Supporting Life through Letters

 Describing an often overlooked characteristic of 19th-century biologists, Joseph Kastner writes:  "Naturalists who never laid eyes on each other became intimate friends by virtue of the long and faithful letters they wrote to each other, year in and year out...."  Early British biologists' use of correspondence for research accelerated after the 1840 creation of the Penny Post within England, which set a fixed rate for a letter regardless of the distance it had to travel.  No biologist took greater advantage of the postal service for gathering scientific data than Charles Darwin, who penned over 14,000 letters.  But there is more than science in those early biologists' letters. There are also matters of the heart.

from Hooker's
Himalayan Journals

Appreciating the poignancy of some letters requires knowing about the state of 19th-century medicine.  Because there were virtually no vaccinations nor oral or injected antibiotics, a child was twenty-five times more likely to die before reaching early adolescence than is a child in Britain today.  Despite 19th-century biologists' accelerating knowledge about the natural world, they were not exempt from that statistic.

After the death of Darwin's beloved daughter Annie at the age of ten, the botanist Joseph Hooker, who helped Darwin study plant species, offered his condolences to Darwin.  Several years later, only an hour after Hooker's daughter died, Hooker was writing to Darwin to tell of his own grief.  Darwin wrote back at once.

Thomas Henry Huxley
   

The leading British advocate for Darwin's theory of evolution for natural selection, Thomas Henry Huxley, also lost a child.  After Huxley's son Noel died at the age of three, Darwin drew upon his own experience of grief with Annie to reassure Huxley that grief could soften with time, writing, "I was indeed grieved to receive your news this morning....  I know well how intolerable is the bitterness of such grief.  Yet believe me, that time, and time alone, acts wonderfully....  I cannot think of one child without tears rising in my eyes; but the grief is become tenderer and I can even call up the smile of our lost darling...."

statue of
Jean Henri Fabre

Such personal expressions of grief and condolence, sometimes traveling in envelopes as part of scientific study, also crossed the English Channel.  The most difficult of emotions were sometimes even revealed in the pages of scientific books.  The eminent French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre closed his first volume on insects with a dedication to the memory of his own son, who had died when Fabre was working on the book. Charles Darwin, despite scientific disagreements,  wrote a cordial letter to Fabre, saying,  "Permit me to add, that when I read the last sentence in your book, I sympathised deeply with you."

I was moved even more by the tenderness and cordiality of these letters when I re-read them during the COVID pandemic.  With our own world's death-count increasing, it had become easy to be numbed by the numbers, so familiar had they become.  Even though we have electronic means of communication these 19th-century letter-writers did not have, these biologists' letters, with their warmth, transcended their limited technology.

~ ~ ~

Can you think of any way our communicating with others might become more spiritually supportive?

(The Kastner quote is from A Species of Eternity by Joseph Kastner, © 1977,

and is taken from The Naturalist's Path by Cathy Johnson, © 1991.  p. ix.)

(The Darwin quotes are taken from Annie's Box by Randal Keynes, © 2001.  pp. 221 & 285.)

What is Natural?

What wakes you up in the morning?  An alarm clock?  A clock-radio set to your favorite station?  The sunlight coming through your window?  Your dog?  Your child who wakes up before you do?

The answer depends upon your particular life circumstances.  At one stage in my life, when I worked at a job that began before daybreak, I would often rouse up before the clock-radio, out of my anxiety that I would oversleep.  Now that I am retired from that job, I can enjoy letting my body's own internal "clock" wake me up.

Thinking about what wakes us up in the morning is an easy place to begin reflecting upon a complex question:  Namely, what is natural?  That sunrise certainly is natural, in contrast to that electronic clock that mimics the sun's 12-hour-average day.  Our body's internal "clocks" are also natural -- although they can be thrown off their rhythms by our having stayed up late the night before, using artificially created electricity to run our man-made computers.

There is more at stake in that word "natural" than the matter of how we wake up.  That is because in trying to understand ourselves, we try to discover some aspects of our human nature that have some connection to the world of Nature.  Even as we declare some human actions to be right or wrong, we also describe some of those actions as being "natural" or "unnatural."  We ask, "What is human nature?"

Over the past few decades, a number of scientists have presented depictions of human nature that have drawn upon the biologist Richard Dawkins' idea of "the selfish gene."  As Dawkins now famously wrote:

"We are... robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules
 known as genes."

However, there is something askew about Dawkins' characterization.  He attributes more personality to genes ("selfish molecules") than he does to human beings.  Whereas genes are able to guide outcomes, we are just robots.

One of the conclusions Dawkins puts forward from his depiction of genes is that humans are fundamentally selfish in nature.  As he wrote, "We are born selfish."  It is here that the philosopher Mary Midgley stepped in to critique what she saw as being the crude simplifications resulting from selfish-gene rhetoric.  Midgley admits the valuable point that genes that contribute to the reproductive and survival potential of a species are more likely preserved.  But she points out that part of that process is genes' making us naturally mammals and social creatures.  And so, one of our gene-related potentials is our ability to take care of other individuals.  As Midgley puts it:

"If we ask whether we are indeed... creatures that are naturally just hell-bent egoists, we can see that this cannot be true because ancestral creatures like that would never have gone through all the trouble and sacrifice that are needed to rear human children.
Such people would leave no descendants."

Midgley underscores our natural potential for offering care by spotlighting a parent's love for their child (even if that child does sometimes wake up the parent who wanted to sleep longer).  Even though as an infant our earliest yearning was to be loved, love was built into our mammalian, social nature.

Midgley's worry is that "the crude metaphor" of "selfish gene" has been employed to promote "an ideology of everyday cynicism."  She writes:

"To repeat -- officially, the doctrine of selfish genes does not mean
 that individuals are motivated only by self-interest."

