the sacred beetle and other science essays - Arvind Gupta

302 Pages·2006·0.98 MB·English

by  Arvind Gupta

THE SACRED BEETLE & OTHER GREAT ESSAYS IN SCIENCE

Chosen and Introduced by Martin Gardner

From Darwin on evolution to Einstein on relativity covering subjects as
diverse as science and literature, the sea, the laws of physics, the beautiful
woman, logic, the bee, and the moon, this is a lively and lucid collection of
essays by thirty-two leading interpreters of science. The essays are drawn
together and provided with an entertaining and perceptive commentary by
Martin Gardner, who explains that his selection was governed not by a
desire to teach, or to bring us up to date on new trends and discoveries, but
'to spread before the reader, whether his interest in science be passionate or
mild, a sumptuous feast of great writing--absorbing, thought-disturbing
pieces that have something important to say about science and say it forcibly
and well'. His explanatory and biographical sketches make this book not
only a rich collection of good reading, but also an informal history of the
people and ideas that have shaped our culture and moulded our everyday
lives. Martin Gardner is a mathematician whose numerous books on science,
mathematics, and philosophy include Science: Good, Bad and Bogus and
Order and Surprise (both available in Oxford Paperbacks). In 1983 he was
named Science Writer of the Year by the American Institute of Physics.

Contents
FRANCIS BACON
The Sphinx (1609)
CHARLES DARWIN
Recapitulation and Conclusion (1859)
JOHN DEWEY
The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy (1909)
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
Nonmoral Nature (1982)
WILLIAM JAMES
The Problem of Being (1911)
HAVELOCK ELLIS
What Makes a Woman Beautiful (1905)
JEAN HENRI FABRE
The Sacred Beetle (1918)
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON
The Logic of Elfland (1908)
CARL SAGAN
Can We Know The Universe?
Reflections on a Grain of Salt ( 1979)
JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH
The Colloid and the Crystal (1950)
JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET
The Barbarism of "Specialization" (1932)
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
Science and Culture (1893)
JOHN BURROUGHS Science and Literature (1889)
ISAAC ASIMOV
Science and Beauty (1983)
ERNEST NAGEL
Automation (1955)
JONATHAN NORTON LEONARD
Other-Worldly Life (1953)
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
Physics in the Contemporary World (1955)
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
Religion and Science (1925)
JOHN DOS PASSOS
Proteus (1930)
JULIAN HUXLEY
An Essay on Bird-Mind (1923)
ARTHUR STANLEY EDDINGTON
The Decline of Determinism ( 1934 )
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Science in the Brave New World (1932)
RACHEL CARSON
The Sunless Sea (1951)
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
The Nuptial Flight (1901)
H. G. WELLS
The New Source of Energy (1914)
Science and Ultimate Truth (1931)
LAURA FERMI
Success (1954)
SAMUEL GOUDSMIT
The Gestapo in Science (1947)
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Pan's Pipes (1876)
SIGMUND FREUD
Dreams of the Death of Beloved Persons ( 1900)
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Science to Save Us from Science (1950)
The Greatness of Albert Einstein (1955)
ALBERT EINSTEIN
E = mc2 (1946)
LEWIS THOMAS
Seven Wonders (1983)

