Anthroposaurus
Must We Always Trust the Infallibility of Experts?
Abstract
Contents Updated: Wednesday, December 15, 1999
"The world would perish were all men learned."
Experts and Iconoclasts
Experts are comedians of error. They claim an authority bounding on infallibility. Yet, from the Eighteenth century to the present day, professors of fossilized remains were wrong and again wrong, not only where evidence was thin on the ground but also often where there was plenty of it.
In contrast, many of the great founders of evolutionary theory were amateurs, self taught or untrained in biological sciences: Darwin was an undergraduate in divinity; Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of the Theory of Evolution, never was a graduate—he was trained as a surveyor; Mendel, who worked out the laws of genetics, was a monk. Amateurs are not tied to the conventions of the professional man. They can be more creative, make imaginative leaps with no worries about reputation—they can think the unthinkable. They can speculate.
Today some experts deliberately reject their professional field to become amateurs in another subject where they can speculate to their hearts content. Fred Hoyle is a well known expert in physics, particularly astrophysics. But Hoyle determined to establish himself as an amateur in the new field, for him, of evolutionary theory. He cast off the mantle of the expert to take on a new and speculative role. And it worked, much to the chagrin of some complacent evolutionists, who have had to take time out to answer Hoyle’s conjectures. Hoyle might often be wrong in his new role, perhaps he always is, but he is right to force the orthodox to justify themselves rather than propagating dogmas they have never thought to examine.
Experts are human and subject to the failings of us all. In fiction scientists are depicted as inhuman fanatics, as dispassionate robots or abstract old dodderers. Rarely are working scientists any of these in real life. Scientists can be passionate about their pet theories despite their training to be objective, but rarely are they fanatical. Great discoveries have been made through scientists engaging in contests over their competing ideas—gladiators of the Bunsen burner!—the fight ends when successful prediction and application establishes one theory over another. But every established theory will eventually be challenged in its turn as new observations are made.
This is healthy. What is not healthy is when experts set up a scientific establishment with its own rules of acceptance, a scientific freemasonry from which others are excluded. Theories no longer belong to individuals but to the group, whose vested interest is served by cleaving to them and ridiculing alternatives. New thought is stifled while yesterday’s innovation, a dynamic force for progress, becomes a new orthodoxy, and establishment opinion becomes oppressively conservative.
Members of the fraternity and those aspiring to it may even become liars and forgers if status and respect is gained or retained thereby. They falsify results and even create imaginary co-workers in their desperation for approval and recognition. Still worse is when scientists sell their objectivity for pieces of silver—when they are employed by governments and businesses to defend their employers’ position and take a partisan view irrespective of the facts. For the general public these are the really dangerous experts.
Thomas Kuhn explains the stability and overthrow of established scientific theories in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Science is conducted within an accepted framework of thought which he calls a “paradigm”. Everyone is happy with it until at some stage it is challenged—someone has a better idea. Learned professors choke into their port at High Table thinking, “All our work is out of date—our research programs are irrelevant”. But their defences are ready. They close ranks, rally to the orthodox view and hasten to discredit the innovators.
The leading modern paleontological iconoclast, Robert Bakker, found himself up against the establishment when he urged vigorously that the physiology and lifestyles of dinosaurs should be reassessed. He later expressed it thus:
Old theories are tough antagonists in court. The scientific establishment tends to believe that old, accepted views are correct unless shown to be wrong beyond any reasonable doubt.
Exactly! Equally good theories find it difficult to get a fair hearing in the experts’ court where the scientific establishment supply counsel for the prosecution, officials, judge and jury, all of whom back the conventional view.
Not long ago Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields (which suggests that once something has happened it is more likely to happen again) was violently attacked by many of his scientific peers. The editor of a respected scientific journal virtually recommended that his book should be burned. Sheldrake’s theory might prove to be worthless—but only by testing it can we find out. However the allocation of research funds depends upon peer group recommendation and, needless to say, those wishing to test this controversial hypothesis could not get financial support.
Those who defend the old paradigm are the majority of established scientists in the field, at least at the beginning. The revolutionaries, the new thinkers, attack it. Competition takes place and the paradigm holds or it falls. If the latter, the new paradigm becomes accepted and is destined to become the canon in its turn. As T.H.Huxley put it: new truths begin as heresies and end as superstitions.
