The Great Fossil Enigma (56 page)

THE INTANGIBILITY OF FOSSILS

In 1988, Walt Sweet observed that workers possessed a large number of isolated tooth-like conodont fossils representing some four thousand species, together with five hundred assemblages and five conodont animals.
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He stated that these alone were the facts; “all the rest is really speculation or, if you will, interpretation.” Sweet believed that anything other than these few material facts was contestable, and although he referred to “species” – which he knew resulted from acts of interpretation – this was simply his concise way of saying “four thousand precisely known types of material object.” Lennart Jeppsson gave a nice illustration of this disconnection between material reality (specimens) and immaterial belief (species): “One specimen = one species; two specimens = two species; 100 specimens = one species.” His point here is that once a conodont worker had sufficient material, he or she became a connoisseur of species' variation and was then able to distinguish differences in an informed manner.

American paleontologist David Raup once admitted that “the road to good scholarship is paved with imagined patterns.” One of those imagined patterns, I suggest, is the fossil as it appears in science. Fossils preserve traces of former life and are composed of minerals that in most cases are not those that existed in the living animal or plant. Yet in common usage we simplify this understanding; we think of the fossil as a trace of life, disregarding the complex processes (geological and intellectual) by which it has come to be considered as such. There is, for example, an unarticulated and ambiguous boundary between the fossilized animal or plant and the materials of which it is composed or a part.
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This ambiguity is apparent in the work of Karl von Zittel and Josef Victor Rohon in the late nineteenth century. They reinterpreted structures long thought to record the anatomy of the animal as mere artifacts of fossilization. Things once considered reminiscent of life were made irrelevant; they were now just rock or mineral. This interpretive act should indicate to us that the fossils that existed within the minds of the conodont workers were different from those preserved in stone. Indeed, the fossil that participates in science is only ever a conceptual or immaterial one: a fossil imagined and believed and not the one that has been hewn, boiled, or dissolved out of the rock. To make use of the material fossil, science must interpret it and in doing so decide what characteristics define it, its material and taxonomic boundaries, its significances, and so on. It is this value-laden fossil – a conceptual fossil, a representation of the reality – that then enters the mind and the science and is partially captured in word and image. This notion has its origins more than two millennia ago, and it is not my intention to attempt to engage with general philosophy. I merely wish to explain the broad basis on which I have explored the practices of this particular group of scientists. A few sound bites might at least set the scene. Ian Parker, for example, noted, “We
must
separate the world from our knowledge of it. We live in an
Umwelt
, beyond which there are currently unimagined material possibilities. We must assume that the world is richer than we know.” Goethe remarked in 1823, “My thinking is not separate from objects; that the elements of the object, the perceptions of the object, flow into my thinking and are fully permeated by it.” Edmond Husserl wrote that “the objects that surround us function less ‘as they are' than ‘as they mean,' and objects only mean for someone…. To see implies seeing meaningfully.” Bertrand Russell observed, “It is not correct to say that I am believing the actual event; what I am believing is something now in my mind…since the event is not occurring but the believing is…. What is believed…is not the actual fact that makes the belief true, but a present event related to the fact. This present event, which is what is believed, I shall call the ‘content' of belief.” Finally, Alfred Schütz: “Even the thing perceived in everyday life is more than a simple sense presentation. It is a thought object, a construct of a highly complicated nature.”
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The material object from which our conceptual fossil is produced remains simply that: material and mute but bearing witness to its origins and the context from which it has come. Science can take its immaterial (or conceptual) fossils wherever it likes, and in the case of the conodont fossils this has been to imagine them in a wide variety of ways. The silent, material fossil – the real fossil – remains in a drawer or on a microscope slide. Although situated in the tame environment of a collection, this object sits apart from science, always belonging to a reality beyond science. Being real, it is there to question science and to be the subject of new investigations as new knowledge and technologies permit; it alone – it must be believed – has the potential to reveal the ultimate truth.
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Science's great task is to unlock that truth or, rather, make its truth the same.

To suggest this reading, rather than adopt the realism the scientists themselves deploy, is not to weaken our conception of the science. It simply means that science's inaccuracies and mistaken beliefs remain separated from reality by an invisible and impenetrable barrier; the factuality of material objects is never dependent upon the vagaries of scientific belief.
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History shows that real fossils have never been affected by thought; they have proven immune to designer gods and successive creations, untouched by the Flood and all those variants of evolution that were believed before and after Darwin. The evidential or immaterial or conceptual object
appeals
to the truth of the material fossil, but its connection to its material twin is detached and fluid – it lives in another world. The object in our thoughts seems material, definite, and fixed, but it is in fact intangible, contingent, and transient.
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This is a useful analytical frame for thinking about the relationship between the fossil and interpretations that produced its enigmatic qualities; it is not an argument against scientific realism. Each approach is culturally situated. The conodont workers needed to approach their subject as realists and believe that material truth was accessible. This was an essential component in the performances necessary for separating truth from non-truth. But these performances were affected by spatial and temporal structures and disruptions that had broad implications for how the material fossil was perceived. We shall now turn to these.

THE SPATIAL DYNAMICS OF INTERPRETATION

The plurality of knowledge in the conodont community offered some protection from erroneous ideas and gave the field some consistency of thinking. While bizarre solutions to the problem of the animal's identity would still surface with surprising regularity, these most often came from outsiders caught up in the mythology. Nevertheless, the conodont research community remained tiny and potentially vulnerable. It was this that permitted Walter Gross to silence a generation when he demonstrated, apparently conclusively, that the conodont fossils could not be teeth. Given his authority in the more fully developed field of fish paleontology, and his exceptional conodont material, along with the novelty, rigor, and logic of his study, other conodont workers were rendered powerless to contest the change he imposed on their worldview. For more than a decade, the nature of the animal and the functioning of the tiny tooth-like objects were hardly discussed. This mind shift led to, and was further helped by, the erasing of a deeply embedded technical language drawn from the study of teeth, which had been used to describe the conodont fossils for more than a century. To retain these terms was now considered unscientific. Then, in the 1970s, paleontology acquired a new intellectual liberalism that in turn produced arguments suggesting that the fossils could be teeth after all. With further research the idea gained support, and at a conference in 2006, Dick Aldridge told his audience to stop beating around the bush and start referring to the fossils as “teeth.”

It is difficult to conceive of Gross's assertion as paradigmatic because the identity of animal itself was not central to conodont science. The assertion was a “truth” that had to be accommodated but could also simply be ignored. It was possible to do this because the culture producing conodont science manifested itself in ongoing social relations rather than concrete institutions. “When we look at how people experience and negotiate authenticity through objects,” Sian Jones notes, “it is the networks of relationships between people, places and things that appear to be central, not the things in themselves.”
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This social adaptability meant Gross's inconvenient truth was negotiated in exactly the same way workers dealt with changes to their discipline in general and inconsistencies introduced by geographical variations in practice. The doing of conodont science, like the doing of paleontology, was never constant or uniform. In the sparsely populated United States of the 1930s, conodont science developed differently in Chicago (and Illinois), Washington D.C., and Missouri. And each of these centers developed an engagement with the fossil that was different from that present in Göttingen. At each center particular individuals played a critical shaping role: Croneis in Chicago, Ulrich in Washington, Branson in Missouri, and Stadtmüller in Göttingen. In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States supported two kinds of paleontology, both interested in the conodont fossils but distributed unevenly across the nation. And in what was still a small and well-connected paleontological community, it was possible for the likes of Ted Branson to assume the role of geological Baron of Missouri and thus exert a degree of control over the local scientific culture and the participants engaged within it.
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Each group tackled these fossils according to intellectual resources, preferences, biases, and ambitions available locally; each formed a distinct “interpretive community.”
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Repeatedly conodont science produced these important, geographically specific cultures that had a profound effect on the development of the science: the University of Iowa in the 1940s and 1950s, Ohio State University in the 1960s, the University of Marburg from the 1950s to the 1970s, and the “British school,” centered on universities in the English Midlands in the 1980s and 1990s.

In Europe, national cultures shaped the engagement. Here language configured separation and collaboration. British conodont veteran Ronald Austin, for example, recalls being required to take French as a subsidiary subject at university, and this determined his collaborations on the Continent in later life. Austin found meeting colleagues in Eastern Europe, then behind the Iron Curtain, extraordinarily expensive and effectively discouraged. In the Soviet Union, a much smaller and largely self-contained conodont research group had developed. With the rise of English as a global scientific language, particularly after 1990, non English speakers became increasingly disadvantaged. Thus language alone ensured that at no point was conodont studies ever an even playing field, and in the 1960s there were frequent appeals for translations of key works. Few workers, for example, could read Pander's book in its original German and had instead to rely upon an American translation, which in subtle ways incorporated mid-twentieth-century thinking.

These geographical inconsistencies within the field were accompanied by changing ideas about the nature of paleontological science in general, particularly after World War II. The drive then was to make the study of fossils more rigorous, sophisticated, and biological. Young workers who entered the science at this time were more than ready for this injection of new ideals; they wanted nothing less than a new paleontology. In the early 1970s, when geology as a whole was embracing big theory, paleontologists again reinvented their science, liberating practitioners to engage more fully in pure reason. In the 1980s, the emergence of planetary thinking took this reasoning to new heights and the imaginings of conodont workers became wonderfully bold and grand. Paleontology had always been a science that opened up rich possibilities for the imagination, but it took time for the imagination to find an appropriate role in legitimate interpretation.

CONFLICT AND CHIVALRY

These spatial and temporal disruptions of conodont science were further affected by the science's treatment of the individual. I have already said that individualism manifested itself in a constellation of beliefs that made the science both adaptable and capable of living with unknowns, difficulties, and errors. This individualism was actively encouraged when a student began his or her doctorate studies. At this moment the student was allocated a geological resource (a set of field sites within a geographically defined area), a subject (a particular group of fossils and rocks), a period of geological time (such as the Upper Devonian), and particular questions and methodologies. This level of management was necessary to prevent students coming into competition with one another. The aim was to create an environment in which a student could thrive and thus pass the examination without having to confront personal rivalries; it served to keep things rational and objective.
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However, it sometimes happened that two students, from different universities, found themselves on the same patch. Frank Rhodes, for example, wanted his student, Ronald Austin, to study some important rock sequences in Yorkshire, but Austin found that territory occupied and moved his research to a field site near Bristol. In this geographical, paleontological, and geological space – uncontaminated by earlier work and free from rivalries – Austin forged his scientific identity. Like the names of most conodont workers, his became inextricably connected to a period of geological time, a specific place and a style of study. To say a worker's name was to implicitly communicate these things.