The Great Fossil Enigma (55 page)

Not long after this meeting, I returned some borrowed papers. Dick Aldridge looked at me with a wry smile on his face. “This will be good for your book,” he said. He showed me a short paragraph in
Ordovician News
that reported that three Australian protagonists – Anne Kemp, Susan Turner, and Carole Burrow – had “initiated a polemic paper on the relationships of conodonts with vertebrates, to develop the idea that conodonts are
NOT
vertebrates. This is agreed in majority by the early vert experts, and perhaps also by many (if not the majority of) conodont experts. This paper will be co-authored by a group of people including Turner, S., Burrow, A., Hanke, G. F., Männik, P., Nowlan, G. S., Reif, W.-E., Rexroad, C. B., Trotter, J., Viira, V. & Young, G. C. (provisional list).”
³⁸
Sometime later, he sent me the abstract of a paper by Alain Blieck, Susan Turner, Carole Burrow, Hans-Peter Schultze, Wolf-Ernst Reif, Carl B. Rexroad, and Godfrey Nowlan's paper explaining “why conodonts are not vertebrates.” It stated, “Excessive self-citation, mis- and over-interpretation by the ‘British School' in association with a blanket of publication and communication have wrongly established an acceptance by the scientific community in journals, textbooks, websites and popular articles that conodonts are vertebrates.”
³⁹
It was a manifesto for political change rather than a scientific argument. The list of signatories included a cross section of the conodont community, many of whom had never engaged in debating the animal's biology. Others had been longtime objectors and had proposed a number of alternative solutions to the enigma. They now formed a confederation that was the equal of the British school. The controversy of the animal was once again alive, and had Christian Pander somehow returned to Earth, he might well have laughed at the irony of it all. For more than 150 years there had been so much scientific effort – and so much dreaming, imagining, and arguing – and yet here we were back at the beginning, or so it seemed to some. As had been the case so many times before, two groups faced off against each other. One, possessing the evidence of real things, assumed Pander's imaginative self-assurance. The other, by contrast, felt it possessed the truth of the known world. It now adopted Owen's uncompromising stare.

In keeping with its enigmatic qualities, the conodont animal truly was as slippery as an eel. At the slightest provocation it seemed to retreat into a Kafkaesque world of disorientation and uncertainty. Aldridge's smile said a lot. He had delighted in the science but also in the debate and controversy. The animal had been an event. It had been fun. And, most important, it had lost none of its enigmatic charm. That too appealed to Aldridge. Was it possible that El Dorado was not here but somewhere in the distance? Some seemed to think so. Perhaps it is still possible to dream of solving the riddle of the conodont, to imagine that somewhere, in “some layer of sub aquatic volcanic ash,” one can find El Dorado.

 

THIS BOOK TELLS THE STORY OF A SCIENTIFIC JOURNEY OF TWISTS
and turns through assertions and denials, past alien monsters and incoming asteroids, through a world of unexpected discoveries and real utility, which ultimately arrives at an animal that, rather surprisingly, seems to say something about our own ancestry. In the course of all this traveling, countless animals formed in scientific minds only to dissolve, replaced by new apparitions. The fossils themselves were so small, that seeing them – really seeing them – was no easy matter. Indeed, the millions of these things present in collections around the world today might, if poured like so many grains of sand, fit into a few shoe boxes. We could be forgiven, then, for not knowing the conodont. But my aim in writing this book has not simply been to record a famous episode in the folk history of a science. Being so tiny and evocative, these fossils possessed a chameleon aspect. El Dorado–like, they pulled their victims into mirror-filled rooms, ensnaring their thoughts with mirages and illusions. Vanishingly small and impossibly ambiguous, they occupied that borderline between material and immaterial, never wholly one or the other. If one was not careful, it was possible to see in them what one wanted to see. If that was the case, then what they saw was no more than a thought, an imagined thing conjured into existence. If what the conodont workers thought they saw was then transcribed onto paper, one has, in these representations of the fossil, a tiny lens on the minds of those who found themselves inextricably entangled with these enigmatic material things. It was with this thought that I began this book, and consequently my focus has been on fossils of the mind rather than their physical counterparts, for it was only in the scientific mind that these objects acquired their magical properties.

So I positioned myself, like an anthropologist, on the edge of this scientific community, never seeking to judge the actions or values of its members. Bronislaw Malinowski, the pioneering anthropologist, once observed, “Living in the village with no other business but to follow native life, one sees the customs, ceremonies and transactions over and over again, one has examples of their beliefs as they are actually lived through, and the full body and blood of actual native life fills out soon the skeleton of abstract constructions.” I am not an anthropologist, but that field nevertheless provided me with an ethical relationship to my subjects. I viewed my actors as existing within a particular cultural world, and my interest was in how within this world these objects were produced, explained, and shared; it just so happens that this world is shaped and regulated by the practices and beliefs of science. My desire was not for the ethnographer's close observation of a moment in the life of this scientific community but to view it through the long lens of cultural history in order to understand how and why thinking changed and how ideas were passed from one generation to the next. This approach, when married with anthropological distancing and an a priori belief in the constructive nature of cultural interactions, would, I felt, permit me to understand how the conodont workers came to know their objects and produce their various animals. It would also reveal how they managed to achieve such major intellectual progress while possessing such an incomplete understanding of the objects themselves.
¹

Using this approach, I chose to treat all knowledge within this community as contingent: different in every mind, often conflicted, and frequently infected with errors and mere orthodoxies. My attitude to these undetected errors and orthodoxies, however, was to treat them as situated truths or beliefs – operationally, this is what they were. At no point was I concerned with what the animal really was, only in what these workers
believed
it to be. My data, laid out chronologically and thematically in the chapters, reveals the faceted manner in which the object – and thus the animal (the two concepts being held in a confused terminology) – acquired its identity; the animal comes into being not simply as a result of individuals hunting it down, but through glimpses of its tracks and traces. Implicitly, and often as a subplot behind the main action, the animal acquires behavioral, geographical, and historical characteristics before it acquires material form.
²

My approach, then, has been to treat the fossils as objects of material culture, “that segment of man's physical environment which is purposely shaped by him according to a culturally dictated plan.”
³
Here fossils are anthropological objects before they are mobilized as evidence in science. Paleontology is, though rarely recognized as such, a discipline deeply engaged in material culture study. Most workers saw these fossils as literally and metaphorically beautiful; they certainly had a full appreciation of the objects' materiality, but the practices of science demanded that they separate the useful data from their poetic experiences. The conodont was (and perhaps still is) one of science's great enigmas because it exists, as Thomas Mann said so eloquently of atoms in the opening quotation, “mean and border-line between material and immaterial.” This is implicitly what this book explores – the dual reality of scientific objects: one material, the other immaterial; one real, the other of the mind.

TAKING KNOWLEDGE TO THE FOSSIL

To begin with, we should consider the knowledge the conodont workers took to the object, for these scientists always came with intentions. Art historian Ernst Gombrich observed, “the role which our own expectations play in the deciphering of the artists' cryptograms. We come to their works with our receivers already attuned.” Studies of perception in science, art, and society suggest that the conodont workers' knowledge incorporated what might be understood as factual and accurate truths
and
all manner of things they imagined or believed to be true or probably true. Gaps in their knowledge were filled – as in the everyday world – using vague memories, possibilities, probabilities, similarities, chance encounters, and so on. We might call this “working knowledge” or, as psychologists in Gombrich's day referred to it, “a mental set,” but in doing so we need to understand that this knowledge is by implication not something hard and fast. So effective is our iterative engagement with the material world that we can possess quite accurate ideas about the properties of things without knowing precisely their cause; imprecise and inaccurate beliefs can be incorporated as substitutes for truth without the world collapsing around us.
⁴

The conodont workers frequently found themselves confronted by objects that forced them to think beyond their previous experiences and thus reach into their stores of expertise, which incorporated things known and (perhaps unknowingly) things
thought
to be true and relevant. Truth was contingent upon belief. For the true or untrue to have effect or agency in their scientific lives, it had to be
believed
, or at least be believable. It must for them
appear
true. The semantics of whether they considered it absolutely, hypothetically, plausibly, or probably true are not important to us. Often these truths were implicit or tacit, and they were almost always undifferentiated.
⁵
Truths of all kinds were performed in much the same way. The conodont workers had a tacit understanding of the possibilities of discovery, the accessibility of reality, the centrality of disinterestedness, the distancing terminology of theories, hypotheses, paradigms, and models (though rarely used it), the superiority of measurement and exact science (particularly chemistry, physics, mathematics and some biology), the necessity of open and testable data, and so on. These things were performed implicitly. They were understood as moral and ethical intentions and expectations. They were the glue that held these workers in the cohesive cultural world they knew as science. But rarely did these beliefs transport them into an abstract intellectual space divorced from other realities and other ways of knowing. Repeatedly they demonstrated that they knew much more about conodonts than other scientists, but nevertheless their expertise was contingent on a whole raft of experiences and aptitudes. They had done science firsthand and so had determined the guiding framework, the rigor applied, the fudging necessary, the things ignored, the treatment of failure, and the impact of external pressures. They knew at least some of the weaknesses and imperfections in their knowledge, but they could not know all of them.