What then is the lesson of this? Simply to remain open minded. And that does not mean to remain sitting on the fence. Since science progresses through the jousting of different ideas until one is unseated, there is nothing wrong with people defending their theory during the tournament. What is wrong is closing one’s mind to the merits of other ideas and, what is worse, closing ranks against them. It is openness, receptiveness, the desire to look at something new, that helps to keep societies and their methodologies healthy. Dogma of any kind puts a straitjacket on the mind and a jackboot on society.
Of course, some proposals will have little merit and will fall quickly when assailed by the evidence—but something is usually gained in the exercise. Bakker, writing about the publication of novel ideas in science, says that even when the revolutionary idea finally proves not correct, the natural tendency to accept orthodoxy unchallenged is beneficially shaken.
Let me give you examples of some comedians of error, some defenders of orthodoxy and some heroes of invention involved in the fields of enquiry most relevant to the subject of this book, paleontology and prehistory.
Baron Cuvier realized before Queen Victoria came to the throne of England that extinction is the fate of us all. Cuvier was born in 1769 and lived his younger life before the French revolution when opportunities for young talented people not of the aristocratic class were limited. As a consequence, after completing his studies, he had to take a lowly post as a tutor in Normandy. But the French Revolution created new opportunities and Cuvier took charge of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Continuing his studies there he successively became a professor of natural history and then of anatomy. The famous mosasaurus found in 1770, which created the original scientific interest in fossils, was identified by Cuvier as an extinct marine lizard.
The spirit of the time imbued Cuvier. He was keen that the French masses should appreciate the wonders of science and nature; but he was not willing simply to wait for people deprived for centuries of mental stimuli to recognize he had something of value. He wanted to create a market for learning, to attract his audience by presenting natural history in novel and exciting ways. His solution was to practise the techniques of showmen and actors. Teaching himself to be a dramatic and persuasive lecturer, choosing analogies he knew laborers and peasants could understand, he won the working people to the thrill of discovery. He even opened his own library for their use. He also sought—and received—assistance for his endeavors from government, persuading Napoleon that he should provide museums with well conceived, visually interesting displays and should donate money for research. His imaginative ideas succeeded and Cuvier not only became a national hero, receiving his title as an honor, he also became internationally renowned.
Cuvier was one of the founders of the study of historical geology or stratigraphy. The other was an Englishman, William Smith.
Cuvier had noticed how different rock strata had different fossils in them. The topmost layers of recent deposits contained familiar bones but the deeper down he looked the less familiar they were.
William Smith was a surveyor and could not fail to notice fossils in the rocks in the everyday execution of his duties. From his observations he proposed that rocks could be dated by the fossils in them, their index fossils. He catalogued them, thereby providing the first reliable geological clock which could be used for dating widely separated rocks.
Cuvier and Smith had erected the two pillars of stratigraphy:
- normally younger rocks lie on top of older ones
- rocks containing the same fossils are the same age.
From these beginnings the scientific study of the earth and prehistory could begin in earnest. Scholars began to look with fresh interest at the rocks, to the natural formations around them, stimulated by the works of the pioneers.
They were astonished by the huge petrified bones that were common in some strata. The Biblical deluge of Noah’s Ark was the orthodox explanation of the fossilized remains of extinct animals, but Cuvier realized it could not explain all the changes from stratum to stratum. He decided there must have been a series of such catastrophes. After each extinction God began again. The theory of catastrophes was published as A Discourse on the Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe.
Cuvier perceptively noted:
Whole races were extinguished leaving mere traces of their existence, which are now difficult of recognition, even by a naturalist.
The study of fossilized bones under the rocks and their identification as extinct species were, because of prevailing religious views, controversial from the start. The Bible was regarded by many, even learned people, as being the infallible word of God and unquestionably true. Though Cuvier was much admired as a scholar his book was regarded by many in the British establishment, the ecclesiastical and political experts of the day, as dangerously radical. It contradicted the Bible! Cuvier’s scientifically observed catastrophe theory had to do battle with the dogma of Noah’s Flood.
Furthermore, according to the Church’s teaching of plenum, God had created the world complete—nothing could have been taken away or added. Dinosaur bones had been emerging from eroding rocks for longer than man had existed, testifying to the extinction of species and the evolution of new ones. Yet the Church dogma of plenum forbade such a heresy.
Religious bigotry resulted in English publishers bowdlerizing Cuvier’s book to give the impression that Cuvier was approving Noah’s deluge not proposing a radically new and more general theory challenging Church dogmata.
Moreover God’s world was thoroughly anthropocentric. Mankind’s rightful place was at the center of creation. Darwin was soon to have trouble over this and respectable paleontologists still believe it today. But a catastrophe theory must admit of the likelihood of future catastrophes eventually even sweeping away mankind—a thought inconceivable to the ecclesiastical experts.
How were species replaced after each catastrophe? Cuvier did not go so far as to advocate evolution. His idea was one of separate creations after each destruction. Evolutionary theory had to wait for Charles Darwin. But fear of confrontation with the clerics obliged Darwin to hold up publication while he sought to amass enough evidence to put the issue beyond doubt. He also spent time seeking noncontroversial examples. Only at the end of On the Origin of Species did he reveal the direction of his thoughts:
light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.
The pressure on innovative thinkers in this stifling atmosphere of intolerance is well illustrated by Cuvier’s predecessor, Le Comte de Buffon, who initially believed correctly that mastodon remains found in the 18th century on the banks of the Ohio river were a new species of animal, but later was shamed into retracting and admitting that they were after all only a mixture of elephant tusks and hippopotamus teeth.
Buffon did have the courage to argue that the geological history of the earth was longer than the Biblical scholars reckoned. He calculated that a molten globe the size of the earth would have taken at least 75,000 and perhaps 500,000 years to cool. His longer estimate was ten thousand times too short but ten thousand per cent better than the theologians’ preference—Bishop Ussher’s now risible estimate (calculated from Biblical lineages) that the earth was created in 4004 BC!
Cuvier’s fossil specimens were often fragmentary—they usually still are—but he was not fazed. From comparative anatomy he concluded that the different parts of an animal were so closely connected that the whole creature could be reconstructed from a single bone. Cuvier had become an expert! Much can be learned about an animal from only a few remains, but Cuvier’s excessive confidence, which inspired later paleontologists, was misplaced and led to serious mistakes. Excessive confidence is a key characteristic of experts.
G.A.Mantell, a professional physician, was an amateur paleontologist whose pleasure was to hunt for fossils and who, perhaps because of his obsession with his hobby, lost his money, his wife and his family, and died in relative obscurity. In his happier days however his fossil hunting brought him recognition. He was the first man to identify a tooth of an iguanodon, a herbivorous dinosaur. (Cuvier thought it was a hippopotamus tooth.) Yet a rival almost deprived him of his precedence. An authority on fossils at that time, The Reverend Buckland, advised Mantell not to publish until he was certain of his identification. Buckland, who had also found dinosaur fossils, had no intention of hanging about. He quickly prepared a description of his own discovery, megalosaurus, a large carnivorous dinosaur from the Jurassic, and published it a year before Mantell published his on iguanodon. Scholars now base Mantell’s prior claim on his earlier lectures and his notebooks which showed the thoroughness of his work and the originality of his thinking.
Buckland’s motives might have been sincere. Perhaps he did not wish to see the enthusiastic Mantell disillusioned by the possibility of ridicule. Be that as it may, Buckland’s own prejudices exposed him to ridicule on a different occasion. He identified the ten thousand year old skeleton of a young cave man as a Romano-British camp follower. The bones were found among remains of animals now extinct in a cave in South Wales. Buckland, a Biblical as well as a geological expert, assumed these animals had perished in the Flood but, since the descendants of Adam had not lived in Britain before the Flood, the human remains had to be later. Nearby were the ruins of a Roman camp. The Reverend noted that the dead person wore beads and, since men do not wear beads, the skeleton, despite the anatomical evidence, had to be that of a woman. Buckland concluded, “whatever may have been her occupation, the vicinity of a camp would afford… a means of subsistence”. Ever since, Buckland’s mistaken identification has been derided as “The Red Lady of Paviland”, a double entendre, the bones being red with iron oxide.
Buckland even failed to draw appropriate conclusions from his own specimen, the megalosaurus, which had teeth set in sockets like crocodiles’ not growing straight out of the jawbones like lizards’. Though Buckland explained why the anatomical features of the fossil proved it was not a crocodile, his mental fixation, his unquestioning acceptance of the conceptual paradigms of the period, stopped him from appreciating the enormous significance of his findings: he had almost discovered the dinosaurs.
