together the latest developments in genetics, cytology, embryology, palaeontology, systematics, and population studies to show how the new discoveries fitted together under the umbrella of Darwinism.

  Ernst Mayr, a German emigré who had been at the Museum of Natural History in New York since 1931, directed attention away from individuals and toward populations. He argued that the traditional view, that species consist of large numbers of individuals and that each conforms to a basic archetype, was wrong. Instead, species consist of populations, clusters of unique individuals where there is no ideal type.52 For example, the human races around the world are different, but also alike in certain respects; above all, they can interbreed. Mayr advanced the view that, in mammals at least, major geographical boundaries – like mountains or seas – are needed for speciation to occur, for then different populations become separated and begin developing along separate lines. Again as an example, this could be happening with different races, and may have been happening for several thousand years – but it is a gradual process, and the races are still nowhere near being ‘isolated genetic packages,’ which is the definition of a species. Dobzhansky, a Russian who had escaped to New York just before Stalin’s Great Break in 1928 to work with T. H. Morgan, covered broadly the same area but looked more closely at genetics and palaeontology. He was able to show that the spread of different fossilised species around the world was directly related to ancient geological and geographical events. Dobzhansky also argued that the similarity of Peking Man and Java Man implied a greater simplicity in man’s descent, suggesting there had been fewer, rather than a greater number of, ancestors. He believed it was highly unlikely that more than one hominid form occupied the earth at a time, as compared with the prewar view that there may have been several.53 Simpson, Mayr’s colleague at the American Museum of Natural History, looked at the pace of evolutionary change and the rates of mutation. He was able to confirm that the known rates of mutation in genes produced sufficient variation sufficiently often to account for the diversity we see on earth. Classical Darwinism was thus reinforced, and all the lingering theories of saltation, Lamarckianism, and orthogenesis were killed off. Such theories were finally laid to rest (in the West anyway) at a symposium at Princeton in 1947. After this, biologists with an interest in evolution usually referred to themselves as ‘neo-Darwinists.’

  What Is Life? published in 1944 by Erwin Schrödinger, was not part of the evolutionary synthesis, but it played an equally important part in pushing biology forward. Schrödinger, born in Vienna in 1887, had worked as a physicist at the university there after graduating, then in Zurich, Jena, and Breslau before succeeding Max Planck as professor of theoretical physics in Berlin. He had been awarded the 1933 Nobel Prize for his part (along with Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac) in the quantum mechanics revolution considered in chapter 15, ‘The Golden Age of Physics.’ In the same year that he had won the Nobel, Schrödinger had left Germany in disgust at the Nazi regime. He had been elected a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and taught in Belgium, but in October 1939 he moved on to Dublin, since in Britain he would have been forced to contend with his ‘enemy alien’ status.

  An added attraction of Dublin was its brand-new Institute for Advanced Studies, modelled on the IAS at Princeton and the brainchild of Eamon de Valera (‘Dev’), the Irish taoiseach, or prime minister. Schrödinger agreed to give the statutory public lectures for 1943 and took as his theme an attempted marriage between physics and biology, especially as it related to the most fundamental aspects of life itself and heredity. The lectures were described as ‘semi-popular,’ but in fact they were by no means easy for a general audience, containing a certain amount of mathematics and physics. Despite this, the lectures were so well attended that all three, originally given on Fridays in February, had to be repeated on Mondays.54 Even Time magazine reported the excitement in Dublin.