To these banks of hard-won knowledge they also were willing to admit other kinds of “knowledge” communicated by esteemed, innovative, or charismatic colleagues, perhaps in short conference presentations. They, of course, judged the truth of such presentations against their own scientific standards and found support and challenges within them.

A third component in this knowledge making were ideas imported from the past and from other fields, whether through their education, personal research, things read, seen, or heard, or, more broadly, from lived experience. Much of this was made relevant through the selective filter of present need; this imported knowledge was often, as a result, supportive knowledge.

So what each conodont worker knew, and took to the object, was of mixed composition. And never was the knowledge they deployed in this way corralled into a discrete part of the mind away from cars, shops, novels, pets, and babies.
⁶
Repeatedly, workers showed the capacity to bring into their reckoning all manner of external influences, though only some of these were articulated in the papers themselves. Being an object-based interpretive science, which is reliant upon connoisseurship skills, paleontology has come to implicitly value this intellectual eclecticism.
⁷

Each individual, then, possessed a constellation of knowledge about the fossil that had been derived from diverse sources.
⁸
At its core was firsthand knowledge, which defined each individual's territory and scientific identity. It was from the security of this heartland of deep experience that individual conodont workers felt most able to develop and defend new ideas about these fossils, as it permitted them to both evaluate and avoid risks, and maneuver around difficulties. This core experience – often nebulous, undigested, and unarticulated – also held within it latent knowledge that had the potential to be configured and used as called upon when problems presented themselves. Paleontological combatants, such as Stephen Jay Gould, knew only too well that great advantage could be gained in an argument if one could drag opponents out of this comfort zone and into an alien territory where they would feel at sea. Gould calculated that he possessed greater knowledge in these other fields, which often drew upon episodes in science, science history, and the classical arts, in which opponents would be too embarrassed to show their ignorance. One way of overcoming these difficulties, however – particularly for experienced conodont workers forced to migrate into new intellectual territories as their research developed – was to seek collaborations with other specialists and/or undergo a degree of self-education.

The variable, eclectic, and contingent manner in which knowledge was acquired and then applied within the conodont research community made individualism a core resource. Among the conodont workers it appears that only Lennart Jeppsson came under the spell of Björn Kurtén, the cave geologist, and only Maurits Lindström held conversations with algal biologist Adolf von Stosch. As a result they could bring unique perspectives into a debate. A quick survey of the thoughts of senior conodont workers on the nature of the animal, conducted in 2007, for example, revealed a surprising array of thinking, despite recent breakthrough discoveries. The imagined animal present in these minds possessed no singularity of form, even if it seemed to coalesce around a number of discrete possibilities. Each worker based part of his or her understanding on the same animal specimens, though most of them had no firsthand experience of the fossils themselves. Each individual viewed this evidence through the filter of his or her own experiences. Far from being problematic, these varied beliefs and performances gave conodont research an intellectual richness, suppleness, and adaptability. The lack of a singularity of view – of a narrowly conceived paradigm for the animal – meant that the animal's elusive identity remained unimportant. It could be worked around or held constantly in negotiation. And anyway, resolving its identity was never the conodont workers' central occupation.

The other implication of this eclecticism was the frequent appearance of what conodont workers referred to as “luck.” Few stopped to consider that a socially connected, opportunistic, and intellectually focused and eclectic culture might have little need for mere chance.
⁹
This feeling, however, demonstrates that members of this community felt that surprising progress was being made; in other words, this socially negotiated, culturally conforming, yet freely intellectualizing community was effective.

These aspects of science culture, frequently discussed by historians and philosophers of science, empowered individuals to mobilize objects as evidence. The history of the conodont animal, however, reveals a huge number of such mobilizations: Countless kinds of animal and plant were put forward as the owners of Pander's mysterious tiny teeth. In a rigorous scientific field, populated with talented individuals, how could this happen? Surely the fossils themselves – the material evidence of the thing – would prevent this?