Preface

IN 1955 Herbert Alexander, then president of Pocket Books, asked me to
edit an anthology to be titled Great Essays in Science. The paperback edition
(it never saw hard covers) came out in 1957. This expanded and revised
edition, with its new title, brings the book back in print after a lapse of more
than a decade.
Most of the small changes made in the introductions have been
occasioned by the deaths of contributors. The computer revolution has
moved much faster than anyone anticipated when Ernest Nagel wrote about
automation, but I am allowing that essay to remain, with my introduction
unaltered, because the coming of the industrial robots has made Nagel's
piece as timely and as accurate as it was in 1957.
The only selection I removed was a long chapter on the moon that first
appeared in Sir Robert Ball's classic work of 1885, The Story of the
Heavens. Although this chapter was written more than seventy years before I
put it in my anthology, it contained surprisingly little that was then out of
date, and indeed one can still learn much from it. "Significant new
knowledge." I wrote in my introduction, "will have to wait upon the first
lunar explorers." I was right in predicting that "soon the artificial satellites
will be whirling around the earth" and that the moon is "certain to be the first
spot visited by our spacemen." Unfortunately, I added another guess that
was far too cautious. "Our children." I wrote, "may well live to see a rocket
ship circle or land on the moon and return."
Four new essays have been added. I wish there could have been more, but
the size of a book is limited and I decided with reluctance to limit my
choices to essays by four Americans who began their distinguished science-
writing careers after the date of the first edition of this collection: Isaac
Asimov, Stephen Jay Could, Carl Sagan. and Lewis Thomas. By an
astonishing coincidence, all four of these men grew up in Brooklyn! I like to
think of the Brooklyn Bridge as a giant symbol of the joining of C. P.
Snow's "two cultures." It is a bridge that all four writers travel back and forth
in their books as easily and often as they must have once travelled back and
forth between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
As I said in my original preface, I had hoped that every major branch of
science might be represented in this anthology, but it was not possible.
Medicine and the social sciences, for example. are not here, although many
of the book's essays raise momentous political questions.
A limit also had to be placed on the age of the selections. For many
reasons I decided to include nothing published earlier than 1859, the pivotal
year of Darwin's Origin of Species. (The prologue by Francis Bacon is the
sole exception.) Only the piece by Havelock Ellis has been cut. The others
are reprinted in full, with no textual alterations.
As a literary form the essay has always had irresponsible boundaries, and
in this collection its definition becomes no clearer. There are "essays" here
that are chapters, or segments from chapters, not written to be read apart
from the book in which they first appeared. Several were originally lectures.
Two are from works of fiction. Some are brief enough to be called sketches,
others long enough to be called treatises. Some are heavy with scientific
erudition, others glance at science casually over a shoulder. Some are
wandering, informal expressions of opinion; others labour a thesis with the
systematic vigour of a medieval schoolman. Even the cardinal rule that a
great essay must be beautifully written has been violated in one or two
instances.
Nothing could be further from my intent than to hand the reader a volume
designed primarily to teach him science or bring him up to date on the latest
trends and discoveries. There is no end to the making of such anthologies
and even the best of them have a distressing way of becoming out of date
before the pages are bound. Rather, the purpose of this book is to spread
before the reader, whether his or her interest in science be passionate or
mild, a sumptuous feast of great writing--absorbing, thought-disturbing
pieces that have some- thing important to say about science and say it
forcibly and well.

