Descartes' Bones (25 page)

Cuvier died on May 13 of that year, and three days later, also following his wishes, Flourens oversaw an event that would be remarkable if carried out today but was somewhat less so then. A team of Cuvier's colleagues from the academy conducted an autopsy of his body. It was fashionable in the early nineteenth century for scientists to nominate friends to do postmortem examinations of them in the hope that even after death they would continue to advance scientific knowledge—a trend that reached its climax in 1875 with the founding in Paris of a “Society of Mutual Autopsy.” Cuvier's friends duly sliced open his chest and belly and studied the vital organs there. Then they moved to the feature attraction. As the newspaper
Journal des débats
reported on its front page on May 16, “At the opening of the skull, all the assistants were struck by the development of the cerebral mass and above all by the truly prodigious number of convolutions present on the surface of this enormous brain.”

Indeed, the brain of Cuvier—which during his life had played such a prominent part in the development of science, not to mention in assessing the authenticity of the skull of Descartes—would soon become quite literally involved in the next debate on brain science. The man who more or less invented the field of comparative anatomy was about to have his own anatomy put up for comparison.

I
N THE AUTUMN OF
1857, while Charles Darwin was in London working feverishly on the manuscript of
On the
Origin of Species,
a man named Pierre-Paul Broca visited a farm in the western French city of Angoulême and touched off what would be a smaller scientific storm than Darwin's but one that prompted the same clash of worldviews. He had come to see a farmer called Roux—or rather to see his animals. Roux had been crossbreeding hares and rabbits for some time and selling them to local butchers. Getting the two species to mate had been tricky—male hares turned out to be sensitive creatures that engaged in lengthy foreplay and this confused the female rabbits, which were used to more brusquely straightforward treatment—but once the farmer had figured out a way to ease the romantic differences he had had good results and a meat that pleased local sensibilities.

Broca had heard about these creatures and came to see for himself. The farmer had produced six or seven generations; Broca was intrigued, and undertook a scientific study. The animals had some features of the rabbit, some of the hare, some entirely their own. They reproduced. Broca wrote papers in which he pressed an argument: this was clearly a new species, which meant that scientists had to admit that “the classical doctrine of the permanence of species is entirely mistaken.” Broca presented his conclusion at the Biology Society in Paris, where it was met with awkward's book—and the writings of Alfred Russel Wallace, which would appear at about the same time—would cause an upheaval for arguing that evolution, across millennia, had produced the myriad varieties of life on earth. Here Broca was not only calling for a similarly revolutionary change in beliefs, but insisting that a new species had come into being in a matter of months. Of course, farmers had been practicing animal husbandry, selectively breeding their livestock, for centuries, but Broca was stating in declarative scientific language that the classic doctrine—Cuvier's “fixity of the species”—was nonsense. It also didn't help that he was speaking frankly about sex and sexual behavior.

The savants who headed the Biology Society applied pressure for him to desist, whereupon Broca decided to found a society of his own. Together with several other intellectuals, he had been working toward a new approach to science, or rather a new application of it, which would bring various disciplines together to study humans and human society. The idea was to treat the human being as dispassionately as any other animal species and try to understand it individually, in groups, and in its environment. Broca himself had studied medicine, but his preternatural energy and curiosity drove him in a variety of directions almost simultaneously, so that he became a surgeon, anatomist, brain researcher, cancer investigator, proponent of evolutionary theory, student of fossil records and spinal cord injuries, pioneer of blood transfusion techniques, and theoretician on the mechanisms of speech. His initiative following the rabbit-hare episode was to launch a new association—and with it a new field—that would bring together as many of these diverse arenas as possible.
Anthropology
was the term that had come into being for this multifaceted approach to humankind.

Broca's Anthropology Society ran into immediate problems. Broca needed government approval to found a scientific society, and to those in power this proposed new field, which would treat people as animals, seemed shockingly demeaning. Through indefatigability and by working the angles in various bureaucratic departments, Broca eventually got wary approval for his Anthropology Society to meet, on condition that a policeman sit in on the sessions to make sure they were not subversive. (For two years a policeman slumbered through the arcane discussions, then quietly stopped coming to the meetings.) Having gotten the sanction, he then proceeded to oversee gatherings in which a sweepingly diverse range of subjects were focused—largely by his own will—into coherence. The business with the rabbits and the hares was hardly tangential. Broca was serious about looking at human interactions fully and dispassionately, down to the level of mating and reproduction. This approach continued to scandalize some of his fellow scientists, but unlike, say, Cuvier or Flourens, Broca was politically and temperamentally a defier of the status quo, a hater of absolutes and establishments. For standing up against religion and superstition, as well as for trailblazing new fields of inquiry, he would become a hero to later scientists.

At the same time, he would become a trailblazer in quite a different way, one with few heroic associations. For in involving itself so intimately with human groups and their differences, the new field of anthropology became, almost at once, a kind of scientific institutionalization of the principles of racism. Certainly much of the work that the new society covered seems very similar to what an anthropology course today might focus on. A meeting in 1861 began with a lively study of “a
pilou-pilou,
or festival mask of the New Caledonians,” whose carved shape incited great interest for being so unusual and yet resembling masks from ancient Greece. The same meeting featured a report by a member analyzing marriage to near relations in Ohio, where a law had recently been passed barring marriage by first cousins. The data, which the French anthropologists found to be “of high interest,” showed that the 873 known marriages between first cousins in that state had produced 3,900 offspring, 2,400 of whom “were afflicted with grave deformities or complete imbecility.” Custom and morality had long barred such unions; the Anthropology Society wished to explore the underlying genetic reasons for these prohibitions.

