Sex Selection

Last year I decided to pay a visit to Highgate cemetery in London and wandered around the ivy chocked gravestones in search of Karl Marx, Douglas Adams and Herbert Spencer. Karl Marx was easy to find. The poor chap chose a rather modest grave the first time around, but in the fullness of time, as his fame became ever greater, he was dug up by his admirers and given a rather grandiose monument adorned with an oversized bust. In 1970 some Vandals tried to blow it up with a fizzing cocktail of weed-killer and sugar, either as a form of protest or as an expression of artistic taste. Across from Marx’s arresting stare lies the grave of Herbert Spencer who developed Social Darwinism, an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies; he also coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’.

The novelist George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) is apparently buried a couple of rows behind Spencer. Unfortunately, cursed by a short attention span and frustrated after about ten minutes of scrabbling and tripping over weeds I was unable to find it. For Eliot, Herbert Spencer was one of a series of men on whom, well into her 30's, she was developing painful, messy crushes. She had a brief, intense emotional involvement with him, which ended in July of 1852 with his rejection of her affections

As their relationship had blossomed Herbert Spencer had described George Eliot as ‘ the most admirable woman, mentally, I have ever met’. He noted in his autobiography that the ‘greatness of her conjoined with her womanly qualities and manner, generally keep by her side most of the morning'. George Eliot for her part reciprocated in gushing terms, saying:

‘I suppose no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this –but I am not ashamed of it, for I am concious that in the light of reason and true refinement I am worthy of your respect and tenderness, whatever gross men or vulgar-minded women might think of me....If you become attracted to someone else, then I must die, but until then, I could gather courage to work and make life valuable, if only I had you near me. I do not ask you to sacrifice anything- I would be very good and cheerful and never annoy you. But I find it impossible to contemplate life under any other conditions’.

Some historians have argued that Darwinian evolution influenced Herbert Spencer to such a profound degree that it caused him to apply his own theories to his love life. He had rejected Eliot’s advances, reputedly because of his conviction that the natural function of a woman is to be beautiful, which Eliot was not. Spencer later wrote in reference to Eliot that ‘Physical beauty is a sine qua non with me as was once unhappily proved where the intellectual traints and the emotional traits were of the highest’. Rather Spencer believed that, ‘nature’s supreme aim is the welfare of prosperity’ and that ‘as far as prosperity is concerned, a cultivated intelligence based on a bad physique is of little worth, seeing that its descendants will die out in a generation or two’. In a subsequent essay, “Physical Training,” Spencer argued that “of the many elements uniting in various proportions to produce in a man’s breast that complex emotion which we call love, the strongest are those produced by the physical attractions; the weakest are those produced by intellectual attractions…". Having rigorously applied this principle till the end of his life he died a bachelor.

Of course if he had consulted Friedrich Nietzsche for advice he would have received some more sage guidance. The cynical German philosopher, not known for his relationship tips, once remarked that:

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.

George Eliot for her part went on to enter into a scandalous relationship with Spencer’s acquaintance, the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes. Perhaps with all that concentration on the ‘survival of the fittest’ Spencer had forgotten that evolution is about what is able to breed and pass its genes into the next generation. Take the wrong attitude and you may end up selecting yourself out of the gene-pool.


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Science and Islam on BBC4

Islamic science was the flavour of the month for January with a three part show on BBC4 called Science and Islam: A History presented by Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics at the University of Roehampton and an Iraqi émigré. In the same month, two new books have been released. The first, by Ehsan Masood, is based on the BBC series and the second is The House of Wisdom by Jonathan Lyons.

I have not had a chance to read either of the books but have caught up with the TV shows. Generally, I thought they were quite good. The production values were very high, as we expect from the BBC, and Jim Al-Khalili is an enthusiastic and engaging presenter. The factual content was fairly lowbrow but accurate as far as it went (apart from a few infelicities from Al-Khalili himself which I’ll mention below). Laypeople who don’t know much about Islamic science will learn plenty. I learnt something new myself – Arab scholars went a long way towards deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. They expected to discover the magical secrets of the Egyptians and abandoned the project when the writings in hieroglyphs turned out to quite mundane.

I would have liked to have seen a few more academic talking heads. The shows made plenty of use of Simon Schaffer from Cambridge, but we heard relatively little from George Saliba. Occasionally, Al-Khalili let his enthusiasm get the better of him. For instance, he kept telling us that Arabic philosophers were following the scientific method when it was obvious that they were doing nothing of the sort. And an expert on the show explained clearly that Avicenna’s canon of medicine ceased to have any influence in the nineteenth century when modern medicine took off. But, in his summary later, Al-Khalili said we had seen how Avicenna was still relevant today, contradicting his own expert. Finally, he seemed to blame the decline of Islamic science on western imperialism even though the decline happened centuries before Muslim countries were colonised in the nineteenth century.

There was also a very subtle mistake that few people will have noticed as it was never mentioned in the script. We see Al-Khalili playing around in an alchemist’s lab and some of the filler film shows a clearly-labelled bottle of nitric acid being used to dissolve gold. This is a neat party trick which caused a lot of excitement in the Middle Ages because Moses appears to dissolve the golden calf at Exodus 32:20 (except he doesn’t really. Alchemists were always looking for scriptural justification for what they were up to). The problem is that nitric acid was first isolated by Christian alchemists in the 13th century and not Muslim ones. For a long time, no one realised this because the Christians wrote up their discoveries under the name of Geber, a mythical Islamic alchemist of the eighth or ninth century. Quite a substantial Latin Geber Corpus survives but it records Christian alchemy. A separate body of Arabic alchemy is also attributed to the same mythical individual, but even that was written a couple of centuries after he supposedly lived. Thus the filler film showing nitric acid is not appropriate as part of a discussion of Islamic alchemy.

Overall, despite a few slips, I enjoyed Science and Islam. It is a good starting point for anyone interested in the subject.



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Boxed in

In the sixth century this theological reasoning was still further developed by Cosmas Indicopleustes. Finding a sanction for the old Egyptian theory of the universe in the ninth chapter of Hebrews, he insisted that the earth is a flat parallelogram and that from its outer edges rise immense walls supporting the firmament…This was accepted by the universal Church as a vast contribution to thought’

Andrew Dickinson White

Cosmas Indicopleustes was a self educated, widely travelled Greek merchant who lived during the 6th century A.D. Having converted to Christianity, he was persuaded by certain biblical passages - which he took a very strict literal interpretation of - that the earth was in fact a flat rectangle covered with a vault containing the stars and planets. His motivation for doing so was his hatred of the heresy of the "spherists" and the antipodists, and he evolved his theory of the universe from the design of the Tabernacle built by Moses in the wilderness. This, he pointed out, Moses himself had declared to be constructed upon the pattern of the visible world. He developed this theory in a book called 'Christian Topography' in which he employed a variety of arguments in support of his hypothesis. In his preface he writes:

'Let me next exhort my readers to examine the sketch of the universe and the stellar motions which we have prepared as a representation of the organic sphere of the pagans, and to study the account of it sent to the pious deacon Homologus, then they with God's help are quite competent, especially with this book and the volume mentioned, to overthrow from the foundation the error of the pagan theories. For if any Christian possesses these three works, and is by divine grace carefully exercised in the divine scriptures, he will easily confute the foolish views of the fable-mongers'

According to Cosmas, the base of the box is formed by the surface of the earth, around which flows the ocean; on the other side of the ocean lies another continent. From this rise walls that support the firmament above. This continent, according to Cosmas, is now altogether inaccessible to man, but used to be the seat of Paradise and the home of the human race up to the time of the great flood; at which point the Ark was swept with its few saved men across to the ‘other Earth’. The stars are then carried by the angels in a circle around the firmament, above which is a vault which separates the heaven from the world beneath.

'All the stars are created….to regulate the days and nights, the months and the years, and they move, not at all by the motion of the heaven itself, but by the action of certain divine Beings, or lampadophores. God made the angels for his service, and He has charged some of them with the motion of the air, others with that of the Sun, or the Moon, or the other stars, and others again with the collecting of clouds, and preparing the rain.'

To the north, the earth rises into a cone-shaped mountain behind which the sun hides during the night. The nights themselves get longer or shorter according to the position of the sun, either near the longer base of the mountain or its shorter summit.

Much of the books consists of a long rant against Cosmas’s critics and their insane belief in a spherical earth, despite their professions to be Christian believers. In book one Cosmas writes:

'Cease, O ye wiseacres! prating worthless nonsense, and learn at last though late to follow the divine oracles and not your own baseless fancies. For, tell us, how ye think that the fixed stars move in an opposite direction to the universe? Is such a motion theirs only or that of the sphere in which they are placed? Then, if it is theirs, how do they traverse unequal orbits in equal time? …But who can imagine a greater absurdity than this? Thus they do their best to prevent anyone surpassing them in their effrontery----or rather, let me say, in impiety, since they do not blush to affirm that there are people who live on the under surface of the earth. What then, should some one question them and say: Is the sun to no purpose carried under the earth? these absurd persons will, on the spur of the moment, without thinking, reply that the people of the Antipodes are there----men carrying their heads downwards, and rivers having a position opposite to the rivers here! thus taking in hand to turn every thing upside down rather than to follow the doctrines of the truth, in which there are no futile sophisms, but which are plain and easy and full of godliness, while they procure salvation for those who reverently consult them.’

In particular he points to the attractiveness, or divine simplicity of his new quadrangular theory because it involves a less complicated model for the earth and the kingdom of heaven. In contrast the spherical model involves a proliferation of heavens to deal with:

‘It is necessary for those who wish to be considered Christians to enquire into which of these eight or nine heavens Christ has ascended, and into which they themselves hope to ascend, and what is the use of the other seven or eight heavens. For having already delineated the world in accordance with the scriptural view, we assert that two places were created, one adapted to the present state of existence, and the other to that which is to come, since we have such a hope, one that is better than the life here. And you, if as Christians you hold such a hope, will of necessity be asked what is the use of the seven or eight other heavens….. But ye advance arguments altogether incredible, and will have it that there is a multitude of spheres, and that there is no final consummation of the world since ye are unable to tell what is the necessity of these things. And in like manner ye will have it that the waters above the spheres rotate----a most ridiculous idea and altogether idiotic, and ye advance arguments which are self-contradictory and opposed to the nature of things. How great is your knowledge! how great your wisdom! how great your intelligence! how great your inconsistency!’

At this point, having worked himself up into a rage Cosmas delivers what I consider to be one of the best retorts in the history of science:

Such then is our reply to your fictitious and false theories and to the conclusions of your reasonings which are capricious, self-contradictory, inconsistent, doomed to be utterly confounded, and to be whirled round and round even more than that unstable and revolving mythical sphere of yours.

Despite Cosmas’s passionate treatise he appears to have had no influence whatsoever; he does deserve an honourable mention however, because later polemicists used him to buttress the manifestly false claim that all (or most) medieval people believed in a flat earth. Cosmas is in fact, the only medieval European known to have defended a flat earth cosmology. It is safe to assume that all educated western Europeans (and all but one educated Byzantine), as well as sailors and travellers, believed in the earth's spherity. The myth of the pre-Columbian flat earth was invented by the essayist Washington Irving in the 1820s and propagated by the notoriously unreliable Dickinson White. Cosmas has proven to be an interesting and reliable guide to the state of the world at the time and his descriptions of his travels in particular have proved invaluable. He remains one of my great heroes, having had the courage to advance an unpopular and highly speculative theory in the teeth of his mocking detractors. He had the spirit of science, but not the education and learning to be able to pull it off. If he were alive today I’m sure he would graciously concede that his detractors were right; but only by accident.

