I Have Landed (24 page)

But one hypothetical solution engenders other collateral problems that must then also be encompassed within a logic already severely stressed and stretched. If these pre-Adamites were good enough to become angels in our eyes after their resurrection, why did God exterminate them in the first place, while dooming all other, and presumably innocent, plants and animals to a common grave (with no subsequent resurrection for these lower unfortunates)? The instigating event must have been something truly awful to contemplate; what could have distressed God so deeply that global destruction represented his only reasonable option?

To complete her argument, Duncan resolves this last puzzle. A wayward group of pre-Adamites rebelled against God, and the entire creation had to suffer for their transgression. As for these miscreants, they remain among us as the fallen angels—Satan and his devil host. Moreover, in destroying the earth (and leaving signs for us to recognize this event as an ice age, as recently discovered by the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz), and then resurrecting the bad with the good, God gave two warnings to his subsequent Adamites that they too should fear the wrath to come if they transgressed and followed Satan:

We now understand that Duncan constructed her fascinating and groundbreaking chart for the full pageant of life through time (discussed in the introduction to this essay) not as a scientific innovation, but as a theological scenario for the earth's history, as constructed within the pre-Adamite tradition of textual analysis. The key white strip of Agassiz's ice-covered world may be validated by geological science, but this catastrophe represents, for Duncan, the agent of God's wrath after the satanic group of pre-Adamites fell from grace,
and “God's great plough” (Agassiz's own description of the glacial age, by the way, but for different purposes and intentions) swept the planet, destroying the work of the first creation, and preparing a furrow to welcome the new race of Adamites, our own puny selves, to a humbled planet.

What, ultimately, can we say for Isabelle Duncan's theory, beyond noting an entertainment value far in excess of most incorrect proposals about human prehistory? A scientist might be tempted simply to dismiss her view as a disproven conjecture: she invented an elaborate theory to explain why prehistoric artifacts, but not prehistoric bones, had been preserved in the geological record—and she was dead wrong because we have since found bones aplenty.

But if we dig a bit deeper and ask
why
she developed such a peculiar explanation (bizarre to a scientist, to be sure, but even a bit odd for most theologians of her time), then we need to consider the more general theme of restriction. We can then learn something important from Isabelle Duncan because her blazingly obvious restrictions may help us to analyze our own, more subtle, limitations—for we always view the natural world within a blinkered mental compass, and we usually don't know how to see beyond our presuppositions (the reason, of course, why many false views of indubitable past geniuses seem so strange to us today).

Duncan operated within the limited procedures of literary exegesis upon a document that she did not permit herself to view as potentially inaccurate. Such a conviction does not leave much maneuvering room for the broad range of hypotheses that we must allow ourselves to entertain if we wish to resolve truly difficult questions about the natural world. This perspective inevitably leads us to ask whether the more obvious limitation imposed upon Isabelle Duncan—the peripheral space granted to intellectual women in her time—also contributed to her overly narrow focus. Did she accept her limited lot, or did she long to rebel? In only one passage of her otherwise impersonal (however passionate) book does she lift the veil of her frustration and allow her readers a brief peek beneath. She needs to refute a potential objection to her claim that God resurrected the pre-Adamites as angels. These people must have included both males and females, but our literature only mentions male angels. So where did the female pre-Adamites go? Duncan answers that they also became angels, but invisible angels because our literary biases place them beyond notice, just as our social biases often relegate contemporary women and children to a similar fate:

In other words, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Or, as Hamlet said in the same scene that includes his sardonic commentary, “What a piece of work is man”:

I'm afraid that we must pay the price in scary thoughts if we wish to fracture the confines of our mental comfort.

I
N
1897,
THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF DETROIT CARRIED OUT
an extensive experiment with a new and supposedly ideal curriculum. In the first grade, children would read
The Song of Hiawatha
because, at this age, they recapitulated the “nomadic” and “savage” stages of their evolutionary past and would therefore appreciate such a like-minded hero. During the same years, Rudyard Kipling wrote poetry's greatest paean to imperialism, “The White Man's Burden.” Kipling admonished his countrymen to shoulder the arduous responsibility of serving these “new-caught, sullen people, half-devil and half-child.” Teddy Roosevelt, who knew the value of a good line, wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge that Kipling's effort “was very poor poetry but made good sense from the expansion point of view.”

These disparate incidents record the enormous influence upon popular culture of an evolutionary idea that ranks second only to
natural selection itself for impact beyond biology. This theory held, mellifluously and perhaps with a tad of obfuscation in terminology, that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” or that an organism, during the course of its embryonic growth, passes through a series of stages representing adult ancestors in their proper historical order. The gill slits of a human embryo record our distant past as a fish, while our later embryonic tail (subsequently resorbed) represents the reptilian stage of our ancestry.

Biology abandoned this idea some fifty years ago, for a variety of reasons chronicled in my book
Ontogeny and Phylogeny
(Harvard University Press, 1977), but not before the theory of recapitulation—to cite just three examples of its widespread practical influence—had served as the basis for an influential proposal that “born criminals” acted by necessity as the unfortunate result of a poor genetic shake as manifested by their retention of apish features successfully transcended in the ontogeny of normal people; buttressed a variety of racist claims by depicting adults in “primitive” cultures as analogs of Caucasian children in need of both discipline and domination; and structured the primary-school curricula of many cities by treating young children as equivalent to grown men and women of a simpler past.

The theory of recapitulation also played a profound, but almost completely unrecognized, role in the formulation of one of the half-dozen most influential movements of the twentieth century: Freudian psychoanalysis. Although the legend surrounding Freud tends to downplay the continuity of his ideas with preexisting theories, and to view psychoanalysis as an abrupt and entirely novel contribution to human thought, Freud trained as a biologist in the heyday of evolution's first discovery, and his theory sank several deep roots in the leading ideas of Darwin's world. (See Frank J. Sulloway's biography
Freud, Biologist of the Mind
[Basic Books, 1979], with its argument that nearly all creative geniuses become surrounded by a mythology of absolute originality.)

The “threefold parallelism” of classical recapitulation theory in biology equated the child of an advanced species both with an adult ancestor and with adults of any “primitive” lineages that still survived (the human embryo with gill slits, for example, represents both an actual ancestral fish that lived some 300 million years ago and all surviving fishes as well; similarly, in a racist extension, white children might be compared both with fossils of adult
Homo erectus
and with modern adult Africans). Freud added a fourth parallel: the neurotic adult who, in important respects, represents a normal child, an adult ancestor, or a normal modern adult from a primitive culture. This fourth term for adult pathologies did not originate with Freud, but arose within many theories of the time—as in Lombroso's notion of
I'uomo delinquente
(criminal
man), and in various interpretations of neonatal deformity or mental retardation as the retention of an embryonic stage once normal in adult ancestors.

Freud often expressed his convictions about recapitulation. He wrote in his
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
(1916), “Each individual somehow recapitulates in an abbreviated form the entire development of the human race.” In a note penned in 1938, he evoked a graphic image for his fourth term: “With neurotics it is as though we were in a prehistoric landscape—for instance in the Jurassic. The great saurians are still running around; the horsetails grow as high as palms.”

Moreover, these statements do not represent merely a passing fancy or a peripheral concern. Recapitulation occupied a central and pervasive place in Freud's intellectual development. Early in his career, before he formulated the theory of psychosexual stages (anal, oral, and genital), he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess, his chief friend and collaborator, that sexual repression of olfactory stimuli represented our phyletic transition to upright posture: “Upright carriage was adopted, the nose was raised from the ground, and at the same time a number of what had formerly been interesting sensations connected with the earth became repellent” (letter of 1897). Freud based his later theory of psychosexual stages explicitly upon recapitulation: the anal and oral stages of childhood sexuality represent our quadrupedal past, when senses of taste, touch, and smell predominated. When we evolved upright posture, vision became our primary sense and reoriented sexual stimuli to the genital stage. Freud wrote in 1905 that oral and anal stages “almost seem as though they were harking back to early animal forms of life.”

In his later career, Freud used recapitulation as the centerpiece for two major books. In
Totem and Taboo
(1913), subtitled
Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Life of Savages and Neurotics
, Freud inferred a complex phyletic past from the existence of the Oedipus complex in modern children and its persistence in adult neurotics, and from the operation, in primitive cultures, of incest taboos and totemism (identification of a clan with a sacred animal that must be protected, but may be eaten once a year in a great totemic feast). Freud argued that early human society must have been organized as a patriarchal horde, ruled by a dominant father who excluded his sons from sexual contact with women of the clan. In frustration, the sons killed their domineering father, but then, in their guilt, could not possess the women (incest taboo). They expiated their remorse by identifying their slain father with a totemic animal, but celebrated their triumph by reenactment during the annual totemic feast. Modern children relive this act of primal parricide in the Oedipus complex. Freud's last book,
Moses and Monotheism
(1939), reiterates the same theme in a particular context.
Moses, Freud argues, was an Egyptian who cast his lot with the Jews. Eventually his adopted people killed him and, in their overwhelming guilt, recast him as a prophet of a single, all-powerful God, thus also creating the ethical ideals that lie at the heart of Judeo-Christian civilization.

A new discovery, hailed as the most significant in many years by Freudian scholars, has now demonstrated an even more central role for recapitulation in Freud's theory than anyone had ever imagined or been willing to allow—although, again, almost every commentator has missed the connection because Freud's biological influences have been slighted by a taxonomy that locates him in another discipline, and because the eclipse of recapitulation has placed this formerly dominant theory outside the consciousness of most modern scholars. In 1915, in the shadow of war and as he began his sixtieth year, Freud labored with great enthusiasm on a book that would set forth the theoretical underpinnings of all his work—the “metapsychology,” as he called the project. He wrote twelve papers for his work, but later abandoned his plans for unknown reasons much discussed by scholars. Five of the twelve papers were eventually published (with
Mourning and Melancholia
as the best known), but the other seven were presumed lost or destroyed. In 1983, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis discovered a copy, in Freud's hand, of the twelfth and most general paper. The document had resided in a trunk, formerly the property of Freud's daughter Anna (who died in 1983), and otherwise filled with the papers of Freud's Hungarian collaborator Sándor Ferenczi. Harvard University Press published this document in 1987 under the titled
Phylogenetic Fantasy
(translated by Axel and Peter T. Hoffer and edited and explicated by Dr. Grubrich-Simitis).