In high school, I was so eager to learn more about evolution that I applied for a volunteer job at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. I had no experience with museum work, and my grades certainly didn’t identify me as a promising junior scientist. But the museum’s department of paleontology always had more field material than the staff could handle. They accepted my application and put me to work in the fossil-preparation laboratory.
I had to ride the bus an hour and a half each way to get from my mom’s house in the Valley to the museum, but I didn’t mind the hassle. The staff at the museum collected large quantities of rocks from the field, which were full of fossilized material. The fossil preparation lab had two full-time technicians, each with an elaborate bench full of tools and alien-looking fossils; a couple of university students with smaller desks; and a modest preparation station for volunteers. My job was to carefully chip away at the rock and discard the sandstone surrounding a fossil, using dental tools, toothbrushes, and a pneumatic device called a zip-scribe. As soon as I finished, the bone would be whisked away for study in another part of the building.
Most of this work was extremely tedious. It might take two hours to reveal a square inch of a bone or extract a tooth from its grainy sandstone matrix. My technique rapidly improved, but I also found that I wanted to learn something more about the animals whose fossils I was preparing. I knew there had to be a larger context within which these fossils were significant. I wanted to know what the fossils meant, not just what they were.
The placement of organisms into categories is known as taxonomy. Many professions have this kind of expertise. An experienced brick mason knows more about the characteristics of bricks than any of us would imagine. He might be able to tell you what quarry the sand came from, how hot the fire was, and what kind of molding was used. His naming of all the different types of bricks is a little like the practice of taxonomy.
My work at the Natural History Museum was necessary for a beginner naturalist, because I needed to learn how to name and categorize organisms. I also took great pleasure in knowing the formal scientific names of plants and animals—it was a kind of secret knowledge that I had and most people didn’t. But naming, labeling, and categorizing assumes a rigid order to things, and the really important and interesting things in life are not static; they continually change. What I was interested in was systematics—the relationship between fossils and modern-day organisms.
Have you ever met anyone with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure rock bands? I knew a group of people in Los Angeles who spent their time browsing the used bins at record shops back in the days when music was recorded on vinyl (which is making a comeback these days, even though most kids have never heard anything other than compressed 128-kilobit-per-second digital recordings). Some of these people were so obsessed with obscure bands that they deserved the moniker “vinyl vermin.” They collected lists of band names and knew all the rarest albums available. There could be an obscure garage band from England that released just five hundred copies of a single album. None of the rest of us would ever have heard of the band, but the vinyl vermin could tell you more about it than you ever wanted to know.
The problem with most vinyl vermin, I’ve found, is that they let their knowledge of trivia overwhelm their judgment. Despite their encyclopedic learning, I can’t recall having a single discussion with them about whether any of the bands were actually any good. Maybe a band that released just five hundred copies of an album was an undiscovered gem, or maybe the music was so bad that no other record company would hire it to make another album. I never knew what most of the vinyl vermin thought about the qualities of musical groups or genres, because they never talked about anything other than trivial facts and statistics.
The lesson I learned from the vinyl vermin was that the most important thing about gathering information is what you do with it. The “secret language” of taxonomy might have made me feel special, but words applied to fossil species (or obscure records) didn’t satisfy me. Taxonomy is a beautiful art. But without theory behind it, taxonomy amounts to words on a museum label. Even today, new species are being discovered and described at a remarkable rate, and each newly discovered species receives a unique official name. But what does the naming and ordering of species say about their relationship to other species and to us? I wanted wisdom, not just knowledge.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my experiences at the Natural History Museum had interesting parallels with the history of fossil collecting in the years before Darwin. As early as the sixteenth century, naturalists in Europe and, to some extent, in other parts of the world began to collect fossils, exotic plants and animals, and other natural objects. They would organize these objects into collections, which they often displayed in “cabinets of curiosities” that the public could view for a fee. Like old-time record stores, these places were repositories of obscure artifacts. Some of the largest collections became the cores of today’s most famous natural history museums.
These early naturalists were dualists. They believed in an ordered, intelligently designed nature that was not constantly changing but rather was lying in wait for God’s inquisitive children to discover. All species were assumed to be specially created by God. The obvious similarities between organisms therefore must be part of God’s plan. But because these similarities were created by God rather than an intrinsic part of nature, early naturalists felt free to use their own schemes for arranging and naming the animals and plants in their collections. This caused utter confusion. It was as if all the vinyl vermin had created their own schemes for bands and musical genres without consulting one another or trying to adhere to a common classification. Without a proper taxonomy, God’s design in nature might never be understood.
The problem of naming and organizing organisms was solved by the seventeenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. He devised a system that used two names for every species, in the same way that people generally have two names. The first name assigns an organism to a genus of broadly similar organisms. This is analogous to your first name. You might know a lot of people who have the same name as you. But your first name doesn’t make you unique. In like fashion, Linnaeus’s goal was to have the first name of a group of related species—called the “genus”—identify a type of organisms. For example, the genus Canis includes dogs, coyotes, wolves, and jackals. The second name (sometimes called the “trivial” name) identifies a unique subset of organisms within the larger genus. This subset is called the species. So the coyotes that roam the woods near my house in upstate New York are Canis latrans. By Linnaeus’s system, humans are Homo sapiens. At the moment, we are the only species in our genus, Homo, though in the past, various other species in our genus existed, sometimes contemporaneously.
Linnaeus had an encyclopedic knowledge of the species that had been discovered, and he knew that they showed varying levels of anatomical similarity to one another. But he operated under the dualist assumption that nature was carefully planned by the Creator. His objective was to figure out God’s scheme, not to question the supernatural wisdom of Creation. For example, in different parts of the world, different species seemed to live in very similar ways and serve very similar biological functions. But this did not require an explanation in Linnaeus’s time. It was all part of God’s plan. The socially acceptable form of intellectual pursuit was to show how various plants and animals conformed to an intelligently designed world. In the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, there was very little opportunity to gain wisdom from the study of organisms.
~~Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God -by- Greg Graffin & Steve Olson
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