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The Golden Grayling

I am pleased and honoured to announce that the winner of last month's 'Dawkinsia of the month' poll was contestant number two, Mr‘Lazy!’. In honour of this achievement I have decided to bestow the 'Golden Grayling' award for 'the most intellectually inept attack upon religion'. This elegant trophy features the wise sage, A.C Grayling, himself in a characteristic pose, awaiting in contemplation to sally forth once again in the 'war' against the irrational theists in the pages of the Manchester Guardian. Since this is awarded on a meritorious basis I shall not be distributing this monthly, it will only be awarded for outstandingly inane non-contributions to the debate.

Here again is the winner

Flagged up by Al, this member of the Dawkinsia deserves praise for his unyielding faith, both in his own staggering intelligence and the memetic ideas of Dawkins. Also worthy of mention are the use of short punchy sentences such as ‘Thats Sad’ to frame and emphasise the points being made. This goes together to create a devastating writing style which is reminiscent of the late A.J.P Taylor.

Charles Darwin gave us a truly brilliant theory of evolution. It explains beautifully how all the breathtaking life on Earth was developed from nothing. Before you criticise the theory of evolution be sure you really understand it! According to Richard Dawkins many don't understand. That's sad. The explanation of the whole universe and it's existence is perhaps not darwinistic. God is a very bad explanation, lazy. Religion tend to say it's ok not to try to understand things. That's why I hate religion so much. I am far too intelligent for that. I have NEVER believed in God, not even in my childhood. I have always understood how silly the idea of God is (in our age). We know too much to think God's existence makes sense. Yeah, I can't prove God doesn't exist. In my mind the probability of God's existence is a very small number, perhaps 0.00000000001 %. That is a damn good justification for being an atheist! Believing in God is silly. Intelligent people do it because 1) they were indoctrinated in childhood (outracious brainwashing!) and 2) Religion sadly has an insanely strong status in society. Religion is dangerous. Religion is a virus exploiting the malfunctions of brain. All people free of that virus should promote reason and hope for secular tomorrow.

Long live the secular utopia, its thousand year reign by Richard Dawkins, and the long awaited resurrection of tired rationalist arguments from the 18th and 19th centuries. Amen.


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The Sin of Onan

A commenter on my previous article has asked me whether masturbation was considered sinful in the Judeo-Christian tradition before the release of the 'Onania' tract in the 18th century and the mass public hysteria that followed. The answer is yes, but the issue received far less attention than is commonly thought. It was a peripheral issue in a wider moral dialogue about human sexuality and the rights and wrongs of non-procreative sex.

According to the seminal work on the subject, Thomas Laqueur’s’ Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation’, polemics against the practice are nearly impossible to find in the ancient Jewish tradition. This was because the sin of Onan, when read in its original context by the rabbis, was for his refusal to procreate in defiance of his creator. Some commentators, attempting to find a condemnation have pointed to the pronouncement by Rabbi Eliezer (Eliezer ben Hurcanus) that ‘anyone who holds his penis while he urinates is as though he brought the flood into the world’, which looks like a rebuke against the wastage of semen which might otherwise be used for purposes of procreation.

Once we move into medieval theology a clear concept of masturbation as a sin was identified, but it was not one of particularly intense interest. Theologians were more concerned with ‘perversions of sexuality as perversions of social life, not as withdrawal into asocial autarky’; these constituted sins such as incest, bestiality, fornication and adultery. The monastic focus was on sodomy rather than masturbation, although masturbation was sometimes condemned in some texts as a form of sodomy. When theologians commented on Onan, it was for what he refused to do. Thus Saint Augustine speaks of Onan as one who refuses to help those in need. This interpretation was necessary because Augustine was approaching the text from the viewpoint of the Christian tradition which rejected the strict rabbinic obligation to procreate and had adopted monastic chastity and an escape from the whole cycle of intercourse.

Masturbation was not permitted, but as part of a wider attempt to overcome sexuality, not just non-reproductive sexuality, so without any particular focus. There were exceptions such as the fifth century abbot John Cassian and Raymond of Penafort (pictured in the top right). Raymond warned married men against touching themselves but only because arousal would make them want to copulate more with their wives. A solitary early-fifteenth-century text of three pages entitled ‘On the Confession of Masturbation’, attributed to the chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean de Gerson, instructed priests on how to elicit confessions of this sin. This does not appear to have been circulated widely and it appears to assume the practice is widespread.

With the appearance of the Reformation the conception of masturbation did not change but it was used in different contexts. Protestants accused Catholics of creating monastic institutions which undermined and denigrated marriage and resulted in prolific masturbation. This was part of the broader argument that sexual pleasure in marriage, provided it was not conduced for sinful purposes, was an acceptable byproduct of the divine purpose of procreation. The masturbation resulting from enforced chastity was condemned for the wastage of seed and the refusal to procreate.

The most infamous example of ‘the unnatural practice’ from the 17th century is that of Samuel Pepys who jotted down in his diaries the times at which he engaged in it; usually documenting the act with the use of a special symbol. What is surprising to the modern eye is that these did not seem to him to be shameful or worthy of self-reproach; instead he seems to have felt triumphant. For example Peypes managed, while in a boat trip up the Thames to have ‘had it complete’ by the strength of his imagination alone. He goes on to descibe how just by thinking about a girl he had seen that day to pass a ‘trial of my strength of fancy.... So to my office and wrote letters’.At High Mass on Christmas Eve in 1666 the sight of the queen and her ladies led Peypes to masturbate in church. This does seem to have bothered him but only a little.

The release of Onania in the 18th century therefore marked a seismic shift in attitudes to masturbation; before this it was decried as sinful but received little attention. The change occurred because the practice was conceived in scientific terms as medically harmful; a thesis which was popular amongst both the intellectual elite and the general populace. Religiously based moral sanctions against non-procreative sex were thereby converted into a secular system that removed the divine and substituted "nature" as its justification. The formerly sinful Onanist was now re-conceptualised as the victim of a process of moral disease, one that created false pleasure and undermined reason. In many ways, it was a disease of the Enlightenment.

