A Question of Science - Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral - David Dobbs

Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral - David Dobbs (2005)

Part II

Chapter 11. A Question of Science

I

FOR THE FIRST TIME since Anna’s death, Alexander felt something other than duty drawing him forward. “I can’t tell you what a pleasant time I have had in Edinburgh,” he wrote Wyville Thomson toward the end of his visit. “It is really the first time since the death of my father and my wife that I have felt in the least as if there were anything to live for, and I hope you have put me on the track to get into harness again.”

For a man who lived mainly for work (and disinclined to reflection), this was a startling declaration of rebirth. What he had found to live for were not the echinoderms he had brought back to Cam bridge, though he did dutifully classify those over the next few years. What Alex had found were the reefs. In the mystery of their genesis glimmered something alluring enough to tug him free of the past.

Hindsight, of course, makes it easy to see how Alexander Agassiz, finally moving forward to pursue coral reefs, set out on a path back into his own history. For all the light, adventure, and new terrain reefs promised, they held for Alex treacherous ground full of holes and old snags. In letters and the dozens of monographs he would publish about reefs, he usually projected an air of unprejudiced scientific interest, and when he grew passionate in print, as he did in a few notable spots, the proximate cause was always an issue of science-the reading of strata, the interpretation of a pattern of soundings, a colleague’s rush to theory. He clearly liked to feel that he was approaching the question from a disinterested place and that when he got mad, he did so on principle.

John Murray s coral reef theory. Murray speculated that reef foundations were formed when a high submarine mound (A)accumulated enough planktonic debris (B) to reach coral-friendly depths, allowing coral to grow upward into an atoll (C).

Yet the reef question carried immense emotional implications for Alexander-too great, perhaps, to be admissible. It inevitably engaged not just his ferocious beliefs about how to do science but his mixed emotions, buried but still strong, about the entwined fates and legacies of Darwin and his own father. This was perhaps unavoidable, so entangled were the two men’s scientific philosophies and personal histories. For Alex, the great clash between idealism and empiricism-the central conflict within his time’s science and culture-was unavoidably enmeshed with family history.

It wasn’t enough, for instance, that in taking up coral reefs Alex, like his father, committed to both an evidentiary and a philosophical battle with Darwin (albeit this time with Darwin taking the more speculative stand). He also took on many of his father’s most formidable personal rivals. The most significant was James Dwight Dana, who as a young naturalist on the Wilkes expedition (an American-sponsored scientific voyage that circled the globe from 1838 to 1842) had collected so much evidence to bolster Darwin’s reef theory. This was the same Dana who had helped Asa Gray evict Louis from his throne in the 1860s, embarrassing Louis in the American Journal of Science in 1862 when Louis tried to defend the Desor book that he hadn’t read, and it was the same Dana who had switched voting groups at the 1864 National Academy of Sciences meeting to help Asa Gray elect the hated Spencer Baird. Alexander had then called Dana “contemptible” and arrogant and referred to him as “his majesty.” By 1876 Alex, disciplined at ignoring his feelings about his father’s tormentors, had been on cordial terms with Dana for several years. But he surely hadn’t forgotten his earlier conclusions about him; he was too much a grump for that. When Alexander took up the coral reef question, Dana was in his sixties and still going strong; he would hold his Yale professorship until 1890 and publish until his death in 1895. Alexander might have preferred to forget Dana. Taking up the coral reef question made that impossible.

And Dana could not be easily dismissed, for his claim to authority in coral reefs (unlike Darwin’s) was founded on extensive field-work. On the Wilkes expedition Dana had seen reefs and atolls in Tahiti, Samoa, and the Tuamotus and classified them into the same three types that Darwin did (fringing, barrier, and atoll) even before he read an early report of Darwin’s theory, which he did at an 1839 stopover in Sydney. The theory “threw a flood of light over the subject,” he said later, and for the rest of the trip, particularly during a three-month stay in the Fijis, he collected evidence and observations that he concluded “afford striking illustrations of [Darwin’s] views, establishing the theory on a firm base of evidence, and exhibiting its complete correspondence with observation.” He even added a key support Darwin had overlooked, arguing that the bays and fjords that Darwin had thought were carved by waves and currents were actually “embayed valleys,” gorges that had been eroded in typical river-valley fashion while above the surface and then became bays and fjords as the islands sank. Though this was still indirect evidence, consistent with subsidence but hardly definitive of it, Dana’s work provided Darwin’s theory with the strongest indication yet that these islands were subsiding. Darwin, who had wrung his hands over his belief that in subsidence he had “a movement the tendency of which is to conceal the parts affected,” expressed great delight. “I write from exuberance of vanity,” he wrote Lyell after reading Dana’s 1849 coral report. “I am astonished at my own accuracy!”

