Metamorphosis, p.33
Metamorphosis, page 33
There are a number of first-rate biographies of J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan. If you have to choose one book, I recommend Andrew Birkin’s J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys from Yale University Press, originally published in 1979 and reissued with a new preface in 2003 to mark Peter Pan’s centennial. A more recent academic book is Peter Pan and the Mind of J. M. Barrie (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016) by the neuroscientist Rosalind Ridley. Looking carefully at Barrie’s further books, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) and Peter and Wendy (1911), Ridley argues that, informed by a post-Darwinian perspective on the evolutionary origins of human behavior, Barrie described the limited mental abilities of infants and animals in order to illuminate the structure of human adult cognition. From time to time the popular press latches on to the accusation that Barrie was a pedophile: See Justin Picardie’s July 13, 2008, article in the Telegraph, “How Bad Was J. M. Barrie?” Watching the 2004 film Finding Neverland (based on Allan Knee’s play), with Johnny Depp as Barrie and Kate Winslet as Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, and listening to Kate Bush’s haunting song “In Search of Peter Pan” from her 1978 album Lionheart, I prefer to believe the denial of Nico, the youngest of the Llewelyn Davies boys, who swore that Barrie had never behaved inappropriately. “I don’t believe that Uncle Jim ever experienced what one might call ‘a stirring in the undergrowth’ for anyone—man, woman, or child,” he is on record as stating. “He was an innocent—which is why he could write Peter Pan.” Poor Nico lost his older brothers George, to World War I, and Michael, to a river. Tragically, some years after Barrie’s death, Peter himself found his death by throwing himself in front of a moving train. This section greatly benefited from a fantastic exhibition at the Israel Museum, named Peter and Pan: From Ancient Greece to Neverland, curated by Rachel Caine Kreinin, David Mevorah, and Morag Wilhelm, and designed by Michal Aldor—which ran from June to December 2019. Peter embodies contrasts, like the Greek god Pan, son of Hermes, part-goat, part-man: brave and fearless, reckless, and in every way ambiguous. Sexless and virile, altruistic and avaricious, Pan represents human hopes, but also everything that we fear. Barrie masked his roots, abducting him from his ancient Peloponnesian cave and dropping him in Neverland. Satyrs and nymphs were replaced by Captain Hook and Tinker Bell. Still, through his modern spectacles, Barrie succeeded in catching a glimpse of what this all meant: the wonder of never growing old.
Finally, the role of the axolotl in felling Haeckel’s biogenetic law is fascinating. Walter Garstang (1868–1949) was a marine zoologist at the University of Leeds who was taken by the axolotl. His “The Theory of Recapitulation: A Critical Re-statement of the Biogenetic Law,” Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 35 (1922): 81–101, is a historical document, and Maurizio Esposito has a nice recent article on the subject, “Beyond Haeckel’s Law: Walter Garstang and the Evolutionary Biology That Might Have Been,” Journal of the History of Biology 53 (2020): 249–268. Looking at the axolotl, Garstang was moved to write a poem in his posthumous book Larval Forms with Other Zoological Verses (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1951). It goes like this:
Ambystoma’s a giant newt who rears in swampy waters,
as other newts are wont to do, a lot of fishy daughters:
These Axolotls, having gills, pursue a life aquatic,
But, when they should transform to newts, are naughty and erratic.
They change upon compulsion, if the water grows too foul,
for then they have to use their lungs, and go ashore to prowl:
but when a lake’s attractive, nicely aired, and full of food,
they cling to youth perpetual, and rear a tadpole brood.
And newts Perennibranchiate have gone from bad to worse:
They think aquatic life is bliss, terrestrial a curse.
They do not even contemplate a change to suit the weather,
But live as tadpoles, breed as tadpoles, tadpoles all together!
