Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (40 page)

My claim may strike many readers as odd and cynical, especially as applied to a scientific theory. Most of us are not naive enough to believe the old myth that scientists are paragons of unprejudiced objectivity, equally open to all possibilities, and reaching conclusions only by the weight of evidence and logic of argument. We understand that biases, preferences, social values, and psychological attitudes all play a strong role in the process of discovery. However, we should not be driven to the opposite extreme of complete cynicism—the view that objective evidence plays no role, that perceptions of truth are entirely relative, and that scientific conclusions are just another form of aesthetic preference. Science, as actually practiced, is a complex dialogue between data and preconceptions. Yet I am arguing that Walcott’s shoehorn operated virtually without constraint from Burgess data, and am thus denying that the usual dialogue occurred in this case. Moreover, I make this claim about the greatest discovery of a first-rank scientist, not about a minor episode in the life of a peripheral actor. Can such an unusual one-way flow from preconception to evidence really occur?

Ordinarily, the answer would be no. The fossils would talk back, just as
Opabinia
told Harry Whittington, “I have no legs under my carapace,” while
Anomalocaris
exclaimed, “That jellyfish
Peytoia
is really my mouth.” But the Burgess animals said little to Walcott, for two basic reasons—thereby casting his shoehorn as a striking example of ideological constraint. First, his preconceptions were strong, rooted as they were at the heart of his social values and the core of his temperament. Second—a reason so ridiculously simple and obvious that we might pass it by in our search for “deeper” meanings—the fossils didn’t respond because Walcott never found time to converse with them. A life can be stretched only so far. Administrative burdens did eventually undo Walcott as a working scientist. He simply never found time to study the Burgess specimens. Walcott published four preliminary papers in 1911 and 1912. His associate Charles E. Resser brought out Walcott’s posthumous notes in 1931. In between, for the last fifteen years of his busy life, Walcott published monographs on Burgess sponges and algae, but nothing more on the complex animals of the world’s most important fossil fauna.

The first reason (strong preconceptions) provides an underpinning for the message of this book; the second reason (administrative burden) is idiosyncratic to Walcott. Yet I begin my discussion with Walcott’s idiosyncrasy, for we must understand how he failed to listen before we mount the record of his own song.

Since administrators are usually recruited from the ranks of successful researchers as they reach mid-life, Walcott’s story of intensely conflicting demands, and consequent internal stress, echoes a pervasive and honest refrain heard from the helm of scientific institutions. Administrators are chosen because they understand research—meaning that they both love the work and do it well. The story is as old as Walcott’s beloved Cambrian mountains. You begin with a promise to yourself: I won’t have as much time for research, but I will be more efficient. Others have fallen by the wayside, but I will be different; I will never abandon my research; I will keep working and publishing at close to full volume. Slowly, the perverseness of creeping inevitability takes over. Research fades. You never abandon the ideal, or the original love. You will get back to it, after this term as director, after retirement, after.… Sometimes, you really do enjoy an old age of renewed scholarship; more often, as in Walcott’s case, death intervenes.

Walcott amazes me. His administrative burdens were so extraordinarily heavy, yet he did continue to publish throughout his later life. His complete bibliography (in Taft
*
et al.
, 1928) lists eighty-nine items between 1910, the year of his first report on the Burgess Shale, and 1927, when he died. Fifty-three of these are primary, data-based technical papers. They include major works in taxonomy and anatomy, some written in his busiest years—a hundred pages on Cambrian brachiopods in 1924, eighty on Cambrian trilobites in 1925, a hundred on the anatomy of the trilobite
Neolenus
in 1921. But the Lord’s limit of twenty-four hours a day still grievously restricted Walcott’s hopes and plans. Most research did shift to the back burners. The most prominently simmering pot held the fossils of the Burgess Shale. Walcott’s guilt at their neglect, and his anticipatory joy in finally returning to his favorite fossils, form a persistent theme in his correspondence. I think that Walcott was consciously saving the Burgess specimens as a primary focus for his years in retirement. But he died with his boots on at seventy-seven.

The whole familiar process, in all its inevitable movement from youthful idealism to elderly resignation, can be traced with unusual thoroughness in the Walcott archives (figures 4.1 and 4.2). On June 2, 1879, the young Walcott, seeking his first job with the U.S. Geological Survey, wrote to the great geologist Clarence King:

4.1. Charles Doolittle Walcott as a handsome young man of twenty-three. Taken in 1873.

4.2. A photographic portrait of Walcott made about 1915. There are many such portraits in the Smithsonian archives, but I particularly like this one because it seems to show so well both Walcott’s strength and great sadness during these years of family tragedy.

King replied positively, and with kindness, on July 18:

Walcott’s work was better than good, and he rose steadily. By 1893, now near the top of Survey personnel, and firmly committed to a lifetime program of empirical work on older Paleozoic rocks, Walcott refused a teaching job at the University of Chicago in order to continue his research without encumbrance. He expressed his regrets to the preeminent Chicago geologist and administrator T. C. Chamberlin: “As you well know, my desire and ambition is to complete the work on the older Paleozoic formations of the continent and to give to geologists the means of classifying and mapping them.”

But in the very next year, 1894, administration called to curtail his work from within. In a letter to his mother, Walcott expressed the conflicting feelings that would haunt him for the rest of his life—pride in recognition, and an urge to serve well, coupled with anxiety about the loss of time for research:

Thereafter, the theme of conflict between administrative duties and research desires came to dominate Walcott’s thoughts. By 1904, while still leading the Geological Survey and before discovering the Burgess, Walcott was already lamenting a massive loss of time for research. On June 18, 1904, he wrote to the geologist R. T. Hill:

Three years later, Walcott assumed his final post, as secretary of the Smithsonian. At the end of this decade, he found the Burgess Shale. Circumstances then conspired, with Walcott’s active encouragement, despite his laments, to augment his public responsibilities continuously, and to rob time from any serious or protracted study of the Burgess fossils.

The archives present a panoply of vignettes, glimpses of the multifarious, largely trivial, but always time-consuming daily duties of a chief administrator. He acted on behalf of friends, proposing Herbert Hoover for membership in the American Philosophical Society in 1917. He encouraged colleagues, writing to R. H. Goddard in 1923: “I trust that your work on the ‘rocket’ is advancing in a satisfactory manner and that in due time you will reach a practical solution of all the problems connected with it.” He promoted the welfare of scientists, writing to the chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1926 to argue that researchers should receive free railroad passes “in the same category as persons exclusively engaged in charitable or eleemosynary work.” He endured endless demands for bits and pieces of his day, as when chief Smithsonian anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička asked for extra time in 1924 to make some forgotten measurements:

But I found nothing more symbolic, yet so immediately practical, than this affidavit submitted to a bank in 1917 in order to verify a change in his signature: “I enclose herewith the affidavit that you wish. I used to sign my name Chas. D. Walcott. I now use only the initials, as I find it takes too much time to add in the extra letters when there is a large number of papers or letters to be signed.”

If these “ordinary” pressures of high administration were not enough to derail research, the decade of 1910 to 1920—spanning his field studies of the Burgess Shale—was full of draining family tragedy for Walcott, as he lost his second wife and two of his three sons (figure 4.3). His son Charles junior died of tuberculosis in 1913, after Walcott had tracked down and evaluated every sanitarium, every rest, dietary, or medical cure, then promoted in the name of hope or quackery. Another son, Stuart, was shot down in an air battle over France in 1917. Walcott wrote to his friend Theodore Roosevelt, who had lost a brother in similar circumstances: