Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (4 page)

In the first week of March 1900, amid the worst storm in living memory, Arthur Evans stepped ashore at Candia (now Heraklion) on the north shore of Crete.
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Aged 49, Evans was a paradoxical man, ‘flamboyant, and oddly modest; dignified and loveably ridiculous…. He could be fantastically kind, and fundamentally uninterested in other people…. He was always loyal to his friends, and never gave up doing something he had set his heart on for the sake of someone he loved.’
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Evans had been keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford for sixteen years but even so did not yet rival his father in eminence. Sir John Evans was probably the greatest of British antiquaries at the time, an authority on stone hand axes and on pre-Roman coins.

By 1900 Crete was becoming a prime target for archaeologists if they could only obtain permission to dig there. The island had attracted interest as a result of the investigations of the German millionaire merchant Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890), who had abandoned his wife and children to study archaeology. Undeterred by the sophisticated reservations of professional archaeologists, Schliemann forced on envious colleagues a major reappraisal of the classical world after his discoveries had shown that many so-called myths – such as Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey
– were grounded in fact. In 1870 he began to excavate Mycenae and Troy, where so much of Homer’s story takes place, and his findings transformed scholarship. He identified nine cities on the site of Troy, the second of which he concluded was that described in the
Iliad.
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Schliemann’s discoveries changed our understanding of classical Greece, but they raised almost as many questions as they answered, among them where the brilliant pre-Hellenic civilisation mentioned in both the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
had first arisen. Excavations right across the eastern Mediterranean confirmed that such a civilisation had once existed, and when scholars reexamined the work of classical writers, they found that Homer, Hesiod, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Strabo had all referred to a King Minos, ‘the great lawgiver,’ who had rid the Aegean of pirates and was invariably described as a son of Zeus. And Zeus, again according to ancient texts, was supposed to have been born in a Cretan cave.
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It was against this background that in the early 1880s a Cretan farmer chanced upon a few large jars and fragments of pottery of Mycenaean character at
Knossos,
a site inland from Candia and two hundred and fifty miles from Mycenae, across open sea. That was a very long way in
classical times, so what was the link between the two locations? Schliemann visited the spot himself but was unable to negotiate excavation rights. Then, in 1883, in the trays of some antiquities dealers in Shoe Lane in Athens, Arthur Evans came across some small three- and four-sided stones perforated and engraved with symbols. He became convinced that these symbols belonged to a hieroglyphic system, but not one that was recognisably Egyptian. When he asked the dealers, they said the stones came from Crete.
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Evans had already considered the possibility that Crete might be a stepping stone in the diffusion of culture from Egypt to Europe, and if this were the case it made sense for the island to have its own script midway between the writing systems of Africa and Europe (evolutionary ideas were everywhere, by now). He was determined to go to Crete. Despite his severe shortsightedness, and a propensity for acute bouts of seasickness, Evans was an enthusiastic traveller.
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He first set foot in Crete in March 1894 and visited Knossos. Just then, political trouble with the Ottoman Empire meant that the island was too dangerous for making excavations. However, convinced that significant discoveries were to be made there, Evans, showing an initiative that would be impossible today,
bought
part of the Knossos grounds, where he had observed some blocks of gypsum engraved with a system of hitherto unknown writing. Combined with the engravings on the stones in Shoe Lane, Athens, this was extremely promising.
³⁰

Evans wanted to buy the entire site but was not able to do so until 1900, by which time Turkish rule was fairly stable. He immediately launched a major excavation. On his arrival, he moved into a ‘ramshackle’ Turkish house near the site he had bought, and thirty locals were hired to do the initial digging, supplemented later by another fifty. They started on 23 March, and to everyone’s surprise made a significant find straight away.
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On the second day they uncovered the remains of an ancient house, with fragments of frescoes – in other words, not just any house, but a house belonging to a civilisation. Other finds came thick and fast, and by 27 March, only four days into the dig, Evans had already grasped the fundamental point about Knossos, which made him famous beyond the narrow confines of archaeology:
there was nothing Greek and nothing Roman
about the discoveries there. The site was much earlier. During the first weeks of excavation, Evans uncovered more dramatic material than most archaeologists hope for in a lifetime: roads, palaces, scores of frescoes, human remains – one cadaver still wearing a vivid tunic. He found sophisticated drains, bathrooms, wine cellars, hundreds of pots, and a fantastic elaborate royal residence, which showed signs of having been burned to the ground. He also unearthed thousands of clay tablets with ‘something like cursive writing’ on them.
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These became known as the fabled Linear A and B scripts, the first of which has not been deciphered to this day. But the most eye-catching discoveries were the frescoes that decorated the plastered walls of the palace corridors and apartments. These wonderful pictures of ancient life vividly portrayed men and women with refined faces and graceful forms, and whose dress was unique. As Evans quickly grasped, these people – who were contemporaries of the early biblical pharaohs, 2500–1500
B.C. —
were just as civilised as them, if not more
so; indeed they outshone even Solomon hundreds of years before his splendour would become a fable among Israelites.
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Evans had in fact discovered an entire civilisation, one that was completely unknown before and could claim to have been produced by the first civilised Europeans. He named the civilisation he had discovered the Minoan because of the references in classical writers and because although these Bronze Age Cretans worshipped all sorts of animals, it was a bull cult, worship of the Minotaur, that appeared to have predominated. In the frescoes Evans discovered many scenes of bulls – bulls being worshipped, bulls used in athletic events and, most notable of all, a huge plaster relief of a bull excavated on the wall of one of the main rooms of Knossos Palace.

Once the significance of Evans’s discoveries had sunk in, his colleagues realised that Knossos was indeed the setting for part of Homer’s
Odyssey
and that Ulysses himself goes ashore there. Evans spent more than a quarter of a century excavating every aspect of Knossos. He concluded, somewhat contrary to what he had originally thought, that the Minoans were formed from the fusion, around 2000
B.C.,
of immigrants from Anatolia with the native Neolithic population. Although this people constructed towns with elaborate palaces at the centre (the Knossos Palace was so huge, and so intricate, it is now regarded as the Labyrinth of the
Odyssey),
Evans also found that large town houses were not confined to royalty only but were inhabited by other citizens as well. For many scholars, this extension of property, art, and wealth in general marked the Minoan culture as the birth of Western civilisation, the ‘mother culture’ from which the classical world of Greece and Rome had evolved.
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Two weeks after Arthur Evans landed in Crete, on 24 March 1900, the very week that the archaeologist was making the first of his great discoveries,
Hugo de Vries,
a Dutch botanist, solved a very different – and even more important – piece of the evolution jigsaw. In Mannheim he read a paper to the German Botanical Society with the title ‘The Law of Segregation of Hybrids.’