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The Unnatural Practice

‘But Onan, knowing that the seed would not count as his, let it go to waste whenever he joined with his brother's wife, so as not to provide offspring for his brother. What he did was displeasing to the Lord, and He took his life also.’

Genesis 38:6-10

‘When a boy injures his reproductive powers so that when a man his sexual secretion shall be of inferior quality, his offspring will show it in their physical, mental and moral natures, shaping the history and destiny of the nation.’

Dr. Sylvanus Stall

Before the early eighteenth century, neither the scientific community nor the church had paid very much attention to the private, yet presumably common practise of masturbation. This was to change dramatically in 1712 with the appearance of an anonymous tract entitled ‘Onania; or, the heinous sin of Self Polution, and all its frightful consequences, in both sexes considered, with spiritual and physical advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice’. The unnamed author was probably an English surgeon called John Martyn, who has been described by later historians as ‘a profit-seeking quack doctor cum pornographer’. Martyn, who had been prosecuted in 1708 for obscenity, linked the sin of ‘wilful self abuse’ to the sin of the biblical Onan who had decided, perhaps understandably, to spill his seed on the ground instead of impregnating his dead brother’s widow. Despite the dubious track record of the author, Onania was written with a strong tone of moral outrage. In the preface Martyn warns his reader that there are:

‘lascivious People of such corrupt Minds, that at no time excepted, they may be rais’d to impure Thoughts by bare Words without Coherence, and the Names of Parts, even when made use of in the Description of Calamitous Cases and Nauseous Diseases..therefore I say, I beg of the Reader to stop here, and not to proceed any further unless he has a Desire to be chast, or at least be apt to consider whether he ought to have it or no’

Having filtered the perverts out of his readership Martyn proceeds to denounce the practice of self defiling in these terms, even going so far as to give guidelines for its elimination in schools.

‘Self-Pollution is that unnatural Practice, by which Persons of either Sex may defile their own Bodies, without the Assistance of others, whilst yielding to filthy Imaginations, they endeavour to imitate and procure to themselves that Sensation, which God has ordered to attend the carnal Commerce of the two Sexes for the Continuance of our Species....Would all Masters of Schools have but a strict Eye over their Scholars, (amongst whom nothing is more common, than the Commission of this vile Sin, the Elder Boys teaching it the Younger) and give suitable Correction to the Offenders therein, and shame them before their School-fellows for it; I am perswaded it would deter them from the Practice, and by that means save them from Ruin’.

The tract then went on to outline the terrible medical consequences of Onanism; this aspect of the work was to have far reaching effects over the course of the next two centuries.

‘In some it has been the Cause of fainting Fits and Epilepsies; in others of Consumptions; and many young Men, who were strong and lusty before they gave themselves over to this Vice, have been worn out by it, and by its robbing the Body of its balmy and vital Moisture, without Cough or Spitting, dry and emaciated, sent to their Graves. In others again, whom it has not kill’d, it has produc’d nightly and excessive Seminal Emissions, a Weakness in the Penis, and Loss of Erection, as if they had been Castrated.’

Onania was to become tremendously successful and enjoy widespread popularity. In his one of his works on the history of sexuality Thomas Laqueur describes it as ‘one of the first books to be extensively advertised in the nascent country press’. The meteoric rise of masturbation ‘to prominence’ wrote Laqueur, ‘constitutes ones of the most spectacular episodes of intellectual upward mobility in literary annals’. In just fifty years, it rose up from an obscure provincial publication to become included in the Encyclopedie of the Philisophes; the enlightenments great compendium of learning.

One of the most important factors in this rise to fame was a book by the famous Swiss physician Samuel Auguste David Tissot, a man described in glowing terms as ‘the physician of the enlightenment’. This work was entitled ‘Onanism; or, a treatise upon the disorders produced by masturbation’, and it was to become a literary sensation throughout Europe. Tissot taught that one of the basic causes of illness and death was the wasting away of the body’s energy and that the most dangerous of the wastes was that brought on by masturbation. Having observed that the body became flushed during and after sexual intercourse, Tissot concluded that all sex was potentially dangerous because it caused the blood to rush to the head, starving the nerves and leaving the person vulnerable to the onset of insanity. Those that performed masturbation, and would therefore ejaculate excessively, would suffer a cloudiness of ideas, a decay of their bodily power, be afflicted with pains in their head and pimples on their face, eventually even losing the ‘power of generation’. Females who indulged would suffer hysterical fits, cramps, ulceration of the matrix and uterine tremors. One man, according to Tissot, was so addicted to self-abuse that his brain dried out and could be heard rattling in his head. Masturbation, he concluded, was more dangerous than smallpox.

Marten, Tissot, and the Encyclopaedists who embraced their ideas were to have a profound cultural impact. Their popularised writings were read and passed on by figures such as, Rousseau and Kant; they also filtered down into the populace and the professions. Over the years, the hysteria multiplied.

In the first American psychiatry textbook, Benjamin Rush claimed that masturbation would inflict upon its victim

“...impotence, ...dimness of sight, vertigo, epilepsy, ...loss of memory, ...fatuity and death.”

By the middle of the 1800s, it was standard to blame masturbation for a bewildering variety of symptoms. If masturbation were widespread in the population, disasters could occur. The brain would wilt, the sex organs would shrivel up and die. Insanity, syphilis, blindness, deafness, cancer, afflictions of the female reproductive organs, nosebleeds, heart murmurs, sterility, acne, undesirable odours of the skin, epilepsy, headaches, infantile paralysis, infantile rheumatism, pederasty, and homosexuality were only a few of the conditions thought to be the direct result of masturbation and the bodily traumas it produced. In publications and popular discourse, lack of cleanliness, nervousness, sitting cross-legged or for long periods, spanking, corsets, straining of the memory, erotic reading, play, pictures, perfumes, solitude, fondling, rocking chairs, pockets, feather beds, horseback riding, and bicycling were all considered to encourage the practice of ‘self pollution’. An illustration from The Silent Friend of 1853 showed a bleary-eyed, slack-jawed, imbecile with his tongue lolling and oozing with drool; this was the grim fate that met the persistent self polluter.