His excitement was well founded. In the decades that followed, Dana played a badly needed Dr. Watson to Darwin’s Sherlock Holmes. While Darwin had been theorizing in his study, Dana had been seeing more coral formations than any other scientist. Dana actually made a strange ally for Darwin, just as he had for Gray, for he rejected the theory of evolution and was unashamed to see in coral reefs an expression of God’s glory, even as they also confirmed Lyell’s slow uniformitarianism. For some, Dana’s eloquent description of reefs-geologically uniformitarian but biologically creationist-was like Louis’s plan of creation or the notion of a God-steered evolution: It provided an exciting and apparently safe way to embrace modern science while clinging to the notion that we are all God’s creatures. Here was a slow-working, transforming dynamic designed ultimately to serve humans. The lovely coral trees and shrubs, Dana wrote, “stand and wave unhurt in the agitated waters,” supporting millions of polyps that “cover the branches, like so many flowers, spreading their tinted petals in the genial sunshine, and quiet seas, but with drawing when the clouds betoken a storm,” and so surviving to slowly build the reef. “Finally, the coral becomes subservient to a still higher purpose than the support of polyps and nullipores” when the debris raises them above water to form an isle on which “the coral polyps, now yielding place to the flowers and groves of the land, … fulfill their end in promoting the comfort and happiness of man.”

This startlingly Agassizian prose is from Dana’s 1846 expedition report on zoophytes. He maintained this higher-calling thesis (though in less purple form) in his major works on corals, the 1853 On Corals and Coral Islands and its 1872 update, Corals and Coral Islands. Yet if Dana’s teleology conflicted with Darwin’s mechanistic materialism, his thick strands of fact provided crucial stays to the lean spire of Darwin’s theory, saving it from many a blow that might otherwise have tipped it. Because of Dana, anyone challenging Dar win’s theory had not only to offer another conceptual framework but to counter or reinterpret Dana’s evidence. Though Murray and Agas-siz disagreed with Dana’s conclusions, they recognized Corals and Coral Islands as a formidable obstacle. By their lights it was-unlike Darwin’s coral reef book-sound work and fair play

2

Alex did not think fair, however, another publication of the time. In 1876, a few months after returning from Edinburgh, he received a stunningly venomous attack launched on his dead father by Ernst Haeckel in Ziele und Wege (Goals and Paths), a long essay about the era’s great changes in developmental biology. Haeckel was the lively embryologist and Naturphilosopher Alex had met on his 1870 Euro peantrip and “liked extremely” despite their philosophical differences. He had sent an especially kind note of sympathy after Louis’s death, drawing from Alex one of his most heartfelt expressions of devastation and hopelessness. The two had since shared a sporadic but warm correspondence. They seemed to have the kind of friend ship that is especially valued because some vital connection transcends seemingly larger, more obvious differences.

Now came to Alex, not long after a friendly letter from Haeckel on other matters, a long essay on the recent history of biology containing an attack on Louis that stands out sharply even amid science’s long history of collegial muggings. Written with the energy wit, and bite for which Haeckel was famous (and which Alex had found so charming), the document is a rant against idealist resistance to Darwinism. Given the subject, and that Haeckel and Louis had traded spirited critiques in journals over the years, it wasn’t surprising that Haeckel would spend some time countering Louis’s cre- ationism. But his remarkable assault-several sharp, contemptuous jabs scattered through the first seventy-five pages and then a murder ous eight-page flurry toward the end-is not simply an insulting counterargument. It is a calculated effort at character assassination. Haeckel acknowledges as much, asserting that destroying Louis Agassiz’s reputation was “advisable” because creationist opponents of evolutionary theory still regaled him as a “pious natural scientist” and “crowned him with a halo.” Haeckel proposed to examine the halo with a spectroscope.

The potshots Haeckel begins with, calling Louis’s plan-of-creation theory “amusing nonsense,” are fairly standard. Then, however, he sets to in earnest and pounds Louis mercilessly page after page. He restates as established fact the charges of plagiarism that had been leveled at Louis over the years by some of his collaborators, saying that Louis did virtually none of the work he was most celebrated for but either exploited his stable of students and assistants or stole out right from other independent workers. Louis, he tells us,

began his well-conceived and highly successful system of robbery not in the United States but in Switzerland, and with his emigration to North America (1846) merely continued it to a greater degree. Many influential scientific theories that usually carry his name were not set out by him but stolen from their actual authors, given a superficial polishing, and brought to bear by him. Thus the famous ice age theory was set out not by Agassiz but by Charpentier and Karl Schimper, the glacier theory by Forbes, etc.

