Review : Impossible Monsters (II)

Time to conclude my breakdown of Michael Taylor's Impossible Monsters, which looks at the discovery of dinosaurs from the perspective of science and religion. In part one I covered how the boundaries between the two were often fuzzy, especially in the early part of the Victorian period. Individuals, too, were the proverbial rich tapestry : some clergy were tolerant and liberal, some agnostics were nasty little bastards. 

Sometimes, a harmonious coexistence of science and religion prevailed. But there were lines which, if crossed, could lead to psychological violence with serious consequences for those involved.

At the start of the period this was almost entirely in favour of the religious, who held all the cards and pulled all the strings of society. By the end, the roles were in no sense reversed, but a critical tipping point had been breached. No longer would every atheist routinely fear for their job security, let alone their social standing and still less for their basic freedoms. It wasn't that there was no longer disagreement by any means. But it was now possible for the outwardly atheist and agnostic to receive the highest honours society could bestow, even to get away with deliberate provocation against the more hardline religious elements.

Philosoraptor Continues

Britain had advanced considerably along the road to liberalism. Like the scientific discoveries that accompanied, and perhaps assisted, the progress of society, it was sometimes slow and grinding work but occasionally punctuated by moments of sudden and decisive change. As a case study, Taylor shows how the theory of evolution came about largely due to decades of painstaking work, building from smaller parts of the main idea, rather than due to lone geniuses or a flash of inspiration. 

Rather than making this end result less dramatic, the exact reverse is true – but it's only clearly visible when we take a step back. For the kind of change of thinking this necessitated affected nothing less than our understanding of time itself, a reshaping of thought so profound that simply couldn't have happened overnight.

Such radical ideas witnessed no small amount of outright hostility, and if the supremacy of religion was waning, it wouldn't go down without a fight. Continuing a theme from the first post, some of this was in fact a result of perfectly legitimate scientific doubts about the strength of the evidence, which initially had literally dinosaur-sized holes in it. In no way did evolution, at first, meet the standards of "extraordinary evidence" required of extraordinary claims. But some of it was due to purely human, emotional fallacies. Ideologies could run rampant on both sides, but ultimately, this was a fight in which there could be only one winner.

Incremental revolutions

But let's begin with a gentle book at how the theory of evolution itself evolved. A variety of social factors shaped how people accepted or rejected the same evidence, or interpreted it differently to each other. Just as the sociological situation was nuanced, so too was the state of the pure evidence itself. The final conclusion of evolution by natural selection was, undeniably, a scientific revolution, but it was not the work of a singular genius. 

One of the most famous building blocks is that of Thomas Malthus, who thought that population growth would eventually lead to consumption of finite resources and thereby catastrophe. Malthus crops up a few times in Impossible Monsters, not for his economic gloom-mongering, but for the more basic principle of natural change implicit in his theory. Keith Thomas' view that medieval paintings show classical antiquity in then-contemporary styles becomes easier to understand when you remember that they genuinely thought the world was just a few millennia old : there just hadn't been enough time for significant changes. 

Malthus' extrapolation to the future was a small but important contribution to reshaping our view of time and thus our own place in the world. Rather than placing us at the summit of creation, we were now at the threshold of a deep and fearful pit – with no obvious mode of escape.

A second, more direct component came from Charles Lyell and James Hutton. Hutton had proposed the idea of slow, continuous geological development and change – deep time and uniformitarianism ("the present is the key to the past", as my geology teacher used to say) – as far back as the 1790s. This was certainly religiously shocking and evinced no small amount of harsh invective, but intellectually it was something of a damp squib. It lay all but ignored and forgotten until Lyell more successfully resurrected it in the 1830s, in a larger, more careful work with a greater body of evidence.

Biologically, too, the idea of change was not unprecedented. Already in 1809, Lamarck had proposed that animals could change their individual characteristics over time in response to their environment. The implication that man could have been the descendent of monkeys had not gone unnoticed, but there was little evidence for Lamarck's idea of transmutation at the time.

Overall, the development of Darwin and Wallace's theory of evolution was a series of incremental developments unregarded by the general public. It was punctuated by moments of sound and fury signifying breakthroughs, but even those came out of work of the most extraordinary levels of painstaking tedium. Darwin himself conducted some pretty horrific experiments (especially on pigeons), and spent so many years studying barnacles that he hated them "as no man ever did before". He applied equally diligent efforts to a study of plants.

This is not to say that the Origin of Species didn't mark a watershed moment in scientific progress : it did*). But it did not spring forth from the head of Darwin fully formed in a flash of genius. It came from a stupendous amount of specialist work by both himself and a great many others – not just Hutton, Lyle, Lamarck, but a host of others as well. Essentially all of the major concepts were already in place for Darwin's big moment, just as so many pieces of the puzzle were ready for Einstein to assemble his theories of relativity. 

* Interestingly though, an early talk shortly before the more famous debates failed to gain much attention from anyone. Taylor makes it clear that the subsequent debates, however, did play out much as in the lively fashion which popular history records.

Darwin, though, gave a plausible mechanism* for how Lamarckian-style changes might come about, together with a wealth of meticulously-detailed evidence for it actually happening. Both Wallace and Darwin formulated their ideas only after global voyages lasting years, collecting their own data by hand because nothing else suitable existed. It was physically exhausting, gruelling work to come up with an idea we now take for granted. Not that it was by any means complete at this stage : the lack of a theory of genetics would remain a difficulty long afterwards. But the force of the arguments and evidence were, slowly, becoming irresistible.

* Oddly, initially he seemed a bit confused as to how natural selection related to animal husbandry, only later realising that it provided solid support for the idea.

In short, scientific advancement isn't without moments of important breakthroughs or paradigm shifts. But those owe at least as much to dedication, specialisation, and an awful lot of hard graft as they ever do to innate genius.

One side can simply be wrong

The distinction between early science and religion was nowhere near as stark as it appears today. But a difference was emerging, gradatim ferociter, into a form that many would eventually come to see as irreconcilable. 

Conflict was present right from the earliest days of modern geological investigations. Hutton's work was described as "contrary to reason and the tenor of Mosaic history, thus leading to an abyss". But disagreement was by no means unrelenting. It was, for a while, possible to frame geological discoveries so as to support scripture, and when this happened there was no problem. This did not even necessarily mean acquiescing to Biblical literalism. Catastrophisim was popular not just because everyone knew that local catastrophes – even extinctions – did happen from time to time, but also because they allowed a metaphorical but acceptable interpretation of the Bible. 

The basic idea was that there could have been multiple catastrophes on a par with Noah's Flood, with God remaking the world multiple times over. If any of the clergy objected to this, it wasn't on a significant scale : there seemed no problem interpreting Biblical "days" of creation as firmly metaphorical. And on the academic side, Buckland, Mantell, Anning, and very nearly all the great and the good of the early fossil hunters and geologists were devout Christians, with Buckland in particular keen to emphasise the harmony of geology and scripture. 

More interesting is the case of Charles Lyell. Whereas the others were actively trying to support scripture, Lyell explicitly declared he wished to "free the science from Moses". Yet his epic, 1,400 page Principles of Geology, though he regarded it as a "deliberate strike against religious dogma", did little to provoke anything nastier than mild criticism. Unfortunately Taylor doesn't go in to why this should be : religious institutions were largely praiseworthy of the Principles, sometimes profusely so; specialists gave it really no more than the most modest of rebukes. How Lyell managed to avoid this, despite resurrecting Hutton's shocking ideas, isn't clear.

Things did eventually turn ugly though. When geology was used to support scripture there was no problem, but when the roles were reversed and the Bible made to be subservient, it was another matter entirely. The clergy had no problem with science giving way before faith, but, especially in America, they had no truck with the opposite. Notably, the same could not be said in Europe, and it was a paradox of the age that while Britain initially led the world in dinosaur research, it did so from a much more conservative position. The whole idea of liberalism and European-style rationalism was openly regarded with something approaching horror.

To cut a long story short(er), Darwin was afraid of publishing his ideas for very good reasons. True, sometimes radical positions had gone largely unpunished save for criticism, but the consequences could be serious. Manuscripts were burned, authors fined, imprisoned, and socially ostracised – no small punishment for academics who weren't in the Old Boys club. Deviants could be publicly humiliated, some police offers were recorded as wishing they could still burn heretics at the stake. Frederik Maurice was hounded from academia merely for debating the meaning of the words "endless" and eternity; only through a protracted struggle did he manage to return. Others, such as Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Beasant, would suffer prosecution and – in Bradlaugh's case – lengthy imprisonment for the right to atheism and socially progressive views.

The conflict between science and religion was, then, real and it did happen. And while in some ways many of the scientists were equally belligerent in their approach to debate (Huxley in particularly must count as the most aggressive agnostic of his age), ultimately it wasn't a fair fight. Scientists were arguing from a position of evidence : imperfect and incomplete, but progressively improving. The faithful, increasingly, clung to their views only out of... well, faith.

