Bully for Brontosaurus (23 page)

Again, Thayer had proposed a good idea for some, even many, cases (though not for zebras, who rarely venture into fields of reeds). His 1903 article argues primarily that butterflies carry disruptive pictures of flowers and background scenery upon their wings: “The general aspect of each animal’s environment,” Thayer wrote, “is found painted upon his coat, in such a way as to minimize his visibility, by making the beholder think he sees
through
him.”

But, amidst his good suggestions, Thayer had made his first overextended argument. Countershading could scarcely be mistaken for anything else and offered little scope for claiming too much. But the principle of “ruptive” concealment permitted enormous scope for encompassing other patterns that actually serve to reveal or mimic. Color patches and splotches—the classic domain of warning and revealing patterns (consider the peacock’s tail)—could, for an overenthusiast like Thayer, become marks of disruptive concealment. Thus, to cite just one example of overstatement, Thayer argued in a 1909 article, adversarily entitled “An Arraignment of the Theories of Mimicry and Warning Colors,” that white patches on a skunk’s head mimic the sky when seen by mice from below:

Still, by 1903, Thayer was not yet ready to claim concealment for all colors. He admitted one category of obvious conspicuousness: “Only unshiny, bright monochrome is intrinsically a revealing coloration.”

Now we can finally understand why Thayer was eventually driven to his absurd argument about flamingos and the sunset. (Divorced from the context of Thayer’s own personal development, the idea sounds like simple disembodied craziness—as professors always present it for laughs in introductory classes.) Once Thayer decided to go for broke, and to claim that all color works for concealment, flamingos became his crucial test, his door-die attempt at exclusivity. As a last shackle before the final plunge, Thayer had admitted that stark monochromes—animals painted throughout with one showy color—were “intrinsically revealing.” If he could now show that such monochromes also served for concealment, then his triumph would be complete. Flamingos occupied the center of his daring, not a curious diversion. He had to find a way to fade bright red into ethereal nothingness. Hence the sunset—his as well as the flamingo’s.

So Thayer visited the West Indies, got down on his belly in the sulfurous muds, and looked at flamingos—not comfortably down from above (as he always accused lazy and uncritical zoologists of doing), but from the side as might a slithering anaconda or a hungry alligator. And he saw red wings fading into the sunset—the entire feeding flock became a pink cloud, a “sky-matching costume”:

Thayer had finally gone too far and exasperated even his erstwhile supporters. His exaggerations—particularly his flamingos—now brought down a storm of criticism, including Roosevelt’s hundred-page barrage. Critics pointed out Thayer’s errors in every particular: Flamingos do not concentrate their feeding at dawn and dusk, but are active all day; anacondas and alligators do not inhabit the thin films of saline ponds that flamingos favor; flamingos eat by filtering tiny eyeless animals that cannot enjoy the visual pleasures of sunset.

Most sadly, Thayer’s argument even failed in its own terms—and Thayer, who was overenthusiastic to a fault, but neither dishonest nor dishonorable, had to confess. Any object viewed
against
the fading light will appear dark, whatever its actual color. Thayer admitted this explicitly by painting a dark palm tree against the sunset in his infamous and fanciful painting of fading flamingos (reproduced here, for unfortunate practical reasons, in inappropriate black and white). Thus, he could only claim that flamingos looked like the sunset in the
opposite
side of the sky: red clouds of sunset in the west, red masses of flamingos in the east. Would any animal be so confused by two “sunsets,” with flamingos showing dark against the real McCoy? Thayer admitted in his 1909 book:

White (top) and red (bottom) flamingos fade to invisibility against the sky at sunrise and sunset. From Thayer’s 1909 book.
NEG. NO. 2A13239. COURTESY DEPARTMENT OF LIBRARY SERVICES, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
.

As a final, and feeble, parting salvo, Thayer added: “but the rosy hues very commonly suffuse both sides of the sky, so that…the flamingos’ illuminated ruddy color very often has a true ’background’ of illuminated ruddy sky.”

Teddy Roosevelt was particularly perturbed. As an old big-game hunter, he knew that most of Thayer’s “ruptive” patterns did not conceal quarries. How could Thayer have it both ways—how could a lion be concealed in the desert, a zebra amongst the reeds when, in fact, they share the same habitat, often to the zebra’s fatal disadvantage? Thus, Roosevelt decided to counterattack and wrote his scientific
magnum opus
during some spare time amidst other chores. He saved his best invective for the poor flamingos. Writing on February 2, 1911, to University of California biologist Charles Kofoid, he stated:

The debate between Roosevelt and Thayer developed into an interesting discussion of scientific methodology, not merely some rhetorical sniping about specifics. To grasp Roosevelt’s primarily methodological (and cogent) objections to Thayer’s work, consider Thayer’s most remarkable painting of all—the frontispiece to his 1909 book, showing a peacock obliterated in the foliage. Here, Thayer argues that every nuance of a peacock’s coloration increases his concealment in a particular bit of habitat—the combined effect adding to invisibility. Given the usual interpretation of a peacock’s color as revealing, and the gaudy impression that he makes both upon us and, one must assume, the peahen, Thayer’s interpretation represents quite a departure from tradition and common sense:

A peacock in the woods, showing how, in at least one highly peculiar position, each “showy” feature can help blend the bird into invisibility. From Thayer’s 1909 book.
NEG. NO. 2A13238. COURTESY DEPARTMENT OF LIBRARY SERVICES, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
.

Thayer then positions his bird so precisely that all features blend with surroundings. He paints the blue neck against a gap in the foliage, so that it may mimic “blue sky seen through the leaves.” He matches the golden greens and browns of the back to forest tones. He depicts the white cheek patch as a “ruptive” hole that disaggregates the face. He paints the celebrated ocelli (eye-spots) of the tail feathers as leaf mimics. He also notes that ocelli are smallest and dimmest near the body, grading to larger and brighter toward the rear end: “They inevitably lead the eye away from the bird, till it finds itself straying amid the foliage beyond the tail’s evanescent border.” The spread tail, he claims, may impress the peahen, but it “looks also very much like a shrub bearing some kind of fruit or flower.” Finally, he argues that the tail’s coppery brown color represents perfectly “the bare ground and tree-trunks seen between the leaves.”

What a tour de force, but what can we possibly make of such special pleading? Who would doubt that some conceivable habitat might conceal almost any animal? Note how precisely the peacock must choose his spot to receive the cryptic benefit that Thayer wishes to confer upon him. In particular, he must always place his shimmering blue neck in a gap amidst the foliage where it will vanish against a clear sky (but what does he do on a cloudy day, or in a bush so dense that no holes exist, as seen from all relevant directions at once?). Peacocks, in any case, live primarily in open fields. Their spreading display is a glory to behold—and the very opposite of invisible.

Thayer, of course, knew all this. He didn’t claim (as his critics sometimes charged) that a habitat offering protection by concealment must be the usual, or even a common, haunt of its invisible beneficiary. Thayer simply argued that such protection might be important at critical moments occurring only once or twice in an animal’s lifetime—at crucial instants of impending death from a stalking predator.

But how could odd and improbable moments shape such complex and intricate patterns as the innumerable details of a peacock’s design? With this question, we finally arrive at the key theoretical issue of this debate—the power of natural selection itself. In order to believe that complex designs might be constructed by such rare and momentary benefits as sunsets or particular positions in trees outside an animal’s normal habitat, one must have an overarching faith in the power of natural selection. Selection must be so potent that even the rarest of benefits will eventually be engraved into the optimal designs of organisms. Thayer had this faith; Roosevelt, and most biologists then and since, did not. Thayer wrote in 1900: “Of course, to any one who feels the inevitability of natural selection, it is obvious that each organ or structural detail, and likewise each quality of organic forms, owes its existence to the sum of all its uses.” Thayer then laid it on the line in stark epitome—patterns of color are built by natural selection, “pure, simple, and omnipotent.”

Roosevelt and other acute critics correctly identified the central flaw in Thayer’s science—not in his numerous factual errors, but in his methodology. Thayer found a hiding place for all his animals but with a method that made his theory untestable and therefore useless to science. Thayer insisted that he had proved his point simply by finding
any
spot that rendered an animal invisible. He didn’t need to show that the creature usually frequented such a place or that the location formed part of a natural habitat at all. For the animal might seek its spot only in the rarest moments of need. But how then could we disprove any of Thayer’s claims? We might work for years to show that an animal never entered its domain of invisibility, and Thayer would reply: Wait till tomorrow when urgent need arises. Scientists are trained to avoid such special pleading because it exerts a chilling and stupefying effect upon hypotheses, by rendering them invulnerable to test and potential disproof. Doing is the soul of science and we reject hypotheses that condemn us to impotence.