  In the lectures, Schrödinger attempted two things. He considered how a physicist might define life. The answer he gave was that a life system was one that took order from order, ‘drinking orderliness from a suitable environment.’55 Such a procedure, he said, could not be accommodated by the second law of thermodynamics, with its implications for entropy, and so he forecas
t that although life processes would eventually be explicable by physics, they would be new laws of physics, unknown at that time. Perhaps more interesting, and certainly more influential, was his other argument. This was to look at the hereditary structure, the chromosome, from the point of view of the physicist. It was in this regard that Schrödinger’s lectures (and later his book) could be said to be semipopular. In 1943 most biologists were unaware of both quantum physics and the latest development on the chemical bond. (Schrödinger had been in Zurich when Fritz London and Walter Heider discovered the bond; no reference is made in What Is Life? to Linus Pauling.) Schrödinger showed that, from the physics already known, the gene must be ‘an aperiodic crystal,’ that is, ‘a regular array of repeating units in which the individual units are not all the same.’56 In other words, it was a structure half-familiar already to science. He explained that the behaviour of individual atoms could be known only statistically; therefore, for genes to act with the very great precision and stability that they did, they must be a minimum size, with a minimum number of atoms. Again using the latest physics, he also showed that the dimensions of individual genes along the chromosome could therefore be calculated (the figure he gave was 300 A, or Angstrom units), and from that both the number of atoms in each gene and the amount of energy needed to create mutations could be worked out. The rate of mutation, he said, corresponded well with these calculations, as did the discrete character of mutations themselves, which recalled the nature of quantum physics, where intermediate energy levels do not exist.

  All this was new for most biologists in 1943, but Schrödinger went further, to infer that the gene must consist of a long, highly stable molecule that contains a code. He compared this code to the Morse code, in the sense that even a small number of basic units would provide great diversity.57 Schrödinger was thus the first person to use the term code, and it was this, and the fact that physics had something to say about biology, that attracted the attention of biologists and made his lectures and subsequent book so influential.58 On the basis of his reasoning, Schrödinger concluded that the gene must be ‘a large protein molecule, in which every atom, every radical, every heterocyclic ring, plays an individual role.’59 The chromosome, he said, is a message written in code. Ironically, just as Schrödinger’s basic contribution was the application of the new physics to biology, so he himself was unaware that, at the very time his lectures were delivered, Oswald Thomas Avery, across the Atlantic at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, was discovering that ‘the transforming principle’ at the heart of the gene was not a protein but deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.60

  When he came to convert his lectures into a book, Schrödinger added an epilogue. Even as a young man, he had been interested in Vedanta, the Hindu doctrine, and in the epilogue he considered the question – central to Hindu thought – that the personal self is identical with the ‘all-comprehending universal self.’ He admitted that this was both ‘ludicrous and blasphemous’ in Christian thought but still believed the idea was worth advancing. This was enough to cause the Catholic Dublin publishing house that was considering releasing the lectures in print to turn its back on Schrödinger, even though the text had already been set in type. The title was released instead by Cambridge University Press a year later, in 1944.

  Despite the epilogue, the book proved very influential; it is probably the most important work of biology written by a physicist. Timing also had something to do with the book’s influence: not a few physicists were turned off their own subject by the development of the atomic bomb. At any rate, among those who read What Is Life? and were excited by its arguments were Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins. What they did with Schrödinger’s ideas is considered in a later chapter.

  Intellectually speaking, the most significant consequence of World War II was that science came of age. The power of physics, chemistry, and the other disciplines had been appreciated before, of course. But radar, Colossus, and the atomic bomb, not to mention a host of lesser discoveries – like operational research, new methods of psychological assessment, magnetic tape, and the first helicopters – directly affected the outcome of the war, much more so than the scientific innovations (such as the IQ test) in World War I. Science was itself now a – or perhaps the — colossus in affairs. Partly as a result of that, whereas the earlier war had been followed by an era of pessimism, World War II, despite the enormous shadow of the atomic bomb, was followed by the opposite mood, an optimistic belief that science could be harnessed for the benefit of all. In time this gave rise to the idea of The Great Society.

  21

  NO WAY BACK

  It was perhaps only natural that a war in which very different regimes were pitched against one another should bring about a reassessment of the way men govern themselves. Alongside the scientists and generals and code breakers trying to outwit the enemy, others devoted their energies to the no less fundamental and only marginally less urgent matter of the rival merits of fascism, communism, capitalism, liberalism, socialism, and democracy. This brought about one of the more unusual coincidences of the century, when a quartet of books was published during the war by exiles from that old dual monarchy, Austria and Hungary, looking forward to the type of society man should aim for after hostilities ceased. Whatever their other differences, these books had one thing in common to recommend them: thanks to the wartime paper rationing, they were all mercifully short.

