The Flamingo’s Smile (26 page)

Yet, though Tyson didn’t pursue this issue, the chain’s gap between human and angel became a major impetus for early speculations about a subject currently popular and, for the first time, perhaps approachable—exobiology (see essays in part 7). For the obvious solution must contend that creatures more advanced than humans, and plugging the gap between man and angel, inhabit other planets. The philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, argued that a large and heavy planet like Jupiter must support such higher creatures. And Alexander Pope gave them explicit notice in his couplets on the chain of being from his
Essay on Man
(while praising Isaac Newton as a paragon of earthly wisdom at the same time):

Pope only indulged in reveries framed in heroic couplets. Tyson was the man who first showed an ape with accuracy and admirable thoroughness.

IN
A Child’s Garden of Verses
, Robert Louis Stevenson labeled the following couplet as a Happy Thought:

Yet most of us do not rejoice when we contemplate the overwhelming diversity of nature; we are stunned by complexity and confusion. We cannot be satisfied until we have established some kind of order; we must make sense of the bewildering variety by classifying it.

Evolution is a satisfying ordering principle and we use it without hesitation today, for evolution both records the pathway of nature and allows us to classify organisms in a coherent manner. But what systems did scientists use before evolution became so popular during the nineteenth century? The “great chain of being,” or even gradation of all living things, surely held pride of place among all competitors. Arthur Lovejoy, the celebrated historian of ideas who traced the lineage of this notion in his greatest work (see bibliography), called the chain of being “one of the half-dozen most potent and persistent presuppositions in Western thought. It was, in fact, until not much more than a century ago probably the most widely familiar conception of the general scheme of things, of the constitutive pattern of the universe.”

In the great chain of being, each organism forms a definite link in a single sequence leading from the lowest amoeba in a drop of water to ever more complex beings, culminating in, you guessed it, our own exalted selves.

wrote Alexander Pope in his expostulations in heroic couplets from the
Essay on Man
.

Since we tend to confuse evolution with progress, the chain of being has often been misinterpreted as a primitive version of evolutionary theory. Although some nineteenth-century thinkers, in Lovejoy’s words, “temporalized” the chain and converted it into a ladder that organisms might climb in their evolutionary advance, the original chain of being was explicitly and vehemently antievolutionary. The chain is a static ordering of unchanging, created entities—a set of creatures placed by God in fixed positions of an ascending hierarchy representing neither time nor history, but the eternal order of things. The static nature of the chain defines its ideological function: Each creature must be satisfied with its assigned place—the serf in his hovel as well as the lord in his castle—for any attempt to rise will disrupt the universe’s established order. Again, Alexander Pope:

In this essay I shall analyze the arguments presented in England’s last influential defense of the chain as a static order—physician and biologist Charles White’s 1799 treatise, “An account of the regular gradation in man, and in different animals and vegetables.” Charles White (1728–1813), who lived and practiced in Manchester, England, was a surgeon renowned for his work in obstetrics, particularly for his insistence on absolute cleanliness during delivery. In 1795, he presented his thoughts on the chain of being to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester. He published the results four years later.

For this conservative physician, the chain functioned in its usual way as an ideological support for social stability and traditional values. From the static nature of the chain itself, White inferred the necessary existence of God as a creative agent—for the only alternative would convert the chain into a temporal product of evolution, a clearly unacceptable interpretation. In the last line of his treatise, White justifies his labors by writing that “whatever tends to display the wisdom, order, and harmony of the creation, and to evince the necessity of recurring to a Deity as a first cause, must be agreeable to man.” And although White expressed his opposition to slavery, and insisted that he merely wished to examine a proposition in natural history, not to cast aspersions upon any race, his conventional ranking of human groups with European whites on top and African blacks on the bottom certainly reinforced the prejudices of his comfortable Caucasian contemporaries. White insisted, speaking of himself:

The chain of being had always vexed biologists because, in some objective sense, it doesn’t seem to describe nature very well. How can we arrange all organisms in a single, finely gradated chain when enormous gaps seem to pervade nature’s system—what comes between plants and animals or invertebrates and vertebrates, for example? And how can we place into a hierarchy of perfection those creatures that seem to represent equivalent variations of a basic design, not lower or higher productions—the breeds of dogs, for example, or the persistent dilemma of human racial diversity?

In an important way the chain of being had always been a bad argument, even in its own terms and for its own time—at least if one believes that a theory about nature should record its literal appearance accurately (a criterion not always in vogue among the learned). Paradoxically, this very feature of poor harmony with nature makes the chain of being a particularly interesting subject for analysis. Good arguments don’t provide nearly as much insight into human thought, for we can simply say that we have seen nature aright and have properly pursued the humble task of mapping things accurately and objectively. But bad arguments must be defended in the face of nature’s opposition, a task that takes some doing. The analysis of this “doing” often provides us with insight into the ideology or thought processes of an age, if not into the modes of human reasoning itself. White’s defense of the static chain is particularly forthright and unsubtle, but no different in substance from other, more sophisticated versions. It thus becomes an excellent primer for the construction of dubious arguments.

White regarded the various human races as separately created species (consistent with his antievolutionary view of gradation in the chain of being) and devoted his treatise to ordering these races as a single sequence from lower to higher. His book pursues two difficult arguments (in sequence) to reach its dubious conclusion. First, White must justify the chain of being in general, and amidst the large gaps that seem to separate plants from animals, and apes from humans. Second, he must arrange human races in a single chain, even though their variation is so multifarious that diverse criteria seem to yield different orderings. In short, how do you construct a single chain when nature seems to present abundant variation but little hierarchy?

The first part of White’s treatise attempts to justify the chain as a general ordering principle for all of life. He first tackles the problem of apparent gaps between major kingdoms, plants and animals in particular. Previous advocates of the chain had generally “resolved” this dilemma by proposing fanciful arguments for intermediate forms. Thus, Charles Bonnet advocated asbestos as transitional between minerals and plants because its fibrous nature recalled the vascular systems of plants. And the freshwater hydra, a relative of corals, was widely heralded, after its discovery in 1739, as an intermediate form between plants and animals because (like plants) it seemed to lack complex internal organs and it propagated asexually by budding.

White paid traditional homage to hydras, but his main strategy for bridging the gap between plants and animals invoked an argument for similarity of anatomical design—for if he could show that plants and animals did not differ in basic design, but proceeded from the same mold with plants as less complex versions of the same fundamental plan, then a single order could be constructed. White proposed three poor arguments in attempting to establish a unity of structure between plants and animals. First, he invoked some bad analogies in claiming, for example, that since plants drop their leaves and mammals shed their hair, a fundamental similarity unites bushes and baboons. Second, he plied simple misinformation in claiming that plants have lungs for breathing. Third, he cited similarities now judged irrelevant because they are too general to support any claim for structural similarity—for example, that plants, as well as animals, are subject to disease.

To plug the largest perceived gap at the other end of the scale—that between apes and humans (although it seems smaller to us today)—White employed the same poor arguments. He did not bother to establish unity of design (even an ape’s biggest detractor could not deny anatomical similarity with humans). Instead, he tried to raise the status of apes while lowering the worth of supposedly inferior people. Using bad analogies (or transferring human concepts to animal behavior), he argued that baboons assign sentinels to watch over their sleeping herds by night. In an amusing passage, and on the theme of simple misinformation, White elevated orangutans by arguing that they willingly submit to that most enlightened of contemporary medical practices—bloodletting: “When sick, these animals have been known to suffer themselves to be blooded, and even to invite the operation; and to submit to other necessary treatment, like rational creatures.” Then, in a double whammy designed to raise apes and debase black humans, he portrayed the simians as both slavers and sexual abusers (ever so human, if not particularly admirable):

Having thus established the chain as a finely nuanced sequence embracing all living things, White proceeded to the major subject of his treatise: the ranking of human races in a single order with his own group on top. For more than 100 pages, structure after structure and organ after organ, White strives mightily to arrange the races as a single sequence. The effort was an intellectual struggle involving the uncomfortable fit of recalcitrant data into a predetermined scheme; for differences among races cannot easily be linearized, no matter how strong one’s a priori commitment to such an arrangement. Moreover, when we force characters into single sequences, we cannot always establish the same directions for each character—blacks may exhibit less of some admirable qualities than whites, but whites will surely rank lower for other features. How did White deal with these inconsistencies and threats to his system?

I can make most sense of White’s efforts by arranging his discussions of particular features into four categories—and by noting that only one comfortably matches his preferred scheme of a single chain rising from “lower” animals to “inferior” races (African blacks at the bottom and Orientals in the middle) and finally to European whites at the summit. The first category includes admirable traits possessed in greater quantity by whites, lesser by blacks, and still less by beasts. For example, using some dubious measures (for human races do not differ substantially in the size of their brains, as if it mattered), White argued that blacks occupied an intermediate position in a heterogeneous sequence of brain size, ranging from birds to dogs to apes and finally through “lower” human races to white Europeans (see figure of White’s diversely cobbled chain of being above). But only this category among his four affirmed White’s presuppositions. The other three imposed distinct and pressing problems in interpretation. White, however, was equal to the task.

Charles White’s heterogeneous version of the chain of being. Note particularly the “ascent” of human races to the abstract ideal of Greek statuary.
FROM WHITE,
1799.
REPRINTED FROM NATURAL HISTORY
.

The second category includes those admirable traits that, to White’s embarrassment, are more abundantly distributed among black people. White dealt with this dilemma by arguing that, although the traits must be deemed valuable, beasts are even better endowed—so the sequence still runs from beast to black to white. He writes: “In these last particulars the order is changed, the European being the lowest, the African higher, and the brute creation still higher in the scale.” Blacks, for example, sweat less than whites—a seeming advance in refinement (although White assures us that blacks have a stronger body odor than Caucasians). White comments:

Similarly, black females have less copious menstruation—a clear increment in daintiness over whites. But most apes bleed even less or not at all. Blacks excel whites in memory, but lower animals are the all-time champs; elephants truly never forget. Indeed, White manages to degrade anything admirable about blacks by attributing more of the same to lower animals. Blacks, he claims for example, tolerate pain better than whites. He cites a colleague who wrote: