The Flamingo’s Smile

Prologue

1
| ZOONOMIA (AND EXCEPTIONS)

1 The Flamingo's Smile

2 Only His Wings Remained

3 Sex and Size

4 Living with Connections

5 A Most Ingenious Paradox

2
| THEORY AND PERCEPTION

6 Adam's Navel

7 The Freezing of Noah

8 False Premise, Good Science

9 For Want of a Metaphor

3
| THE IMPORTANCE OF TAXONOMY

10 Of Wasps and WASPs

11 Opus 100

12 Human Equality Is a Contingent Fact of History

13 The Rule of Five

4
| TRENDS AND THEIR MEANING

14 Losing the Edge

Postscript: Strike Three for Babe

15 Death and Transfiguration

16 Reducing Riddles

5
| POLITICS AND PROGRESS

17 To Show an Ape

18 Bound by the Great Chain

19 The Hottentot Venus

20 Carrie Buck's Daughter

21 Singapore's Patrimony (and Matrimony)

6
| DARWINIANA

22 Hannah West's Left Shoulder and the Origin of Natural Selection

23 Darwin at Sea—and the Virtues of Port

24 A Short Way to Corn

7
| LIFE HERE AND ELSEWHERE

25 Just in the Middle

26 Mind and Supermind

27 SETI and the Wisdom of Casey Stengel

8
| EXTINCTION AND CONTINUITY

28 Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs

29 Continuity

30 The Cosmic Dance of Siva

Bibliography

IN THE MEDIEVAL GLASS
of Canterbury Cathedral, an angel appears to the sleeping wise men and warns them to go straight home, and not return to Herod. Below, the corresponding event from the Old Testament teaches the faithful that each moment of Jesus’ life replays a piece of the past and that God has put meaning into time—Lot turns round and his wife becomes a pillar of salt (the white glass forming a striking contrast with the glittering colors that surround her). The common theme of both incidents: don’t look back.

The Flamingo’s Smile
is my fourth volume of essays from monthly columns in
Natural History Magazine;
it also contains my hundredth contribution to a genre that I once considered both more ephemeral and impossible to sustain. Thus, I will also break Lot’s injunction, hope for a sweeter fate, and look back upon the previous volumes.

One brand of Scotch often graces
New Yorker
back covers with its claim that Angus Mac-somebody-or-other (and ancestors of that ilk) have been throwing the caber on the same field since 1367, give or take a few years. “Some things never change,” the bottom line (literally) proclaims. Some things better change (however difficult under punctuated equilibrium), if only to allay boredom, but fundamental themes (like a successful blend) should revel in persistence. If my volumes work at all, they owe their reputation to coherence supplied by the common theme of evolutionary theory. I have a wonderful advantage among essayists because no other theme so beautifully encompasses both the particulars that fascinate and the generalities that instruct.

Evolution is one of the half-dozen shattering ideas that science has developed to overturn past hopes and assumptions, and to enlighten our current thoughts. Evolution is also more personal than the quantum, or the relative motion of earth and sun; it speaks directly to the questions of genealogy that so fascinate us—how and when did we arise, what are our biological relationships with other creatures? And evolution has built all those creatures in stunning variety—an endless source of delight (though not the reason for their existence!), not to mention essays.

To map the changes within this persistence, I reread the prefaces to my other volumes and found a coordinating theme, linked to times of composition, for each.
Ever Since Darwin
, as a first attempt, presented the basics of evolutionary theory as a comprehensive world view with implications for a political world (of years just following the Vietnam War) that treated human diversity more generously.
The Panda’s Thumb
highlighted a series of debates (about rates and results) that arose among professional evolutionists and imparted renewed vigor and range to “this view of life.”
Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes
appeared in the shadow of resurgent Yahooism—so-called “creation science” as preached by Falwell and company—and required a gentle defense of both the veracity and humanity of evolution.

The Flamingo’s Smile
has a different kind of trigger—a specific discovery with cascading implications. It now seems, to use the favored jargon of the profession, “highly probable” that an errant asteroid or shower of comets provoked the great Cretaceous extinction (dinosaur death knell and, conversely, the Introit for our own evolution). Moreover, such quintessentially fortuitous and episodic restructurings of life have occurred several times, perhaps even on a regular cycle of some 25–30 million years. The particulars are striking (pun intended, I suppose), but the general implications are even more arresting, and beautifully coincident with persistent themes that infest all my columns—the meaning of pattern in life’s history (partly random and, in any case, not designed for us or towards us); the social implications of scientific assaults upon pervasive biases of Western thought (my favorite four horsemen of progress, determinism, gradualism, and adaptationism—all severely questioned by the impact theory of mass extinction). At the center stands the one theme that transcends even evolution itself in generality—the nature of history.
The Flamingo’s Smile
is about history and what it means to say that life is the product of a contingent past, not the inevitable and predictable result of simple, timeless laws of nature. Quirkiness and meaning are my two not-so-contradictory themes.

All this sounds awfully tendentious and may lead readers to fear that potential pleasure has been sacrificed on a bloated altar of imagined importance (my volumes have become progressively longer for an unchanging number of essays—a trend more regular than my mapped decline of batting averages from essay 14, and a warning signal of impending trouble if continued past a limit reached, I think, by this collection). My potential salvation in the face of admitted egotism must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with “aha”—while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over. Even my most grandiloquent essay (emphatically not my best)—number 29 on continuity itself—arose as a gloss on a small observation: the mingling of sacred and profane in the iconography of Pio Quatro’s Palace in the Vatican.

I placed my essays on reversals and boundaries (part 1) at the beginning because they best exemplify this style of letting generality cascade out of particulars—three essays on inversions of general expectations (flamingos that feed upside down; female insects that supposedly eat their mates after copulation; flowers and snails that change from male to female, and sometimes back again); and two on continua and the problem of boundaries in nature (are Portuguese men-of-war individuals or colonies, are Siamese twins one person or two). Each essay is both a single long argument and a welding together of particulars.

Throughout most of Europe, the communication of science to a general audience has been viewed as part of humanism, as an honorable intellectual tradition stretching from Galileo, who wrote in Italian to bring science beyond the Latin confines of church and university, to Thomas Henry Huxley, who was as fine a literary stylist as many a great Victorian novelist, to J.B.S. Haldane and Peter Medawar in our own times. In America, this worthy activity has been badly confused with the worst aspects of journalism, and “popularization” has become synonymous in some quarters with bad, simplistic, trivial, cheapened, and adulterated. I follow one cardinal rule in writing these essays—no compromises. I will make language accessible by defining or eliminating jargon; I will not simplify concepts.

I can state all sorts of highfalutin, moral justifications for this approach (and I do believe in them), but the basic reason is simple and personal. I write these essays primarily to aid my own quest to learn and understand as much as possible about nature in the short time allotted. If I play the textbook or TV game of distilling the already known, or shearing away subtlety for bare bones accessible in the vulgar sense (no return work required from consumers), then what’s in it for me?

All these essays are based on original sources in their original languages: none are direct reports from texts and other popular summaries. (The propagation of error, by endless transfer from textbook to textbook, is a troubling and amusing story in its own right—a source of inherited defect almost more stubborn than inborn errors of genetics.) My errors are my errors.

These essays, in this light, fall into three categories. Most are exercises in personal scholarship. Some reach new interpretations (at least to me): I think that my reading of Tyson as a conservative supporter of the chain of being and not as an innovative pioneer of evolution resolves the disparities between his text and the usual analyses (essay 17); I found that Wells’s first statement of natural selection is not so consonant with Darwin’s later version as most commentators have held (essay 22); although Kinsey’s previous life as a wasp taxonomist has not been hidden, I don’t think that its intimate intellectual connection with his sex research had been properly traced (essay 10—I suspect that such a treatment required a professional taxonomist working from the wasp’s end, and not a psychologist proceeding backwards). Other essays represent discoveries of sorts based on new data. It may not be clear from the jocular tone of the essay, but more work (of the dumb tabulatory type—a kind of perverse or benumbing pleasure in itself) lies hidden in my chart of low batting averages through time (essay 14) than in many fancy analyses flaunted in my technical papers on land snails. (Each of my volumes contains an essay in lighter relief—allometry of cathedrals in
Ever Since Darwin
, neoteny of Mickey Mouse in
The Panda’s Thumb
, shrinking Hershey bars in
Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes
, extinction of .400 hitting herein. I often insist that these are serious pieces, and I really mean it—though I will be absolutely crushed if you don’t chuckle. I almost regret the chosen illustration, the history of batting averages, in essay 14, because its general theme—a plea for considering systems rather than abstracted parts—should be part of the fun, not lost in it.)

In a second category, I report the discoveries or interpretations of friends and colleagues, but I embed them in a personal theme. I use Iltis’s theory on the origin of corn (essay 24) to illustrate the most difficult and important evolutionary concept of homology; the discovery of the conodont animal (essay 16) becomes a handle for discussing what may be the basic (but underappreciated) pattern of life’s history—reduction in diversity of morphological designs, with marked expansion among survivors.

The third category sets general themes that need an airing, but searches for quirky or unusual particulars for their illustration. Essays 4 and 5 are an experiment—the same theme twice, with radically different illustrations. I discuss reductionism via the tragic life of E.E. Just (essay 25) and the numerology of antiquated pre-Darwinian taxonomies (essay 13). I temper
the
nature of science with some funny ideas about dinosaurs (essay 28) and a plea for Mr. Gosse (essay 6), who argued that as God created animals with feces in their intestines, so too did he make the earth with coprolites (fossil excrement) in its strata.

I also hope that the arrangement of essays into categories aids my larger purpose by emphasizing, via juxtaposition, the themes expressed in essays taken separately. In making three statements about the chain of being (17–19), I try to show how the unavoidable embedding of science in culture acts both as a constraint (in defending unwarranted prejudice as certified knowledge, with tragic consequences for individual lives—essay 19 on the Hottentot Venus), and as a fruitful prod to new discovery that may influence culture in return (the chain of being guided Tyson to some remarkable data about the anatomy of chimpanzees—essay 17).

My profession embodies one theme even more inclusive than evolution—the nature and meaning of history. History employs evolution to structure biological events in time. History subverts the stereotype of science as a precise, heartless enterprise that strips the uniqueness from any complexity and reduces everything to timeless, repeatable, controlled experiments in a laboratory. Historical sciences are different, not lesser. Their methods are comparative, not always experimental; they explain, but do not usually try to predict; they recognize the irreducible quirkiness that history entails, and acknowledge the limited power of present circumstances to impose or elicit optimal solutions; the queen among their disciplines is taxonomy, the Cinderella of the sciences. As I wrote
Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes
, I watched with almost detached amusement as history slowly emerged in the forefront of my concerns. It has spread through this volume like a transposon. The flamingo’s smile (like the panda’s thumb) is its synecdoche—a quirky structure, constrained by a different past, and cobbled together from parts available.

Essay 12, on contingent vs. necessary facts, may be my most direct statement about history, but this subject laces the entire volume. I pondered for a long time about my hundredth essay, for I thought that it should epitomize my efforts. I wrote on the importance of taxonomy, as applied to the West Indian land snails that serve as a focus for my technical research in biology. Taxonomy, the most underappreciated of all sciences, is the keystone of historical disciplines. Part 3 celebrates taxonomy in many guises. Other essays also discuss the methods of history—essay 24 on homology as a guide to descent; essays 4 and 5 on the meaning of boundaries in a world of continua.

Several sections treat the patterns that history produces by its mandated process of evolution—part 4 on trends in the history of life (and some smaller systems); part 8 on extinction as so much more than a negative force; part 7 on life here on earth, and the predictions that history permits about life elsewhere (the limits of contingency again, I fear, rather than the blueprints for ET). Finally, if history matters and science cannot be reduced to robotic experiment, then the interplay of science with culture and personality is no mere nuisance, but a spur to creativity and a key to understanding. Part 5 treats the interplay for themes of human evolution. Part 2 preaches respect for fine scientists who were misunderstood or ridiculed by the arrogant approach that regarded history only as a repository of error and, thereby, a source of moral instruction. I confess a particular fondness for essay 5 and its poignant subject.

If Alvarez’s asteroid was the external prod to cohesion, this book has an internal theme as well. It is no particular secret that I have spent the last few years fighting cancer. My disease was diagnosed just a week after the last volume went to the printers. This book becomes, therefore, a kind of
roman à clef
(complete, I hope) to a personal odyssey. Essay 19, “The Hottentot Venus,” was the first piece I wrote as a member of this largest involuntary club—and its last line was my
touché
. When arranged in their order of appearance in
Natural History
, these essays may trace an emotional journey (though I do not choose to pursue the analysis). I will only say that some essays are spare in their exegetical style of commentary on single historical texts (for I couldn’t reach the libraries for my usual ramblings, and several nights with a beautiful old book were such a solace), while others are downright baroque in their patchwork of detail (my simple joy in being able once again).