Keynote address - Stephen Jay Gould - In the Company of Animals - Transcript

Social Research, Fall, 1995

This text is an edited transcript of a keynote address given at the

conference "In the Company of Animals" in New York City on

April 6, 1995. Written and spoken English are entirely different

languages, and this address, prepared only to be spoken, must

be fairly awkward in this printed version. In addition, the talk

depended upon a large number of slides, which could not be

included here. I either deleted the sections based entirely on

pictures or kept the text when I felt that the points could be

understood without the visual material.

Stephen Jay Gould

WE all know the conclusion to that most famous of all poems about invertebrates--namely, Robert Burns's "To A Louse." The louse speaks from its position in a hairpiece of an upper-class lady, if I remember correctly. "Oh, would some power the giftie give us, to see ourselves as others see us. It would from many a blunder free us, and foolish notion." Very familiar lines that you all know. Apparently, unfortunately, no such power exists, and so everything we know about animals we see in our terms.

I want to illustrate the general theme of how we're always seeing not only animals, but everything else, in our terms, by giving you four quick examples of what, in a way, is the most egregious kind of misinterpretation we can make--namely, when we try to identify the attributes of animals as a result of nothing more than the arbitrary name that we happen to have given to them. It's bad enough that we backread our features into organisms, but when we backread an arbitrary name that we happen to give to an organism, and then assume that its characteristics flow from this arbitrary name, then that's the ultimate example of the backreading fallacy.

Steve Glickman this afternoon talked about T.H. White's bestiary translation. If you look at the attributes in medieval bestiaries, they always discuss where the names of animals come from--why is the goat Capra, for example. White's bestiary tells us that you only have to invert the syllables. It's aspera captet: "he seeks the rough places." And you reverse it, and then it's capra. Now let's go forward, to the age of Newton and Sir Thomas Browne, and we come to various myths, such as the famous myth of the beaver--that to elude the hunter, the beaver bites off his own testicles. It's a very old myth. And Sir Thomas Browne debunks it in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica--that is, his Epidemic of Falsities, the first of the great exposes of foolish wisdom, so to speak, written in the 1640s. He first goes Through the various reasons why people ever would have believed such nonsense and points out (I am quoting): "Some have been so bad grammarians as to be deceived by the name." The name for the beaver is Castor, and many people thought the name came from castrate.

Browne is marvelous--his use of language--so, if you don't mind we'll go on just a little bit. He says--After pointing out that the name castor does not share the same root as "castration," but ultimately derives from a Sanskrit word for musk; that comes later. He then cites the factual evidence of intact males, and the reasoned argument that a beaver couldn't even reach his own testicles if he wanted to bite them off. Now quoting from Browne: "The testicles properly so called are of a lesser magnitude, and seated inwardly upon the loins. And, therefore, it were not only a fruitless attempt but impossible act to eunuchate, or castrate themselves, and might be an hazardous practice of art if at all attempted by others."

And then we move forward another 100 years to Linnaeus. Linnaeus, among his many inventions--we'll come back to mammalia later in this talk--did coin, as a name for the order that includes us among the mammals, Primates, or first. Now, that leads to all sorts of trouble--this time in the opposite direction, because this is one example where the animal meaning almost takes over. In this particular case, the original use of "primate" in the English language is not for monkeys and apes, but for heads of the Anglican church. This slide shows Mr. Ussher, who gave the famous date of 4004 B.C. to the earth; Jacobus Usurius, totius Hibernia primes (primate of all Ireland.

Linnaeus then used the name primate for monkeys and apes, and everybody thinks that is the original meaning. This example is just an excuse, because I wanted to read one of the most marvelous letters that I ever got. This is a letter from the Reverend Michael Ingham, who is the principal secretary to the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, and he wrote it to a John Hearn, the Director of the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center--who, dearly, thought that this guy represented the other kind of primate. In any event, it is a terrific letter. Ecclesiastics must live for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. "Dear Dr. Hearn: Thank you for your letter of December the fourth addressed to Dr. George Cram of the Primate's World Relief and Development Fund, in which you seek information for your international directory of primatology. I should perhaps inform you that the term 'primate' in our context refers to the senior archbishop and chief pastor of the Anglican Church of Canada. The Relief and Development Fund over which he presides is an agency for the alleviation of global poverty and hunger on behalf of Anglican Christians. I think the primates in your study are perhaps of a different species. While it is true that our primate occasionally enjoys bananas, I have never seen him walk with his knuckles -on the ground or scratch himself publicly under the armpits. He does have three children, but this is a far cry from 'breeding colonies of primates,' as your research project mentions. Like you, we do not import our primates from the wild, however. They are elected from among the bishops of our church. This is occasionally a cause of similar, though arcane, comment. The subject of primate biology might be of great importance in your field, but, alas, not so in ours. There are a mere 28 Anglican primates in the whole world. They are all males, of course, and so far we have had no problems of reproduction."