Our human lives and societies are complex integrations of the natural and the man-made.  Valentine's Day is an artificial, societal construction.  And yet, like those natural cycles of the sun, Valentine's Day's annual rhythm can wake us up again to the importance of being loving.  Loving toward partners.  Toward friends.  And even by being courteous to the stranger we meet.

~ ~ ~

(Where do you see love at work?)

(The Dawkins quotations are from The Selfish Gene, © 1976, 1989, pp. 127 & 3.)

(The Midgley quotations are from her article "The Origins of Don Giovanni" in the magazine Philosophy Now, Winter 1999/2000, p. 32.)

Of Campfires and Stars

Even before there was writing, humans gathered around fires.
And even before there was writing, humans told stories.  As those ancient humans sat around fires at night, telling stories, they would have noticed some of the sparks from the fire ascending against the darkness of the night sky.  As their eyes followed those sparks upward, some of those sparks would have seemed to almost merge with their cousins -- the stars.  And as those humans looked upward and told stories, some of those random stars became transformed into constellations. They saw animals and legendary heroes there:  A bear.  A scorpion.  Orion.  And thus, the cosmic dome became part of the narratives about human lives.

Today, the idealized campfire is a symbol of belonging and peace.  It is a place where we hope people will come together to find belonging and a warmth of spirit.

The literary analyst Harold Bloom provided a revealing analysis of the connection between fire and belonging in one narrative in the Bible's book of Luke (22:54-62).  After Jesus is arrested, his disciple Peter flees into the darkness of the night.  Peter is alone and cut off in the coldness of the night.  But then he notices a fire burning in the distance.  On many occasions in the past, Peter's companions and Jesus spent time around such fires at night, sharing stories.  And so, the lonely Peter is drawn towards this new fire, around which people are huddled.  But when Peter draws closer to this fire, his face becomes illuminated, and so he is recognized as being a disciple of Jesus, the identity which he had been trying to conceal.  Peter and the strangers around the fire have not felt their common humanity.  And Peter flees back into the darkness of the cold night.

There is a larger way the sense of belonging can become lost.  Jeffrey Sobosan recounts an incident involving a mentor of his, "an old priest who had .... contributed brilliantly to his own specialty in theology, and now at the close of life had given himself over to what he once described as his first love, the study of the stars."  Sobosan continues:

"I met him in a garden one evening, where he sat by his beloved telescope...
with a look of ineffable sadness in his eyes.... He spoke of the beauty of the universe...
but in striving after this beauty,... his mind had taken a savage turn ...
toward the damning conclusion: the universe is void of meaning."

The vast cosmos had, for him, become alien.

It is not hard to understand why Sobosan's mentor-priest felt himself betrayed by the cosmos, which he had hoped would provide him a comforting beauty with its views though the telescope.  Even though telescopes have revealed much more of this vast universe, the view through a telescope is a narrowing of our immediate field of vision. It is somewhat like trying to view an ocean through a ship's small porthole.  As the philosopher Max Oelschlaeger explains, using Galileo as an example:

"By using the telescope, Galileo’s eyes gathered additional light,
and the telescopic image itself was magnified....
What he lost was the sweeping field of view of the naked eye astronomy....
And perhaps, in his intense concentration, he lost also the sounds and smells of the night
and the awareness of himself as a conscious man beholding
a grand and mysterious stellar spectacle."

A sweeping field of vision can encompass both those stars and ourselves in one grand narrative.  And that narrative can give us a sense of universal belonging -- provided we remember our common humanity as part of that domed narrative.  The story-telling circle must become wider than the ring around our particular campfire.

~ ~ ~

(Do you have any recollection of being around a campfire in a way that increased your sense of belonging?  When was it?  What was it like?)

(The Sobosan quotation is from his Romancing the Universe: Theology, Science, and Cosmology. © 1999. p. 1.)

(The Oelschlaeger quotation if from his The Idea of Wilderness. © 1991. p. 78.)

Gift about Life on a Deathbed

What would you want to be given as a gift if you were not likely to live much longer?  Of course, if in pain, medicine to alleviate that suffering would be welcome.  But in this instance, the bedridden man -- Charles Darwin -- had learned to live with a chronic illness through most of his adult life (even during his most fruitful years of scientific research and writing).  So, what turned out to be a welcome gift was a book to read.  And the book was on Darwin's favorite subject:  Nature.

Aristotle,
in an
old Latin translation

The gift, from William Ogle, was his new translation of a work by Aristotle titled The Parts of Animals.  That ancient Greek scientist's collection of observations about animals would have been of particular interest to Darwin.  Even though Aristotle's way of doing science was not grounded in the experimental methods of modern science, Aristotle's collection of investigations about animals had been part of the corpus of Western education for centuries.  Aristotle recognized the temptation researchers might have of not investigating animals they might consider useless, ugly, or even disgusting.  Therefore, in the book Darwin had received, Aristotle cautioned:

"For this reason we should not be childishly disgusted at the examination of the less valuable animals.
For in all natural things there is something marvelous."

Those words would have gone straight to Darwin's heart because they mirrored his own endless fascination with Nature's intricacies (something Darwin had commented on in the eloquent closing passage of his own book Origin of Species).

Thanks to the rapid growth of the railway system in England during the 19th century, frequent correspondence by mail had become a mainstay of life among many Brits, and Darwin had throughout his career relied upon a network of correspondents (some of whom became good friends) in order to ground his scientific studies.  Darwin always wrote cordially, expressing his appreciation.  And now, he did so again, expressing how even near the end of his own life he was grateful for the new perspective the gift of a book had provided.  Darwin wrote to Ogle, who had sent him the book:

"From quotations I had seen I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was.  Linnaeus and Cuvier

 [two pivotal 18th-century biologists] have been my two gods... 

but they were mere school-boys to old Aristotle."

