Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (52 page)

Engraving of Anton Von Werner’s original painting, copyright © The Granger Collection,
New York.

Evolution
, copyright © Vint Lawrence, 1995.

La giraffe,
Georges Buffon.

From
The Origin of Vertebrates
, Walter Holbrook Gaskell, 1908.

From
Memoires du Museum d’Histoire Naturelle
, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1822. Neg. nos. 338680, 337423. Photographs by Jackie Beckett. Courtesy of the Department of Library Services, American Museum of Natural History.

E. M. De Robertis and Y. Sasai;
reprinted with permission from
Nature
, vol. 380. Copyright © 1996 Macmillan Magazines Limited.

From
Mars and Its Canals
, Percival Lowell (New York: Macmillan, 1906). Courtesy of the Lowell Observatory, Arizona.

Copyright © UPI/Corbis-Bettmann.

From
Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism
, E. Ray Lankester (London: Macmillan and Co., 1880).

Courtesy of Archives de Zoologie Expérimentale Deuxième
Série, Tome II, 1884.

Beth Beyerholm; with permission from
Nature
, vol. 377. Copyright © 1995 Macmillan Magazines Limited.

Courtesy of Nancy J. Haver, from
Invertebrates
, R. C. Brusca and G. J. Brusca (Sinauer Associates, 1990).

Reverse Evolution
copyright © Vint Lawrence, 1995.

Footnotes

To return to the corresponding text, click on the reference number.

Introduction: PIECES OF EIGHT: CONFESSION OF A HUMANISTIC NATURALIST

1
. The etymology is much disputed, but I will follow John Ciardi’s
Browser’s Dictionary
(Harper & Row, 1980) for the conventional story that American colonials (in the absence of an official mint before we became a nation) used the coins of several
countries for change. The Spanish silver “piece of eight” (so called because the coin bore a large number 8 to signify its value as eight
reals
) was often cut into pieces, called “bits.” Since the
real
was worth about 12½ cents, two bits became an American quarter, four bits a half-dollar, and so on—in terminology still used today.

1. THE UPWARDLY MOBILE FOSSILS OF LEONARDO’S LIVING EARTH

1
. What goes ’round, comes ’round—as Leonardo must have said somewhere. This Leicester Codex, one of Leonardo’s most important notebooks, filled largely with commentary on the nature and use of water, first came to light in the 1690s, when Giuseppi Ghezzi found the document in a chest of manuscripts in Rome. In 1717, Thomas Coke, late Lord Leicester (hence the codex’s name), purchased the notebook,
which remained in his family until Armand Hammer bought it in 1980—and renamed it, in Trumpian fashion, Codex Hammer. With enormous fanfare (at enormous profit), Christie’s auctioned this notebook on November 11, 1994, where America’s Bill Gates outbid several European governments, and bought the manuscript for more money than I can count. Gates, to his credit, restored the original name, and has
favored public exhibition of the document—including a show at the American Museum of Natural History in 1996, where I finally saw this icon of my dreams and admiration, and where I developed the ideas for this essay. The Leicester Codex is the only manuscript of Leonardo’s now residing in America.

2
. An air of impenetrability continues to surround Leonardo. A scholar must still struggle to obtain
a complete translation of any document like the Leicester Codex. The Richter edition of Leonardo’s notebooks is maddeningly fragmentary, and the individual passages of the codices are broken apart and rearranged by subject. (Thus, you can find Leonardo’s statements about water under a common heading, as abstracted from all his notebooks, but you cannot put together the text of the Leicester Codex—admittedly
a hodgepodge and miscellany, but scholars do need to trace sequential jottings, however motley the apparent medley, for Leonardo often made odd juxtapositions for interesting reasons.) The other major edition of Leonardo’s notebooks—Edward MacCurdy’s compilation of 1939, and my source of quotation for this essay—is far more adequate (and nearly complete for the Leicester Codex), although
also broken up by topic, I must confess to a wry amusement (which might have blossomed to near fury if I had a different temperament) at the recent exhibit of the Leicester Codex in New York’s Museum of Natural History. Visitors could see all the original pages and buy a beautiful catalog with each page reproduced in full facsimile. But no printed translation could be found anywhere, and the
catalog only provided a pitifully scrappy summary of each page. You could purchase a CD-ROM with the full text (as Bill Gates showed his true commitment!), but most homes don’t have a machine for playback, and the version that I tried to use couldn’t even put a full line, with Leonardo’s marginal annotations, on the screen at once. Moreover, a scholar can’t work with only one part of a text on a
screen at a time. You have to be able to compare passages from several pages at once—as you can do with an old-fashioned book. I almost felt as though our modern age of the passive sound bite—the attitude of “we know what little bit you need”—had launched a conspiracy against scholarship to keep Leonardo hidden. I do love to consult original sources in their original languages, but my skills (and
patience) do not extend to long bouts of reading medieval Italian in a mirror!

3
. Here Leonardo properly rejects a popular explanation supported by some of his contemporaries—that the earth, in cross section, is an elongated ellipse rather than a sphere, and that water at the end of the long axis of the ellipse will stand higher (farther from the earth’s center) than mountains in the short axis
of the ellipse. Water could then flow “down” from oceans to mountains. But Leonardo recognized that the surface of the ocean will always lie below the summits of mountains on other quadrants of the earth’s surface.

4. THE CLAM STRIPPED BARE BY HER NATURALISTS, EVEN

1
. Indeed, I did miss the only modern article published about Mendes da Costa, an excellent and thorough account by P. J. P. Whitehead
in 1977 (see bibliography for details). I regret this oversight, both for my failure to honor Whitehead’s extensive work, and for the considerable extra time and labor I therefore spent in locating (from scratch and for a second time) the rare and sketchy sources that we both used as a basis for our articles. (Scholarship is truly a collective and accumulative exercise in this crucial sense,
as 1 failed both Whitehead and myself. To be sure, Whitehead published his account in a small and highly technical journal not included in most standard bibliographies. But, no excuses. My sources on Mendes da Costa were far more obscure and far more difficult to locate!)

Whitehead’s article treats a quite different subject from my focus (the true authorship of Mendes da Costa’s book on conchology,
which Whitehead determines to be, indeed, da Costa’s own work, and not that of other contenders). But he also includes an interesting account of Mendes da Costa’s life. We reach very much the same conclusions, but Whitehead’s work does resolve one issue in the original version of my essay (here corrected). I had been unable to find enough evidence to convince me of Mendes da Costa’s guilt in
charges laid against him by the Royal Society in 1767, and leading to his several years in prison. But Whitehead proves that Mendes da Costa was indeed guilty as charged, though his deep regret and subsequent rehabilitation also seem well documented.

In one crucial theme of my essay, Whitehead ably affirms my central claim that Mendes da Costa has—curiously, given his unique and fascinating status—elicited
remarkably little attention from later historians and scientists. Whitehead writes: “Da Costa has so far received only brief biographical treatment although, like many of his colleagues, he was an avid letter-writer and his carefully preserved correspondence (over two thousand letters) still survives.” May I hope that some aspiring Ph.D. candidate in the history of science reads this
footnote and finds a superb thesis topic thereby? Then Whitehead’s article and this essay will truly not have been in vain.

14. NON-OVERLAPPING MAGISTERIA

1
. Interestingly, the main thrust of these paragraphs does not address evolution in general, but lies in refuting a doctrine that Pius calls “polygenism,” or the notion of human ancestry from multiple parents—for he regards such an idea as
incompatible with the doctrine of original sin “which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.” In this one instance, Pius may be transgressing the NOMA principle—but I cannot judge, for I do not understand the details of Catholic theology and therefore do not know how symbolically such a statement
may be read. If Pius is arguing that we cannot entertain a theory about derivation of all modern humans from an ancestral population rather than through an ancestral individual (a potential fact) because such an idea would question the doctrine of original sin (a theological construct), then I would declare him out of line for letting the magisterium of religion dictate a conclusion within the
magisterium of science.

2
. This passage, here correctly translated, provides a fascinating example of the subtleties and inherent ambiguities in rendering one language into another. Translation may be the most difficult of all arts, and meanings have been reversed (and wars fought) for perfectly understandable reasons. The Pope originally issued his statement in French, where this phrase read
“. . .
de nouvelles connaissances conduisent à reconnaitre dans la théorie de l’évolution plus qu’une hypothèse.” L’Osservatore Romano
, the official Vatican newspaper, translated this passage as: “new knowledge has led to the recognition of more than one hypothesis in the theory of evolution.” This version (obviously, given the official Vatican source) then appeared in all English commentaries,
including the original version of this essay.

I included this original translation, but I was profoundly puzzled. Why should the Pope be speaking of
several
hypotheses within the framework of evolutionary theory? But I had no means to resolve my confusion, so I assumed that the Pope had probably fallen under the false impression (a fairly common misconception) that, although evolution had been
documented beyond reasonable doubt, natural selection had fallen under suspicion as a primary mechanism, while other alternatives had risen to prominence.

Other theologians and scientists were equally puzzled, leading to inquiries and a resolution of the problem as an error in translation (as many of us would have realized right away if we had seen the original French, or even known that the
document had been issued in French). The problem lies with ambiguity in double meaning for the indefinite article in French—where
un
(feminine
une
) can mean either “a” or “one.” Clearly, the Pope had meant that the theory of evolution had now become strong enough to rank as “more than
a
hypothesis”
(plus qu’une hypothèse)
, but the Vatican originally read
une
as “one” and gave the almost opposite
rendition: “more than
one
hypothesis.”
Caveat emptor.

I thank about a dozen correspondents for pointing out this error, and the Vatican’s acknowledgment, to me. I am especially grateful to Boyce Rensberger, one of America’s most astute journalists on evolutionary subjects, and David M. Byers, executive director of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Science and Human Values.
Byers affirms the NOMA principle by writing to me: “Thank you for your recent article . . . It admirably captures the relationship between science and religion that the Catholic Bishops’ Committee works to promote and to realize. The text of the October 1996 papal statement from which you were working contains a mistranslation of a key phrase; the correct translation supports your thesis with
even greater force.”