9. “Riddle”: Haeckel’s views on man have been a controversial subject. Here, I wished as loyally as possible to present his voice on the matter. Unquestionably, one of Haeckel’s contributions to evolutionary studies was his stem-trees, and here his friend Schleicher’s influence was great. See again August Schleicher’s Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft from 1863, where he develops the tool of the stem-tree to indicate distance and closeness between languages. When Haeckel introduced stem-trees in his popular book Natürlische Schöpfungsgeschichte in 1868, there was a surge in popular literature in Germany about Native Americans, who were depicted romantically as ideals of the noble savage. This probably accounted for their high standing in Haeckel’s hierarchy, though they were demoted in the eighth edition in 1889, replaced by the Indians from the subcontinent. Like other naturalists of his or any day, Haeckel was strongly influenced by cultural biases, but his more exacting anatomy led to the prescient description of heterochrony, about whose evolutionary role more can be learned briefly in Stephen Jay Gould, “On the Importance of Heterochrony for Evolutionary Biology,” Systematic Zoology 28, no. 2 (1979): 224–226, and in more depth in Gould’s book Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Harvard, 1977). Gould was very disparaging of Haeckel regarding his views on different races, as well as his so-called faked developmental images—more about that in the next section—but recognized the importance of his introduction of the term heterochrony. Important, too, was Haeckel’s suggestion that a “missing link” be searched for, a task taken on by Eugène Dubois, whose grateful letter to Haeckel from December 24, 1895, after discovering Java Man can be found in the Haeckel Correspondence at Haeckel-Haus, in Jena. After the popular success of The Natural History of Creation, Haeckel came back in 1874 with Anthropogenie; oder, Entwickslungsgeschichte des Menchen (translated to English as The Evolution of Man), which was printed in six editions, and in 1899 with his most famous offering, Die Welträtsel, which literally means “the world puzzles,” but was titled The Riddle of the World in English. The popular success Haeckel was gaining drew much fire, from both the church and many scientific colleagues. T. H. Huxley’s supportive letter quoted in the text is from December 28, 1974; The New York Times article “Haeckel Kills the Soul” ran on May 8, 1905; and the Hampstead Congregationalist Church preacher’s warning is quoted in R. F. Horton, “Ernst Haeckel’s ‘Riddle of the Universe,’” Christian World Pulpit 63 (June 10, 1903): 353–356. Haeckel was inspired to write The Riddle of the Universe as a reply to his fellow German Darwinist Emil du Bois-Reymond’s philosophical view that there are certain problems, like consciousness, that man will never solve. Haeckel doubtless thought of himself as more scientific, or what we would call more hard-headedly positive, but Bois-Reymond doubtless thought the opposite: Haeckel’s talk of the “soul” of cells and “life” of crystals seemed to him teleological, and unscientific. For a modern appreciation in this vein, see Gabriel Finkelstein, “Haeckel and du Bois-Reymond: Rival German Darwinists,” Theory in Biosciences 138 (2019): 105–112, and for Haeckel’s perspective—anything written by his biographer, Robert J. Richards. Those of you who feel the need to return to Nietzsche’s Superman theory (what he called the Übermensch), it’s in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, published in four volumes between 1883 and 1885. And the history of Haeckel’s Phyletic Museum was beautifully presented in a book sponsored by the museum on the occasion of its centennial in 2008 by Martin S. Fischer, Gunnar Brehm, and Uwe Hoßfeld, titled Das Phyletische Museum in Jena.
10. “Lucy”: Scientists define metamorphosis as either “radical” or “dramatic” post-embryonic development, but that’s somewhat arbitrary. After all, who gets to decide what “dramatic” or “radical” really means? To view puberty in humans as a form of metamorphosis is to acknowledge that the biological definition of metamorphosis exists on a continuum: We may not turn from caterpillars into butterflies, but we sure do go through a lot of post-embryonic change. To learn more about the considerable physical changes that happen during human adolescence, featuring brain-driven interactions between hormones and the nervous system, see Cheryl L. Sisk and Douglas L. Foster, “The Neural Basis of Puberty and Adolescence,” Nature Neuroscience 7 (2004): 1040–1047. Adolescence is so peculiar that legal minds have recently begun to argue that the usual binary child/adult should be abandoned in favor of a tri-partite classification. See Elizabeth S. Scott and Laurence Steinberg’s book Rethinking Juvenile Justice (Harvard University Press, 2010), in which they make the case for creating a third legal category: the adolescent. A further, more recent source on the science involved is Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, Jean-Claude Carel, and Yves Christen, eds., Brain Crosstalk in Puberty and Adolescence (Springer, 2015), but consider the limits of science in this debate, as set out in my essay “Unformed Minds: Juveniles, Neuroscience and the Law,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44, no. 3 (2013): 455–459. On the role of sexual selection in the evolution of females and males—their relationships, behaviors, and physiologies—see Richard R. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (Anchor, 2018), and my review of it (upon which I draw in this section), “Darwin’s Really Dangerous Idea,” Science and Education 28, no. 6 (2019): 803–812. For an entertaining, if speculative and rather too reductive, account of what the period of adolescence may actually be for, from an evolutionary perspective, read David Brainbridge’s 2009 book Teenagers: A Natural History. A general and excellent primer on the relationship of our human natures to different apes is Frans De Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006), and two solid treatments of our moral natures from an evolutionary perspective are Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (MIT Press, 2006); and Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism and Shame (Basic Books, 2012), by Christopher Boehm. Boehm also has an excellent book titled Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Harvard University Press, 2001), which relates to the subject of this section. As for a new assessment of the sex lives of primates, see Esther Clarke et al., “Primate Sex and Its Role in Pleasure, Dominance and Communication,” Animals 12, no. 23 (2022): 3301. Finally, when it comes to Lucy, read the 1981 account by the discoverer himself, Donald Johansen, with Maitland Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, as well as a sequel from 2009, this time with Kate Wong, Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins. They’ll get you thinking about just how wonderfully serendipitous human evolution is.
11. “Strauss”: There are reasons why Haeckel remains a dark figure of history in many minds: his combative personality, the charges of fraud, the adoption of some of his ideas by the Nazis. His biographer Richards does his best to exonerate him of the harsher charges, agreeing that some of the images and woodcuts he used were a serious lapse in judgment, but pointing out that they were made in a popular book, not a scientific treatise, that woodcuts were expensive to produce, and since the best science of the time agreed that the morphological structures of early embryos of different species are virtually indistinguishable, it made economic sense to simply replicate the same images as a device to bring home the message to the public. I believe that while much of the apology for Haeckel’s fudging of images remains unconvincing, Richards successfully debunks the myth that Haeckel provided the intellectual foundations for Nazism. But the best way to develop an opinion on these matters is to check out the facts for yourselves: On the charges of fraud, compare Richards’s “Haeckel’s Embryos: Fraud Not Proven,” Biology and Philosophy 24 (2009): 147–154; and E. Watts, G. S. Levit, and U. Hoßfeld, “Ernst Haeckel’s Contribution to Evo-Devo and Scientific Debate: A Re-evaluation of Haeckel’s Controversial Illustrations in U. S. Textbooks in Response to Creationist Accusations,” Theory in Biosciences 138 (2019): 9–29; to Richardson’s 1997 Science article “Haeckel’s Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered,” and his more considered piece (again with Gerhard Keuck), “A Question of Intent: When Is a ‘Schematic’ Illustration a Fraud?,” Nature 410 (2001): 144. Finally, have a look at Nick Hopwood’s magisterial study of the controversy surrounding Haeckel’s Embryos: Images Evolution, and Fraud (Chicago, 2015), in which he tries to explain why the copying of images, the epitome of the unoriginal, allows images to become creative, contested, and of consequence. If you read German, you might also want to look at Wilhelm His’s nineteenth-century attack on Haeckel in Unsere Körperform und das physiologische Problem ihrer Entstehung: Briefe an einen befreundeten Naturforscher (Leipzig, 1874–1875). On Haeckel’s ties to Nazism, compare Richards’s The Tragic Sense of Life (University of Chicago Press, 2008) to Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (Science History Publications, 1971), and Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Harvard, 1977), from which the quote in the text comes. Compare, too, Peter Weikart’s From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) to Richards’s own Was Hitler a Darwinian? (Chicago, 2013), which takes a very different view. When both were alive, Haeckel and Darwin were on nothing but good terms, each respecting the other as a scientist and an ally. In “The Break Up Between Darwin and Haeckel,” Theory in Biosciences 138 (2019): 113–117, Nicolaas Rupke takes a look at the social and political, rather than scientific, issues that brought about a separation between the two in many people’s minds. Some historians continue to argue that Darwin and Haeckel held completely different approaches to evolution: Peter Bowler, for instance, holds that while Darwin eschewed all forms of teleology, including rejecting the biogenetic law, Haeckel should be viewed as a late representative of romantic German Naturphilosophie, and not a modern scientist, much less a true representative of Darwin. See his book The Non-Darwinian Revolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), and the exchange in “A Bridge Too Far,” Biology and Philosophy 8 (1993): 98–102. That Haeckel was adored by many in his day is uncontroversial; the Isadora Duncan scene, for example, including her letter to him from May 8, 1910, is described in Richards’s biography. Described in Richards, too, are Haeckel’s pacifism before, and patriotism during, the war; his spat with Plate; his affair with Frida; and his death. It is impossible to know whether, like Strauss, Haeckel would have tried to walk in between the drops in order to go on doing his science, but I think Richards is correct in judging that he would have felt repugnance toward the Nazis. As for the question of Haeckel’s overall importance in the history of biology, Georgy S. Levit and Ute Hoßfeld provide a balanced analysis in “Ernst Haeckel in the History of Biology,” Current Biology 29 (2019): R1276–R1284, from which the quote on the triumph of Darwinism being “unthinkable without Haeckel” comes. For the continued relevance of Haeckel’s science, in particular his biogenetic law, see Michael K. Richardson and Gerhard Keuck’s “Haeckel’s ABC of Evolution and Development,” Biological Review 77 (2002): 495–528; L. Olsson, G. S. Levit, and U. Hoßfeld, “The ‘Biogenetic Law’ in Zoology: From Haeckel’s Formulation to Current Approaches,” Theory in Biosciences 136 (2017): 19–29; and M. Usesaka, S. Kuratani, and N. Irie, “The Developmental Hourglass Model and Recapitulation: An Attempt to Integrate the Two Models,” Journal of Experimental Zoology B 338 (2022): 76–86. Richardson’s “Theories, Laws and Models in Evo-Devo” in that same issue (pp. 36–61) is also clarifying.
There are a number of good sources on Strauss, including Bryan Gilliam’s The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Charles Youmans’s more recent Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism (Indiana University Press, 2005). For a heartbreaking description of American soldiers arriving at Strauss’s villa in Garmisch toward the end of World War II, see the relevant chapter in Alex Ross’s book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Picador, 2008). I am most grateful to Jeremy Eichler for sharing with me his hauntingly beautiful manuscript, “The Truth of Music: Four Composers and the Memory of the Second World War,” before it was published as Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (Knopf, 2023). It includes an insightful description of Strauss and his Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig’s fraught relationship, as well as a deep interpretation of Metamorphosen, from which the “I made music under the Kaiser,” “infinite reaches of heaven,” “death mask,” “opacity of self,” and Nietzsche quotes come. Of the musical composition, Eichler writes: “Gone are the glittering facades of irony and wit. Gone are the liberated heroes of the early tone poems. Gone is the proudly modern pose of objectivity, the lofty sense of authorial detachment from his own music. In its place is an almost disorienting sense of sincerity.” For more on the historical appraisal of Strauss and his relationship to the Nazis, see Pamela M. Potter’s article, “Strauss and the National Socialists: The Debate and Its Relevance,” in Bryan Gilliam’s edited volume Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Music (Duke University Press, 1992), as well as a disparaging take by Oliver Hilmes in his bestselling book Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August (The Bodley Head, 2018). The “hunger for wholeness” quote comes from Anne Harrington, in her book Re-enchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton University Press, 1996). And the final Goethe quote comes from his poems Faust, Prometheus, and God and the World, as quoted by Haeckel in the final lines of his The Riddle of the Universe.
