The Flamingo’s Smile (10 page)

Nature, in some respects, comes to us as continua, not as discrete objects with clear boundaries. One of nature’s many continua extends from colonies at one end to organisms at the other. Even the basic terms—organism and colony—have no precise and unambiguous definitions. We may, however, use the two criteria of our vernacular as a guide. We tend to call a biological object an organism if it maintains no permanent physical connection with others and if its parts are so well integrated that they work only in coordination and for the proper function of the whole.

Most creatures lie near one or the other end of this continuum, and we have no trouble defining them as organisms or colonies. People are organisms—even though all multicellular creatures probably arose as colonies about a billion years ago. This origin is so distant, and so much has happened since, that we detect no signs of coloniality in our current operation. Thus, we are organisms by any reasonable use of language. Reef-building corals are colonies because each polyp is a complete creature, fully functional in its own right, though attached to its fellows.

But since nature has built a continuum from colony to organism, we must encounter ambiguity at the center. Some cases will be impossible to call—as a property of nature, not an imperfection of knowledge. Consider a progression from evident organisms toward the undefinable center. Human societies are made of organisms; each person is genetically distinct and spatially separate. What about ants? We still opt for organisms even though ants may so submerge their individuality in tightly knit societies that some naturalists refer to an ant colony as a superorganism.

What about aphids? We begin to lose clarity. All members of an aphid clone are female; each founding mother grows her young within her own body, without benefit of fertilization. All her offspring are genetically identical. Is the clone an aggregation of separate individuals or one gigantic evolutionary body with many thousand separate parts, all identical? (One prominent evolutionary biologist has recently urged this second view.)

What about a stand of bamboo? Harder still. All stems are members of a clone; they are genetically identical, and attached to a common underground runner. Is each plant above ground a person or a part? We still usually opt for persons (though many biologists demur) because each plant looks much the same and has a full set of structures.
^*

Finally, then, what about siphonophores? We are now squarely in the middle of a continuum, and we cannot provide a clear answer. The parts of siphonophores are persons by history, organs by current function, and a bit of both by growth. Our criteria of separation and independent operation have failed, but we cannot deny a history that still stares us in the face.

Siphonophores do not convey the message—a favorite theme of unthinking romanticism—that nature is but one gigantic whole, all its parts intimately connected and interacting in some higher, ineffable harmony. Nature revels in boundaries and distinctions; we inhabit a universe of structure. But since our universe of structure has evolved historically, it must present us with fuzzy boundaries, where one kind of thing grades into another. Objects at these boundaries will continue to confuse and frustrate us so long as we follow old habits of thought and insist that all parts of nature be pigeonholed unambiguously to assuage our poor and overburdened intellects.

The siphonophore paradox does have an answer of sorts, and a profound one at that. The answer is that we asked the wrong question—a question that has no meaning because its assumptions violate the ways of nature. Are siphonophores organisms or colonies? Both and neither; they lie in the middle of a continuum where one grades into the other.

The siphonophore paradox is illuminating, not discouraging. It cannot be resolved, but when we understand why, we grasp a great truth about nature’s structure. Siphonophores deliver the same message as that old one about the lady who visits her butcher one Friday morning, seeking a large chicken for the Sabbath meal. The butcher looks in his bin and finds to his chagrin that he has but one scrawny animal left. He takes it out with great fanfare and puts it on the scale. Two pounds. “Not big enough,” the lady says. He puts it back in the bin, pretends to rummage amidst a large pile of nonexistent alternatives, finally pulls out the same chicken, puts it on the scale, and puts his thumb on the scale. Three pounds. “Fine,” says the lady. “I’ll take them both.”
^*
Things that seem separate are often the different sides of a unity.

THE AMPLE FIG LEAF
served our artistic forefathers well as a botanical shield against indecent exposure for Adam and Eve, our naked parents in the primeval bliss and innocence of Eden. Yet, in many ancient paintings, foliage hides more than Adam’s genitalia; a wandering vine covers his navel as well. If modesty enjoined the genital shroud, a very different motive—mystery—placed a plant over his belly. In a theological debate more portentous than the old argument about angels on pinpoints, many earnest people of faith had wondered whether Adam had a navel.

He was, after all, not born of a woman and required no remnant of his nonexistent umbilical cord. Yet, in creating a prototype, would not God make his first man like all the rest to follow? Would God, in other words, not create with the appearance of preexistence? In the absence of definite guidance to resolve this vexatious issue, and not wishing to incur anyone’s wrath, many painters literally hedged and covered Adam’s belly.

A few centuries later, as the nascent science of geology gathered evidence for the earth’s enormous antiquity, some advocates of biblical literalism revived this old argument for our entire planet. The strata and their entombed fossils surely seem to represent a sequential record of countless years, but wouldn’t God create his earth with the appearance of preexistence? Why should we not believe that he created strata and fossils to give modern life a harmonious order by granting it a sensible (if illusory) past? As God provided Adam with a navel to stress continuity with future men, so too did he endow a pristine world with the appearance of an ordered history. Thus, the earth might be but a few thousand years old, as Genesis literally affirmed, and still record an apparent tale of untold eons.

This argument, so often cited as a premier example of reason at its most perfectly and preciously ridiculous, was most seriously and comprehensively set forth by the British naturalist Philip Henry Gosse in 1857. Gosse paid proper homage to historical context in choosing a title for his volume. He named it
Omphalos
(Greek for navel), in Adam’s honor, and added as a subtitle:
An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot
.