Martin Gardner
Prologue

FRANCIS BACON

The Sphinx
SPHINX, says the story, was a monster combining many shapes in one.
She had the face and voice of a virgin, the wings of a bird, the claws of a
griffin. She dwelt on the ridge of a mountain near Thebes and infested the
roads, lying in ambush for travellers, whom she would suddenly attack and
lay hold of; and when she had mattered them, she propounded to them
certain dark and perplexing riddles, which she was thought to have obtained
from the Muses. And if the wretched captives could not at once solve and
interpret the same, as they stood hesitating and confused she cruelly torn
them to pieces. Time bringing no abatement of the calamity, the Thebans
offered to any man who should expound the Sphinx's riddles (for this was
the only way to subdue her) the sovereignty of Thebes as his reward. The
greatness of the prize induced (Edipus, a man of wisdom and penetration,
but lame from wounds in his feet, to accept the condition and make the trial:
who presenting himself full of confidence and alacrity before the Sphinx,
and being asked what kind of animal it was which was born four-footed,
afterwards became two- footed, then three-footed, and at last four-footed
again, answered readily that it was man; who at his birth and during his
infancy sprawls on all fours, hardly attempting to creep; in a little while
walks upright on two feet; in later years leans on a walking-stick and so goes
as it were on three; and at last in extreme age and decrepitude, his sinews all
failing, sinks into a quadruped again, and keeps his bed. This was the right
answer and gave him the victory; whereupon he slew the Sphinx; whose
body was put on the back of an ass and carried about in triumph; while
himself war made according to compact King of Thebes.
The fable is an elegant and a wise one, invented apparently in allusion to
Science; especially in its application to practical life. Science, being the
wonder of the ignorant and unskilful, may be not absurdly caned a monster.
In figure and aspect it is represented as many-shaped, in illusion to the
immense variety of matter with which it deals. It is said to have the face and
voice of a woman, in respect of its beauty and facility of utterance. Wings
are added because the sciences and the discoveries of science spread and 9·
abroad in on instant; the communication of knowledge being like that of one
candle with another, which lights up at once, Claws, sharp and hooked, are
ascribed to it with great elegance, because the axioms and arguments of
science penetrate and hold fast the mind, so that it has no means of evasion
or escape; a point which the sacred philosopher also noted: The words of the
wise are as goads, and as nails driven deep in. Again, all knowledge may be
regarded as having its station on the heights of mountains; for it is
deservedly esteemed a thing sublime and lofty, which looks down upon
ignorance as from an eminence, and has moreover a spacious prospect on
every side, such as we find on hill-tops. It is described as infesting the roads,
because at every turn in the journey or pilgrimage of human life, matter and
occasion for study assails and encounters us. Again Sphinx proposes to men
a variety of hard questions and riddles which she received from the Muses.
In these, while they remain with the Muses, there is probably no cruelty; for
so long as the object of meditation and inquiry is merely to know, the
understanding is not oppressed or straitened by it, but is free to wander and
expatiate, and finds in the very uncertainty of conclusion and variety of
choice a certain pleasure and delight; but when they pass from the Muses to
Sphinx, that is from contemplation to practice, whereby there is necessity for
present action, choice, and decision, then they begin to be painful and cruel;
and un- less they be solved and disposed of they strangely torment and
worry the mind, pulling it first this way and then that, and fairly tearing it to
pieces. Moreover the riddles of the Sphinx have always a twofold condition
attached to them; distraction and laceration of mind, if you fail to solve
them; if you succeed, a kingdom. For he who understands his subject is
master of his end; and every workman is king over his work.
Now of the Sphinx's riddles there are in all two kinds; one concerning the
nature of things, another concerning the nature of man; and in like manner
there are two kinds of kingdom offered as the reward of solving them; one
over nature, and the other over man. For the command over things natural,-
over bodies, medicines, mechanical powers, and infinite other of the kind-is
the one proper and ultimate end of true natural philosophy; however the
philosophy of the School, content with what it finds, and swelling with talk,
may neglect or spurn the search after realities and works. But the riddle
proposed to Edipus, by the solution of which he became King of Thebes,
related to the nature of man; for whoever has a thorough insight into the
nature of man may shape his fortune almost as he will, and is horn for
empire; as was well declared concerning the arts of the Romans,-

Be thine the art,
O Rome, with government to rule the nations,
And to know whom to spare and whom to abate,
And settle the condition of the world.
And therefore it fell out happily that Augustus Caesar, whether on
purpose or by chance, used a Sphinx for his seal. For he certainly excelled in
the art of politics if ever man did; and succeeded in the course of his life in
solving most happily a great many new riddles concerning the nature of
man, which if he had not dexterously and readily answered he would many
times have been in imminent danger of destruction. The fable adds very
prettily that when the Sphinx was subdued, her body was laid on the back of
an ass: for there is nothing so subtle and abstruse, but when it is once
thoroughly understood and published to the world, even a dull wit can carry
it. Nor is that other point to be passed over, that the Sphinx was subdued by
a lame man with club feet; for men generally proceed too fast and in too
great a hurry to the solution of the Sphinx's riddles; whence it follows that
the Sphinx has the better of them, and instead of obtaining the sovereignty
by works and effects, they only distract and worry their minds with
disputations.
CHARLES DARWIN

