Pluto's Republic by Peter Medawar OUP, New York 1988
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes by Stephen Jay Gould. W.W. Norton, New. York 1988
The acknowledged master of biological belles let-tres has long been. Sir Peter
Medawar. If there is a younger biologist or an American biologist that bears
comparison, it is probably in both cases Stephen Jay Gould. It was therefore with
anticipation that I received these two collections of essays, ref-lections by
leading and highly literate biologists on their subject and its. history and
philosophy.
Pluto's Republic is one of those titles that cannot even be mentioned without an
immediate explanation, and Sir Peter begins thus:
A good many years ago a neighbour whose sex chivalry forbids me to disclose (it
takes a Meda-war to get away with this kind of thing nowa-days) exclaimed upon
learning of my interest in philosophy: "Don't you just adore Pluto's Repub-lic?"
Pluto's Republic has remained in my mind ever since as a superlatively apt
description of that intellectual underworld which so many of the essays in this
volume explore. We each populate Pluto's Republic according to our own prejudi-ces.
...
Here I nursed a mischievous half-hope that Step-hen Gould might be found among the
denizens of Medawar's private Underworld - his more sancti-monious cosignatories of
a notorious letter to the New York Review of Books about "sociobiology" (13th Nov
1975) are prominent in mine. But Gould is several cuts above those former associates
of his and he is not among Medawar's targets. Indeed they share many targets,
cliometricians for instance.
Most of the essays in Pluto's Republic have appea-red twice before, first as book
reviews or transcripts of lectures, then in previous anthologies such as The Art of
the Soluble and The Rope of Progress which were presumably reviewed at the time.
Although I shall therefore give Pluto's Republic less than half my space in this
joint review, I vigorously repudiate any muttering about such collections being too
much of a good thing. The earlier books have long been out or print, and I have been
scouring the second-hand book shops since my own Art of the Soluble was stolen. I
discovered when I reread them here that I had many favourite passages word-perfect
in memory. Who indeed could forget the opening sentence of the 1968 Romanes Lecture,
Science and Literature? "I hope I shall not be thought ungracious if I say at the
outset that nothing on earth would have indu-ced me to attend the kind of lecture
you may think I am about to give." At the time this Prompted the apt rejoinder from
John Holloway: "This lecturer can never have been thought ungracious in his life."
Or listen to Medawar on another great biologist, Sir D'Arcy Thompson:
He was a famous conversationalist and lec-turer (the two are often thought to go
together, but seldom do), and the author of a work which, considered as literature,
is the equal of anything of Pater's or Logan Pearsall Smith's in its com-plete
mastery of the bel canto style. Add to all this that he was over six feet tall, with
the build and carriage of a Viking and with the pride of bearing that comes from
good looks known to be possessed
The reader may never have read Logan Pearsall Smith, he may never even have heard of
Pater, but he is left with the overwhelming impression (since he probably is
familiar with the idiom of P. G. Wo-dehouse) of a style that is undoubtedly bel, and
it may very well be canto. And there is more of Meda-war in the passage quoted than
Medawar himself realised.
Medawar continually flatters his readers, implying in them an erudition beyond them,
but doing it so that they almost come to believe in it themselves:
"Mill, said John Venn in 1907, had 'dominated the thought and study of intelligent
students to an extent which many will find it hard to realise at the present day';
yet he could still take a general familia-rity with Mill's views for granted." The
reader scarcely notices that Medawar himself is still taking a general familiarity
with Mill's views for granted, although in the reader's own case it is probably far
from justified. "Even George Henry Lewes found himself unable to propound his fairly
sensible views on hypotheses without much prevarication and pur-sing of the lips."
The reader's knowing chuckle is out before he realises that actually he is in no
position to respond knowingly to that "even".
Medawar has become a sort of chief spokesman for "The Scientist" in the modern
world. He takes a less doleful view of the human predicament than is fashio-nable,
believing essentially that hands are for sol-ving problems rather than for wringing.