William Ogle, upon receiving Darwin's letter with its complimentary remark about Aristotle, wrote back, saying:

"Thank you for your kind and eulogistic letter re [Aristotle's book].
It gave me much pleasure.  I am glad also to have added a third person to your gods."

Darwin died only three days after Ogle sent off his letter.  But Ogle's, Darwin's, and Aristotle's lives had all become tied together through a chain of correspondence.  And also through a mutual fascination with the forms of animal life in which Aristotle had found "something marvelous."

~~~

Are there any animals you find particularly fascinating?  Which ones?

(All of the quotations are taken from the "Aristotle" entry by James G. Lennox in

Evolution:  The First Four Billion Years, ed. Michael Ruse, et al., © 2009.  p. 427.)
(The images are in the public domain.)

Is there a Purpose for a Porpoise?

"Being put under water is fine for fish but bad for zebras."

Mary Midgley

That example, presented by the philosopher Mary Midgley, was such an unexpected scenario that it brought a smile to my face.  Although humorous, what she states is obviously true once it is stated.  And that was her intent -- to provide an example so obvious that it would support a more general point.  As she put it before giving her zebra example:

"Our own planet...is full of organisms,
beings which all steadily pursue
their own characteristic ways of life,
beings that can only be understood by grasping
the distinctive thing that each of them
is trying to be and do."

And behind that statement (which could be demonstrated by taking a tour of a zoo) lay Midgley's even broader philosophical point:

          "It is obvious that our own planet...is riddled with purpose."

Why was Mary Midgley having to jump through so many argumentative hoops (such as imagining zebras under water) in order to support her main point that there was purpose on our planet, and therefore purpose to be found in the universe?  It was because so many scientists with high media-profiles over the past few decades have been claiming that the world is without purpose.  One of the most quoted of such claims has been that of the atheist biologist Richard Dawkins, who wrote:

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect
if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil and no good,
nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

The whole problem can be traced back to the limitations our modern form of science placed upon itself as it began to develop in the 17th century: In order to obtain objective information that was clear and precise, it set out to exclude questions about value, meaning, and purpose.  The consequence is that if you more and more view the world solely through the lens of science’s knowledge, the world can easily come to look as if there is no purpose in it.  Similarly, it can come to look as if the world contains no values, consisting of only those objective facts science extracts from it.  But again, as Midgley points out:

"Value, in fact, is not an extra feature pasted onto the facts by human observers. 
It is a real emergent property of situations in the world. 
Each kind of organism acts according to its own values,...
the characteristic pattern of needs and capacities which determines its direction."

How many pieces?

What can make an overall pattern hard to discern is that there is such a multitude of entities in the world, each with its own capacities and direction.  Even though science can provide us fascinating and sometimes useful information about the world, we have to enlarge our vision beyond the limitations of science to perceive the larger patterns of the world.  We need more than scientific facts.  We also need a philosophical or spiritual vision that discerns a larger pattern in which facts and values coalesce, allowing meaning to emerge.

Another philosopher, Max Oelschlaeger, provides an example, writing:

"By using the telescope, Galileo’s eyes gathered additional light,
and the telescopic image itself was magnified, thus extending his mental vision....
What he lost was the sweeping field of view of the naked eye astronomy....
And perhaps, in his intense concentration,
he lost also the sounds and smells of the night
and the awareness of himself as a conscious man
beholding a grand and mysterious stellar spectacle."

~ ~ ~

(Do you have a way of "stepping back" to gain a broader, more meaningful perspective on our world?)

(The quotations by Mary Midgley are from "Why The Idea Of Purpose Won't Go Away,"
originally published in Philosophy, Oct., 2011. pp. 558 & 559.)

(The quotation by Richard Dawkins is from River Out of Eden, © 1995. p. 155.)

(The quotation by Max Oelschlaeger is from The Idea of Wilderness, © 1991. p. 78.)

Waste Not, Want Not

It's hard not to make jokes about it . But many of the jokes cannot be repeated on this website, given the respectful tone toward readers it aims to maintain.  We do have a high-sounding word for those low jokes: "scatological."  Yes, I'm talking about feces, manure, dung.

Perhaps a courteous way to begin to talk about it—especially in a website about Nature—is to talk about dung beetles.  When observing them, the comedy, instead of being scatological, can become lighthearted.  And, indeed, it is hard not to make jokes about dung beetles once you know that the oversized ball they comically struggle to take home is made out of manure.  When the manure the dung beetle locates is rolled in the usually sandy soil in which the beetle lives, it usually becomes a perfect sphere, sometimes larger in diameter than the beetle in length. As if to add another gag to its comic act, the beetle will often walk on its forelimbs, pushing the ball backwards with its rear legs.

There is, however, a seriousness of purpose behind the act.  The aim of the beetle's often difficult struggle is to get the ball into a burrow, where the beetle's eggs laid into the sphere will incubate in the decomposing heat of the manure. That choice of a material for a nursery also means that there will be ready-made food right at the mouths of the larvae once they hatch.

It is so fascinating for naturalists (or Nature lovers) to watch the dung beetle's maneuvering that they inspired the classic opening essay in Jean-Henri Fabre's ten-volume book on entomology, the study of insects.  He wrote of a group of them:

"What excitement over a single patch of Cow-dung! 
Never did adventurers hurrying from
the four corners of the earth
display such eagerness
in working a Californian claim."

Now that I've coyly talked about insects, I can return to my more delicate subject.  Viewed from a wider perspective than the several square yards a dung beetle inhabits, the matter of manure takes on larger implications.  Life on this finite planet could not exist if one species' waste did not become another species' raw material.  Moreover, the long-term quality of human civilization will depend in part upon how adept we become at recycling what we would have otherwise considered to be just trash or waste.

Given the critical nature of caring about where things go once we think we have gotten rid of them, the content of that beetle's prized ball might not be a bad place to begin our reflections. We humans, for good reason, do not talk too much about what we flush down the toilet. (One TV talk-show host in the early days of television even got disciplined for making a joke about what was demurely called a "water closet.")  Nevertheless, much could be revealed about the practical challenges of building a human civilization if we examined how humans have dealt with such waste.  Although I've never encountered a copy of the book, I do know that the nonfiction writer Lawrence Wright has written a book titled Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom and the Water Closet.

house in Tibet with manure-brick wall

People who have economically poorer lives in traditional cultures live out the meaning of "Waste not, want not."  In some societies, animal dung is even shaped into bricks, dried in the sun, and used as fuel.  Or even to make houses!  Mind you, I'm not suggesting that such a method of house-construction be widely adopted.  But such ingenious uses of even the most distasteful waste (as that little beetle knows) can help remind us that Nature is the Great Recycler. And it must be.

~ ~ ~

Have these reflections lead you to any thoughts about life?

(The quotation by Fabre is from his Souvenirs Entomologiques.)

Undisturbing Bedtime Reading

Among writers' names, theirs are two of the most famous to people in the U.S. -- Mark Twain and Charles Darwin.  But how differently they are thought of:  Twain as the grandfatherly humorist; Darwin as the trouble-causing scientist.  When I was in elementary school, my grandmother was displeased that my school was named after the horror-story writer Edgar Allan Poe, but quite pleased when I moved to an elementary school named after the grandfatherly Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens).  And we all know that any proposal to name a school after Charles Darwin would evoke controversy.

