A Brief History of Creation (23 page)

A century later, cholera would be known as a relatively benign condition easily treated by intense hydration and replacement of mineral salts. In Bastian's time, the typical treatment for such diuretic conditions was
to actually
restrict
the amount of water that those afflicted drank, which usually made the disease fatal.

Cholera is caused by a bacterium now known as
Vibrio cholerae
, but in the nineteenth century, most British medical men believed that illnesses were passed through the air as vapors. These were called “miasmas,” from the Greek for “pollution,” and the theory came to be called the miasmatic theory of disease. Medical vernacular is still filled with words suggesting an airborne source of illness. “Malaria,” for instance, means “bad air.” In London, where industrialization and its concomitant burning of coal had led to the persistent grayish-brown “London fog”—what we would now
call smog—the idea that air could be bad for one's health had a particular salience. So did the fact that disease spread rapidly among the growing ranks of the urban poor, who lived in filthy, overcrowded slums without proper sewage. To combat cholera, people took steps to contain the unhealthy vapors that had become associated with its spread. Barrels of tar and vinegar were set afire in infested streets to purge the air. Houses were doused with solutions made from lime.

Burning barrels of tar to ward off miasmas during the Manchester cholera outbreak of 1832.

By the time of Bastian's investigations into spontaneous generation, a competing theory had started to gain traction. The zymotic theory, now more commonly known as the germ theory of disease, held that many illnesses were caused by microscopic organisms. It was not a new theory, but the biggest hurdle it faced was a simple fact that almost everyone who dealt with disease understood: one did not actually have to touch an infected person to catch a disease like cholera, but could merely be in the presence of an infected person, breathing the same air. The means of transmission in such cases was unknown but was about to be solved by Louis Pasteur.

I
N 1865, PASTEUR RECEIVED
a letter from Jean-Baptiste Dumas, a famous chemist and devout Catholic supporter of Napoleon III. From the south of France, the heart of France's growing silk industry, Dumas wrote that, “misery is greater here than anything one can imagine.”

Since the late eighteenth century, France had been steadily encroaching on the Chinese monopoly of silk production. Most of the silk production was centered around the city of Lyon, which had become the silk capital of Europe. Whole forests had been cut down to make room for the golden-leaved mulberry trees that supplied the leaves upon which the silkworms fed. But a mysterious disease spreading among the silkworms had begun to cripple the economy of the region. In desperation, the silk producers turned to Pasteur. Though he had little experience in biology outside his work on fermentation, Pasteur devoted himself to finding the source of the disease, which he eventually traced to parasitic microbes that preyed on silkworm eggs.

Pasteur's discovery saved the silk industry. It also led him to realize
that he could turn his expertise to the problem of infectious disease in people, where he would make his most lasting impact as a scientist. Pasteur's interest in disease had a personal dimension: he had lost two young daughters to typhoid fever.

Soon, Pasteur brought his experience with the spontaneous generation question to bear on the notion that germs were the cause of most disease. If his theory of airborne bacteria was indeed true, it stood to reason that bacteria could spread disease in the same way. The transmission of the disease by bacteria would solve germ theory's biggest conundrum, the mystery of infection without direct contact.

Initially, the idea of airborne bacteria causing disease was a notion on the fringes of the medical community, particularly in Britain. Doctors could often see bacteria in samples taken from infected patients, but they usually attributed their presence as a side effect—a
result
of the disease—rather than the cause. Most British physicians believed these bacteria were spontaneously generated, and they doubted Pasteur's assertion that germs could travel through the air. Bastian became a champion of miasmatic theory and argued that his own experiments on spontaneous generation provided a more sensible explanation for the presence of bacteria. Rather than floating through the air, they were spontaneously generated results of infection. The conflict over spontaneous generation thus became wrapped up in the conflict between the zymotic and miasmatic theories of disease.

A
FTER HUXLEY
, the next-most-important member of the X Club was the brilliant physicist John Tyndall, holder of England's singularly most prestigious scientific post, Professor of Natural Philosophy of the Royal Institution, where he had succeeded the great Michael Faraday. Tyndall built a sterling reputation through his experimental work on the electromagnetic properties of crystals. Later, he made huge strides in explaining the effects of infrared radiation on the atmosphere and the composition of ozone.

In his spare time, Tyndall was an avid mountain climber. He was the first person to climb the Weisshorn, one of the tallest peaks in the Swiss Alps, and he was one of the first to climb the Matterhorn. During an alpine
expedition in 1869, Tyndall slipped in a rocky pool, severely cutting his leg on a granite outcropping. The resulting abscess had nearly killed him. Tyndall became convinced that airborne bacteria were responsible for his brush with death. He became a leading advocate of Pasteur's theory that germs carried through the air were the cause of disease.

Tyndall's advocacy of germ theory put him at odds with Bastian. Soon, the two men were facing off over germ theory and spontaneous generation in a series of letters to the editor published in the
Times
. Tyndall saw this as a battle to encourage the idea of a professional scientist as opposed to the “quackery” he railed against in the medical community. Bastian meanwhile became the champion of physicians, defending them against encroachment by interlopers from other branches of science who had no experience in medicine.

This was the beginning of Bastian's fall from grace in the eyes of the X Club. Huxley was appalled to see the argument between Tyndall and Bastian being waged in the
Times
. Huxley was striving to maintain a united front capable of advancing the evolutionist cause into mainstream Britain, and he believed it dangerous for the scientists he counted as allies to turn on each other in public forums, especially when one of those forums was the most widely read newspaper in Britain. What's more, Bastian was breaking Huxley's cardinal rule that scientists should show deference to their more experienced and accomplished colleagues.

Bastian had begun to try Huxley's patience even before coming into conflict with Tyndall. Early in Bastian's experimental work, Huxley had taken the young man under his wing. In Bastian, he spotted an opportunity to bring another promising young scientist into the web of influence of the X Club. He had personally watched Bastian conduct his experiments on several occasions to ensure the validity of Bastian's experimental evidence. But Huxley was concerned when traces of moss, considered too complex to be spontaneously generated, appeared in one of Bastian's supposedly hermetically sealed and sterile tubes. There was no accounting for their presence. To Huxley, this fact called into question the eventual appearance of microbes in Bastian's later experiments. As Bastian moved closer to publishing what Huxley knew would be a contentious book, Huxley
advised Bastian to delay publication. On a subject as inflammatory as the origin of life, one had to proceed cautiously.

Huxley himself had learned that lesson the hard way. In 1868, he had been examining an old specimen of mud dredged from the Atlantic seafloor when he discovered a curious organic slime growing on its surface. The slime didn't resemble any known living organism and appeared to have emerged spontaneously in a sterilized sample. Huxley speculated it might be a kind of missing link between living and nonliving matter. He called the slime
Bathybius haeckelii
, in honor of the German philosopher and evolutionist Ernst Haeckel's idea that life had begun with a substance the German naturalist Lorenz Oken had named
Urschleim
(“primordial slime”). In his book
The History of Creation
, Haeckel had used Oken's slime to explain the first rung on his proposed evolutionary ladder. But other scientists were not convinced, seeing
Bathybius
as no more than a common fungus. Huxley sensed that he was precariously close to an Andrew Crosse moment. When
Bathybius
was finally shown to be nothing more than calcium sulfate precipitated from seawater by the ethanol used to preserve specimens, he promptly ate his leek, recanting in a letter published in
Nature
and a mea culpa delivered before the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Huxley's error had been seized upon by opponents of evolution as proof that the whole evolutionary scheme was faulty. The episode taught Huxley the dangers of trying to move too fast, particularly when the evidence was shaky. He had no doubts that life had once arisen in the past, but the very distant past, when conditions on the
Earth were very different. He had moved to a position similar to Darwin's: that the conditions for spontaneous generation were no longer present in the current state of the natural world. Just as Bastian had adopted the name “archebiosis” to describe spontaneous generation, Huxley tried to breathe new life into the concept by giving it a new name. His choice of words was telling. He began calling the process “abiogenesis,” Greek for “nonbiological creation.” The term avoided the connotation of a process ongoing in the present, like the one Aristotle had once imagined. And unlike Bastian's term “archebiosis,” the term “abiogenesis” left room for doubt that it was the source of
all
life. Huxley strongly believed that archebiosis was indeed the source of all life, but he felt it was enough simply to imply it. The idea didn't need to be shoved into people's faces.

Drawing of
Bathybius haekelii
as seen under a microscope.

B
ASTIAN'S BOOK
,
The Beginnings of Life
, posed a challenge for Huxley. Rank-and-file evolutionists were inspired by Bastian's attempt to explain the beginning of evolution, but his anticreationist language frightened religious moderates, threatening to undermine Huxley's attempts to bring these moderates into the evolutionary fold. One of those who could see the overwhelming scientific evidence for Darwin's theory but was repulsed by its implications for his religious belief was the American mathematician George Barnard, the president of Columbia University in New York. Barnard had read Bastian's
Beginnings
and found himself swayed by its reasoning. Yet he still felt compelled to reject all of evolutionary theory because of what it meant to his spiritual beliefs. In an otherwise unremarkable paper that he authored about the germ theory of disease, Barnard meandered into his thoughts about the challenges that evolution and spontaneous generation posed to his own personal religious beliefs. It amounted to one of the most eloquent defenses of faith against reason ever written:

We are told, indeed, that the acceptance of these [evolutionary] views need not shake our faith in the existence of an Almighty Creator. It is beautifully explained to us how they ought to give us more elevated and more worthy conceptions of the modes by which He works His
will in the visible creation. We learn that our complex organisms are none the less the work of His hands because they have been evolved by an infinite series of changes from microscopic forces of light and heat and attraction acting on brute mineral matter. . . . It is indeed a grand conception which regards the Deity as conducting the work of His creation by means of those all-pervading influences which we call the forces of nature; but it leaves us profoundly at a loss to explain the wisdom or the benevolence which brings every day into life such myriads of sentient and intelligent beings, only that they may perish on the morrow of their birth. But this is not all. If these doctrines are true, all talk of creation or methods of creation becomes absurdity; for just as certainly as they are true, God himself is impossible . . . if, in my study of nature, I find the belief forced upon me that my own conscious spirit . . . is but a mere vapor, which appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away forever, that is a truth . . . for which I shall never thank the science which has taught it me. Much as I love truth in the abstract, I love my hope of immortality still more; and if the final outcome of all the boasted discoveries of modern science is to disclose to men that they are more evanescent than the shadow of the swallow's wing upon the lake . . . give me then, I pray, no more science. Let me live on, in my simple ignorance, as my fathers lived before me, and when I shall at length be summoned to my final repose, let me still be able to fold the drapery of my couch about me, and lie down to pleasant, even though they be deceitful dreams.