He regards the scientific method - in the right hands - as our most powerful tool in
his "melioristic' aim of "fin-ding out what is wrong with (the. world) and then
taking steps to put it right." As for the scientific method itself, Medawar has a
good deal to tell us, and he is well qualified to do so. Not that being a Nobel
Prizewinner and a close associate of Karl Popper is in itself an indication that one
will talk sense, far from it when you think of others in that category. But Medawar
not only is a Nobel Prize-winner, he seems like a Nobel Prizewinner; he is
everything we think a Nobel Prizewinner ought to be. If you have never understood
why scientists like Popper, try Medawar's exposition of the philosophy of his
"personal guru." Actually most "Popperian" scientists have probably never tried
anything but Me-dawar's exposition!
He read zoology at Oxford and early in his career made important contributions to
classical zoology, but he was soon drawn into the highly populated and highly
financed world of medical research. Inevitably his associations have been with
molecular and cell biolo-gists, but he seldom had any truck with. the mole-cular
chauvinism which plagued British biology for two decades and is only now being edged
out by American influence. Despite remarks like, 'It is simply not worth arguing
with anyone so obtuse as not to realise that this complex of discoveries (DNA and
all that) is the greatest achievement of science in the twentieth century," Medawar
has a good appreciation of biology, at all levels, as his Biological Retrospect and
his essay on Ethology show.
He has also inevitably associated with doctors, and the preoccupations and
sympathies of a doctor pervade several of these essays, for example his sensitive
reviews of books on cancer and psychosomatic heart disease. I especially enjoyed his
blistering contempt for psychoanalysis, not a lofty, detached contempt for any
ordinary pretentious drivel, but a committed contempt, fired by a doctor's concern.
Psychoanalysts have even had their say over the puzzle of Darwin's long illness,
and Medawar is at his withering best in telling us about it:
For Good, "there is a wealth. of evidence that unmistakably points" to the idea
that Darwin's illness was "a distorted expression of the aggres-sion, hate and
resentment felt, at an unconscious level, by Darwin towards his tyrannical father"..
These deep and terrible feelings found outward expression in Darwin's touching
reverence towards his father and his father's memory and in his describing his
father as the kindest and wisest man he ever knew: clear evidence, if evidence were
needed, of how deeply his true inner sentiments had been repressed.
Medawar, when he smells pretentious pseudo-science is a dangerous man. His famous
annihilation of Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man might have been thought
an unfair attack on the dead, but for the extraordinary influence Teilhard exerted
(and still exerts: Stephen. Gould tells us that two journals. that were established
to discuss his ideas still flou-rish) over legions of the gullible including, I am
afraid, my juvenile self. I would love to quote huge chunks of what is surely one of
the great destruc-tive book reviews of all time, but must content myself with two
sentences from Medawar's typically barbed explanation of the popular appeal of
Teilhard:
Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies
and week-lies, so the spread of secondary and latterly of tertiary education has
created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and
scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake
analytical thought. [The Phenomenon of Man] is written in an all but totally
unintelligible style, and this is construed as prima-facie evidence of profundity
Medawar's Herbert Spencer Lecture, and his re-view of Arthur Koestler's Act of
Creation are more respectful of his victims, but pretty punchy neverthe-less. His
review of Ronald Clark's Life of J. B. Haldane is enlivened by personal
reminiscence; and re-veals a sort of affection for the old brute which seems to have
been reciprocated:
I remember Haldane's once going back on a firm promise to chair a lecture
given by a distinguished American scientist on the grounds that it would be too
embarrassing for the lecturer: he had once been the victim of a sexual assault by
the lecturer's wife. The accusation was utterly ridiculous and Haldane did not in
the least resent my saying so. He didn't want to be bothered with the chairmanship,
and could not bring himself to say so in the usual way.
But if Haldane did not in the least resent Meda-war's saying so, one cannot help
wondering whether this was not because Medawar must have been one of the very few
people Haldane ever met who could look him levelly in the eye, on equal terms
intellectually. Peter Medawar is a giant among scientists and a wicked genius with
English prose. Even if it annoys you, you will not regret buying Pluto's Re-public.
