When Fossils Were Young

Natural History, Oct, 1999 by Stephen Jay Gould

Outmoded classification systems persister long periods before being rapidly replaced by something more sensible.

In his first inaugural address, in 1861, Abraham Lincoln expressed some strong sentiments that later guardians of stable governments would hesitate to recall. "This country, with its institutions," he stated, "belongs to the people who inhabit it.... Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." Compared with these grand (and just) precepts, the tiny little reforms that make life just a tad better may pale into risible insignificance, but I would not disparage their cumulative power to alleviate the weariness of existence and to forestall any consequent movement toward Lincoln's more drastic solutions. Thus, while acknowledging their limits, I do applaud, without cynicism, the introduction of workable air-conditioning in the subways of New York City, croissants in our bakeries, goat cheese in our markets (how did we once survive on cheddar and Velveeta?), and supertitles in our opera houses.

Into this category of minuscule but unambiguous improvements I would place a small change that has crept from innovation to near ubiquity on the scheduling boards of our nation's airports. Until this recent reform, lists of departures invariably followed strict temporal order--that is, the 10:15 for Chicago came after the 10:10 for Atlanta (and twenty other flights also leaving at 10:10), with the 10:05 for Chicago listed just above both, in the middle of another pack for the same time. Fine and dandy--so long as you knew your exact departure time and didn't mind searching through a long list of different places sharing the same moment. But most of us surely find the difference between Chicago and Atlanta more salient than the distinction between two large flocks of flights separated by a few minutes that all experienced travelers recognize as fictional in any case.

A few years ago, some enlightened soul experienced a flash of insight that should have occurred to myriads of travelers decades ago: why not list flights by cities of destination rather than times of departure--and then use temporal order as a secondary criterion for all flights to each city? Then travelers need only scan an alphabetical list to find Chicago and its much shorter and far less confusing array of temporal alternatives. Listing by city of destination has now virtually replaced the old criterion of departure time at our nation's airports. The transition, however piecemeal, both within and among airports, took only a few years--and life has become just a bit less stressful as a result. The innovator of this brilliant, if tiny, improvement deserves the "voice of the tutfie" medal for easing life's little pains (see the Song of Solomon for a full list of the small blessings that lead us to "rise up ... and come away" to better places).

I suspect that two important and linked properties of cultural change lead to long persistence of truly outmoded and inconvenient systems, followed by rapid transition to something more sensible. First, the outdated modality arose for a good reason at the time, not by mere caprice. A lingering memory of rationality might help explain the great advantages afforded by simple incumbency in both politics and ideology. (I suspect that listing by time of departure made evident sense when the train, or the stagecoach in earlier times, passed through town along the only road, and all travelers went either one way or t'other: "The southbound stage, did you say, sir? Do you want to take the 10:30, the 3:00, or the 5:15?")

The old way, having worked so well for so long, will persist faute de mieux until oozing change finally makes the world sufficiently different and some bright soul gets inspired to say, We can do much better at essentially no cost or bother. The ease of the change and the obvious character of the improvement then induce the second feature of great rapidity, once thought breaks through the thick wall of human stodginess. In seeking a biological analogy to express the speed of such a transition, I would seek an appropriate metaphor in the concept of infection, not evolution.

I mention this phenomenon because, in an accident potentiated by browsing through old books (a grand and useful pleasure that we must somehow learn to preserve--or, more accurately, keep possible--in the forthcoming world of electronic source materials rather than primary documents), I encountered a remarkably similar example, with an entirely sensible beginning at the birth of modern paleontology in 1546, followed by a troublesome middle period resembling our difficulty in searching through large flocks of flights ordered by time, and ending with a resolution by 1650 that has persisted ever since. How shall the names of authors in scholarly bibliographies be ordered? Alphabetically, of course (and "alphabetical order" already had a long pedigree), but how particularly, since people have more than one name?