He goes on to say that it is already well known in Europe and in North America

that Louis Agassiz owes his prominent place as America’s fore most natural scientist for the most part not to the scientific worth of his own works but to the extraordinary skill with which he could use the work of others, the rare entrepreneurial knack with which he could liquefy great sums of money for his ends, and the remarkable talent for organization with which he created the most magnificent collections, museums, and insti-
tutes. Louis Agassiz was the most ingenious and energetic racketeer in the entire domain of natural history.

Then, resuming at least somewhat his historical agenda, Haeckel asserts that Louis’s prominence was a problem not only because it was falsely built but because it encouraged reactionary creationist opposition to Darwinism. As the creationists’ champion, lauded as “the greatest natural scientist of his time” who knew how to “bring natural science into the nicest harmony with the … Bible,” Louis continued to harm science.

“The consequence of this charlatanry is not to be underestimated,” writes Haeckel. “But I, at least, see clearly the hoof of Mephisto peeking out from under the black robes of the priest in which the sly Agassiz, with his theatrical decorum and talent for ornament, knew to wrap himself.”

Nothing burns like malevolent exaggeration. Alex immediately wrote Haeckel calling him a “calumnious slanderer,” saying he wished he’d never met him, and declaring their relationship finished. A few days later, when he responded to a letter his uncle Alexander Braun had written him objecting to Haeckel’s attack, he said he was aching to beat Haeckel senseless:

I must say I was stung to the quick when I saw Haeckel’s Ziele und Wege. I did not think it possible for a man like Haeckel to use the weapons of a Vogt.* This is more astonishing to me as to the very day of issuing that I was receiving the most friendly letters from Haeckel! When the Anthropologie[a previous Haeckel essay that attacked Louis less viciously] was published, I remonstrated with Haeckel (in lettres) about his treatment of father and hoped he would not push his discussion [to] degenerate into personalities. He wrote me subsequently, but made no reference to this and because he wished it closed that way, you can imagine my astonishment at receiving from him the Ziele und Wege, an advance copy at that! I wrote him a letter such as I have never written a mortal being and should I ever meet him my only answer can be the horsewhip.

Still, Alex shows in this same letter to Braun the sort of restraint-a sensible determination to stay out of such fights-that he had learned a decade before when his father was having his worst fights with Gray and Dana.

I was very glad … to hear again directly from you and especially about the conviction of feeling regarding the article of Haeckel and his attacks on father… But I hope that you will not pursue this fight any further. What is the use of it? Have we not better things to do than to be constantly firing off fire works, which after all do not convince and will hardly silence opponents?

This is the same letter in which Alex tells his uncle (like Haeckel, an idealist Naturphilosopher and an evolutionist) that he leans toward evolution “in the general sense,” but that he has so adroitly sat the fence that he is “claimed equally by the extreme evolutionists and the most ardent Cuvierian, so that I must have expressed myself much like the Delphian oracles to suit all parties so well.”

In its opaque way, this letter is one of the most revealing Alex ever chose to preserve. He still loves his uncle Braun, brother to his mother, and feels compelled to clarify for him not only his own position on evolution but why he chose, in the long, bloody brawl between Louis and Darwin, creationists and evolutionists, idealists and empiricists, not only to abandon Louis’s corner but to sit in the darkest, most remote rows of the hall. He urges Braun to take the same sort of back-row seat and keep his head down. Better, he says, to avoid “the present mania for extremes,” for “I know … that those who have kept cool and continued to work quietly during this time of transition will find themselves someday just so much ahead of their metaphysical opponents.”

It’s good advice. But coming atop Alex’s description of fence sit ting regarding evolution, his plea for silence regarding Haeckel speaks volumes about his determination not just to stay clear of distracting peripheral spats but to take a position on central matters that is so inscrutable, so consciously limited to the factual, and so stridently avoidant of the emphatic that he could not possibly be spattered in the sort of blood match his father fought. All his life he tried to stay clear of any arena that smelled of either evolution or metaphysics. He was determined not to be dragged into such a thing. The problem with avoiding the arena, of course, is that it denies you the chance to swing the horsewhip. Alexander never saw Haeckel again, so he never had to confront the opportunity to thrash him. After his Edinburgh visit, however, he did have the coral reef question, which offered a more appropriate way to rebut both the Darwinist zealots like Haeckel and the imaginative excesses of Dar win’s method. Facts would trump speculation, rigorous work the flights of philosophers and theorists. And so only six months after advising Braun to step back, seemingly unaware of what he was doing-thinking he was going back to the office-Alexander Agassiz rose from his seat and stepped into the arena. He would be there an awfully long time.

*Vogt was one of the Neuchâtel “scientific factory” assistants who spoke ill of Louis after he left.