When progress is imprisoned by the experts’ paradigms (or preconceptions, call them what you will) the break out is frequently the work of the astute amateur. An appropriate example is the discovery of the nature of the ichthyosaur. It also illustrates how accident rather than design so often in science reveals what was previously hidden. The fossils found with the remains of the ichthyosaur showed that it was a marine animal. They lived in schools because wherever there were deposits “they were as tightly packed in that slate as herrings in a barrel”.
William Daniel Conybeare, an Englishman who wrote the first monograph on the ichthyosaur, drew it as a lizard with paddle-like limbs, while Cuvier described it as “a creature with the snout of a dolphin, the teeth of a crocodile, the skull and the chest of a lizard, the paddles of a whale, and the vertebrae of a fish”. This is not an unreasonable description, but how were these components put together, what was its actual shape and what was its lifestyle?
The experts reasoned thus: being reptiles, they must have laid eggs; marine turtles have to shuffle their way up beaches to do this, the ichthyosaurs must have done the same; they would not have looked very elegant but then turtles do not either, though they manage; walruses and seals are also clumsy on land yet they also manage; ergo, ichthyosaurs were ill-adapted amphibious lizards.
Enter the famous Victorian paleontologist, Richard Owen, a very remarkable man of considerable genius who suffered only from becoming an expert. Having trained with Cuvier in Paris, coined the word dinosaur in 1841, and established himself as an authority on comparative anatomy, Owen, despite his successes, was able to demonstrate, with immense confidence, how spectacularly wrong he could be. A confirmed anthropocentrist and anti-evolutionist, he classified mankind as being unique in all creation and sought to prove it by listing human anatomical features that were similarly unique. T.H.Huxley toppled humans and Owen from their respective pedestals by showing that all of the “unique” features chosen by Owen were present in the great apes!
From his examination of the ichthyosaur fossil Owen successfully showed that the creature had tendons attaching muscles from its tail to its bones indicating that, like whales, the ichthyosaurs used their tails to power themselves through the water. The difference was that the ichthyosaur’s tail fin was vertical whereas the whale’s tail fin was horizontal. An odd thing was that all specimens seemed to have broken tails; about a third of the way along, the tail vertebrae bent downwards. Owen felt that the tail must have broken after death but before fossilization. As the corpse of the dead animal drifted around gradually decaying, at some stage the tail had dropped under its own weight but tendons kept it attached to the body so that it became fossilized apparently broken.
This was the picture of the ichthyosaur until the 1890s when Bernard Hauff, the owner of a few slate quarries at Holzmaden near Stuttgart in Germany, raised himself to a remarkable level of proficiency in cleaning fossil-bearing slate slabs. In 1892 someone carelessly spilled a glass of water on to a slab that Hauff was cleaning. No one thought anything of the accident itself, the water would dry leaving the specimen perfectly all right. But amazingly Hauff saw that, as the water dried, it revealed the living outline of the ichthyosaur.
Though skilled at cleaning slates, Hauff was still an amateur as far as the interpretation of any of the fossil specimens was concerned. A few days later, therefore, when some experts led by Professor Oscar Fraas from the Stuttgart Natural History Museum called by, he asked them whether it was possible for the soft tissues of an animal to fossilize. If so he would spend time trying to bring out the outline as clearly as possible. “Absolutely no possibility of it at all, my dear Hauff, Don’t bother to waste your time over it. Just carry on with the excellent work you are already doing. The stains must be simply some peculiar property of the slate”, was their dismissive reaction.
Fortunately Herr Hauff was not put off by these learned opinions and the next time the museum’s experts visited he was able to show them the impression of an ichthyosaur’s skeleton within its skin, the tail fin and dorsal fin clearly showing. Hauff’s lucky accident, his unwillingness to obey the voice of authority and his astonishing skill answered many questions and offered the authorities an altogether more streamlined, fish-like creature than they had imagined.
The ichthyosaur was fully adapted for its marine existence. The bend in its tail bones was natural and not caused by breakage. It supported the lower part of a crescent shaped tail fin, rather like a shark’s except that in the shark the cartilaginous support extends into the upper part of the fin. The dorsal fin was totally unexpected. The ichthyosaur was a saurian dolphin not a brother to the turtle or even a saurian sea lion. On land it would have been just as helpless as a whale. But if ichthyosaurs could not move about on land how did they lay their eggs? More of that later.
Bernard Hauff was not obedient to authority; he did not accept the dogmas of the experts. He went on to show that all good ichthyosaur specimens from Holzmaden had a skin. He was eventually rewarded with an honorary doctorate. In fairness to Oscar Fraas, he was delighted by the discoveries, although he did briefly argue that the dorsal fin was just one of a series of lizard like vanes running down the ichthyosaur’s back. That view was soon demolished by further specimens given the Hauff treatment.
Evidently experts either see more than is there or nothing at all. They are either omniscient or nescient, seeing all or seeing nothing depending upon whether new observations slot into their paradigm or not. Those expecting only the conventional can be, to all intents and purposes, truly blind.
John Ostrom of Yale University relates the story of how he found the clawed hand of a dinosaur, subsequently called deinonychus, protruding from an eroded mound. Yet only feet away were the recent footprints of his team of experts who, while prospecting the site for specimens, had passed by missing it completely.
On the other hand Richard Owen’s training with Cuvier seemed to give him a degree of omniscience. Given a mere fragment of fossilized bone, he was able to identify it as “a struthious bird nearly equal in size to the ostrich, belonging to a heavier and more sluggish species”. In this instance Owen was spot on: the bone proved to be one of the giant moas of New Zealand, quite unknown at the time.
That shows expertise at its best. What of its worst?
Paleontologists had a bias for the aquatic lifestyle of the duck-billed hadrosaurs. The well known dinosaur classifier, Joseph Leidy, had originally thought them aquatic because they had beaks rather like a duck’s and an animal with a bill must feed like a duck and ergo be aquatic like a duck. The logic is impeccable, don’t trouble us with facts! Direct evidence testified otherwise. The petrified contents of the hadrosaur’s stomach included twigs, needles from conifers and the remains of willow and poplar, showing that the creature browsed on lowland forest trees not on soft weed in slow moving rivers or lakes.
To construct and name new species from inadequate fragments is fraught with hazards even if you are an Owen or a Cuvier. For lesser men it is mayhem. Witness the variety of species described initially as being megalosaurus. After William Buckland’s description in 1824, any partial remains of Jurassic carnivores were attributed to megalosaurus. Reports of it came in from all over Europe and as far afield as Australia and North America. David Norman, an authority on dinosaurs, says that at least 26 instances have occurred. Trying to sort them out causes more muddle. Omniscience replaces nescience and suddenly the classifiers have not one but lots of different species.
Neither the original specimen nor the others were sufficient to merit the attempts to name them. A complication of tyrannosaurid teeth is that their shape varies from the front to the back of the jaw. Experts attempting “a Cuvier” or “an Owen” came to think that differently shaped teeth came from different animals. The result was a variety of names given by different authorities at different times to bits of the same animal. Norman comments:
This welter of names provides yet another example of how dangerous it can be to name new species on the basis of inadequate material… If these scientists had resisted the temptation to name the teeth until better material, such as skull and jaws had been discovered, much confusion could have been avoided.
To judge how the intelligent dinosaur might have evolved, we shall be looking at the evolution of mankind, the intelligent mammal. Here again experts were at work debunking new ideas and discoveries just as they had in other realms. The discovery of fragments of a skull and skeleton of a primitive man at Neanderthal in the mid-Nineteenth century aroused widespread interest but impressed the experts little.
“It is not a primitive skull at all”, they announced. “It is merely the skull of a Dutchman”" offered one German anatomist (German anatomists at that time being highly respected). Another expert retorts, “Nonsense, it is the skull of a Cossack who died while pursuing Napoleon’s retreating armies in 1812”. Thomas Huxley dryly observed that this Cossack had removed his clothes in a freezing continental January, disposed of them, climbed a 60 feet high cliff, died, and buried himself.
“It plainly is thick skulled so it must be an Irishman”, reasoned yet another expert, this time French. “You are all quite wrong”, announced Rudolf Virchow, the doyen of German pathologists:
The poor man’s unusual features are nothing to do with primitiveness but are simply due to rickets and arthritis together with some severe buffeting about the head.
These learned men failed to appreciate the antiquity of the skull which was thereafter put away and forgotten for many years. Then Marcellin Boule of the French Museum of natural history published three tomes, supposedly seminal, on it from 1910 to 1913. Boule was so astonishingly lacking in objectivity that his work defies explanation even for an expert. Let us merely highlight his most well known error which was to fail to take account of the poor man’s arthritis, noted correctly by Virchow, which was cripplingly severe and had seriously distorted his body. The skeleton was that of an old man.
His conclusions influenced subsequent generations into thinking that Neanderthal man was brutish, dim-witted and subhuman. Today Neanderthal is still a term of abuse even though W.Strauss and A.J.Cave wrote this about Neanderthal man in the 1950s:
If he could be reincarnated and placed in a New York subway, provided he were bathed, shaved and dressed in modern clothing, it is doubtful whether he would attract any more attention than some of its other denizens.
Indeed one wonders whether a Neanderthal man would risk travelling alone on the New York subway.
Over a hundred years ago Edouard Piette discovered that Homo sapiens had domesticated horses in very early times. The most respected authority of the time, the Abbe Breuil, another churchman, vigorously rejected the idea. Piette died at the turn of the century and it was not until 1966 that the question was reopened with the description of a 15,000 years old carving of a horse’s head in a quite elaborate bridle. If horses were being handled in this sophisticated way 15,000 years ago there is strong reason to believe that horses were captured and held tethered in less sophisticated ways many thousands of years before that. In fact, there is evidence from the wear of horses’ teeth 30,000 years old that they were tethered even then.
Learned men proved their blindness more recently when Raymond Dart, an anatomist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, discovered the skull of the Taung child. Sir Arthur Keith, Keeper of the Hunterian Collection at the Royal College of Surgeons, at first seemed supportive but then dismissed Dart’s claim that the skull was hominid. “It is the skull of a young chimpanzee”, pronounced Keith. Hominid jaws are distinguished from other apes by the lack of large canine teeth and the corresponding absence of a gap (the diastema) in the opposing set of teeth to accommodate the canines when the jaw is closed. The Taung skull had small, human-like canines and no diastema proving to any anatomical tyro that the skull was not a chimpanzee’s.
Keith’s fellow experts, Sir Arthur Smith-Woodward, Sir Grafton Elliot and Dr W.L.H.Duckworth, all blind as moles, joined in the skepticism in varying degrees towards Dart’s discovery. Only as he approached 80 did Keith concede that he had been wrong about the Taung child. For that he deserves some praise—most experts are not gracious enough to admit it though they know they are wrong.
Keith was so blind that he confirmed the blatant forgery, the Piltdown skull, as authentic, naming it Eoanthropus Dawsonii, after its discoverer and possible forger. Woodward, who had been present at the Piltdown site, backed him in his judgment. Woodward went on to devote most of the later part of his life to the Piltdown skull, going so far as to write a book about it with the appalling title, The First Englishman. One wonders whether later Englishmen were as ignominious as the first. Only those who are experts, perhaps.
Blindness struck a footprint expert only to be followed by omniscience. According to Don Johanson, discoverer of Lucy, the most complete hominid skeleton yet found, the astonishing pre-human footprints at Laetoli were almost ignored. American footprint specialist, Louise Robbins pronounced that the first print discovered was merely that of a horse.
Paul Abell (who had found the print under the turf), Tim White and Peter Jones felt sure the print was hominid and wanted to continue excavating, hoping to find prints that were more easily identifiable. Because they were not specialists in footprints, Mary Leakey, for many years one of Britain’s topmost paleoanthropologists, who was directing the excavation, felt obliged to respect the opinion of her footprint professional. She ordered that the scarce resources of the team should be used elsewhere. But, faced with the protests of the trio, she then agreed to compromise by putting one of the untrained native workers on to the job. Only after the trainee successfully revealed several more human looking footprints did Mary Leakey relent and agree to put Tim White in charge of excavating the tracks.
They proved to extend for almost 30 yards and induced a miracle—Louise Robbins’ skepticism suddenly turned to revelation. She not only conceded that the prints were hominid but found her expertise returning to such an extent that he knew which prints were male and which were female, that the female prints were those of a pregnant ape and that the apes came from a line of bipedal walkers that stretched back for a million years. Johanson does not record whether she revealed the sex of the pregnant lady’s baby!