At the 1861 meeting, the society also received the skull of a New Caledonian tribesman, the skull of a native of the New Hebrides, a catalog comparing the skulls of different peoples, and a manuscript French translation of a book entitled
The Forms of the Head in the Various Races.
Given the focus of the nascent field, comparing cultural differences was a natural component of the work. But the comparisons weren't restricted to masks and they had a heavy weight attached to them. Discussion of origins and national and cultural identity reflected a desire to believe—to know—that one's people were somehow superior. Nineteenth-century science, in other words, was asked to confirm ancient self-image. In the case of France, the burning question was: Who were the original French people, and in what ways were they unique? Members of Broca's Anthropology Society held forth on the ancient Gauls and their relationship to Celtic peoples; they discussed Julius Caesar's
Conquest of Gaul
and teased out language clues in an effort to advance the argument of an originating race that gave France its distinctiveness. Along the way, the scientists developed any number of racial typographies featuring different breakdowns. One savant divided humankind into five racial categories: white, yellow, red, brown, and black. Another found fifteen flavors of humanity.

It's curious that, on the one hand, the field of anthropology was the clearest expression yet of a scientific commitment to objectivity, with its practitioners vowing to bring the dispassionate mode of inquiry that had become the hallmark of science deep inside the human being and the human community and, making fullest use of the Cartesian method, valiantly discarding traditions and ignoring the received wisdom of societies, nationalities, and social classes. On the other hand, the anthropologists became racists by definition as they threw themselves headlong into fraught questions regarding human types.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that these men stacked the deck against other races as they sought to delineate the superiority of white Europeans. The fact is they never even tried to set up a dummy “I wonder which race is superior?” question and then proceed to solve it. They weren't out to prove that whites were superior for the simple reason that they assumed it from the start. It was so obvious to them it didn't need proving. The proper use of science was in figuring out why this was so. Of course, racism was built into nearly every culture in the nineteenth century, and in partial defense of the field of anthropology in particular, it might be worth noting that in working through these beliefs—beginning to question the underlying superiority complex as an awareness of it slowly rose to the surface over the course of a century—the field helped to lead the way to the wholly new concept of racial equality.

Even more than on linguistic or historical clues, the nineteenth-century scientists relied on bodily characteristics to explore the question of how it was that their race was superior. Hair color, skin color, size and shape of teeth, nostril width, lip thickness, jawline, chest hair, breast size, penis length, sexual appetite—the level of detail on which they focused was graphic and encyclopedic.

Of all the parts of the body that came under scrutiny, the face and head were deemed foremost in importance. The so-called science of physiognomy, which was developed by an eighteenth-century Swiss poet named Johann Lavater and adapted by many eminent scientists of the nineteenth century, was built around the idea that features of the head and face of each human race correlate with intelligence and inclinations. The man who refined physiognomy and gave it scientific legitimacy was none other than Georges Cuvier. Some of Cuvier's investigations in comparative anatomy are impossible to read today without cringing. In
Lessons in Comparative Anatomy,
a textbook, he measured the facial angle—the angle from the forehead to the front of the teeth—in a variety of apes as well as in different racial categories of humans. A macaque had a facial angle of 45 degrees—a severe slope downward from the forehead to the lips. Monkeys were in the range of 60 degrees. An orangutan measured 67 degrees; this, for Cuvier, was meaningfully close to the angle of 70 degrees he found for the “Negro” and quite removed from the 80 degree angle in European skulls. The more extreme slope in the Negro and the orangutan Cuvier related to a flattened frontal bone and reduced size of the frontal lobe of the brain. A more severe facial angle, he went on to reason, meant a lesser intellect and a brain that was more driven by “animal” instincts. Add the facial angle to other comparative data and the full picture emerges: “The Negro race is confined to the south of the atlas,” Cuvier wrote in a crisp overview. “Its complexion is black, its hair frizzy, its cranium compressed, and its nose crushed; its prominent muzzle and its large lips obviously bring it closer to the apes: the tribes that compose it have always remained barbarous.”

Such data and conclusions became part of the foundation from which the science of anthropology began its investigation of the human animal. Another concept of comparative anatomy that featured prominently—and whose development came to a head, as it were, at the very moment that Broca founded his Anthropology Society—was cranial capacity. One component of Gall's work that had been accepted as relatively noncontroversial by the academy was the notion that the size of the brain (and thus the size of the skull) correlated with intelligence. That is to say, having a bigger brain meant that you were probably smarter.

While phrenology itself had been discredited by the French Academy of Sciences, it had continued to develop in the popular consciousness elsewhere. It had a lively run in England and the United States through much of the nineteenth century. In particular, it fit with American ideas of individualism and upward mobility. Gall's theory of localization of mental functions in the brain may have meant that some people were born with greater capacities for love or intelligence or wisdom than others, but everybody already knew that. What struck a nerve was that it seemed to show that social status didn't matter. Among parents, doctors, and educators in nineteenth-century America, phrenology thus evolved into a self-help program, whose tenets were that each person was endowed with certain strengths and weaknesses and that it was possible, through hard work, to improve.

At the same time, following Gall's formulation of his ideas in Vienna, phrenology had evolved in Germany along a parallel yet quite different social track. It became a force in the German wing of the culture war. Politically, Germany in the early nineteenth century was a confusing confederation of semifeudal states. In the 1840s, a movement to throw off the monarchical paraphernalia, embrace democracy, and unite into a federation caught fire across social classes. Phrenology actually became a plank in the political platform of a lawyer named Gustav von Struve, one of the leaders of the movement, and helped to foment a revolution in 1848. As in the United States, von Struve and others took from phrenology the notion that—the multitude of individual differences aside—human brains, and thus minds, were essentially all the same. All, therefore, were entitled to the same status and treatment.