‘AT LAST gleams of light have come," Darwin wrote in 1844 to a friend,
"and 1 am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with)
that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable."
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was a man of extraordinary patience and
humility. "Almost convinced," he wrote, and this after more than ten years
of painstaking labour in the gathering of relevant facts, and fourteen years
before he felt compelled to publish his views! The theory of evolution had
been pro- pounded before; but not until Darwin issued his Origin of Species,
in 1859, had such a mountainous mass of evidence been brought together
into one orderly, irrefutable argument. In truth, a murder of a sort had been
committed. The book dealt a mortal blow to prevailing interpretations of the
opening chapters of Genesis, and Christian orthodoxy was never the same
again.
Darwin himself, as a young biologist aboard H.M.S. Beagle, was so
thoroughly orthodox that the ship's officers laughed at his propensity for
quoting Scripture. Then "disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate," he
recalled, "but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no
distress." The phrase "by the creator," in the final sentence of the selection
chosen here, did not appear in the first edition of Origin of Species. It was
added to the second edition to conciliate angry clerics. Darwin later wrote, "I
have long since regretted that I truckled to public opinion and used the
Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant 'appeared' by some
wholly unknown process.
Darwin knew nothing, of course, of modern mutation theory. He thought
environment could modify an individual organism and that these
modifications could be communicated through the blood stream to the germ
plasm and so passed on to the next generation. This Lamarckian aspect of
his views has long been discarded, but natural selection by survival of the
fittest remains the indispensable cornerstone of the evolutionary process.
"There is grandeur in this view of life," Darwin writes. And there is grandeur
also in the unpretentious sentences of this great and unassuming man.
CHARLES DARWIN

Recapitulation and Conclusion

I HAVE now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have
thoroughly convinced me that species have been modified, during a long
course of descent. This has been effected chiefly through the natural
selection of numerous successive, slight, favourable variations; aided in an
important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts; and
in an unimportant manner, that is in relation to adaptive structures, whether
past or present, by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations
which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously. It appears that I
formerly underrated the frequency and value of these latter forms of
variation, as leading to permanent modifications of structure independently
of natural selection. But as my conclusions have lately been much
misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of
species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in
the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most
conspicuous position--namely, at the close of the Introduction --the
following words: "I am convinced that natural selection has been the main
but not the exclusive means of modification." This has been of no avail.
Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science
shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.
It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so
satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several
large classes of facts above specified. It has recently been objected that this
is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging of the
common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural
philosophers. The undulatory theory of light has thus been arrived at; and the
belief in the revolution of the earth on its own axis was until lately supported
by hardly any direct evidence. It is no valid objection that science as yet
throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life.
Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of Gravity? No one
now objects to following out the results con- sequent on this unknown
element of attraction; notwithstanding that Leibnitz formerly accused
Newton of introducing "occult qualities and miracles into philosophy.
I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the
religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient
such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by
man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by
Leibnitz, "as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion." A
celebrated author and divine has writ- ten to me that "he has gradually learnt
to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He
created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and
needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply
the voids caused by the action of His laws."
Why, it may be asked, until recently did nearly all the most eminent living
naturalists and geologists disbelieve in the mutability of species? It cannot
be asserted that organic beings in a state of nature are subject to no variation;
it cannot be proved that the amount of variation in the course of long ages is
a limited quantity; no clear distinction has been, or can be, drawn between
species and well-marked varieties. It cannot be maintained that species when
intercrossed are invariably sterile, and varieties invariably fertile; or that
sterility is a special endowment and sign of creation. The belief that species
were immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history
of the world was thought to be of short duration; and now that we have
acquired some idea of the lapse of time, we are too apt to assume, without
proof, that the geological record is so perfect that it would have afforded us
plain evidence of the mutation of species, if they had undergone mutation.
But the chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species
has given birth to other and distinct species, is that we are always slow in
admitting great changes of which we do not see the steps. The difficulty is
the same as that felt by so many geologists, when Lyell first insisted that
long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and great valleys excavated, by
the agencies which we see still at work. The mind cannot possibly grasp the
full meaning of the term of even a million years; it cannot add up and
perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an
almost infinite number of generations.
Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this
volume under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince
experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all
viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite
to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the
"plan of creation," "unity of design," &C., and to think that we give an
explanation when we only re-state a fact. Any one whose disposition leads
him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation
of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory. A few
naturalists, endowed with much flexibility of mind, and who have already