De Vries – a tall, taciturn man – had spent the previous years since 1889 experimenting with the breeding and hybridisation of plants, including such well-known flowers as asters, chrysanthemums, and violas. He told the meeting in Mannheim that as a result of his experiments he had formed the view that the character of a plant, its inheritance, was ‘built up out of definite units’; that is, for each characteristic – such as the length of the stamens or the colour of the leaves – ‘there corresponds a particular form of material bearer.’ (The German words was in fact
Träger,
which may also be rendered as ‘transmitter.’) And he added, most significantly, ‘There are no transitions between these elements.’ Although his language was primitive, although he was feeling his way, that night in Mannheim de Vries had identified what later came to be called
genes.
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He noted, first, that certain characteristics of flowers – petal colour, for example – always occurred in one or other form but never in between. They were always white or red, say, never pink. And second, he had also identified the property of genes that we now recognise as ‘dominance’ and ‘recession,’ that some forms tend to predominate over others after these forms
have been crossed (bred). This was a major discovery. Before the others present could congratulate him, however, he added something that has repercussions to this day. ‘These two propositions’, he said, referring to genes and dominance/recession, ‘were, in essentials, formulated long ago by
Mendel….
They fell into oblivion, however, and were misunderstood…. This important monograph [of Mendel’s] is so rarely quoted that I myself did not become acquainted with it until I had concluded most of my experiments, and had independently deduced the above propositions.’ This was a very generous acknowledgement by de Vries. It cannot have been wholly agreeable for him to find, after more than a decade’s work, that he had been ‘scooped’ by some thirty years.
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The monograph that de Vries was referring to was ‘Experiments in Plant-Hybridisation,’ which Pater Gregor Mendel, a Benedictine monk, had read to the Brünn Society for the Study of Natural Science on a cold February evening in 1865. About forty men had attended the society that night, and this small but fairly distinguished gathering was astonished at what the rather stocky monk had to tell them, and still more so at the following month’s meeting, when he launched into a complicated account of the mathematics behind dominance and recession. Linking maths and botany in this way was regarded as distinctly odd. Mendel’s paper was published some months later in the
Proceedings of the Brünn Society for the Study of Natural Science,
together with an enthusiastic report, by another member of the society, of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which had been published seven years before. The
Proceedings
of the Brünn Society were exchanged with more than 120 other societies, with copies sent to Berlin, Vienna, London, St Petersburg, Rome, and Uppsala (this is how scientific information was disseminated in those days). But little attention was paid to Mendel’s theories.
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It appears that the world was not ready for Mendel’s approach. The basic notion of Darwin’s theory, then receiving so much attention, was the variability of species, whereas the basic tenet of Mendel was the constancy, if not of species, at least of their elements. It was only thanks to de Vries’s assiduous scouring of the available scientific literature that he found the earlier publication. No sooner had he published his paper, however, than two more botanists, at Tubingen and Vienna, reported that they also had recently rediscovered Mendel’s work. On 24 April, exactly a month after de Vries had released his results,
Carl Correns
published in the
Reports of the German Botanical Society
a ten-page account entitled ‘Gregor Mendel’s Rules Concerning the Behaviour of Racial Hybrids.’ Correns’s discoveries were very similar to those of de Vries. He too had scoured the literature – and found Mendel’s paper.
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And then in June of that same year, once more in the
Reports of the German Botanical Society,
there appeared over the signature of the Viennese botanist
Erich Tschermak
a paper entitled ‘On Deliberate Cross-Fertilisation in the Garden Pea,’ in which he arrived at substantially the same results as Correns and de Vries. Tschermak had begun his own experiments, he said, stimulated by Darwin, and he too had discovered Mendel’s paper in the Brünn Society
Proceedings.
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It was an extraordinary coincidence, a chain of events that has lost none of its force as
the years have passed. But of course, it is not the coincidence that chiefly matters. What matters is that the mechanism Mendel had recognised, and the others had rediscovered, filled in a major gap in what can claim to be the most influential idea of all time: Darwin’s theory of evolution.

In the walled garden of his monastery, Mendel had procured thirty-four more or less distinct varieties of peas and subjected them to two years of testing. Mendel deliberately chose a variety (some were smooth or wrinkled, yellow or green, long-stemmed or short-stemmed) because he knew that one side of each variation was dominant – smooth, yellow, or long-stemmed, for instance, rather than wrinkled, green, or short-stemmed. He knew this because when peas were crossed with themselves, the first generation were always the same as their parents. However, when he self-fertilised this first generation, or F, as it was called, to produce an F
₂
generation, he found that the arithmetic was revealing. What happened was that 253 plants produced 7,324 seeds. Of these, he found that 5,474 were smooth and 1,850 were wrinkled, a ratio of 2.96:1. In the case of seed colour, 258 plants produced 8,023 seeds: 6,022 yellow and 2,001 green, a ratio of 3.01:1. As he himself concluded, ‘In this generation along with the
dominant traits
the
recessive
ones appear in their full expression, and they do so in the decisively evident average proportion of 3:1, so that among the four plants of this generation three show the dominant and one the recessive character.’
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This enabled Mendel to make the profound observation that for many characteristics, the heritable quality existed in only
two
forms, the dominant and recessive strains, with
no
intermediate form. The universality of the 3:1 ratio across a number of characteristics confirmed this.
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Mendel also discovered that these characteristics exist in sets, or chromosomes, which we will come to later. His figures and ideas helped explain how Darwinism, and evolution, worked. Dominant and recessive genes governed the variability of life forms, passing different characteristics on from generation to generation, and it was this variability on which natural selection exerted its influence, making it more likely that certain organisms reproduced to perpetuate their genes.