When this phenomenon was documented by later historians, some tended to stress the continuity with earlier patterns of thought in the classical, Jewish or Christian traditions. But this obscures the fact that what had emerged in the early 18th century was radically different and widely popular. The ‘Sin of Onan’s’ rise from obscure biblical passage to cultural phenomenon happened -perhaps could only have happened- because it was backed by the best minds of the age and the most fervent advocates of 'unshackling the chains of unreason'. They conceptualised masturbation in scientific and rational terms, as a vice of individuation, a threat to the enlightenment, a medically reckless pursuit which was in danger of ushering in a world of solipsism; a denial of moderation, real autonomy and reason. In doing so they created a monster which was to haunt the Victorian imagination.

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Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

The Great American Moose

"In America, therefore, animated Nature is weaker, less active, and more circumscribed in the variety of her productions; for we perceive, from the enumeration of the American animals, that the numbers of species is not only fewer, but that, in general, all the animals are much smaller than those of the Old Continent. No American animal can be compared with the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the dromedary, the camelopard [giraffe], the buffalo, the lion, the tiger, &c."

George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

In the wake of the American Revolution the fledgling United States was eager to assert its national identity, and proclaim its capacity to create a new society which could be morally superior to those of Europe. Yet one man proved to be a fly in the ointment; Georges Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon (1707-88), the best selling scientific author of the eighteenth century. Work after work from Buffon’s pen claimed that the New World, upon which the new Republic was staking its territory, was fundamentally inferior; a land of weaklings, limp foliage and stunted animals. How could the American experiment in liberty flourish in such surroundings?. It was soon realised by Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson that Buffon would have to be refuted. If not the United States would fail to gain sorely needed financial assistance and credit in Europe. The very future of the young state was in jeopardy.

The thesis Buffon presented in the ‘Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière’ was that the New World, in which he had never set foot in his life, was an immature landscape. The continent had only recently been raised up from the depths and was substantially younger in geological terms than the Old World. Its flora and fauna, including its native peoples, were under-developed and greatly inferior. Its mountains were higher, its environments wilder and more inaccessible and its animals much smaller; including the European livestock which had been shipped over. According to Buffon only snakes and insects could survive in such a cursed land:

‘Even those which, from the kindly influence of another climate have acquired their complete form and expansion, shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky and an un-prolific land, thinly peopled with wandering savages, who, instead of using this territory as an master, had no property or empire; and having subjected neither the animals nor the elements, nor conquered the seas, nor directed the motions of the rivers, nor cultivated the earth, held only the first rank amongst animate beings and existed as creature of no consideration in nature, a kind of weak automatons, incapable of improving or fecunding her intentions.’

Later on, Buffon described the American Indians in these somewhat derogatory terms:

‘The American savage is feeble and has small organs of generation; he has neither hair nor beard, and no ardour whatsoever for his female.... he is also less sensitive, and yet more timid and cowardly; he has no vivacity, no activity of mind, the activity of his body is less an exercise, a voluntary motion, than a necessary action caused by want; relieve him of hunger and thirst and you deprive him of all the active principle of all his movements; he will rest stupidly upon his legs or lying down entire days.’

We might question Buffon’s objectivity when critiquing the genitalia of America’s native peoples. He was relying on purely anecdotal evidence and idle speculation. A principle motivation of the Comte was his vehement opposition to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's notion of the "noble savage" which argued that humans had lived in a state of primeval grace before becoming corrupted by the evils of civilisation. Another was undoubtedly his aristocratic snobbery towards the United States, a country with a somewhat too egalitarian outlook which irritated the French aristocracy. In time other writers such as the Abbe Raynal and Corneille de Pauw were to extend the ideas of Buffon, even going so far as to claim that Europeans emigrating to the United States were also becoming degenerate. Native American males, wrote de Pauw, were not only reproductively unimposing, but 'so lacking in virility that they had milk in their breasts'. In his Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes, the abbe Raynal wrote:

"One must be astonished that America has not yet produced one good poet, one able mathematician, on man of genius in a single art or a single science.

These European attitudes, and some of the more arrogant pronouncements of Buffon, incensed Thomas Jefferson who exclaimed that in two hundred years:

"in war we have produced a Washington . . . in physics we have produced a Franklin, than whom no one of the present age has made more important discoveries . . . [and] we have supposed Mr. Rittenhouse second to no astronomer living."

In 1781 Jefferson threw himself into writing his only book, ‘Notes on the State of Virginia’, in which he mounted a vigorous defence against Buffon’s accusations. As well as defending the American Indian by referring to eloquent speeches by native celebrities such as Chief Logan, he also addressed the claim that the animals of the Americas had been stunted. Here he pointed to the fact that the American black bear weighed in at an impressive 412 pounds compared to the European bear at 18. The American beaver, Jefferson wrote, trounced its European counterpart at 45 pounds to 18. He wasn’t above being a little economical with the truth, claiming a little unrealistically that the American cow weighed 2,500 pounds against the European version at 763.

Yet Jefferson lacked a decisive trump card. At one point he was excited to discover a fossil claw, which he incorrectly identified as belonging to an American lion that had been larger in size than any lion of the old world. Sadly, as it transpired, the claw had come from a sloth, a somewhat less inspiring creature. He also tried to use the Mastodon as an example to refute Buffon; not realising it was extinct.

In the end Jefferson was to build his argument around the moose, an animal, he claimed, that was so big a European reindeer could walk under it. When Jefferson moved to Paris he went so far as to write to his friend General John Sullivan, the governor of New Hampshire, asking for a large specimen to be sent over in order to add force to his arguments. Accordingly, in one of the most bizarre military operations in recorded history, 20 men were sent out into the northern woods to prove the strength of American quadrupeds. After two weeks of searching they were able to shoot a moose, but when inspected, it was found that the specimen lacked the imposing horns that Jefferson had asked for. General Sullivan therefore decided to attach a set of anthers from a stag which bestowed a greater sense of majesty to the corpse.

Having been decorated, the moose was shipped to France and delivered by Jefferson to Buffon’s associate "in hopes that Monsieur de Buffon will be able to have it stuffed, and placed on his legs in the King's Cabinet.". Sadly, Buffon was too sick at this point to view the by now rancid carcass, but by this time he had been sufficiently impressed to retract his thesis. Jefferson later told Daniel Webster that Buffon had "promised in his next volume, to set these things right . . . but he died directly afterwards."

The efforts of Benjamin Franklin had been no less important in persuading Buffon to change his mind, although the way he went about it was much different. At a dinner party in Paris when a great number of American guests and French dignitaries were assembled, Franklin asked his fellow countrymen to stand up. When the Frenchmen including the Abbe Raynal rose to their feet, it quickly became apparent that their American counterparts towered over them. Rather than revelling in this victory, Franklin graciously remarked that he wasn’t exactly the tallest of men.

Following a number of scientific discussions with Franklin, Buffon was to remark that:

"because we know from the celebrated Franklin, that in twenty-eight years the population of Philadelphia (without immigration) doubled . . . in a country where the Europeans multiply so promptly, where the life of the natives is longer than previously, it is not possible that humans degenerate."

Honour had been restored and the flora and fauna of the great American continent had been elevated to the high esteem it has remained in ever since; mainly thanks to the efforts of a few founding fathers and the far less appreciated moose.


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Why is the Universe so big?

It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.

Richard Feynman

People frequently ask me ‘Humphrey, why is the universe so big?’. Actually that’s a lie, I wish people would quiz me like that. Invariably they ask me questions like, ‘would you like to come into your local branch of Lloyds TSB for a personal finance review?’, or ‘would you like to have wholegrain bread or Italian bread with your side salad?’; all things I have a limited opinion on and frankly couldn’t give a toss about. Here we are, spun into existence and breathed into life by a mysterious universe and all people seem to be concerned with is what motorway you take to get to Basingstoke; it’s the M3 in case you were wondering.

The short answer to the question ‘why is the universe so big?’ is that, since Erwin Hubble’s observations in the first half of the 20th century, we have come to realise that the universe is expanding and therefore its huge size is a consequence of its great age. This rate of expansion and vast expanse of time turn out to be critical for the development of complex life for a variety of reasons.

Any universe that contains the kinds of things you need to develop complexity must be sufficiently old enough for stars to form and generate the elements on which life is based. The universe throughout its history has been constantly changing and has gone through around 10-15 billion years of expansion. As the universe expanded it became a continually changing enviroment; sparser, more rariefied and cooler. As this process occurs certain conditons can then arise. The tempreture of the universe at the moment is pretty low. If we ran the tape back to when the cosmos was 300,000 years old, the conditons become very extreme and too hot for even atoms to exist. As things got cooler atoms and molecules were able to form and basic chemistry was able to begin. Once this occurred, great islands of material were able to form and get denser, until eventually their gravity became great enough to form stop them expanding. They formed great achipeligos of material where such objects as stars, planets and people could eventually form.

The first microscopic life forms appeared on earth just 3 or 4 billion years ago, making the origin of life remarkably close (in cosmic terms) to the beginning of everything 13.7 billion years ago. This emergence of life requires elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which were formed in the first three minutes of the Big Bang. All the heavier biochemical elements, like carbon, have to made from these simpler elements by nuclear reactions in the stars. These reactions are delicately poised to produce a lot of carbon, but not too much oxygen. When stars die and explode these biochemical elements are dispersed into space and ultimately find their way into planets and into people. Its enjoyable to reflect that every carbon nucleus in your body has been through a star, probably more than once. This process of nuclear alchemy is long and slow. It takes tens of billions of years to run its course. Thus a universe that contains curious anomalies like us must be billions of years old and hence billions of light years in size due to the expansion rate.

We could not exist in a universe which was significantly smaller and even if we represent the only living creatures in the cosmos, the universe would still have to be roughly the size it is just to support us. You could have an economy sized universe the size of a galaxy (about 100 billion stars), but a universe the size of our galaxy would be only about 3 months old, which is barely enough time to pay your gas bill.

These are necessary conditions for life to be possible, but there are further advantages to a big expanding universe. The universe turns out to be a bit lumpy, in fact it has pretty much the same level of lumpiness whereever you look in the night sky at around 1 part in 100,000. In a more lumpy universe stars would form rapidly and turn into black holes, everything would be too dense and the tidal forces from other stars would disrupt our solar system. If there wasn’t enough lumpiness there wouldn’t be enough material together to form planets and stars. According to Guth’s cosmic inflation theory the universe went through a period of incredible acceleration, which smoothed out the bumps and wiggles and gave us the big smooth universe we observe today. The continued expansion of the universe ensures that it has a very low average density and so galaxies and stars are widely separated. Areas where life can develop are likely to be separated by vast astronomical distances. If there were more material it would change the rate at which the universe expands, exerting more gravity and making the universe evolve too quickly for stars and galaxies to emerge.Hence the apparent emptiness of the universe transpires to be a rather good thing.

The large amount of expansion also ensures that the universe is very cold. The temperature fall inversely to the size. This, in turn, means that the night sky appears dark as there is too little energy density in the universe to make it bright. Another curious component of the universe’s expansion is the small value of the cosmological constant (a repulsive force believed to be dark energy), which counteracts the force of gravity. If it were 10 times bigger, no complexity could exist in the universe as the acceleration would have begun too early for structure to form in the universe. As things stand the expansion will continue for ever and the universe will not end in a big crunch or a big rip.

