Michael Taylor's Impossible Monsters fits in extremely well with my recent reads of mythological animals. Here are the real monstrous creatures of the past... but Taylor's focus is not on the dinosaurs themselves but how they changed our understanding of the world. A seismic shift that had begun centuries earlier was about to come to its heady climax : from a world of magic and mystics we had shifted to intercessionary relationships with an omnipotent singular God. Now we were about to take another dramatic lurch, replacing scriptural literalism with scientific materialism. The last vestiges of a medieval mindset were, at last, giving way to modernity.
Here, then, is a philosophical, theological, and sociological history of dinosaurs – and of those who found them.
The Review Bit
There's so little to criticise about the book that I can keep this brief. The book has an excellent balance of breadth and depth presented in an engrossing, accessible way without dumbing down. Taylor gives mini-biopics of each of the major characters that greatly add to the understanding of how the discoveries came about, very carefully curated to balance the purely human, amusing side of things with informing the reader of just how different the academic process was in Victorian Britain. He covers a range of topics with sensitivity and impartiality, from the sociological situation (such as the treatment of the poor and destitute) to the theological disputes (especially the big one, over whether the Bible needed to be taken as literal truth).
Rarely, if ever, does he get on a hobby-horse and rant at the reader about the absurdity of religious literalism. At the same time, he's abundantly clear that it's Wrong With A Capital W. He balances the attempts to harmonise science and religion with the painful conflicts that occurred between the two. The latter, he says, happened loudly and frequently. This is in stark contrast to an earlier documentary which claimed (as I remember it) that Creationism and the like never really got going until decades later, and that the initial reaction to evolution was actually fairly muted.
Not so, says Taylor, putting forth a wealth of evidence to the contrary, and always careful to set everything in context. For example he compares the sales figures of Darwin's works with other (religiously moderate) texts*, which initially far exceeded them; he notes that when Paine's The Age Of Reason was censored, this wasn't because of the work's particular nature but part of a prevailing approach to anything deemed offensive at the time. Even so, there was no shortage of incidents of harsh invective from both sides, sometimes with severe and serious consequences for those caught up in the debates.
* Of which Darwin himself approved, despite having all but lost his own personal religious faith by this point.
In Taylor's history, science ultimately wins – but there's no unnecessary triumphalism here. He tries quite earnestly to get into the literalist mindset rather than pronouncing believers as simply idiots, and isn't afraid to criticise the scientists either. What emerges is, if you'll forgive the clichés, an extremely rich and nuanced picture, colourful characters rather than any monochromatic sort of good-versus-evil struggle. These were real people with all their foibles : Darwin's staunch social conservatism persisted despite his loss of faith; Richard Owen was highly intelligent but capable of being a Right Stupid Bastard; Huxley's agnosticism was often viciously aggressive. And to Taylor's great credit, what could have been a complex, messy narrative is always kept clear and on-point.
There is one glaring omission, however. Taylor chronicles in detail both the geological discoveries and the changing social and scientific reaction to them. But what drove those changed responses ? At the start of the 19th century, someone speaking out against scripture would certainly be socially ostracised and likely fined or even imprisoned. By the end of the period, atheist scientists were being awarded high honours. So was it the changing geological findings that drove a loss of faith, or was it the loss of faith that allowed for new interpretations of the evidence ? What specifically was different in Victorian Britain that allowed for such radically different understandings of the same sort of dinosaur bones that had undoubtedly been unearthed for centuries past ?
To be fair, this is really the only difficulty of any substance I have with the book – but it's a pretty big one. Overall, I'm giving this one 8/10. I suspect it's a book that will age well and become a lasting influence.
The World According To Philosoraptor
Taylor references Jurassic Park a couple of times, but surprisingly never uses any philosoraptor memes. Oh well, a missed opportunity. On the other hand, most of the ideas discussed in the book don't lend themselves easily to meme-format, so perhaps it's for the best. So here's my summary of the most interesting themes from the book, delivered as good-old-fashioned text rather than the considerably more popular captioned images.
In this first part, I'll look the complexities in distinguishing science from religion at the start of the period, as well as just how weird some of the major characters were. In part two I'll cover how the theory of evolution was itself, in part, the result of an evolutionary rather than revolutionary process, and how while science and religion can sometimes live together happily, sometimes they can't help but fight it out.
Blurred boundaries
Taylor promises not to go on a polemic against religious literalism and he does indeed manage to steer clear of this. He clearly views such ideas with disdain, but he makes a pretty good attempt at sympathising with the believers as people. Often they were, at the time, genuinely doing the best they could with the evidence they had at hand (the same cannot be said for modern lunatics, of course).
While most of the book covers the period of the 19th century, the prologue examines the famous estimate of the age of the Earth by Bishop Ussher. It's worth remembering that this now obviously nonsensical result was obtained a mere two centuries before the Victorian era, and while there had been other similar calculations, this was one of exceptionally diligent effort*. And it was a calculation. This was no mere quick reading of the Bible and trying to make things add up on the back of an envelope. This was a slow, tedious examination of a multitude of historical documents that took years to complete. It was a meticulous, scholarly effort – you could even call it scientific, in its way.
* Though other estimates had reached similar values. Ussher's would also have likely have faded into similar obscurity, had he not been fortunate enough to have it included in the commentary printed with certain editions of the Bible.
Without the careful, fully scientific results that would take thousands of people centuries longer to obtain, Ussher simply had no better methods available. The conceptual leaps needed to arrive at the modern value were monumental : atomic theory, thermodynamics, whole forms of mathematics... he had none of this. It wasn't his fault, the poor sod.
And if doubts about the age of the Earth were creeping in by the start of the Victorian era, they were weakly founded, and nowhere near strong enough to challenge the prevailing literalist wisdom. At most there was uncertainty and concern rather than any genuine rival theories; no alternative, self-consistent world view had yet been presented. Again, the conceptual leap needed to go from an Earth thousands of years old to billions is vast, and can't – shouldn't – be done without extraordinary evidence. Scientifically, Ussher and the early fossil hunters were on surprisingly solid ground, given what was actually known at the time.
It's a similar story with the development of the central theory in the field : the theory of evolution, the climax of Taylor's book. If the boundaries between science and religion were not always well-delineated, then evolution was by no means the self-evident notion it appears today. At least, not at first. One of the major problems was, ironically, with the fossil record. To arrive at evolution proper required a series of advancements more than a singular inspiration (as we'll see next time), but one of the problem was that animals in the past, naively, should be expected to be simpler than the modern ones. Dinosaurs, being huge and complex beasts, did not fit that pattern at all.
Nor, with the fossil record still being hugely incomplete, were there any signs of clear progressions. It all just seemed too chaotic, too haphazard. This fit neatly with the widely-held idea of occasional catastrophes, which nobody took issue with since these demonstrably happened. But there was a huge implicit bias that any sort of slow, incremental change must necessarily be progressive. The idea of speciation, and in particular adaptation to the current circumstances (probably Darwin's biggest and most unique contribution to the field), was of an altogether different order to the kind of changes that were accepted to occur. Everyone could see disasters for themselves, but you couldn't see speciation (or even lesser developments) unless you were extremely dedicated and carefully looking for it.
So in essence, just as in the very distant past the idea of a spherical Earth would have contradicted all the evidence any sane person could see, so too was evolution on a much more rickety pedestal than it is today. You could very credibly argue that its early advocates were making nothing less than a leap of faith in adopting it, because some of its findings went against the available evidence rather than being shaped by it. Not all of evolution's (early) detractors were skeptical simply because of religious devotion,;just as with Galileo, some doubts were scientifically legitimate.
The human factors should not be neglected either. Richard Owen, who coined the word "dinosaur" and founded the Natural History Museum, could be a horrible elitist snob, as could much of the Geological Society. Indeed Owen coined "dinosaur" as a deliberate way to highlight the apparent absurdity of the complexity of earlier creatures. Remember, this era was not far removed from a period where even the notion of extinction implied the heretical notion that God could make mistakes : prevailing wisdom is difficult to overcome because sometimes we're not even aware of the assumptions behind it. But try and flip it around and things become easier to understand. If today an academic were to try and claim a divine origin for all things, then the difficulties they would encounter become clear.
A few final points. Materialism (the idea that the physical world is all there is) was a problem both socially as well as theologically. Not only would it flatly contradict the Bible by leaving little or no room for God, but it would also give the lower orders... agency. Suddenly everyone's brain would become, after a fashion, equally capable of understanding and reason, or at least having equal potential. Any idea of nobility, any hint of being one of the elect*, would be gone. This was the dramatic restructuring of thought that the Victorians were being demanded to make.
* On a tangential note, the idea of God's Chosen People baffles me. Whenever this crops up, it's never clear why God made that choice – if he did it just on whimsy, then he's clearly a moron. Theologically this seems bonkers.
To give this some context, Richard Owen was progressive by the standards of his day in that while he regarded certain races as far inferior to others, he did at least accept them as human. The more conservative elements of his day... didn't. They literally believed that some people weren't actually people. So the idea of allowing them freedom of opinions was a tough selling point, to say the least.
It's worth stressing the character complexities a little more. Owen could be an academic thug, but he was also a dedicated champion of science and public outreach. He also had some experiences which were truly bizarre, involving decapitated heads and ghost stories (I give a proper quotation here). And of course, he was religiously conservative : he could accept evolution if it was pre-ordained, but the idea of natural selection was to him a step much too far.
Other religious figures responded differently to scientific progress. While the various crises that afflicted Mary Anning made her cling all the more deeply to her faith, the loss of Darwin's daughter saw him all but lose his. The great fossil hunter Gideon Mantell refused to be swayed away from his faith, while Charles Lyell was sympathetic to the principles of evolution but couldn't stomach the idea of mankind arising from apes. And, completely independently of geology, Bishop Colenso decided that the Bible was actually riddled with contradictions* and was excommunicated for saying so (he was later reinstated despite his highly unorthodox views).
* For example, he was required to deny the existence of witchcraft despite witches very much existing in the Bible.
Finally, the famous Alfred Russel Wallace later became skeptical of natural selection, but vigorously defended the scientific method : he was, confusingly, staunchly opposed to the Flat Earth movement, anti-colonial, pro-phrenology and pro-supernatural. Characterising anyone as simply religious or atheist or agnostic is, then, a calamitous oversimplification of the extremely complex factors that shaped their highly individual beliefs.
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