Dry Storeroom No. 1 (14 page)

I have mentioned that nearly all the contemporaries of Muir-Wood, Spath and Withers in the Department of Geology were greatly interested in stratigraphy—in using fossils as tools for correlating rock successions. This interest extended to reading the rocks for direct evidence of evolution. Put the fossils in order and the course of evolution would be revealed like a petrified narrative, and the ticking of geological time could be measured by the same token. If some unexpected fossil appeared at the wrong level in the rocks—well, that meant that not enough collecting had been carried out. Then it was back into the field doing much damage with the geological hammer until all became clear. Spath collected the ammonites from the Cretaceous Gault Clay metre by metre in a manner almost Bairstow-like in its thoroughness, and spent several decades publishing the results. The evolutionary narratives that were allegedly revealed by the stratigraphic studies became the basis of a variety of ungainly scientific terms—palingenesis, lipopalingenesis and the like—that have now been almost entirely forgotten. Palingenesis, for example, described the appearance in an immature descendant species of features that were found in
mature
individuals of an ancestral species in strata immediately below it. Many modern workers believe that such graded, simple evolutionary sequences from one species to another are a rare occurrence in the rocks. Species remain comparatively unchanged through a thickness of strata and then are replaced rather suddenly by another. However, there has been a revival in interest in the kind of changes with which the ammonite specialists were concerned—but by now this work has developed an entirely new vocabulary! Regardless of the debates about evolutionary theory, the scientific names of the ammonites live on, as do the subdivisions of geological time that they helped to distinguish. It is sometimes difficult to anticipate which contributions will stand the test of time. This is a telling example of how facts tend to endure whereas the ideas that the facts originally engendered are more subject to revision or reinterpretation.

The Experimental Officers were released from their slavery when a reform in the Civil Service abolished the difference between them and the Scientific Officers in the early 1970s. Hard-working people like Ellis Owen could now rise into the ranks of the scientists on the basis of merit—and they did just that. The same period marked a rejection of the tradition of the stratigraphic palaeontologists that had held sway almost since the fossils had their own department: these were revolutionary times indeed. It was surely a good time to throw over the shibboleths of the past. I found myself in a kind of limbo, since I had been raised in the tradition of stratigraphy, and now found myself required to examine my principles. In the previous chapter I briefly introduced the cladistic methods that were to take command of the taxonomic agenda. The high priest of cladistics was a palaeontologist in our department, Colin Patterson, who worked on fossil fishes. He was one of the few scientists I have known gifted with that mysterious property called charisma. Many scientists of real distinction would pass unnoticed in a crowd or be the last person to be served at the bar. Colin had one of those voices that instantly commanded attention: a trained Shakespearean actor’s kind of voice, not exactly fruity, but with a natural authority such as a good actor might employ to portray Agamemnon or Henry V. He had a brain to match the voice. The odd paradox was that despite his charisma and expertise on fossil fishes, Colin Patterson was dead set against the notion of “the authority”—he insisted that the evidence for natural classification should be objectively based in morphology, a list of features incorporated into a cladistic analysis, which must be laid out for all to see, not buried in the mystique of the sage who knows all, speaking from his Olympian redoubt. I could not help but remember stories of Spath, who was known simply as the Great Man, and whose word was not capable of being challenged—except, of course, by Dr. Arkell. What Colin helped develop was a language—one that is still in use, and will remain in use, unlike the terms coined by Spath and his colleagues.

That language is now the familiar argot in the recognition of clades: for example, a
synapomorphy
is a character shared by taxa that helps to define a group, like the particular feather structure or brain of
Archaeopteryx
I have described that serve to link it with the birds. Its opposite is a
plesiomorphic
character—one that is retained from a common ancestor, like
Archaeopteryx
’s teeth, or the egg-laying habit of the birds as a whole, or the genes that instruct the sequence of our own embryonic development much as they do in the fruit fly. I have shown that you cannot define birds as animals that lay eggs, any more than you can claim
Archaeopteryx
for the reptiles because it has teeth. The idea that classification should be based on synapomorphies rather than plesiomorphic characters whenever possible informs modern systematics, and Colin Patterson was one of those who wrought this clarification. He had started out in the long-established tradition of the Museum, publishing a huge monograph on the fishes of the Cretaceous Chalk. He was always a great believer in the taxonomic purpose of natural history museums, and in the primacy of collections. He also, whether he liked it or not, became an authority. When he delivered a lecture, young scientific visitors used to cluster at the door to hear that commanding voice lay out ideas with exceptional clarity. He pioneered a style of shabby chic that was much copied by the younger generation, in which a sagging velveteen jacket played an important part. The charisma was palpable.

The renowned fish specialist and classification theorist Colin Patterson, relaxing in ornithological mode

Almost as impressive was Dick Jefferies, who had joined the Museum as an echinoderm expert in the 1960s. Echinoderms are a great group of marine animals that includes sea urchins, starfish and sea lilies. Dick spent much of his subsequent career attempting to remove some peculiar fossil animals known as carpoids from the echinoderms to a position at the base of the group of animals to which you and I belong—the chordates, of which the familiar vertebrates are a part. Dick had the look of the perfect scientific intellectual, with a high, bald cranium and a magisterially distrait manner. His deep sonorous voice is still as distinctive in its own way as the Pattersonian tones, and he has splendidly crested eyebrows that somehow help to invest his remarks with seriousness and just a touch of quizzical humour. The hegemony of the stratigraphic palaeontologists was already a memory, although the Keeper at the time, Dr. H. W. “Bill” Ball, did hail from that tradition. My near namesake, Peter Forey, coelacanth expert supreme, joined the Museum shortly after I did, and we have been receiving one another’s mail ever since. The combination of Patterson, Jefferies and Forey was a formidable one in the cause of cladistics. They lived close together on the first floor of the “new building” their convictions made them slightly scary to other mortals. They tended to refer to me and some of my colleagues as “the stratigraphers on the third floor.” If an opinion was offered that did not emanate from the cutting edge, they were wont to dismiss it with “We don’t do it like that any more,” which simultaneously had the effect of excluding the interlocutor from “we” and making him feel hopelessly out of date. Colin Patterson managed a kind of dismissive sniff, often without looking up from his microscope, which reminded me of the story of Diogenes greeting a visiting dignitary with the cry “Get out of my light.” Of course, they were right: we really don’t do it like that any more. It was only a few years before desktop computers were constructing trees in a few seconds that would have taken weeks to work out by hand. Systematics had become a modern science.

But does that invalidate expertise? After all, any system that strives towards objectivity should be manageable by technicians and computers, like the sequencing laboratories that routinely examine DNA “fingerprints.” Surely, we don’t need specialists any more…

Actually we do, because the familiar adage “rubbish in, rubbish out” applies even more in an age of systematics married to computer algorithms. The most important part of understanding any group of animals and plants remains their characters, their morphology. Discovery of new, unsuspected characters, new kinds of “hairs on legs,” can change a classification for the better, something which remains more important than the latest whiz-bang computer program. The worry now is that the leisurely ways of the old museums are no longer possible. The pressure on publication means that young scientists cannot spend a decade learning their trade—their group of ammonites or moths or whatever; and there is really no substitute for experience. It was always true that some people have a kind of feel for what is significant in a group of organisms; this is a gift, like a musical ear. This gift is found in the born naturalist, and may determine who eventually earns a living in the business. It is equally true that there is the equivalent of tone deafness, which I might term taxonomic blindness. Many people will wave vaguely at a landscape admiring the trees, but won’t distinguish an ash from an oak, let alone a spruce from a larch. Flowers are daisies or not-daisies. I guess my instinctive appreciation of how much they might be missing is equivalent to a musician feeling for one who cannot appreciate Mozart. The more you know about nature, the more you see, and this is enriching.

Not that the
experts
always get it right. Possibly the most famous fraud in scientific history was perpetrated upon the Geology Department of the Natural History Museum: Piltdown Man. Between 1908 and 1913 a series of discoveries of fossil bones around the little village of Piltdown in the rural county of Sussex allowed the identification of the “missing link” between apes and humans. Recall that this was before the exploration of Africa as the cradle of human evolution, and that Charles Darwin’s observations on likely human descent were at the time almost unsupported by fossil evidence. Here was a discovery devoutly to be wished by the scientific community, and the find of
Eoanthropus dawsoni
fitted the bill. The occupier of the Keeper’s position at the time, Arthur Smith Woodward, named the species “in honour of its discoverer” Charles Dawson, a local Sussex solicitor who enjoyed a considerable reputation as an antiquary and amateur palaeontologist. In my childhood copy of Arthur Mee’s
Children’s Encyclopedia
there was a reconstruction of Piltdown Man, as solid as you like, dressed in skins and hammering away with his stone tools. He enjoyed forty years of existence. But in November 1953 he evaporated: the evidence on which he had been based was nothing more than a cheap fraud. Arthur Smith Woodward had been duped by a faker.
Eoanthropus dawsoni
was a confection of dyed bones—“not one of the Piltdown finds genuinely came from Piltdown,” as Sir Gavin de Beer, Director of the Museum, wrote in 1955. Piltdown’s mandible was probably that of an immature orangutan. Human skull fragments had been similarly stained with iron to make them “fit.” Bone “tools” had been filed down with rasps. Nothing was what it seemed. When Arthur Smith Woodward spent field seasons in the Piltdown pits over several years, he was being set up like any “mark” by a conman. Fortunately for the reputation of the Natural History Museum, its staff were equally involved with the subsequent exposure of the fraud. Kenneth P. Oakley first noticed that the fluorine concentrations of Piltdown bones were far too low to support its supposed antiquity. Once doubt set in, the fraud was obvious—all that staining and filing and the admixture of different sources of bones—so much so that today wonderment is expressed about how a scientist of the stature of Smith Woodward could have fallen for it. There has even been the suggestion that he must have been party to the deception. Given his impeccable record elsewhere, and the fact that he fruitlessly continued “digging” long after the supply of bones had dried up, this is extremely unlikely. He was the patsy, poor man. He
wanted
Piltdown to be genuine and as a consequence was led by the nose.