It is an important fact to grasp that many of the aspects of the universe which appear so obviously in conflict with any interpretation of the universe as hospitable for life, turn out to be crucial features that are necessary for a universe to support complexity of any known sort.We shouldn’t be surprised to find that the universe is so big because that appears to be the only kind of universe we could in principle observe. Furthermore we should not be surprised not to observe extra-terrestrials as the distances involved are so vast. Universes that meet the necessary conditions for life are big and old, dark and cold. ‘All the worlds a stage’ as Shakespeare would say, and it has to be an unimaginably big one to have any players on it.


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An Interesting Reaction

One theistic argument is the moral argument (or axiological argument). It's the idea that in order to say that there are actual moral rights and wrongs, we have to presuppose a sort of metaphysical anchor or ground for these values that transcends individual cultures and epochs, something in fact which looks very much like the Judeo-Christian God. If we reject such a ground, then we are left with pure relativism, where nothing is actually right or wrong. This may be OK when the issue under discussion is whether you should be completely forthcoming on your taxes, but when we point to horrific atrocities, it becomes very difficult to say that there is simply nothing morally wrong going on.

However, rather than defend this argument, I want to point to an interesting reaction to it. Many atheists who hear the moral argument misunderstand it to mean that atheists cannot be moral people or upstanding citizens. If you need to believe in God in order to believe that rape is wrong, then you're essentially arguing that if you don't believe in God, then you must not believe that rape is really wrong. But of course, this isn't the argument. The point, rather, is that the moral judgment "rape is wrong" -- made by theist and atheist alike -- must have a metaphysical ground in order to be valid. Thus, according to the moral argument, the atheist is being inconsistent in affirming that rape is wrong while denying that God exists. But this does not mean that atheists don't know right from wrong.

Now part of the reason I find this reaction interesting is that I could present a parallel argument which almost certainly would not provoke the same reaction. Say, for example, I argued that in order for mathematics to be possible we have to posit a metaphysical foundation for numbers, a Platonic realm of forms, which is best understood as the mind of God (such arguments have been made). So in order to affirm that 2 + 2 = 4, we have to presuppose something like the Judeo-Christian God. How many people would misunderstand such an argument to mean that if you don't believe in God, you don't really believe that 2 + 2 = 4? I suspect very few, if any. Yet this argument is exactly parallel to the moral argument: in order to affirm X we have to presuppose a metaphysical foundation for it that is best understood as God.

So why are some people so liable to misunderstand the moral argument? Again, I suspect (although I could very easily be wrong) it's because our views on morality are inextricably bound up with our views of ourselves: what we do and what we think should be done says a great deal of what kind of person we are. So when someone tells an atheist that her worldview is inconsistent with believing that rape is wrong, she reacts. Instead of realizing that the moral argument is saying something about the relationship between her worldview and moral beliefs, she only sees it as saying something about her moral beliefs, and thus about herself: whether she is a good person.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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Comte de Buffon and the Sorbonne

Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century one man was at work on natural history who might have contributed much toward an answer to this question: this man was Buffon. He had caught the idea of an evolution in Nature by the variation of species, and was likely to make a great advance with it; but he, too, was made to feel the power of theology.

As long as he gave pleasing descriptions of animals the Church petted him, but when he began to deduce truths of philosophical import the batteries of the Sorbonne were opened upon him. For his simple statement of truths in natural science which are to-day truisms, he was, as we have seen, dragged forth by the theological faculty, forced to recant publicly, and to print his recantation.

Andrew Dickinson White

In the eighteenth century Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon published the first volumes of his ‘Histoire Naturelle’, a work which anticipated some of the ideas of Charles Darwin. Buffon was an eccentric, especially when he was at his most creative. In order to begin writing he had to dress up in his finest regalia, from braided wig to silk waistcoat, to a lacy high-collard shirt. He was also fond of saying that there were only five truly great men: Newton, Bacon, Leibniz, Montesquieu..and himself. The ‘Histoire’, which would eventually reach 36 volumes,was a work of stunning ambition, which aimed to include everything known about the natural world up until that date. In it Buffon considered the similarities between humans and apes, and the possibility of a common ancestry.

Upon publication of ‘Histoire Naturelle’ in 1750, which was paid for by the King of France, the work became an astonishing success, the first printing selling out in around six weeks to be followed speedily by German, Dutch and English editions. Eventually ‘Histoire Naturelle’ was to become the most widespread work of the eighteenth century, outselling even the Philosophes ‘Encylopedie’ and the works of Voltaire and Rousseau. This inspired jealousy amongst some in the salons of Paris, including the Abbe Raynal who remarked that the work ‘did not succeed particularly well with educated people’ but that ‘women, to the contrary, attach importance to it’. Amongst Buffon’s greatest admirers were the Jesuits, who dedicated four articles (a total of 100 pages) in their journal ‘Journal de Savants’ to praising him. During October 1749 the Journal published a glowing analysis of the first volume of ‘Histoire Naturelle’, but then fell silent as a controversy erupted. Buffon had caught the attention of the Jansenists.

French intellectual opinion of the time was bitterly divided. The outlawed Jansenists were in great favour with the general public because they were seen as defying royal authority and hostile to absolutism. They fought bitterly with the Jesuits who were more liberal and open to new ideas. These two religious groups were too often at each others throats to pay much attention to the Philosophes. Jesuits tended to admire and prefer the writings of Locke and Bacon to those of Descartes; yet because they asserted papal authority they were unpopular. In the Jansenists eyes, the Jesuits were responsible for the decline of religion in France because of the indulgence they showed to dangerous works. In turn the Jesuits tended to regard the Jansenists as reactionary.

The Jesuit endorsement of Buffon was enough for them to resolve to condemn him. The official journal of the Jansenists was the ‘Nouvelles Eccclesiastiques’, which was officially banned by the French government but regularly published and distributed. In February 1750, in response to the Jesuit's review, the Jansenists published a scathing attack on the ‘Histoire Naturelle’, criticising it for its overt scepticism, its contradiction of Genesis and its implicit insult towards both God and the king. ‘Should such a pernicious book go unstigmatised’, claimed the Jansenists who went on to denounce the entire Academy of Sciences, the Jesuit’s Journal des Savants and the Academy of Inscriptions, which had published works by Alexander Pope; and the Academie Francaise, which had just elected Voltaire. This condemnation immensely irritated Buffon who wrote:

‘I hope it is out of the question to blacklist it...and in truth I have done everything not to deserve it and to avoid theological harassment, which I fear much more than the criticism of natural philosophers of geometers’

The Jansenists had stirred up a row amongst the populace and this forced the Sorbonne (the faculty of theology in Paris) to react. The Jansenists were demanding some kind of censorship, but this put the Sorbonne in a very difficult position. The power to censor depended on the royal administration, but the theologians did have the power to make representations to the king if the situation demanded it. In this case the book had been published by the royal press and was the work of a very high ranking civil servant; to make matters worse it was now an outstanding commercial success. Yet not to act would be to hand a victory to the Jansenists and expose the Sorbonne to rebuke. D’Argenson was exaggerating but captured something of the public’s mood when he wrote:

‘The Seigneur de Buffon...has been greatly affected by the grief that his book’s success gives him. The devout are furious and want to have it burned by the executioner. Truly he contradicts Genesis in every way.’ (this may be the source of the for the idea Buffon's books were burned which I can't find reference to elsewhere)

The Sorbonne made the decision to come to a secret agreement. In ‘Buffon – A life in natural history’ Jacques Roger notes that:

We do not know the details of the secret dealings which permitted Buffon and the Faculty to find an honourable solution for both parties. We know only that these dealings took place, certainly with Riballlier, the Faculty’s syndic, probably during the fall of 1750.

On January 15 1751 Buffon recieved the following corteous letter from the Sorbonne:

‘Sir

We have been informed, by someone amongst us on your behalf, that when you learned that the Natural History, of which you are the author was one of the works chosen by order of the faculty of Theology to be examined and censured because it contained principles and maxims that are not in accordance with those of religion, you declared to him that you did not have the intention of dissociating yourself from it and that you were prepared to satisfy the faculty in regard to each of the articles it found reprehensible in your work; we cannot, Sir, praise you enough for such a Christian resolution, and in order to put you in a position to carry it out, we are sending you the statements taken from you book that seemed to us to be contrary to the beliefs of the Church. We have the honour of being respectfully, Sir, Your very humble and obedient servants'

Attached to the letter were the 14 ‘reprehensible statements’ including the idea the earth was eternal, Buffon’s theory of planets formation and the discussion of truth and immaterialism. In reply Buffon made the necessary concessions and stated in a letter that he believed ‘very firmly in all that is told in the scriptures about creation, both as to the order of time and the circumstances of the facts’.

According to Roger

‘The proposal was clever...for we have every reason to believe that Buffon’s answer had been composed by the theologians themselves and Buffon had only to sign it. He should therefore have been sure of the success of his approach’.

Regarding the Sorbonne, Buffon was to note:

‘Of the one hundred twenty doctors assembled, I had on hundred fifteen on my side, and their decision even contained praise which I was not expecting’

Honour had been saved and the Sorbonne must have been relieved at the outcome. The Jesuits praised the retraction while the Jansenists cried foul:

‘What shame for the Faculty..to applaud such a deceleration..it amounts to hoping everyone will be taken in as the Sorbonne carcass has been..this academician has made fun of them and they deserve it’.

Buffon’s dealings with the Sorbonne were to protect him against all official accusations of irreligion for the next 30 years without him having to change a single word. With the publication of ‘Les époques de la nature’ in 1778 he further developed his ideas, discussing the origins of the solar system and speculating that the planets had been created by comets colliding with the sun (this idea was described by Voltaire as ridiculous, reminding him of an old fable in which Minerva had emerged from the brain of Jupiter). He also suggested that the age of the earth was 75,000 years, denied that Noah's flood ever occurred and observed that some animals retain parts that are vestigial and no longer useful, suggesting that they have evolved rather than having been spontaneously generated.

Buffon’s work was again attacked, both on scientific and religious grounds by figures such as the Abbe Royau and the Abbe Grosier. The Sorbonne became involved in 1779 to issue a criticism of Buffon's ‘general principles of the manner of understanding scripture’. Buffon contacted the Sorbonne directly and engineered a new retraction, very similar to the one he had signed in 1750. He promised to print this in the next edition, but in the event, refused to do so. In retaliation, and without bothering to issue any formal censure, the Sorbonne printed the correspondence in a Latin brochure in order to embarrass Buffon. Unfortunately for the faculty, no-one paid any attention to it. Theological debates has ceased to interest anyone in the 1780s; a fact acknowledged by Buffon’s religious critics who chose to attack him on purely scientific grounds in the hope people would listen. Abbe Royau in particular castigated Buffon for his hypothetical writings, remarking that 'at first leave is asked for a hypothesis, and once granted it becomes transformed into a demonstrated truth'.

As for Buffon, in 1785 he said to Herault de Sechelles:

‘The people need a religion....When the Sorbonne picked petty quarrels with me, I had no difficulty giving it all the satisfaction that it could desire: it was only a mockery, but men were foolish enough to be contented with it.’

Later on, in the late 19th century, the story of Buffon and the Sorbonne was used by Dickinson White in his ‘History of the Conflict between Religion and Science’ ( and as a favourite anecdote in the introductions of biology textbooks) ; although as we have seen, the Buffon retraction of 1751 was prompted by the rabble rousing Jansensists. The Sorbonne was far from hostile and actually worked to protect Buffon from criticism. Eventually in 1779 the Sorbonne and Buffon became involved in a petty squabble but there was no formal condemnation and the faculty's low-key protest fell on deaf ears. Rather than some sinister suppression of science by religion, the activities of Buffon and the religious groups in 18th century France merely displayed the factionalism, squabbling and double dealing we are all familiar with. When history is co-opted for other agendas, these subtleties tend to be lost.

Further Reading : Buffon : A Life in Natural History - Jacques Roger


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