Metamorphosis, p.16
Metamorphosis, page 16
Haeckel’s plate comparing the development of different vertebrate taxa (left to right: fish; salamander; turtle; chicken; pig; cow; rabbit; human). From his The Evolution of Man (1874).
At Jena all the while, Haeckel expanded the ambition of his program. He built a new home that he named Villa Medusa, created a new Zoological Institute down the hill, and petitioned government to include the study of descent theory in German classrooms. In this, to his great regret, he was opposed by his former teacher, Rudolf Virchow, whose eyes had been blinded from seeing Darwin’s truth. Virchow the eminent scientist had become more of a politician, asserting not only that no evidence existed for evolution but also that descent theory may lead to chaos, and even communism. Haeckel thought he had it backward: The theory of descent taught that equality was a lie, nothing but a pipe dream. This didn’t stop Virchow from frightening audiences with the example of the French Commune,vi signaling to Bismarck that the same thing might happen in Germany. “May your shadow never be less,” Darwin’s “bulldog,” Thomas Huxley, strengthened Haeckel in his colorful language from London, “and may all your enemies, unbelieving dogs who resist the Prophet of Evolution, be defiled by the sitting of jackasses upon their grandmother’s graves.” Haeckel laughed when he received Huxley’s letter, but when Darwin died on April 12, 1881, it was like being struck by lightning. He was alone in his homeland, fighting powers of darkness. But this only strengthened his resolve. The teaching of religious myths from the Middle Ages in schools had to be replaced by a rationally based natural religion, for the betterment of human society. The deadliest enemy of reason was not malice, but ignorance.
There were many myths and men to combat, including the successor of his beloved teacher Müller, a physiologist named Emil du Bois-Reymondvii in Berlin. Unlike Virchow, Bois-Reymond had seen the truth of Darwin, but had shied away from the consequences. In a famous speech to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1880, he spoke of seven great riddles. Three of them—the origin of life, the apparently preordained orderly arrangement of nature, and the origin of speech—he found difficult, but solvable in principle. Three others—the nature of matter and force, the origin of motion, and the birth of consciousness—he thought transcendental and out of human reach. Finally, on the question of free will, Bois-Reymond remained agnostic, contributing in Haeckel’s view to the reign of superstition over reason. He called himself a strict mechanist, but failed to see that Haeckel’s monistic philosophy was concerned first and foremost with the problem of substance. Showing that there could be no mind without matter and no matter without mind, monism provided solutions to the three riddles the Berlin orator considered insoluble. Those he thought difficult, including the birth of consciousness, were in turn answered by Darwin’s theory of descent. The seventh riddle was no riddle at all but based purely on dogma: Free will was an illusion invented by mystics and philosophers, and used by organized religion to inspire shame and guilt. Bois-Reymond preached ignoramus et ignorabimus—we are ignorant and shall remain ignorant, but Haeckel put this to the lie in his book Die Welträthsel. Translated into English as The Riddle of the Universe, it was the bestseller of the age, selling four hundred thousand copies before the Great War.
Haeckel began painting landscapes once more, and traveling, drawn to the richness of life’s profusion. Maybe this was an escape from the assaults hurled at him from different quarters, university lecterns as much as church pews across the land. He was called a fake, a cheat, a mere popularizer. Men of God accused him of materialism, men of science, of telos. The preacher of the Hampstead Congregationalist Church in England warned that he would steer the ship of humanity to primitive barbarism, sun worship, Mohammedanism, and self-love. Even The New York Times published an article in response to The Riddle gently titled: “Haeckel Kills the Soul.” His best friend Carl Gegenbaur broke off their friendship, unable to withstand the pressure. But despite the obloquy, Haeckel remained true to himself. He did not wish, like his countryman Nietzsche, to replace Christian morality with a new Super Man beyond good and evil. He did not see in Darwin the death of God and loss of meaning. Instead, he perceived that altruism was a natural gift: The roots of the Golden Rule were to be found in even simpler animals, explained by self-preservation and social instinct. Haeckel’s conscience was clear. From earliest youth he had studied just one book, the Book of Nature. It was through that book that he came to know the only true god, his god, the god of Goethe, and Spinoza.
Haeckel thought he saw clearly: Egoism was the key to self-preservation of the individual, and altruism the key to preservation of the species. Man’s most urgent task was to strike a harmony between the two, notwithstanding the precept “If any man will take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also,” peddled by fools. Were not countless conveniences of technical science in industry and agriculture, commerce and hygiene, found by religionists to be injurious to man’s soul, along with the pleasure that comes from painting, music, and sculpture? Did not Christianity sacrifice the ephemeral body for the immortal soul, putting no emphasis on corporeal exercise, including swimming and gymnastics? Was it not Paul who declared it better not to marry, and “good for a man not to touch a woman”? If humanity followed such pernicious advice, it would be killed off within two generations. Not only was the Church responsible for the death of over ten million persecuted heretics and victims of religious wars, it was the source of tenfold more misery cast upon those whose higher mental life was extinguished, whose conscience was tortured, whose family life was destroyed. Christianity, Haeckel preached, no less, is the enemy of civilization.
Monism was the foundation for a new theory of man and morality, but went far beyond mere fallible human beings. Those faithful to a personal God had extricated man from nature in order to serve Him, engendering a contempt for other forms of life, and other forms of matter. In reality evolution was an endless refinement of structure. A vast, all-embracing metamorphosis infused the entire universe: It could be traced in the geological history of the Earth, in the evolution of its living creatures and peoples, but also in glowing nebulae billions of miles away, embryos of stars and galaxies. Some of these harbored life, undoubtedly, although in shapes we can only imagine. While the embryo of a new world is being formed from a nebula in one corner of the universe, another has already condensed into a rotating sphere of liquid fire elsewhere, a third already cast off rings at its equator, a fourth become a vast sun whose planets have formed a secondary retinue of moons. Like the ancients, Haeckel saw now that all is eternally changing, all is in flux from the very start. But all is also a unity. Nietzsche was much too dour. He failed to see that indivisible into the organic and inorganic, into mind and body, God-Nature was an unfolding work of art.
More and more, Haeckel grasped that it was crucial that the people become educated; this was the nineteenth century, and yet the world persisted in believing medieval cant. Free will, resurrection of the dead, a personal God, eternal life in hell or heaven: All were rendered fictions by the intellectual triumphs of the times. The greatest of these was the law of substance, at the very core of the philosophy of monism. It encompassed two arms, the first being the law of the conservation of matter, stating that the sum of matter that fills infinite space is unchangeable. The second was the law of the conservation of energy, stating that the sum of force at work in infinite space is unchangeable. Both were inseparable, lacking meaning without the other, and attested to the unity of nature. At any moment, one force may be converted into another. Wedded to cell theory, the dynamic theory of heat, and finally Darwin’s great theory of evolution, this upended everything, like a plow thrust into an anthill. And no one was happier than Haeckel to see those rudely awakened from their comforts scuttling about dazed and confused.
When the opportunity occasioned shortly before his retirement, Haeckel was eager to leave behind him a temple to his philosophy of nature. Adjacent to his institute and one hundred and fifty meters from his house, he built the Phyletic Museum, with a large tree of life painted on its façade flanked on each side by the words “ONTOGENIE” and “PHYLOGENIE.” All could now see that man doesn’t stand outside of or opposed to nature, but rather firmly within it, noble and ethereal. The museum would one day house glass menageries of butterflies, birds, and insects; a stuffed gorilla and the skeleton of an African elephant; beautiful models of human development; even a painted shoulder blade of a bowhead whale once owned by Goethe. Haeckel himself left the museum empty, but placed a bronze statue of a maiden holding the torch of truth in the foyer, for all to follow its light.
This would be his legacy: On one side, spiritual freedom and truth, reason and culture, evolution and progress, standing under the bright banner of science; on the other side, spiritual slavery, superstition, and falsehood, standing beneath the black flag of hierarchy. The battle between them was a human affair, but he never lost sight of the grander drama. No body is so small and no spirit so insignificant that it does not contain a part of the divine substance by which it is animated. From the lives of giant crystals to the souls of tiny radiolarian cells, the great is little, the little is great, everything after its kind.
In the shallow waters of Messina and the jungle depths of Ceylon, Haeckel bore witness to life eternally folding and unfolding, shaping and reshaping. This was the truth of things, from end to beginning: Substance preserves itself yet is ever changing. For Haeckel there remained therefore just one final riddle: When he dies, in some form or another, would he once more be united with his precious love,
Anna?
Footnotes
i There was, in fact, an exception: Inspired by the British parliamentary debates on slavery, the German anatomist Friedrich Tiedemann (1781–1861) compared brains and skulls of different human groups relative to body size and found no marked differences between the races.
ii German for “pinnacle.”
iii Eugène Dubois (1858–1940) was a Dutch paleoanthropologist and geologist, famous for discovering “Java Man” in 1891.
iv Haeckel also invented the term heterotopy to denote a displacement not in time, but in place. His favorite example of this was how cells that differentiate into reproductive organs in modern organisms come from the mesoderm, whereas these organs must have arisen historically in one of the two primary layers, either the endoderm or exoderm, which came before it.
v Haeckel coined two new words to signify what he called “epitomized history,” and “falsified history”: Palingenesis described terminal additions that swept evolution forward, whereas cenogenesis described the addition of new stages in the midst of development.
vi Following defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, the local government in Paris refused to accept occupation and organized to inaugurate social reforms, including separation of religion and state and the cancellation of rents. Backed by the king, the conservative national government in Versailles sent its troops into Paris, leading to a civil battle in which tens of thousands of Communards, many of whom were socialists, anarchists, and republicans, were executed and jailed. Darwinism was associated in France with socialism and revolution, in no small measure thanks to the first translation into French of the Origin of Species by the outspoken, self-taught feminist and freethinker Clémence Royer.
vii Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896) was a renowned physiologist famous for developing experimental electrophysiology, and being the codiscoverer of the nerve action potential.
10.
LUCY
Metamorphosis is defined as “dramatic post-embryonic development.” Notwithstanding monism, it applies to living things, here on planet Earth. And Kafka exempted, most of us don’t think of ourselves as a metamorphosing species. But metamorphosis is a continuum, and its definition seems arbitrary. We may not molt, or grow wings, but considering our transformations into sexual adulthood, we too undergo dramatic change. As it turns out, our connection to metamorphosis in other creatures runs deeper than we imagine. Deep, that is, into the farther reaches of our African past.
We’re sitting at breakfast, Yaeli’s chair more than a foot away from the table, her belly’s so large. Six months have passed, but the next three feel like an eternity. Eating our Cheerios in a cloud of morning exhaustion, everyone just sits there staring in silence.
Infanticide, I announce to Yaeli and the kids, out of thin blue air. In gorillas it’s rampant. In fact it accounts for up to 33 percent of infant mortality, and in baboons it’s even worse. It may seem harsh to us, but from an evolutionary perspective it makes perfect sense. Since the female only becomes receptive again once she’s finished breastfeeding, getting rid of her baby is the fastest way to drive her into estrous. Females organize in a harem around a single silverback gorilla; chimps in larger mixed groups. It used to be believed that females are indiscriminate about their mates, and that males are solely preoccupied among themselves with gaining dominance. Today, we know that’s not entirely true: Primates of all kinds and of both sexes have preferences, and they seem to engage in sex sometimes even when it doesn’t lead directly to procreation. Still, reproduction and fertility stand above everything. Sex to beget babies remains the rule.