The writers Twain and Darwin are also known for different genres of writing --  fiction and nonfiction.  Different also are the ways that Nature is a part of their writings.  Twain, even when writing about his experiences as a young man on the Mississippi, turned them into tall tales about the adventures of people.  In contrast, even Darwin's reminiscences of his journey on the Beagle are strengthened by his scientist's eye for observation of Nature by itself, apart from people.

Despite their many differences, their lives as writers intersected (even if indirectly) in an entertaining incident related by Mark Twain in one of his public presentations.  Twain tells first how he felt flattered when the president of Harvard College, Charles Eliot, who had visited Darwin, told Twain:

"Do you know that there is one room in Darwin's house,
his bedroom, where the housemaid
is never allowed to touch two things?
One is a plant he is growing
and studying while it grows....
The other some books that lie on the night table
at the head of his bed. They are your books,
Mr. Clemens, and Mr. Darwin reads them every night
to lull him to sleep."

What a compliment Twain felt it was to know, as he put it, that "a brain teeming with bugs and squirming things like Darwin's" was reading the American humorists' books.

But Twain's inflated ego was punctured by a subsequent event that Twain also relates.  He tells how, after Darwin died, Twain was visited by the Rev. Joseph Twichell, who he describes as "my oldest friend -- and dearest enemy on occasion."  Twichell had been reading Darwin's Life and Letters, and opened it to show Twain a passage apparently explaining more fully why Twain's books were on that night table.   As Twain tells it:

"Twichell ... said, 'Here, look at this letter from Mr. Darwin to Sir Joseph Hooker.'
What Darwin said -- I give the idea and not the very words -- was this:
I do not know whether I ought to have devoted my whole life to these drudgeries
in natural history and the other sciences [because]
while I may have gained in one way I have lost in another.
Once I had a fine perception and appreciation of high literature,
but in me that quality is atrophied.  'That was the reason,' said Mr. Twichell,
'he was reading your books.' "

It looks as if in this case, it was Darwin who had the last laugh.  Or did he?  It was Twain who was able to tell of the incidents, and thereby laugh at himself.

~ ~ ~

Do you have bedtime reading that helps you let go of the cares of the day?  What is it?

(The incident and quotations are taken from What about Darwin?,
edited by Thomas F. Glick, © 2010, pp. 439-441. [emphasis added])

When the “Lightning” Strikes

"Lightning, a kite, and an almanac by Dick."  It almost sounds like a Jeopardy clue under the category-heading of "Founding Fathers."  And the contestant who can hit their button first and say "Who was Benjamin Franklin?" gets the points.

So frequently repeated are the story of Franklin flying a kite in the lightning storm and the title of Poor Richard's Almanack that we rarely get a chance to learn about the other contributions of Franklin. (Whose face and build are also widely recognized from the many portraits of him, some with the illumination of a lightning strike.).  Some people in the general public might know a bit about his having lived in France for awhile as part of his public service for his countrymen back in America.  Or maybe know about his fiddling with science even beyond that kite.  But we hear little about his religious habits or his spirituality.

That omission is why I was struck by one page in the book Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries: The Founding Fathers in the Age of Enlightenment by Tom Shachtman. That author emphasizes that:

"The Founding Fathers' science was in no way opposite to their religion. 
The notion that science and religion were antithetical
is a nineteenth-century construct."

And in regard to Franklin, Shachtman writes:

"By the age of fifteen, Franklin wrote in his Autobiography, he had become
a doubter of organized religion...until he chanced upon printed lectures that
tried to debunk Deism: [Franklin wrote:] ' They wrought an effect on me quite contrary
to what was intended by them, for the arguments of the Deists...appeared to me
much stronger than the refutations; in short I soon became a thorough Deist.' 
In his twenties, he set out his religious beliefs
in a ten-page liturgy, complete with a hymn."

Benjamin Franklin's explanation of his newly found religious orientation continues:

"I think it seems required of me, and my Duty, as a Man,
to pay Divine Regards to SOMETHING....
When I stretch my Imagination thro' and beyond...the visible fix'd Stars themselves,
into that Space that is every Way infinite, and conceive it fill'd with Suns like ours...,
then this little Ball on which we move, seems, even in my narrow Imagination,
to be almost Nothing, and my self less than nothing."

There were two things I liked in these passages.  The first was Franklin's ability to remain sufficiently open to change his mind.  He had apparently began reading the arguments trying to refute the existence of God because they aligned with his doubts about organized religion; but he turned in a different direction when he found the refutations lacking.  That turn in direction put him on a course where, several years later, he could put to pen his own majestic expression of religious belief.

The second thing I liked was Franklin's expression of his need to feel reverence (the paying of "Divine Regards," as he interestingly put it). Our media today are so quickly drawn towards brash voices and dominating personalities that it is easy to forget that we are often better served by humility.  And in religious and spiritual lives, humility is cultivated through following a path of reverence.

~ ~ ~

How do you think we can find a good midpoint between the extremes of brashness and timidity?

(Quotations are taken from Shachtman's Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries, © 2014, pp. xii-xiv.)
(Both pictures are details from the originals, both of which are in the public domain.)

The Cute, the Cuddly, and the Colossal

nine-banded armadillo

Contemporary psychologists have been able to figure out why human beings are drawn affectionately to certain animals.  The secret lies primarily in our emotions being easily captured by the round, big-eyed face of a baby, an instinct that has helped the human race protect its fragile offspring and thus endure.  This instinct is also revealed in our hearts' being easily tugged by paintings of big-eyed children, and by dogs bred to look more baby-faced.  That human instinct cannot explain, however, the seeming proclivity of Texans and other southerners to find armadillos cute. Those animals, with their long pointed noises and tiny eyes, have heads the very opposite of human babies.  There is a bit of a mystery here.  Behind armadillos also lies a story about how Darwin unraveled what was once called the "mystery of mysteries."  Namely, how new species evolve.

depction of
ancient armadillo (Glyptodon)

When Charles Darwin was on his groundbreaking trip on the Beagle around South America, he stopped many times to travel inland, studying the life-forms in that foreign land.  Darwin had a keen scientific eye for the similarities and dissimilarities between various species, both living and extinct.  Scientists at that time had been trying to piece together the puzzle of the fossil remains of some colossal species that no longer existed.  Darwin found the fossilized armor-plate of an extinct nine-foot cousin of today's armadillos (which in the U.S. are about one-and-a-half feet long).

Even though most of us today might be repulsed by the idea of eating an armadillo (either because of its possible taste or its cuteness), Darwin and his companions dined on a species of armadillo.  The preparation of that meal would have helped Darwin see the similarities and dissimilarities between the armor-like coverings of existing and extinct species of armadillos.  As he explained later in his autobiographical reflections:  "During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the Pampean formation great fossil animals covered with armour like that on the existing armadillos...."

The relationships between the complex skeletons of existing and colossal extinct species (such as sloths) was challenging even to scientists.  Here is where the simpler armor of armadillos was something Darwin could take advantage of in Origin of Species, writing that a "relationship is manifest, even to the uneducated eye, in the gigantic pieces of armour like those of the [extinct] armadillo found in several parts of la Plata."

Now that Darwin and evolutionary biologists have done so much work on the background of these creatures, we are left with trying to understand ourselves:  Why are people so easily fascinated by armadillos, even finding them cute?  With their hard covering, they do not fit into the category of "soft, cute, and cuddly," which would latch in with our mammalian tactile affection.  Some of our delight in armadillos seems to come from their very oddness.  Also, when one is spotted in the wild, there can be the excitement and fun of trying to chase the small animal as it scurries in the underbrush.  We are just lucky those colossal nine- footers are no longer around!

