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(See update.)
April 7, 2008
Last month, writing about the birth of modern natural history in 18th-century London, I had occasion to think about some of the less obvious ways the study of nature has changed since then.
The obvious ways are the explosion of scientific knowledge and technological power and precision that now enables us to examine nature from the cosmic depths the Hubble peers into all the way down to the molecular and subatomic levels. Knowledge we now blithely take for granted was only hard and very recently won. As a kind of marker, a book reviewed in our October 2007 issue, Pascal Richet's A Natural History of Time, revealed the remarkable fact that at the beginning of the 20th century, we counted the Earth's age in tens of millions of years. (Getting up to 4.6 billion would require the discovery of naturally occurring radioactive elements, for which Marie Curie would win the Nobel Prize in 1911.) A hundred fifty years earlier, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon, had used fledgling scientific principles to get the estimate up to 75,000 years (Buffon’s Natural History: Containing a Theory of the Earth . . . , 1749); and a mere quarter century before that, one of the very founders of science, Sir Isaac Newton, had applied astronomy to classical history (in A Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, 1728) to try to prove that the world had indeed been created in 4004 B.C. (As the sound-bite version of Richet's book, don't miss Cabinet Magazine's Timeline of Timelines, which I just came across myself.)
The less obvious ways the study of nature has changed have to do with our resolute displacement of ourselves, and the God we imagined as specially focused on us, from the center of the universe.
Eighteenth-century scientists were secure in their belief that to study the creation was to adore the Creator, and that, as stated in the Bible, God had given nature to man to control and exploit. You will not find a politically-correct view of gentle stewardship in their writings. Whenever Captain Cook and his naturalists Banks and Solander saw an intriguing new animal in Australia, they tried to shoot it and eat it. “Furnished with these arms,” meaning the new classification schemas of Linnaeus, naturalist-physician Alexander Garden of South Carolina wrote that he was ready “to make war upon the Vegetable kingdome, and to submit the lofty honours of the forest to the rule and authority of Botanic Science.” Now that’s dominion. This zestful imperial bravado toward nature may be charitably viewed, not as proof of how ignorant and barbarous our ancestors were, but of how recently they had begun to crawl out of abject, terrified slavery to nature. (No antibiotics till 1928. How many of us and our kids would be dead, or never born, without them?)
But understanding is a two-edged sword. Even as it has gradually made us the material masters of nature, it has relentlessly whittled us down to size. And like The Incredible Shrinking Man, we keep on feeling smaller and smaller. As if the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions hadn’t dealt sufficient blows to the human ego, now there’s the microbial revolution. Read this and tell me it doesn’t make you dizzy.
The struggle to survive skews one’s view of the world. If it’s a constant pounding into humility, it also breeds a defiant, myopic egocentrism: biology’s scream “I must live!” makes “me” important and everything else dispensable. Security brings at least the possibility of dispassion and compassion. Scientists of the 18th century were the keenest observers of nature since hunter-gatherers, but they still viewed it anthropocentrically, in terms of how it could be a servant to us and a credit to our God.
Of course, we’re still trying to improve our own lot by understanding and manipulating nature. We’ll never stop. But something more is going on, too. In today’s natural history, we try to use our imagination along with the data to get out of our own parochial perspective. We start from the premise that each creature we study is a center of the universe. The world, as ordered by that lifeform’s needs and capacities, revolves around it. It exists in its own right; its relationship to us is not only for how we can use it, or learn new tricks from it, or protect ourselves from it, but also for how imagining its point of view can enlarge and correct ours. Probably people who danced in feathers or antlers were doing this; poet William Blake practiced it, in his Romantic way:
How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?
And I learned it from my late mentor Ken Norris, who said in our 1977 interview (which is not online):
“When you get down to a little rinky-dink thing like this beetle, I think the whole world changes when convection changes. . . . You mustn’t get your own ego involved, you must throw out all your mistaken notions—the specimen is the authority. . . . [Porpoises] engage in context-aware behavior, like deceit, and they show altruism toward each other and towards us . . . and they like to play tricks on each other and on you. They’ll splash you, and . . . how the hell do they know you’re dry? Hmmm? Imagine looking up through the wavy surface and seeing a person! That’s really the question. What’s it like to be a porpoise?”
What’s it like to be a tortoise?
The evolution from the 18th-century view of nature to ours is most beautifully illustrated by two accounts, separated by more than 200 years, of the beloved English naturalist Gilbert White’s tortoise Timothy. When White’s 86-year-old aunt died in March 1780, White dug up from her garden the still hibernating Greek tortoise she had kept for 40 years, and brought it to his country house, Selborne, where Timothy became a kind of mascot and touchstone in White’s groundbreaking nature journals (now online in blog form), outliving its host by a year. By clicking a tag, you can read the entries about Timothy in reverse order, blog-style:
June 5, 1787
The tortoise took his usual ramble, & could not be confined within the limits of the garden. His pursuits, which seem to be of the amorous kind, transport him beyond the bounds of his usual gravity at this season. He was missing for some days, but found at last near the upper malt-house.
In 1946, Sylvia Townsend Warner extracted all the entries that mentioned Timothy and published them as The Portrait of a Tortoise. In 2006, New York Times nature editorialist Verlyn Klinkenborg rewrote the story from a tortoise-eye view in Timothy, or Notes of an Abject Reptile. The same year Natural History excerpted what I think could become a modern classic.
Imagine looking up through the wavy lettuce leaves and seeing—a person!
Great soft tottering beasts. . . . Drab furrows of person-scented cloth hang about them. False head of hair or kerchief or hat. Contrivance of hide or wood on the feet, or none at all. That mass of body and brainpan to heat and cool with their internal fires. Fleece, hide, feathers, scales, and shell all denied them.
Humans of Selborne wake all winter. Above ground, eating and eating, breathing and breathing, talking and talking. Huddled close to their fires. Never a lasting silence for them. Never more than a one-night rest. When they go down in the ground, they go down in boxes, for good, and only with the help of others standing round. Peering into the darkness of the cold earth they fear. . . .
Not . . . me. Warm earth waits just beneath me, the planet’s viscous, scalding core. It takes a cool blood to feel that warmth, here at its circumference. The humans’ own heat keeps them from sensing it.
Klinkenborg’s Timothy has scorn for the humans’ patronizing projection of their warm-blooded assumptions onto him (and for their failure to recognize that “he” is a she). But when White noted his observations of the real Timothy, with a very English mix of objectivity and whimsy, the Long March of humans out of the center—our exile by victory—had already begun. The first words in Timothy’s imagined voice were written by—Gilbert White. From a letter to his niece:
These matters displease me; but there is another that much hurts my pride: I mean that contempt shown for my understanding which these Lords of Creation are very apt to discover, thinking that nobody knows anything but themselves.
What is it like to be a bat? asks philosopher Thomas Nagel, combining the “problem of consciousness” (can it ever be explained in purely material terms?) with the challenge other lifeforms present to our imagination and empathy:
I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.
I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.
(Annie Gottlieb) |
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