Not for us humans. We may not have sex with each other regardless of age, status, or gender, as bonobos do—to mediate social conflicts, from food sharing to reconciliation. But we hardly reserve it exclusively for reproduction, either, not by any means. Instead, we evolved in small, isolated populations with few sexual options, becoming picky, if randy: We seek out sexual partners bounteously but are highly discriminatory when it comes to procreation. Over time, for us humans, sex and reproduction became decoupled. Helping to strengthen commitment, the act took on another function, fostering genuine feelings of affection and love. In chimps, females sport swollen red behinds when in estrous, but our females developed concealed ovulation. Unable to determine when sex counted, males stuck around to ensure parenthood, and began investing in their young.
Yaeli and the kids look at me as if I’ve been hit on the head with a blunt object. Shaizee’s almost six, Abie almost four now; both are old enough to recognize weird when they see it. And the last thing on Yaeli’s mind is monkey sex, that’s clear. She rolls her eyes at me: When I don’t quite know what to do, I often start babbling about evolutionary theories. It’s a silly but persistent vice, and I’m no genius at combatting my vices. So I smile at everyone stupidly. And just keep babbling on.
What was responsible for the gradual elimination of infanticide in humans? Most anthropologists say natural selection. Just as the arrival of bonobos on the southern bank of the Congo Basin river helped reduce violence, gradually selecting for more socially stable cooperative groups, so too would lower aggression and increased tolerance help improve survival in humans. Self-domestication was a group-level adaptation: As males fought less, the entire troupe would be more ecologically efficient, outcompeting less cooperative groups for resources, and siring more kin.
But not everyone agrees with this theory. For skeptics, it wasn’t docile males who were responsible, but assertive females. Protecting themselves from larger males, mating with smaller ones, females eventually reduced the gap in size between the sexes from 25 to 35 percent to just 16 percent. By the time our ancestors walked the African plains three and a half million years ago, the physical difference between females and males had already shrunk appreciably. Sharp male canine teeth disappeared, and soon the rest would follow. Hominin males couldn’t sexually coerce females anymore with great ease, nor would they engage in killing their children. Instead, they were kinder now, and more thoughtful.
As sex became decoupled from procreation, I continue, doing my best to catch Yaeli’s eye, females began to enjoy it. One obvious reason was that they were selecting for social personality. But there was another reason, recently suggested by the Yale ornithologist Richard O. Prum: They were also choosing males with penises that made them happy. In relation to our cousins, we’re really quite well endowed: Average penis length in male humans is six inches, compared to three in chimps and one and a half in gorillas. Not only that, ours sport a glans, a coronal ridge, and width, physical peculiarities that enhance female pleasure. Even the female orgasm, Prum believes, owes its umph to sexual, not natural, selection.
“What’s your point?” Yaeli asks, wiping wayward milk off Abie’s ears.
I am quick to admit that sexual selection went both ways. Male proclivities brought about breasts in females (we’re the only mammal in which they’re permanent, a result of aesthetics, not biology, since engorged teats are only obligatory while nursing). Curves, too, were born, and meaty lips and softer skin. None of these exist in the females of our ape kin. But by reifying the male gaze as an adaptation, a sexist bias has been woven into the fabric of evolutionary biology: Breast size, waist-to-hip ratio, facial symmetry, and “femininity” have all been interpreted as signs of healthy genes—as if our male ancestors were making rational, productive choices. Few evolutionary psychologists, on the other hand, have gone on record claiming that penis size is an honest indicator of male quality. Perhaps these male scientists lack the courage of their own convictions.
In reality, the sexes have shaped each other in humans. Just look at body hair. Compared to our hairy ape cousins, our coats all but disappeared except in erogenous areas: armpits, the pubic region, on our heads, above our eyes. Why did this happen? Our ancestors learned to hunt by outrunning their prey; shedding hairy coats may well have been an adaptation to help us cool off more efficiently. Still, the fact that the patches of hair that do remain appear at about the same time in both sexes is a strong indication that they evolved as sexual cues.