In 1978 the Reviews Editor of a famous scientific journal, whose nature chivalry
forbids me to disclose, invited me to review Stephen Jay Gould's Ever Since Darwin,
remarking that I could "get my own back" on opponents of "genetic determinism". I
don't know which annoyed me more, the suggestion that I favoured "genetic
"determinism" (it is one of those words like sin and reductionism: if you use it at
all you are against it), or the suggestion that I might review a book for motives of
revenge. The story warns my readers that Dr Gould and I are supposed to be on
opposite sides of some fence or other. In the event I accepted the commission and
gave the book what could fairly be described as a rave review, even, I think, going
so far as to praise Gould's style as a creditable second best to Peter Medawar's.
I feel inclined to do the same for Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes. It is another
collection of essays reprin-ted from Gould's column in Natural History. When you
have to turn these pieces out once a month you must pick up some of the habits of
the professional working to a deadline - this is not a criticism, Mo-zart did the
same. Gould's writing has something of the predictability that we enjoy in Mozart,
or in a good meal. His volumes of collected essays, of which this is the third, are
put together to a recipe, one part biological history, one part biological poli-tics
(less if we are lucky), and one part (more if we are lucky) vignettes of biological
wonder, the modern equivalent of a medieval bestiary but with interes-ting
scientific morals instead of boring moral ones. The essays themselves, too, often
seem to follow a formula or menu. As appetiser there is the quota-tion from light
opera or the classics, or sometimes its place is taken by a piece of reassuring
nostalgia, a reminiscence from a normal, happy, very American world of baseball
stars and Hershey bars and Bar-Mitzvahs - Gould, we learn, is not just one of your
pointy-headed intellectuals but a regular guy. This homely informality softens the
conspicuous erudition of the main course. - the fluency in seve-ral languages, the
almost Medawarian familiarity with literature and the humanities - and even gives it
a certain (un-Medawarian) charm (compare Gould himself on Louis Agassiz: "..... the
erudition that had so charmed America's rustics...").
Gould's own respect for Medawar is evident. The idea of science as "the art of the
soluble" provides the punchline for at least four of the essays: "We may wallow
forever in the thinkable; science traffics in the doable"; "... science deals in
the workable and soluble"; and two essays end with explicit quotations of the
phrase. His view of Teilhard de Chardin is similar to Medawar's: "... difficult,
convoluted wri-ting may simply be fuzzy, not deep". If he gives Teilhard's
philosophy a slightly more sympathetic hearing, he is probably. just making amends
for his delightfully mischievous thesis that the young Teil-hard connived in the.
Piltdown hoax. For Medawar, Teilhard's accepted role as one of the principal victims
of the joke is just more evidence that he was "in no serious sense a thinker. He had
about him that innocence which makes it easy to understand why the forger of the
Piltdown skull should have chosen Teilhard to be the discoverer of its canine
tooth". Gould's case for the prosecution is a fasci-nating piece of detective work
which I will not spoil by attempting to summarise. My own verdict is a Scottish
"non-proven".
In whatever Underworld the Piltdown forger lan-guishes, he has a lot to answer for.
Only last month an acquaintance, whose sex the grammar of English pronouns will
probably force me to disclose, exclaimed upon learning of my interest in evolution:
"But I thought Darwin had been disproved." My mind star-ted placing bets with
itself: which particular second-hand BBC-distorted half-truth. had she
misunderstood? I had just put my money on garbled Stephen Gould with a small side
bet on (no need to garble) Fred Hoyle, when my companion revealed the winner as an
older favourite: 'I heard that the missing link had now been shown to be a hoax."
Piltdown, by God, still raising his ugly cranium after all these years!