Since
Omphalos
is such spectacular nonsense, readers may rightly ask why I choose to discuss it at all. I do so, first of all, because its author was such a serious and fascinating man, not a hopeless crank or malcontent. Any honest passion merits our attention, if only for the oldest of stated reasons—Terence’s celebrated
Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto
(I am human, and am therefore indifferent to nothing done by humans).

Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888) was the David Attenborough of his day, Britain’s finest popular narrator of nature’s fascination. He wrote a dozen books on plants and animals, lectured widely to popular audiences, and published several technical papers on marine invertebrates. He was also, in an age given to strong religious feeling as a mode for expressing human passions denied vent elsewhere, an extreme and committed fundamentalist of the Plymouth Brethren sect. Although his
History of the British Sea-Anemones
and other assorted ramblings in natural history are no longer read, Gosse retains some notoriety as the elder figure in that classical work of late Victorian self-analysis and personal exposé, his son Edmund’s wonderful account of a young boy’s struggle against a crushing religious extremism imposed by a caring and beloved parent—
Father and Son
.

My second reason for considering
Omphalos
invokes the same theme surrounding so many of these essays about nature’s small oddities: Exceptions do prove rules (prove, that is, in the sense of probe or test, not affirm). If you want to understand what ordinary folks do, one thoughtful deviant will teach you more than ten thousand solid citizens. When we grasp why
Omphalos
is so unacceptable (and not, by the way, for the reason usually cited), we will understand better how science and useful logic proceed. In any case, as an exercise in the anthropology of knowledge,
Omphalos
has no parallel—for its surpassing strangeness arose in the mind of a stolid Englishman, whose general character and cultural setting we can grasp as akin to our own, while the exotic systems of alien cultures are terra incognita both for their content and their context.

To understand
Omphalos
, we must begin with a paradox. The argument that strata and fossils were created all at once with the earth, and only present an illusion of elapsed time, might be easier to appreciate if its author had been an urban armchair theologian with no feeling or affection for nature’s works. But how could a keen naturalist, who had spent days, nay months, on geological excursions, and who had studied fossils hour after hour, learning their distinctions and memorizing their names, possibly be content with the prospect that these objects of his devoted attention had never existed—were, indeed, a kind of grand joke perpetrated upon us by the Lord of All?

Philip Henry Gosse was the finest descriptive naturalist of his day. His son wrote: “As a collector of facts and marshaller of observations, he had not a rival in that age.” The problem lies with the usual caricature of
Omphalos
as an argument that God, in fashioning the earth, had consciously and elaborately lied either to test our faith or simply to indulge in some inscrutable fit of arcane humor. Gosse, so fiercely committed both to his fossils and his God, advanced an opposing interpretation that commanded us to study geology with diligence and to respect all its facts even though they had no existence in real time. When we understand why a dedicated empiricist could embrace the argument of
Omphalos
(“creation with the appearance of preexistence”), only then can we understand its deeper fallacies.

Gosse began his argument with a central, but dubious, premise: All natural processes, he declared, move endlessly round in a circle: egg to chicken to egg, oak to acorn to oak.

When God creates, and Gosse entertained not the slightest doubt that all species arose by divine fiat with no subsequent evolution, he must break (or “erupt,” as Gosse wrote) somewhere into this ideal circle. Wherever God enters the circle (or “places his wafer of creation,” as Gosse stated in metaphor), his initial product must bear traces of previous stages in the circle, even if these stages had no existence in real time. If God chooses to create humans as adults, their hair and nails (not to mention their navels) testify to previous growth that never occurred. Even if he decides to create us as a simple fertilized ovum, this initial form implies a phantom mother’s womb and two nonexistent parents to pass along the fruit of inheritance.

Gosse then invented a terminology to contrast the two parts of a circle before and after an act of creation. He labeled as “prochronic,” or occurring outside of time, those appearances of preexistence actually fashioned by God at the moment of creation but seeming to mark earlier stages in the circle of life. Subsequent events occurring after creation, and unfolding in conventional time, he called “diachronic.” Adam’s navel was prochronic, the 930 years of his earthly life diachronic.

Gosse devoted more than 300 pages, some 90 percent of his text, to a simple list of examples for the following small part of his complete argument—if species arise by sudden creation at any point in their life cycle, their initial form must present illusory (prochronic) appearances of preexistence. Let me choose just one among his numerous illustrations, both to characterize his style of argument and to present his gloriously purple prose. If God created vertebrates as adults, Gosse claimed, their teeth imply a prochronic past in patterns of wear and replacement.

Gosse leads us on an imaginary tour of life just an hour after its creation in the wilderness. He pauses at the seashore and scans the distant waves:

Yet the teeth grow in spirals, one behind the next, each waiting to take its turn as those in current use wear down and drop out:

Should we try to argue that teeth in current use are the first members of their spiral, implying no predecessors after all, Gosse replies that their state of wear indicates a prochronic past. Should we propose that these initial teeth might be unmarred in a newly created shark, Gosse moves on to another example.

All modern adult hippos possess strongly worn and beveled canines and incisors, a clear sign of active use throughout a long life. May we not, however, as for our shark, argue that a newly created hippo might have sharp and pristine front teeth? Gosse argues correctly that no hippo could work properly with teeth in such a state. A created adult hippo must contain worn teeth as witnesses of a prochronic past:

Gosse’s (1857) figure of a hippo’s skull showing the beveled tooth edges (a product of time and wear) necessary for function.

This could go on forever (it nearly does in the book), but just one more dental example. Gosse, continuing upward on the topographic trajectory of his imaginary journey, reaches an inland wood and meets
Babirussa
, the famous Asian pig with upper canines growing out and arching back, almost piercing the skull: