Making History (Susskind continued …)

This is part 2 of my review of The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskind. Part 3 is here.

Here is the dilemma. You’re a well-respected scientist. You decide that you want to write a popular science book to bring your field and your research to the masses. However, a straight, logical presentation of the facts and the theories is too dry. We need to break it up a bit, add a bit of human interest.

So tell a story! Stories make us want to keep reading to find out how it ends. You decide to give some anecdotes, or even a historical overview. For the period of time during which you were in the field, this is easy – you can simply give a personal history of your interactions with the scientists involved, the ideas proposed, and their reception by the community. However, if you want to go back before your career started then you’ll need to rely on historical sources. Here lies the problem: you’re not a historian. As a scientist, if you read a paper published 20, 50, 100 years before you entered the field, you do it because the information is still relevant to your work. You don’t do it to get a fair and balanced sample of the intellectual climate at the time.

Your popular science book has now strayed out of your field and into the history of science. History is a very subtle subject – it deals with people, lots of people. People are complicated. If you’re not careful, you might end up repeating convenient, popular myths that reduce personalities to caricatures and events to fables.

Given the title of this post, you may have guessed that I’m about to accuse Susskind of precisely this allegation. Keep in mind – overall, his book is highly recommended. I am literally taking issue with a couple of footnotes. And, as I keep reminding you, I’m no historian either. I’ll do my best to quote from actual historians of science.

Around the Medieval World

Repeat after me: people in the Middle Ages did not think that the Earth was flat. Twice in his book, Susskind suggests that people only started believing that the Earth was round when it was circumnavigated, either by Magellan (page 67) or Columbus (page 160). This myth has been debunked so many times. It’s on Wikipedia’s “List of common misconceptions”. The best TV show ever joined the cause. The ancient Greeks not only knew it was round, but Eratosthenes made a very good estimate of the Earth’s diameter in 240 BC. In 1945, the “Members of the Historical Association” published a series of pamphlets titled “Common Errors in History”, the second of which says:

The idea that educated men at the time of Columbus believed that the earth was flat, and that this belief was one of the obstacles to be overcome by Columbus before he could get his project sanctioned, remains one of the hardiest errors in teaching.

Stephen Jay Gould says:

[T]here never was a period of ‘flat earth darkness’ among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology.”

The idea that people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth was flat seems to have gained popularity with “inaccurate histories such as John William Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896)” (Hannam). This myth annoys me because it makes modern science seem desperate. Are we really so insecure that we need to inflate our egos by portraying “pre-scientific” people as dunces? The successes of modern science are rather impressive: we have the Internet, aeroplanes and antibiotics. We don’t need to invent lies about the Middle Ages. Think about the genius of Isaac Newton’s formulation of the laws of mechanics using calculus and their application to the solar system. A civilisation is lucky if it gets one Newton per millennium. Only Einstein might be worthy of comparison. No one else comes close. Science needed a Newton to show the way beyond Aristotle. Being less intelligent than Newton doesn’t make you a blockhead. It makes you one of us, the other 99.9999999%.

Huxley vs Wilberforce

Susskind says:

Samuel Wilberforce, an Anglican bishop, was called Soapy because of his slipperiness in ecclesiastical debate. Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s chief disciple, was called Darwin’s Bulldog for obvious reasons. The two squared off in 1860 to debate Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Soapy Sam gleefully asked Huxley if it was his grandmother or grandfather who has been the ape? Huxley turned on him and said, “I’d rather be descended from a monkey than from someone who would so prostitute the truth.”

This story has been retold many times. The moral of the story is: when Darwin published his theory, he was opposed by the slippery, dishonest, obfuscating, bible-thumping God-botherers who refused to face the facts, instead resorting to personal attacks to preserve their ridiculous fairy-tales. Thankfully, the heroic scientists, who were all atheists and instantly saw that Darwin’s theory was completely true, swept in to defend reason, truth and integrity using the power of the zinger. Take that, Bishop! And thus, religion was defeated. (I like to imagine that it looked a bit like this).

Here is Huxley showing Slippery Sam how it’s done:

We are too loyal pupils of inductive philosophy to start back from any conclusion by reason of its strangeness. Newton’s patient philosophy taught him to find in the falling apple the law which governs the silent movements of the stars in their courses; and if Mr Darwin can with the same correctness of reasoning demonstrate to us our fungular descent, we shall dismiss our pride, and avow, with the characteristic humility of philosophy, our unsuspected cousinship with the mushrooms. … We have no sympathy with those who object to any fact or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears is taught by Revelation.

We must put our personal preferences aside and follow the evidence wherever it leads. Exemplary. Except, dear reader, Huxley didn’t say it. Wilberforce did. The passage about comes from Wilberforce’s review of Origin of the Species, published in The Quarterly Review five weeks before the Oxford debate. Wilberforce’s speech at the debate was a condensed version of the review. Most of the review is a scientific evaluation of Darwin’s theory – it turns out that Wilberforce was “something of an ornithologist” (Lucas), and a vice-president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Darwin read Wilberforce’s review, commenting: “It is uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the difficulties.” Wilberforce was not ignorant of the science. He was also not alone is his scepticism of Darwin; Lucas says: “although there were significant exceptions, it must be remembered that, as The Athenaeum correctly reports, ‘The most eminent naturalists assembled at Oxford’ were on Wilberforce’s side”. Other scientists were critical of Darwin’s theory in the debate. Huxley debated Prof. Richard Owen two days before Wilberforce on the scientific merits of Darwin’s theory. Wilberforce’s participation is not surprising: remember that in the 1860’s, the profession of “scientist” still overlapped with the parson-naturalist, preaching on Sunday and compiling biological field notes during the week. In the period 1831-65 no fewer than forty-one Anglican clergy had presided over the various sections of the British Association (Brooke).