Incidents like this reveal the extreme flimsiness of the straws that will be
clutched by those with a strong religious (or political) desire to believe something
silly. There are between 3. and 10 million species alive today, and as many as a
billion have probably exis-ted since life began. Just one fossil of just one of
those millions of species turns out to be a hoax. Yet of all the volumes and volumes
of facts about evolu-tion, the only thing that stuck in my companion's head was
Piltdown. A parallel case is the extraordinary popular aggrandisement of Eldredge
and Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium." A minor dispute among experts (about
whether evolution is smoothly continuous or interrupted by 'periods of stagnation
when no evolutionary change occurs in a given linea-ge) has been blown up to give
the impression that Darwinism's foundations are quivering. It is as if the discovery
that the Earth is not a perfect sphere but an ablate spheroid cast sensational doubt
on the whole Copernican world view, and reinstated flat--earthism. The
anti-Darwinian sounding rhetoric of the punctuated equilibrists was a regrettable
gift to creationists and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Dr Gould regrets this
as strongly as anyone, but I can tell him that protestations that his words have
been misinterpreted will be to little avail.
Whether Gould really has anything to answer for, he certainly has fought the good
fight in the bizarre tragicomedy or tragifarce of modern American evolu-tionary
politics; He travelled to Arkansas in 1981 to led his formidable voice to the right
side in the "Scopes Trial II." His obsession with history even took him on a visit
to Dayton, Tennessee, scene of that previous Southern farce, and the subject of one
of tbe most sympathetic and charming of the essays in the present book. His analysis
of the appeal of creationism is wise, and should be read by intolerant Darwin-freaks
like me.
Gould's tolerance is his greatest virtue as a his-torian, that and his affection for
his subjects. His centennial tribute to Charles Darwin is off-beat in a
characteristically delightful and affectionate way. Where others loftily
pontificate, Gould goes down to earth and celebrates Darwin's own last treatise, on
worms. Darwin's worm book is not "a harmless work of little importance". It
exemplifies his entire world view; based on the power of small causes, working
together in large numbers and over long time spans, to wreak great changes:
We who lack an appreciation of history and have so little feel for the aggregated
importance. of small but continuous change scarcely realize that the very ground is
being swept from beneath our feet; it is alive and constantly churning... Was Darwin
really conscious of what he hid done as he wrote his list professional lines, or did
he proceed intuitively, as men of his genius some-times do? Then I came to the last
paragraph, and I shook with the joy of insight. Clever old man; he knew full well.
In his last words, he looked back to his beginning, compared those worms with his
first corals, and completed his life's work in both the large and the small ...
And the quotation of Darwin's last sentences follows.
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes is as enigmatic a title as Pluto's Republic and it
requires more explanation. If the present volume could be said to exercise a bee in
Gould's bonnet, to distinguish it from its two predecessors, it is epitomised in the
essay of the same name. I will explain the point rather fully, because it is one
with which I strongly agree although I am supposed, apparently by Gould himself
among others, to hold opposing views. I can sum the point up by giving. a new twist
to a phrase already twisted by Peter Medawar. If science is the art of the soluble,
evolution is the art of the developable.
Development is change within an individual orga-nism; from single cell to adult.
Evolution is. also change, but change of a type that requires subtler understanding.
Each adult form in an evolutionary series will appear to "change" into the next, but
it is change only in the sense that each frame on a mo-vie film "changes" into the
next. In reality, of course, each adult in the succession begins as a single cell
and develops anew. Evolutionary change is change in genetically controlled processes
of embryonic deve-lopment, not literal change from adult form to adult form.
Gould fears that many evolutionists lose sight of development, and this leads them
into error. There is firstly the error of genetic atomism, the fallacious belief in
a one-to-one mapping between single genes and bits of body. Embryonic development
just doesn't work like that. The genome is not a "blueprint." Gould regards me as an
arch genetic atomist, wrongly, as I have explained at length elsewhere. It is one of
those cases where you will misunderstand an author unless you interpret his words in
the context of the position he was arguing against.
Consider the following, from Gould himself: "Evo-lution is mosaic in character,
proceeding at different rates in different structures. An animals parts are largely
dissociable thus permitting historical change to proceed." appears to be
rampant and very un-Gouldian, atomism! Until you realize what Gould was arguing
against: Cuvier's belief that evolution is impossible because change in any part is
useless unless immediately accompanied by change in all other parts. Similarly the
apparent genetic atomism that Gould criticizes in some other authors makes sense
when you realize what those authors were arguing against: "group selection" theories
of evolution in which animals are supposed to act "for the good of" the species or
some other large group. An atomistic interpretation of the role of genes in
development is an error. An atomistic interpretation of the role of genetic
differences in evolution is not an error and is the basis of a telling argument
against errors of the "group selection" kind.
Atomism is just one of the errors that Gould sees as flowing from evolutionists'
cavalier treatment of development. There are two others which are almost opposite.
to each other: the error of assuming that evolution is too powerful, and the error
of assuming that it is not powerful enough. The naive perfectio-nist believes that
living material is infinitely ductile ready to be shaped into whatever form natural
selection "desires" This ignores the possibility that developmental processes are
incapable of producing the "desired" form. The extreme "gradualist" believes that
all evolutionary changes are tiny, forgetting, according to Gould, that
developmental processes can change in very large and complex ways in single
mutational steps This general point, that we have to. understand development before
we can speculate constructively about evolution is correct.
This must be what Medawar meant when he complained about "the real weakness of
modern evolutionary theory, namely its jack of a complete theory of variation, of
the origin of candidature for evolution". And this is why Gould is interested in
hen's teeth and horse's toes He makes the point that atavistic "throwbacks", like
horses with three toes rather than one, are interesting because they tell us about
the kind and magnitude of evolutionary change that development allows. For the same
reason he is interested in (and very interesting on) the development of Zebras'
stripes, and macromutations like insects with supernumerary thoraxes and wings
I said that Gould and I were supposed to be professional adversaries, and I would be
disingenuous to pretend to like everything in this book. Why for instance, does he
find it necessary after the phrase "A strict Darwinian", to add " -- I am not
one --".
Of course Gould is a strict Darwinian, or if he isn't nobody is: if you interpret
"strict" strictly enough nobody is a strict anything. On a more personal note, if
Gould thinks that the theory of "selfish DNA", of which he approves, "could not more
different" from the theory of "selfish genes", of which he disapproves, he should at
least appreciate from my point of view the irony that, whereas I did not originate
the ideas he attri-butes to me, I probably was the first to publish the hypothesis
now labelled 'by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel "Selfish DNA"!
It is a pity, too, that Gould is still preaching against innocuous phrases like
"adultery in mountain bluebirds" and "slavery in ants." His rhetorical question
about his own disapproval of such harmless anthro-pomorphisms, "Is this not more
pedantic grousing?" should be. answered with a resounding "Yes.' Gould himself made
unselfconscious use of "slavery in ants" in his own account of the phenomenon (Ever
Since Darwin p265 Presumably this was written in the days before some pompous
comrade spotted the dangerous ideological implications of the phrase) Since our
language grew in a human setting, if biologists tried to ban human imagery they
would almost have to stop communicating. Gould is an expert communicator, and of
course he in practice treats his own puritanical strictures with the contempt that
he secretly knows they deserve. The very first essay of the present book tells how
two angler fish ("angler" fish?) are caught "in flagranteb delicto" and discover
"for themselves what, according to Shakespeare, 'every wise man's son doth know' --
'journeys end in lovers meeting'."
This is indeed a beautiful book, the pages glowing with a naturalist's love of life
and a historian's respect and affection for his subjects, the vision extended and
clarified by geologists' familiarity with "deep time." To borrow a Medawarian phrase
and like Peter Medawar himself, Stephen Gould is an aristocrat of learning. These
are both extraordinarily gifted men, with some of the arrogance natural to
aristocrats and to those who have always been top of every class of which they have
been members, but big enough to get away with it and generous enough to rise above
arrogance too. Read their books if you are a scientist and, especially, read them if
you are not.
Richard Dawkins
(The Literary Gazette, Moscow, July 1988)
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