Don Johanson also illustrates the extent to which offended experts aim to go to revenge themselves. Johanson was attending a conference in New York in 1974. He had just announced his remarkable find of the knee joint of an ape over three million years old which showed that its owner was plainly bipedal and therefore seemed to be in the direct human line. At lunch, Mary Leakey told him she had overheard some anatomists saying they were positive the knee was that of a monkey. Carried away with self-assured expert malevolence they agreed to “wait until he goes into print, then we’ll carve him up”. But Johanson’s identification was sound—he was not carved up.
It can be even worse. Dr Harold Hillman, a medical doctor and qualified research worker with degrees in neurobiology and physiology joined an English university as a lecturer and soon became its director of Applied Physiology. His credentials seemed admirable and for ten years he was highly respected in his field—until 1980. In that year Hillman criticized much of the basis of biochemical research. He claimed techniques for preparing tissues for the electron microscope altered the structures of the tissue being examined.
The electron microscope has, on the face of it, been a great boon to biologists because it gives beautiful pictures under huge magnification with a depth of field that is veritably three dimensional. It apparently shows immense details of the very basic processes of life. But Hillman questioned the validity of what was seen when the preparation of the sample was so harsh that the original structures were lost or modified and spurious structures replaced them.
Even to a layman the question seems justified when it is considered that the scientists are taking samples of living cells which are largely water, drying them out, coating them with molecules of gold and finally belting them with beams of electrons to create the picture.
The electron microscope depends on electrons mimicking light in an optical microscope: they have to travel in straight lines and so have to be in a vacuum otherwise molecules of air knock them in all directions. In a vacuum any water present in the sample would evaporate and likewise scatter the electrons. The gold coating makes sure that the electrons do get deflected efficiently where they should be—from the surface of the sample—to ensure a clear photograph.
If the structures seen in an electron microscope are often artifacts of the techniques of preparation of the samples, as Hillman claims to have demonstrated, then a lot of experts are spending a lot of money concocting theories that depend only on what has been created by accident in the laboratory.
Hillman was removed from teaching—even of topics unconnected with his criticisms. He was told that his work was unorthodox and of little general merit, that there were insufficient funds to support it and that he should retire. Hillman protested and found an independent source of funds for a year. But the authorities moved the goalposts—he had to find funding for three to five years.
Hillman’s views might be thought damaging by those whose electron microscope is a nice little earner of reputations and whose interests are vested in a nice set of comfortable theories generated thereby, but that is not the point. The UK Sloman report, which was published in response to a different case of academic disagreement, said quite forcefully, “academic staff must not be inhibited by any tradition of accepted views. They have the right to be unorthodox”. Richard Dawkins writes:
Some of the greatest advances in science have come about because some clever person spotted an analogy between a subject that was readily understood, and another still mysterious subject.
Yet he warns that one of the hallmarks of futile crankiness is overenthusiastic analogizing. The trick is to strike a balance. The successful scientist and the raving crank are separated by the quality of their inspirations, which amounts to an ability to reject foolish analogies and to pursue helpful ones.
It sounds reasonable. But is it really wise to inhibit originality even if cranky? Who knows how many important ideas do not see the light of day because their originator feels wrongly they are a bit too cranky, or is timid about the response of his peers. What is the criterion of the quality of an inspiration other than the influence it ultimately has? Perhaps scientific journals should have a section entitled Wildly Speculative Letters in which overenthusiastic analogizing is encouraged.
Dawkins does not like what he regards as ill-founded attacks by creationists and others critics of evolutionary theory. Yet out of these attacks has come Dawkins own brilliant book, The Blind Watchmaker, defending the theory. Perhaps he will concede that good can come even of cranky ideas even if indirectly.
Many will regard the proposals put in this book as cranky. That is why I have devoted space to seeking to persuade the reader that: (1) experts are fallible, yet; (2) they are so cocksure they consider it a philanthropic duty to suppress those who contradict them; (3) unorthodox thinkers have a right to be unorthodox; (4) good can come of crankiness.
If you are not so persuaded then you can read on for amusement or put the book down, as you wish. Otherwise you can read on with the confidence that some unorthodox, interesting and perhaps frightening views will be unveiled.