What, then, of the debate? Firstly, it wasn’t – scientific papers had been presented by others, and neither Wilberforce nor Huxley spoke until called upon by members of the audience and the presiding officer. The classic version of the clash comes from the October 1898 issue of Macmillan’s Magazine, in an article entitled `A Grandmother’s tales’.

Then the Bishop rose, and in a light scoffing tone, florid and he assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution; rock-pigeons were what rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey? On this Mr Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us, and spoke those tremendous words – words which no one seems sure of now, nor I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to carried out: I, for one, jumped out of my seat.

It is, however, rather difficult (though not impossible; see Jensen) to find an account of the incident before this one, which you will notice is 38 years after the event. The contemporary accounts in The Atheneum and Jackson’s Oxford Journal report neither the tremendous words nor their tremendous effect. A letter written the day after from the English botanist Joseph Hooker to his close friend Charles Darwin doesn’t mention it. Canon Farrar’s letter to Huxley’s son paints a different picture:

[Wilberforce’s words] did not appear vulgar, nor insolent nor personal, but flippant. … [He] rhetorically invoked the help of feeling: and said … `If anyone were to be willing to trace his descent through an ape as his grandfather, would he be willing to trace his descent similarly on the side of his grandmother.’ It was (you see) the arousing the antipathy about degrading women to [apes]. … It did not sound insolent, but unscientific and unworthy of the zoological argument which he had been sustaining. It was a bathos [an abrupt transition in style from the exalted to the commonplace]. Your father’s reply …  showed that there was a vulgarity as well as a folly in the Bishop’s words; and the impression distinctly was, that the Bishop’s party as they left the room, felt abashed; and recognised that the Bishop had forgotten to behave like a gentleman. The victory of your father, was not the ironical dexterity shown by him, but the fact that he had got a victory in respect of manners and good breeding.

We have here Wilberforce’s words; it doesn’t seem to be a personal attack on Huxley. Wilberforce, in his review in The Atheneum, had noted the potential for Darwin’s theory to be misused as a justification for racism. Wilberforce argued that Darwin’s theory was degrading to humanity. It is hardly surprising that Wilberforce would be concerned with such things, given his father’s magnum opus. To drive home his point he appealed not just to the ape ancestors of one’s grandfather, but also one’s grandmother, which he hoped would hold more emotive force. It is undoubtedly a cheap shot, “unscientific and unworthy”, but not one that is characteristic of Wilberforce’s entire speech. Farrar notes how out of character the remark was.

What was Huxley’s response? Here we can appeal to the man himself, in a letter written a few months after the debate:

I was quite ready to met the Right Revd. prelate even on that ground – If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion – I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape. Whereupon there was inextinguishable laughter among the people.

Lucas takes this to mean that Wilberforce didn’t ask the question; Huxley asked it of himself.

There is much more to say about this incident; please read the references below for a more adequate account than mine. Perhaps a more interesting divide between the sides is not in terms of religion but rather age. Wilberforce was 55, established in his position, reputation and influence, part of the tradition of amateur (often clerical) natural philosophers, a status quo power figure. Huxley was 35, having fought for many years for a scientific career, a leader of the persecuted minority of professional scientists, young and ambitious. One eyewitness at Oxford noted that the young men were on Darwin’s side, while the older men were in opposition. Darwin himself noted if his theory were adopted it would be by “young men growing up and replacing the old workers”. Thomas Kuhn would have approved.

My point is not to defend Wilberforce, nor really to say anything on the reception of Darwinism. The point is that the reality is much more interesting than the fable. Scientists who try to teach history should get it right. They should approach the retelling of a historical episode with the same sense of rigour and carefulness with which they approach their own field. In particular, note the danger in reducing a couple of decades of scholarly and popular debate down to an anecdote. You are asking two sentences to summarise an entire intellectual and political climate. Even if the story of Huxley’s zinger were true, does it accurately represent the intellectual debate over Darwin’s theory?

I’ll give the last words to Wilberforce:

It is necessary to remember that there is a wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of Evolution. This proposition is that the whole world … is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed. If this be true, it is no less certain that the existing world lay potentially in the cosmic vapour, and that a sufficient intelligence could, from a knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapour, have predicted, say the state of the fauna of Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the vapour of the breath on a cold winter’s day. [The doctrine of evolution] does not even come into contact with Theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine.

Oh dear, I’ve done it again. Those are Huxley’s words.

References:

(Note the easy way to spot that I’m not a historian: all my references are secondary. I haven’t read the primary sources.)

John Hedley Brooke, ‘The Wilberforce-Huxley Debate: Why Did it Happen?’ (Available online.)

Lindberg, David C.; Numbers, Ronald L. (1986). “Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science”. Church History (Cambridge University Press) 55 (3): 338–354

John R. Lucas, ‘Wilberforce and Huxley: a legendary encounter’, The Historical Journal, 22 (1979), 313-30

J. Vernon Jensen, ‘Return to the Wilberforce-Huxley debate’, British Journal for the History of Science, 21 (1988), 161-79

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