~~~

Have you ever seen an armadillo or other peculiar-looking animal in the wild?  When?

(The Darwin quotes are, respectively, from

 The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow, © 1958.  p. 118.

and from The Origin of Species [1959] by Charles Darwin.  Chap. 10.)

(The photo of a contemporary armadillo is by Jerry Segraves.

The artwork of extinct armadillo by Pavel Riha is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

A Rocky History Read Backwards

Writers in Western culture have long employed the metaphor of a "book" for depicting the natural world, with we being "readers" of that "book."  Theologians in both Christianity and Islam have said that the "Book of Nature" might even speak to us something about God.  It was a famous scientist, however, who in 1859 drew upon the "book" metaphor to explain an aspect of the geological record.  In Origin of Species, Charles Darwin wrote:

"I look at the natural geological record... as a history of the world imperfectly kept,

 and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone....

 Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved;

 and of each page, only here and there a few lines."

Darwin was having to explain why -- unlike, other books that we haven't finished reading -- we know more about the last pages of the book of the Earth's geology than about the first.  Today, geologists have succeeded in reading more and more of those pages, going further and further back, despite the fragility of many fossils, and the fact that fossils were created only under special circumstances.  This geological "history book" is being read from the back towards the front.

It was not along a book-like, historical narrative that I first encountered the science of geology.  Instead, I first experienced the identity of rocks in compartmentalized categories. When I was of upper elementary-school age, I was given a boxed set of rocks.  It consisted of a white, plastic tray of 15 thumb-size rocks, each one in its open-topped compartment.  The makers of the set, knowing that children would want to take the rocks out of their cubbyholes, wisely managed to adhere a small, identifying nametag to each rock.

 I found the differences between those unpolished rocks fascinating.  White gypsum.  Yellow sulfur.  Black coal.  Even the feel of each one was different.  Despite that childhood enjoyment, when I had some brief encounters with geology books in high-school and college, I could never get the rocks to "speak" to me.  When those books tried to explain geological history, I could not create a powerful enough mental picture because those geological layers were out of sight, underground.

That changed one day when my wife and I were driving slowly through a mostly desert area of Big Bend Natl. Park in southwest Texas.  When our car turned around the corner of  a small projecting mass of rock that had been hiding part of our view, my wife exclaimed, "That field's growing boulders!"  And how striking indeed was that area of desert beside our car.  It was a flat, tan area of desert, on which it looked as if a giant had been playing with a set of dark-brown marbles ranging from one foot to several feet in diameter.  It was if the surface of the Earth had been turned inside out, with those out-of-place boulders shouting a message about how their lives that had once been underground.  Yet they now stood there before us, unmoving, like a moment frozen in time. A book held open to one page so that we might read it more carefully

~~~

Have you ever seen rocks or geological structures that were fascinating to you?

(The Darwin quote is from the last paragraph of

 Chapter IX of Origin of Species [orig. 1859].)

Among Friends, Books, and Plants

It is the midsummer of 1866.  Five-thousand Prussian troops move into the city of Brünn (in the present-day Czech Republic) as one step in their invasion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Forcing themselves upon the civilian community, sixteen army officers house themselves at the Abbey of St. Thomas, where ninety-four horses of the military are also moved onto the grounds.  The abbey is required to feed everybody at its own expense.  With the city's sanitation pushed to its limits, cholera breaks out, spreading through the terrified city.  Over six weeks, three-thousand civilians and soldiers die.  And on one of those dark days, observing it all from his window at the abbey, would have been a friar with a now famous name: Gregor Mendel.

This is not the setting in which most books place Mendel.  Almost invariably, they put him in the abbey's seemingly idyllic garden in which Mendel grew his now famous pea plants -- leading to his scientific discovery of the basic patterns of inheritance.  Placing him in that idyllic garden cultivates a contrast between science and stereotyped religion, especially given our modern myth that science and religion have usually been in conflict.  I still remember my own surprise in middle school upon reading in my biology textbook that a "monk" made one of the pivotal discoveries of modern science.


More precisely, the religious order Mendel was part of was a Roman Catholic order of friars (the Augustinian order). That classification meant that its members were more integrated into the surrounding secular community, primarily as teachers, even though in this case living in an abbey.  And the friars of the Abbey of St. Thomas were especially engaged.  The Abbey had a 30,000 volume library with books on botany, horticulture, agriculture, physics, and, of course, theology.  Among Gregor's friar-colleagues were a musical maestro, a Goethe scholar, and a noted philosopher. The head abbot, Cyrill Franz Napp, was current on the latest scientific discoveries. It was in this abbey setting -- more conducive to enlightenment than being surrounded by occupying troops -- that "Mendel found a supportive scientific community," as the contemporary biographer Simon Mawer puts it.

Gregor Mendel was fond of logging statistics on many things, not just his famous pea-plant hybrids.  He also kept data on the weather and astronomy.  His being educated in probability and combinational mathematics doubtlessly encouraged his applying those types of skills to the study of plants.  The data led him to discovery.

Despite the temporary distraction of an occupying army, Mendel's now famous scientific paper on plant hybridization was published that same year of 1866.  It was the culmination of eight years of work, hand-pollinating and logging seven pairs of traits in 28,000 pea plants, their 40,000 flowers, and nearly 400,000 seeds.

May we in our own small ways show determination in wanting to observe and appreciate the world of Nature, even when human conflict and chaos might dishearten us.

~ ~ ~

Have there been friends who have been part of your learning or your appreciating more the world of Nature?

(The quotation by Simon Mawer is taken from 

Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics, © 2006. p. 30.)
(The drawing of pea plants, Pisum sativum, is from the book Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz, 1885,
 by Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé, and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

A Church and a Novel

Say “the hunchback of Notre Dame,” and many people will think of that hulky character in one of the movie versions of the novel. Maybe the mental image evoked will include some sense of the height of the great cathedral of Notre Dame, from which the hunchbacked character looks down upon the jeering mob below. Rarely has there been such a famous intersection of a church and a novel; in this case, Paris's largest cathedral and the novel by Victor Hugo.

Paris's second largest church building, the much less famous Church of Saint-Sulpice, has had an interesting intersection with a novel, but in a quite different way.  And that intersection may say something about our human struggles to bring the illumination of both science and religion to our world.

Now on display in Saint-Sulpice is this note about the long, straight line in the 17th-century church's floor:

"Contrary to fanciful allegations in a recent best-selling novel,
 this [line] is not a vestige of a pagan temple.
 No such temple ever existed in this place.
It was never called a "Rose-Line'."

The "best-selling novel" discreetly referred to is the 2003 book The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

The inlaid brass line is in fact part of a device (a "gnomon") for knowing when the spring equinox occurs, based on where during the course of a year a noon-time shaft of light falls along that line, or on the obelisk at the far end of it. The word "gnomon" has its root in the Greek word for "to know." But there is much that Brown does not appear to know (or desire to convey) about the true history of this gnomon. The religious reason for discerning the spring equinox is explained by an inscription on the obelisk's base: "Ad Certam Paschalis," or "for the determination of Easter." That religious task, as the 20th-century scientist Stephen Jay Gould explained, "requires considerable astronomical sophistication, for lunar and seasonal cycles must both be known with precision."

The sun-calculating device in the Church of Saint-Sulpice is not an exotic oddity, as one might think reading Brown's book.  In fact, other similar installations (sometimes called "meridian lines") can be found in cathedrals in Rome, Florence, and Bologna, Italy -- all demonstrating conjunctions of the Church and astronomy. Even beyond those other installations, there is additional evidence that Saint-Sulpice's gnomon has real Christian roots, and is not a pagan import: The Christian practice of scientifically calculating solar equinoxes was mastered notably by an English monk living in the 700's, the Venerable Bede. He developed tables for calculating Easter for the three centuries yet to come. His manual for that scientific field called "computus" continued to be used into the Middle Ages.

And what about the letters "P" and "S" in two of Saint-Sulpice's windows? Here again, the notice posted in the cathedral brings illumination:

"Please also note that the letters "P" and "S" in the small round windows
 at both ends of the transept refer to Peter and Sulpice, the patron saints of the church,
 and not an imaginary "Priory of Sion" [a secret society in Brown's novel ]."

The architecture of the Church of Saint-Sulpice is not to my personal taste. Nevertheless, I can admire the openness not only of the people who built Saint-Sulpice, but also the other Christian minds stretching back to the Venerable Bede and even beyond -- bringing together knowledge and inspiration from both science and religion.

~ ~ ~

Is there knowledge about the natural world from contemporary science that expands your spirit?

(The quotation by Stephen Jay Gould is from his Dinosaur in a Haystack, © 1995, p. 39.)

Fathers of Biology, and of Children

Describing an often overlooked characteristic of 19th-century biologists, Joseph Kastner writes:  "Naturalists who never laid eyes on each other became intimate friends by virtue of the long and faithful letters they wrote to each other, year in and year out...."  Early British biologists' use of correspondence for research accelerated after the 1840 creation of the Penny Post within England, which set a fixed rate for a letter regardless of the distance it had to travel.  No biologist took greater advantage of the postal service for gathering scientific data than Charles Darwin, who penned over 14,000 letters.  But there is more than science in those early biologists' letters. There are also matters of the heart.

from Hooker's
Himalayan Journals

Appreciating the poignancy of some letters requires knowing about the state of 19th-century medicine.  Because there were virtually no vaccinations nor oral or injected antibiotics, a child was twenty-five times more likely to die before reaching early adolescence than is a child in Britain today.  Despite 19th-century biologists' accelerating knowledge about the natural world, they were not exempt from that statistic.

After the death of Darwin's beloved daughter Annie at the age of ten, the botanist Joseph Hooker, who helped Darwin study plant species, offered his condolences to Darwin.  Several years later, only an hour after Hooker's daughter died, Hooker was writing to Darwin to tell of his own grief.  Darwin wrote back at once.

Thomas Henry Huxley
   

The leading British advocate for Darwin's theory of evolution for natural selection, Thomas Henry Huxley, also lost a child.  After Huxley's son Noel died at the age of three, Darwin drew upon his own experience of grief with Annie to reassure Huxley that grief could soften with time, writing, "I was indeed grieved to receive your news this morning....  I know well how intolerable is the bitterness of such grief.  Yet believe me, that time, and time alone, acts wonderfully....  I cannot think of one child without tears rising in my eyes; but the grief is become tenderer and I can even call up the smile of our lost darling...."

statue of
Jean Henri Fabre

Such personal expressions of grief and condolence, sometimes traveling in envelopes as part of scientific study, also crossed the English Channel.  The most difficult of emotions were sometimes even revealed in the pages of scientific books.  The eminent French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre closed his first volume on insects with a dedication to the memory of his own son, who had died when Fabre was working on the book. Charles Darwin, despite scientific disagreements,  wrote a cordial letter to Fabre, saying,  "Permit me to add, that when I read the last sentence in your book, I sympathised deeply with you."

I am struck by the tenderness and cordiality of these condolences mingled among the scientific facts.  I cannot begin to comprehend all the research of these early naturalists. But I can hope that some of my emails and "snail-mail" notes might express a similar warmth.

~~~

How do you think we today might make our correspondence spiritually supportive?

(The Kastner quote is from A Species of Eternity by Joseph Kastner, © 1977,

and is taken from The Naturalist's Path by Cathy Johnson, © 1991.  p. ix.)

(The Darwin quotes are taken from Annie's Box by Randal Keynes, © 2001.  pp. 221 & 285.)

Putting Flesh on the Bones

Is there any child who does not at some point become interested in dinosaurs?  Any of a number of things about them can intrigue children.  Such as the dinosaurs' often large size (compared to being so small oneself).  And the fact that dinosaurs inhabit a world that cannot be seen, but which children can enter using their imagination.

The first dinosaur statues
(at Crystal Palace Park)

Even the adults who in the first half of the 19th century discovered fossils from large dinosaurs had to use their imagination to try to surmise what the living creatures would have looked like.  Monsters was the first guess. And so one of Britain's leading fossil anatomists, Richard Owen, named the category Dinosauria from the Greek words deinos and sauros, i.e. "monstrous lizard."  A 19th-century London sculptor depicted dinosaurs as so obese and close to the ground that the poor animals could have barely moved.

For people who were children a century later, it was the 1940 Walt Disney movie Fantasia that helped imaginations put life into dinosaur bones, even if that movie was cartoon animation. Disney's cartoon artists, in creating the dinosaur-story segment, drew the animals' complex movements more like living reptiles.  (Rather than turning dinosaurs into clown-like stick figures, as have some marketers of dinosaur-shaped breakfast cereal and canned noodles for children.)

Despite that improvement the Disney studio made, it was still to some degree a projection of our own mental monsters upon those ancient skeletons.  That is because even in the 1800's, paleontologists had possessed fossil evidence indicating that some dinosaurs had resemblances to birds rather than being more lumbering reptiles.  During the 20th century, more and more scientific evidence -- such as birdlike hipbones and fossils with signs of feathers -- has led to a strong consensus of the close lineages of birds and dinosaurs.  The earliest bird-branch of evolution is more like an overlap with some dinosaurs, thus making birds today somewhat like dinosaur descendants.  One biologist explains:  "Biologically [dinosaurs] were perhaps more akin to today's birds and mammals, thus possibly explaining their great success."

Even when envisioned as being in a way reptilian, there is something to be said for dinosaurs. Nevertheless, the word "dinosaur" continues to be used sometimes to mean something extinct, a relic.  The science-writer Stephen Jay Gould complains about that usage:

"I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur in succumbing to progress.  Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium.  Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects,

 entirely self-imposed, for extended geological longevity."

That child playing with plastic toys could have told adults that there was something cool about dinosaurs.

~~~

Did you become interested in dinosaurs as a child?  What do you think about them now?

(The biologist's quote is by Gregory M. Erickson in

 Evolution:  The First Four Billion Years, ed. Michael Ruse, et al., © 2009.  p. 518.)

(The Gould quote is from his collection Dinosaurs in a Haystack, © 1995.  p. 50.)

(Both the statues photo by Jes from Melbourne and the sign photo by Jeremy Thompson

 are used under Creative Commons Attribution Generic licenses.)

Friendly Competition by Fahrenheit

The United States is positioned on latitudes that stretch from semitropical climates in the south to winter temperatures in the north that approach those of Russia.  That wide range within a single nation with one main language allows for some friendly competition during winters and summers. When winter extremes hit more northern states, those who live in balmier climates can tweet, email, or phone their northern friends, bragging about relatively comfortable environments.  Of course, the danger is that come next summer, those in the north will get their revenge by communicating long-distance about their refreshingly cool nighttime temperatures while those in the south are baking.  Another way to try to gain advantage in this friendly game is for me to turn my own weather extreme to my advantage by bragging about the hardship I am enduring!

 "Various Meteorological Phenomena" (1856)

Comparing weather notes in some fashion is nothing new.  The 18th-century British lexicographer Samuel Johnson observed:  "When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather."  Our modern means of communication, however, allow us to share simultaneous but dissimilar experiences of weather, all within our single nation.

Behind the extremes of winter and summer lies a larger truth about life on planet Earth.  Namely, that species on this planet have evolved so as to be able to usually live within such extremes.  Even more broadly, some scientists have put forward the "anthropic principle" as a way of pointing to a kind of "fine-tuning" of certain characteristics of the universe that match the conditions necessary for life.  Such as the forces that make possible certain chemical elements in the universe.  The extremes of weather and the extremes of what various species can tolerate are, however, one place we can observe directly a "fit" between life and its environments.

We humans, with our complex cultures, tool-making, and accumulation of knowledge have stretched our natural limits.  We have found ways to dress ourselves for extreme colds, and invented ways to artificially warm or cool our burrows.

We might ask though: Can we also extend ourselves spiritually to encompass the extremes that press in upon our lives?  The friendly game of contrasting temperatures sometimes needs to be set aside.  When the extremes of weather bring injury, or even death, we need to shift to another mode, remembering the religious leader Paul's reminder to "Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep."

Thus, the extremes we endure can call us to rise above a concern centered just upon ourselves, recognizing that the element of unfortunate chance can strike any life.  Rising above a narrow self-concern can be something like rising above this planet's surface to see all of it as a whole. The Saudi Arabian astronaut Prince Sulatan Bin Salmon Al-Saud described his experience with fellow astronauts this way:

"The first day or so, we all pointed to our countries.

The third or fourth day,
 we were pointing to our continents.

By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth."

~~~

How do you deal with the shifting seasons psychologically or spiritually?

(The quote by Samuel Johnson [1709-1784] is taken from

 Bloomsbury Treasury of Quotations, ed. John Dainith, © 1994, p. 763.)

(The quote by Paul is from Christianity's New Testament, Romans 12:15 [NRSV].)

(The Prince Al-Saud quote is from Weather: How It Works and Why It Matters by Arthur Upgren, p. 42.)

Creatures of Habit

Each morning, as dawn comes, the birds in my suburban neighborhood begin their calls back and forth, re-establishing contact with others of their species.  Each morning, once it is fully daylight, the squirrels begin their intricate descent to the deck in my backyard, where they will search for breakfast in the leaves or nearby grass.  All those animals have their morning habits, just as I do with my routine of coffee, radio, and reading.  All of our seemingly mechanical behavior is prompted by something even more regular -- the clock-like rising of the sun.  Therein lies a story of the universe, with its complex mixture of order and the unexpected.

Our contemporary U.S. culture, in which new products and discoveries are continually publicized, tends to elevate change.  We are frequently exhorted not to get stuck in a rut. When I was growing up, I often heard people say that we should not be "creatures of habit." The very use of the word "creatures" in that label (rather than saying "people") underscored that habits were something mindless -- something we humans should rise above.  (No one noticed the irony that people were habitually exhorting others not to be creatures of habit.)

The 20th-century Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, a master of tragicomedy, said through one of his characters that "Habit is a great deadener."

Despite habits so often being considered something that we should break, no society could long exist without them.  That insight was made by the late 19th-century psychologist William James, who wrote:

"Habit is... the enormous fly-wheel of society, 

its most precious conservative agent.... 

 It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life 

from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. 

It keeps the fisherman 

and the deck-hand 

at sea through the winter."

The morning routines of the birds, squirrels, and myself were all triggered by the "habitual" rising of the sun. With the rise of Newtonian science in the 17th century, scientists tended to say that bodies such as our sun obeyed "natural laws" with their mathematical regularity. Today, scientists still search for underlying regularities in the world, but much less often use the phrase "laws," which was clearly a term borrowed from human society. We even know that the apparent movement of the old sun through our sky, which once seemed absolutely mechanical in its seeming clock-like movement , is not absolute, because the Earth's rotation is gradually slowing over time. Thus it is that even the sun in our sky cannot be absolutely unchanging in its habits.  It even has unpredictable flares in the fires on its surface.  Even the sun is a complex mixture of order and the unexpected.

We live in a world of both underlying order and underlying novelty.  And, I bet even those birds and squirrels -- with all their alertness along with their regularity -- would also make adjustments in their behavior if something new and potentially significant entered the routine of their day.

~~~

Do you have a routine, intentional or not, that adds something valuable to your life?

(The Beckett quote is from Waiting for Godot, III. © 1952, trans. 1954.)

(The James quote is taken from Psychology, Briefer Course, by William James, © 1892.  p. 143.)

(Both the photo and the illustration are in the public domain because their copyrights have expired.)