Religious literalism was ultimately dealt a mortal wound with the discovery that reptiles preceded birds, contrary to Genesis; even the most metaphorical interpretation of "day" simply couldn't make the ordering work. Attempts to compromise were, in the end, futile. 

To be fair, many changed their minds in response. The majority of religious believers today aren't Creationists. But a scientific world view and one which adheres to the literal truth of the Bible are inevitably at odds. Taylor's major point here (backed up by Keith Thomas where he strays into this period) is that literalist beliefs persisted far longer than we like to think – they were absolutely normal in Victorian Britain, and hadn't been overturned by previously findings. That's something which Thomas doesn't really cover.

There are many ways in which science and religion can and do happily coexist. I personally find some of the Biblical metaphors useful : the loss of innocence of Adam and Eve, the magnitude of the cosmos expressed to Job, the and of course the markedly socialist tracks of some of the teachings of Jesus. In no way does this mean I believe in any of it, but for those who do, there is no reason for any sort of anti-science attitude. To me, to believe that an ancient text of any kind must be on unimpeachable Truth is just not sensible, but to deny that it contains any truths at all is equally crazy. There are innumerable straw man arguments raised by New Atheists (and indeed by Victorian atheists, as Taylor shows !) that I have no sympathy with, the sort that tar all believers as Six Day Creationists – as though you could reduce the awesome complexity of the human condition to a box-ticking exercise. You can't and it's silly.

But, Richard Dawkins was dead right when he said that one side can be simply wrong. Even a couple of centuries ago, there was no good scientific evidence for an Earth billions of years old. Early objections did not proceed entirely from religious devotion, though that was part of it. But nowadays any position against the scientifically-determined age of the Earth or evolution is untenable. Despite protestations to the contrary, that debate has been long since won.

---

How exactly did religious literalism develop ? Even Greek mythology alone contains different explanations of the same thing : different creation stories, different explanations, different actions by the same heroes, different moral interpretations. It would be difficult indeed to have any sort of devotion to any one particular story in that system, which is innately flexible and versatile.

The Biblical stories are much simpler. They state unequivocally what happened with no room for alternatives. Yet even the earliest Church grandees realised that contradictions pointed to metaphorical interpretations, and theological debates raged incessantly (a very nice SMBC illustrates how taking things literally is itself fraught with difficulty). From Keith Thomas I never had the impression that a Creationist view was especially widespread in the late medieval/early modern period – and he gives pretty good direct evidence that many ordinary people both hated religion. They neither understood it nor saw it as especially important; it was really understood that the practise of going to Church was what mattered, not what one believed.

Something had clearly changed by the Victorian period, but as to how this came about would surely take another book. Whether this represents an error or only an incompleteness on the part of Keith Thomas, I don't care to speculate. I note, though, that Taylor doesn't restrict himself to the academics, with ordinary people also being a bunch of literalist zealots in his account. 

On that note, the difference between literalists and zealots is also something not often discussed. I tend to think of them as synonymous, but in the Victorian period this seems not to have been the case : people accepted the literal truth of the Bible as their default position, but most of them changed their opinions when enough new data was presented. A hardcore of fanatics were unconvinced, of course, but the point is that type and strength of belief don't necessarily correlate. Presumably there's a selection effect at work here though : today, religious literalism demands irrational devotion, in a way it simply didn't back in the era of early Victorian science.

If there were some stark differences in beliefs of the era compared to today, there were also some interesting parallels. One of which, muscular Christianity, had suspiciously familiar emphasis on male strength and patriotic duty to certain modern day movements. How depressing that some of the stupider Victorian beliefs appear to be making such a resurgence !

There's nothing wrong with setting ambitious goals for oneself, of course. What becomes problematic is when one applies those same standards to others who might have entirely different life goals, and of course how one responds when they don't meet those expectations. This is why I harp on about the myth of lone geniuses so much (of which I go into a bit more detail on Quora, see also the comments). They give the impression that all science is done by a handful of supermen and all the work by the rest of us counts for nothing. They also pander to the crazies who believe themselves misunderstood only because they're so far above the ordinary scientists.

What Impossible Monsters shows is just how much the incremental work really matters. Yes, there were moments of genius here and there (radical free-thinking did play a part), and no small amount of luck was involved too. But far more important this was dedication to hard, tedious work by people with all the same flaws and virtues as the rest of us. Decades of their patient efforts ultimately achieved something stupendous : they changed the way we think.