  The first of these, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, by Joseph Schumpeter, appeared in 1942, but for reasons that will become apparent, it suits us to consider first Karl Mannheim’s Diagnosis of Our Time, which appeared a year later.1 Mannheim was a member of the Sunday Circle who had gathered around George Lukács in Budapest during World War I, and included Arnold Hauser and Béla Bartók. Mannheim had left Hungary in 1919, studied at Heidelberg, and attended Martin Heidegger’s lectures at Marburg. He was professor of sociology at Frankfurt from 1929 to 1933, a close colleague of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and the others, but after Hitler took power, he moved to London, teaching at the LSE and the Institute of Education. He also became editor of the International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction, a large series of books published by George Routledge and whose authors included Harold Lasswell, professor of political science at Chicago, E. F. Schumacher, Raymond Firth, Erich Fromm, and Edward Shils.

  Mannheim took a ‘planned society’ completely for granted. For him the old capitalism, which had produced the stock market crash and the depression, was dead. ‘All of us know by now that from this war there is no way back to a laissez-faire order of society, that war as such is the maker of a silent revolution by preparing the road to a new type of planned order.’2 At the same time he was equally disillusioned with Stalinism and fascism. Instead, according to him, the new society after the war, what he called the Great Society, could be achieved only by a form of planning that did not destroy freedom, as had happened in the totalitarian countries, but which took account of the latest developments in psychology and sociology, in particular psychoanalysis. Mannheim believed that society was ill – hence ‘Diagnosis’ in his title. For him the Great Society was one where individual freedoms were maintained, but informed by an awareness of how societies operated and how modern, complex, technological societies differed from peasant, agricultural communities. He therefore concentrated on two aspects of contemporary society: youth and education, on the one hand, and religion on the other. Whereas the Hitler Youth had become a force of conservatism, Mannheim believed youth was naturally progressive if educated properly.3 He thought pupils should grow up with an awareness of the sociological variations in society, and the causes of them, and that they should also be made aware of psychology, the genesis of neurosis, how this affects society, and what role it might play in the alleviation of social problems. He concentrated the last half of his book on religion because he saw that at bottom the crisis facing the Western democracies was a crisis of values, that the
old class order was breaking down but was yet to be replaced by anything else systematic or productive. While he saw the church as part of the problem, he believed that religion was still, with education, the best way to instil values, but that organised religion had to be modernised – again, with theology being reinforced by sociology and psychology. Mannheim was thus for planning, in economics, education, and religion, but by this he did not imply coercion or central control. He simply thought that postwar society would be much more informed about itself than prewar society.4 He did acknowledge that socialism had a tendency to centralise power and degenerate into mere control mechanisms, but he was a great Anglophile who thought that Britain’s ‘unphilosophical and practically-minded citizens’ would see off would-be dictators.

  Joseph Schumpeter had little time for sociology or psychology. For him, insofar as they existed at all, they were subordinate to economics. In his wartime book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, he sought to change thinking about economics no less than John Maynard Keynes had done.5 Schumpeter was firmly opposed to Keynes, and to Marx as well, and it is not hard to see why. Born in Austria in 1883, the same year as Keynes, he was educated at the Theresianum, an exclusive school reserved for the sons of the aristocracy.6 Schumpeter was there by virtue of the fact that his mother had remarried a general after his father, an undistinguished man, had died. As a result of his ‘elevation,’ Schumpeter was always rather self-consciously aristocratic; he would appear at university meetings in riding habit and inform anyone who was listening that he had three ambitions in life – to be a great lover, a great horseman, and a great economist. After university in Vienna (during its glorious period, covered earlier in this book), he became economic adviser to a princess in Egypt, returning to a professorship in Austria after he had published his first book. After World War I he was invited to become finance minister in the newly formed centre-socialist government, and though he worked out a plan to stabilise the currency, he soon resigned and became president of a private bank. In the debacle after Versailles the bank faded. Eventually, Schumpeter made his way to Harvard, ‘where his manner and his cloak quickly made him into a campus figure.’7 All his life he believed in elites, ‘an aristocracy of talent.’