And then in a still more remote corner of this wing of the museum was revealed a collection of gray, convoluted objects, stored in formalin to retard spoilage -- shelf upon shelf of human brains. There must have been someone whose job it was to perform routine craniotomies on the cadavers of notables and extract their brains for the benefit if science. Here was the cerebrum of a European intellectual who had achieved momentary renown before fading into the obscurity of this dusty shelf. Here a brain of a convicted murderer. Doubtless the savants of earlier days had hoped there might be some anomaly, some telltale sign in the brain anatomy or cranial configuration of murderers. Perhaps they had hoped that murder was a matter of heredity and not society. Phrenology was a graceless nineteenth-century aberration. I could hear my friend Ann Druyan saying, “The people we starve and torture have an unsociable tendency to steal and murder. We think it’s because their brows overhang.” But the brains of murderers and savants -- the remains of Albert Einstein’s brain are floating wanly in a bottle in Wichita -- are indistinguishable. It is, very probably, society and not heredity that makes criminals.
And the best line is, in fact, Druyan’s, not Sagan’s. “The people we starve and torture have an unsociable tendency to steal and murder.” It jumped out at me while reading Broca’s Brain, but it powerfully came back to me some books later, while I was reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. There, the context was not murder, but child abuse and how it, apparently inevitably, leads to broken and dysfunctional adults. Much more on that we I get to writing up my post on that book.
The rest of Broca’s Brain I can frankly take or leave. The book is a collection of essays and articles, most published in other places, that don’t, in my opinion, cohere together very well.
The worst of the bunch is “Venus and Dr. Velikovsky,” a skeptical takedown that goes on for an interminable fifty-six pages. In 1950, a scholar named Immanuel Velikovsky published a book called Worlds in Collision, which was apparently a kind of best seller and cultural phenomenon. In Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky proposed that:
The planet Jupiter disgorged a large comet, which made a grazing collision with Earth around 1500 B.C. The various plagues and Pharaonic tribulations of the Book of Exodus all derive directly or indirectly from this cometary encounter. Material which made the river Nile turn to blood drops from the comet. The vermin described in Exodus are produced by the comet -- flies and perhaps scarabs drop out of the comet, while indigenous terrestrial frogs are induced by the heat of the comet to multiply. Earthquakes produced by the comet level Egyptian but not Hebrew dwellings. (The only thing that does not seem to drop from the comet is cholesterol to harden Pharaoh’s heart.)
That last parenthetical sentence gives you an idea of the humor that Sagan can employ and, yet, despite the biting sarcasm, he then goes on the counter scientifically every possible claim that Velikovsky’s fanciful story employs. Here, for the sake of example, is what Sagan writes about the idea that flies could have come out of a comet that was once part of Jupiter and would eventually, according to Velikovsky, become the planet Venus.
Even stranger are Velikovsky’s views on extraterrestrial life. He believes that much of the “vermin,” and particularly the flies referred to in Exodus, really fell from his comet -- although he hedges on the extraterrestrial origin of frogs while approvingly quoting from the Iranian text, The Bundahis (page 183), which seems to admit a rain of cosmic frogs. Let us consider flies only. Shall we expect houseflies or Drosophila melanogaster in forthcoming explorations of the clouds of Venus and Jupiter? He is quite explicit: “Venus -- and therefore also Jupiter -- is populated by vermin” (page 389). Will Velikovsky’s hypothesis fall if no flies are found?
The idea that, of all the organisms on Earth, flies alone are of extraterrestrial origin is curiously reminiscent of Martin Luther’s exasperated conclusion that, while the rest of life was created by God, the fly must have been created by the Devil because there is no conceivable practical use for it. But flies are perfectly respectable insects, closely related in anatomy, physiology and biochemistry to other insecta. The possibility that 4.6 billion years of independent evolution on Jupiter -- even if it were physically identical to Earth -- would produce a creature indistinguishable from other terrestrial organisms is to misread seriously the evolutionary process. Flies have the same enzymes, the same nucleic acids and even the same genetic code (which translates nucleic acid information into protein information) as do all the other organisms on Earth. There are too many intimate associations and identities between flies and other terrestrial organisms for them to have separate origins, as any serious investigation clearly shows.
In Exodus, Chapter 9, it is said that the cattle of Egypt all died, but of the cattle of the Children of Israel there “died not one.” In the same chapter we find a plague that affects flax and barley but not wheat and rye. This fine-tuned host-parasite specificity is very strange for cometary vermin with no prior biological contact with Earth, but is readily explicable in terms of home-grown terrestrial vermin.
Then there is the curious fact that flies metabolize molecular oxygen. There is no molecular oxygen on Jupiter, nor can there be, because oxygen is thermodynamically unstable in an excess of hydrogen. Are we to imagine that the entire terminal electron transfer apparatus required for life to deal with molecular oxygen was adventitiously evolved on Jupiter by Jovian organisms hoping someday to be transported to Earth? This would be yet a bigger miracle than Velikovsky’s principal collisional thesis. Velikovsky makes (page 187) a lame aside on the “ability of many small insects … to live in an atmosphere devoid of oxygen,” which misses the point. The question is how an organism evolved on Jupiter could live in and metabolize an atmosphere rich in oxygen.
Next there is the problem of fly ablation. Small flies have just the same mass and dimensions as small meteors, which are burned up at an altitude of about 100 kilometers when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere on cometary trajectories. Ablation accounts for the visibility of such meteors. Not only would cometary vermin be transformed rapidly into fried flies on entrance into the Earth’s atmosphere; they would, as cometary meteors are today, be vaporized into atoms and never “swarm” over Egypt to the consternation of Pharaoh. Likewise, the temperatures attendant to ejection of the comet from Jupiter, referred to above, would fry Velikovsky’s flies. Impossible to begin with, doubly fried and atomized, cometary flies do not well survive critical scrutiny.
And that’s just the flies. On and on the critical analysis goes, page after page, until even I begin to question what it is all about. Is Sagan trying to deal in print with a kind of Gish Gallop? In other words, there are so many things wrong with Velikovsky’s book that the only possible way to conclusively refute them all is through this reasoned and measured approach. Sagan is a scientist after all. He no doubt believes that by putting such a treatise in the scientific literature, the conversation can finally move beyond Velikovsky -- or at least refer back to his rational take down whenever necessary. That would seem to be the case when, near the very end, Sagan says this:
To the extent that scientists have not given Velikovsky the reasoned response his work calls for, we have ourselves been responsible for the propagation of Velikovskian confusion.
I’ve got to admit. This sentence stopped me in my tracks. The reasoned response his work calls for? Are you kidding, Carl? Near as I can tell, the only thing Velikovsky’s “work” calls for is ridicule. That, as a great statesman once said, is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.
+ + +
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment