I can explain exactly how I became a scientist. It is a long rambling tale probably of interest only to me. But it will introduce you to one of the most important scientists of all time, Mary Anning. A woman with one of the most improbable back stories you will ever hear. And explain the religious right in America and creationists.
But before I get to all of that I have to explain something important. I was born too late. In so many ways. I will be writing about that here some day.
For now just know I belonged in an earlier era of science. Today science is about least publishable units, chasing grants by studying whatever is hot right this instant, and a truly absurd reductionist approach that typically produces lots of “facts” and very little knowledge. This is accompanied by a dogmatic world view in far too many sciences. And I would argue evolutionary biology is one of them. (I will introduce you to somebody right at the end of this diary entry who can argue that point from first hand experience. He also happens to be a great authority on Mary Anning).
I have always been interested in the big picture, the synergy of ideas, as for example the 40+ years I have spent studying human adaptations to living at high altitude and how they evolve the longer a population is resident at high altitude. I have spent that time trying to come up with a unifying theory of how our bodies adapt and how those adaptations arise from our genes and how some gene expression gives the individual greater fitness and an evolutionary advantage which they pass on. In that time the “facts” discovered by my colleagues have changed many times. What we thought we knew 40 years ago looks very little like what we think we know now. {My specific interest is in the adaptations that allowed humans to have babies at altitude — high altitude causes restriction of blood flow to the fetus and leads to miscarriage.}
I chose the ichthyosaur skull because it is an example of science that has literally taken more than a century to work out. Ichthyosaurs are still being studied today. This is because these amazing creatures had a remarkable run. For 160 million years they roamed the worlds oceans. Think of them as looking remarkably like a large Dolphin and occupying a similar ecological niche. They are totally unrelated but very similar. We call this convergent evolution.
ichthyosaurs.wordpress.com/…
www.palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/...
And I also chose it because I am one of the people studying them.
What is the one thing you notice about the drawing above?
It is probably the size of the eyes. Ichthyosaurs had the largest eyes of any creature, ever! My interest is the evolution of sight (and what it might tell us about diseases like Macular Degeneration). Ichthyosaurs eyes went through amazing evolutionary changes over the 160,000,000 years they were on this Earth. And the first person known to have realized that is?
Mary Anning.
Mary Anning supported herself by selling sea shells by the sea shore. Well and fossils and bones as well. She had her own shop. Anning’s Fossil Depot. In Lyme Regis in England.
The story of Mary’s life is utterly preposterous. It includes her surviving a lightening strike at 15 months. Well it killed her actually. And the three adults she was standing with. Mary was revived by being immersed in a bath of warm soapy water. The adults weren’t so lucky.
At about 8 she fell through ice into a pond. They were thawing out her body by the fire so they could prepare her for burial when she came back to live. Mary was often referred to as the twice dead Mary Anning. But she also in her mid twenties survived a cliff falling on her. It killed her beloved dog but left Mary without a scratch.
Her friend Henry De la Beche who we will meet a bit later said of her, “it takes a person of great personal faith to stand anywhere near Mary.” His paintings of Mary are the only evidence we have of how she looked, dressed, and worked.
So back to me.
I was taking Grade 13 English Literature. Now we’d call it AP English Lit. The teacher/professor Walter Schoen was convinced we should all learn how to present our ideas to an audience. In furtherance of this he assigned us each a reading. We had to close read it and then prepare a fifteen minute talk which we’d deliver to our fellow students and “selected” guests. Most of us, and I was no exception, had never spoken in public. I was genuinely terrified.
Part of my terror was because I couldn't make any sense of the reading I had been given. It was a few mimeographed sheets from an old, old magazine called “All the Year Round”. It dated from 1865. It was by turns an obituary, a eulogy, a travelogue, social history, a satire on man’s many failings, a listing of the fossils of dinosaurs of Britain, and most of all a rant about how female scientists get shafted. I was reasonably confident that it was non-fiction.
I knew the name of the woman being eulogized, Mary Anning. And that clearly she had something to dinosaurs and fossils and science. Oh, and where she was buried. In a place called Lyme Regis. On pretty much the southern tip of England.
What exactly Dr. Schoen expected me to do with these tidbits I had no clue.
I could find no reference to Mary Anning in either my school or local library nor could the librarians. Or to “All the Year Around”. Dr. Schoen refused to help. I felt like he was trying to destroy me.
Then the long arm of coincidence reached out, grabbed me by the throat, and changed my life.
To understand what happened next you have to know I love to blow things up. My dad taught me how to build little jet boats to play with in the bathtub (my Dad had a Master’s degree in Chemistry) when I was six or seven. When I was ten he taught me to make gunpowder from a few simple ingredients. I took it from there and to this day my favorite hobbies are rocketry and building pyrotechnic displays (I am not good at either -explosive failure is a common problem- but it brings me great joy and what more can you ask for in a hobby). You can see my Dad was laying the ground work for me being a scientist, preparing me as it were for Mary Anning.
I was utterly bored one day in Mr. Kempton’s Biology class and I built a little rocket while I was supposed to be dissecting a frog (Bio lab and Chem Lab were connected by a store room). I put my little rocket in a sink and launched it. It was just a bit more powerful than I expected. My rocket blew a whole in the ceiling of the lab and impaled itself in the roof of the school.
I got detention. Many, many hours of detention. 90 minutes every day after school. In bio lab, though they made sure the door to the supply room was locked and I was never left unattended.
I was supposed to do homework but I never had enough to fill the full 90 minutes. Mr. Kempton had these various biographies meant to inspire kids to careers in science. One of which was Edward Lurie’s Louis Agassiz; A Life in Science. Agassiz among other scientific achievements came up with the idea and evidence for Ice Ages. He is the father of Glaciology. But he was also a pioneer in paleontology and evolutionary biology. He was fascinated by fish and did research that remains the foundation of most evolutionary work on fish.
Sadly, he was almost certainly a racist. He believed in something called polygenesis. That is the idea that different races of humans have different evolutionary origins. This is completely wrong and honestly wasn’t that widely accepted even in his lifetime. It is proof even great minds can wander down blind intellectual alleys, because Agassiz was just, as he saw it, following the evidence where it lead.
Polygenesis is alive and well in the Alt-Right in America by the way. And the arguments they offer can all be traced back to Louis Agassiz’s work.
But Agassiz believed in credit where credit is due. And so as Lurie explains he gave credit to the two women who helped him in his seminal work on fish fossils and the resulting classification system he created. Their names were Elizabeth Philipot and her friend Mary Anning. Agassiz named two separate species of fish for Anning.
Now I knew Mary Anning was real and had contributed to work on both fish and dinosaur fossils. And that Agassiz thought she was a genius.
I was terribly excited by this (and watch the coincidences begin to pile up) and told my parents at supper that night. We almost never ate together by this point in my life. I was 14 and a latch key kid. My Dad traveled extensively for work (occasionally taking me with him) and my Mom raced from the business she ran to board meetings of the various charities she ran. But that night they were both there. I babbled on and on.
Then my Dad tells me he has actually been to Lyme Regis. After WWII ended my Dad stayed on in England decommissioning military bases. He used the opportunity to travel all over England. He went to Lyme Regis because it was the southern tip of England.
All he could remember about the place was it was where he fell in love with stained glass windows and realized they could be art. I can’t tell you how many times I was dragged someplace just so my father could look at a stained glass window. Ms always figured prominently. Manitoba, Montana, Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, and so on. But it started for my Dad at Lyme Regis.
It was my Mom who suggested we phone the local Anglican Church in Lyme Regis and see if they could tell me anything about Mary Anning. She was thinking parish records etc. She wasn’t expecting we would hit a gusher.
My Mom placed the call for me but made me do the talking. Which is how I came to speak with the Reverend Sithwell. Who was astonishingly knowledgeable about Mary Anning.
That isn’t surprising. His Church, St. Michael’s is of course home to the Anning Window. The stained glass window that fueled my father’s interest in all things stained glass. It has an inscription.
“This window is sacred to the memory of Mary Anning of this parish, who died 9 March AD 1847 and is erected by the vicar and some members of the Geological Society of London in commemoration of her usefulness in furthering the science of geology, as also of her benevolence of heart and integrity of life.”
The window itself the Vicar explained to me depicted the Six Corporal Acts of Mercy. These are of course, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting prisoners, and visiting the sick. The Six Corporal Acts of Mercy of the Anglicans are what my faith calls “The Footsteps of Christ”.
I asked only a couple of questions. I had never tried interviewing somebody before. All I could think to ask was who designed the window because I thought my Dad would want to know. And which members of the Geological Society had contributed?
The window was designed by Henry De la Beche. Don’t worry I had never heard of him before that day. It would be years before I understood how De la Beche and Anning who were friends from at least their early teens came up with two of the most important ideas in human history. Or perhaps I should say both the idea and the evidence that proved the idea.
De la Beche was one of the people who paid for the Anning Window. The others were mostly just names to me. Charles Lyell I knew. The Father of Geology. Adam Sedgewick was another name I recognized. Because by this time I had read Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species and knew Sedgewick was Darwin’s Cambridge professor, mentor, friend, editor, and inspiration. There was only one other name I knew. And I had never thought of him as a Geologist.
Charles Dickens.
Once I had the name I recognized the style. It turns out “All the Year Round” was a magazine Dickens founded and edited for years. While the Anning tribute is unattributed it is now well established that Dickens wrote it. We have to this day no idea how they knew each other or why Dickens suddenly decided to write about her 18 years after her death. Or truthfully what he was trying to say.
What is important to my story is that the Vicar told me about how Mary started collecting fossils as a child. Her father collected fossils and sold them to supplement his income as a carpenter. He died when she was ten by falling off a cliff. She began to work in the business with her mother and older brother. At 12 she found her first dinosaur an ichthyosaur. It would be fairer to say her brother John found it but Mary realized what it was and meticulously dug it out of a cliff face. By her death at 48 she was acknowledged as the Princess of Paleontology and the greatest fossil hunter the world will ever know.
I am a bio-mathematician, statistician, and mathematical modeler. You would think I could figure out the odds.
Imagine it as a word problem. What are the odds that a girl, born into severe poverty in 1799 in a small sea side town on the coast of England would, after miraculously escaping death twice, and with no formal education at all, at the age of 12 begin a career that would shake the society she grew up in to its very core and of course help shape our modern world? Oh and go on to inspire the most famous tongue twister of all time?
All while being discriminated against by egotistical male scientists and denied credit for her own work?
Home’s 1814 paper, for example, from which the drawing above is taken, announces the discovery of a full skeleton of an ichthyosaur, the first ever found, without mentioning the discoverer, the 12 year old Mary Anning. While she did eventually receive credit for this discovery and even though most of Home's paper turned out to be wrong it is worth including here as testimony to just what asses male scientists can be and often are when presented with a woman whose mind exceeds their own frail capacities.
royalsocietypublishing.org/…
And this might be a good point to introduce Dickens tribute to Anning as well.
observationdeck.kinja.com/…
Mary’s most famous discovery is the first known skeleton of a plesiosaurus. Though this time William Conybeare took credit. And I only mention him because he is going to be the pivot point, the catalyst if you like for Mary and Henry to come up with the ideas that enabled the phenomena we call the American Right by allowing them to go on considering the Bible as literal truth.
Tourists came from all over the world to Mary’s little shop. Mary was actually not a very good business women. She eked out a living selling fossils, rocks, and other curiosities. It was until the British government gave her a small grant that she finally became financially secure. Her biggest score was the sale of the pleisosaurus skeleton. Which got her about a year’s income.
Some friends convinced Lord Melbourne who was then Prime Minister to sponsor the grant because it wasn’t just tourists who came to see her. It was scientists, philosophers and historians. They came, in today’s vernacular to pick her brains. And never paid her. And her friends thought that was unfair.
Because you see Mary had read and thought deeply about everything ever written about fossils. She had a truly encyclopedic knowledge of the known fossils of the world. And unique theories about what they meant.
Again, back to me.
I decided if Mary at 12 could find a dinosaur at 14 I should be able to find something even more incredible. The creek that ran through town seemed like a good place to go looking. I found nothing. Just some weird stones.
I was in university when I showed the stones to a professor who identified them as bezoar stones. Bezoars form in our intestines when we have trouble passing undigestible hair and fiber in our poop. Mine passed through the gut of a dinosaur. One guess who realized bezoars were dinosaur poop?
Mary Anning.
Want to guess the sex of the person who got credit for her work?
When I thought I had struck out in my small home town I convinced my parents to take me for a picnic to the banks of the mighty Peace River. To a place called Dunvegan. I am guessing every professional paleontologist and amateur fossilist just got really interested.
By the way Dunvegan picnic site is really beautiful as is the surrounding countryside. And it is under threat from a new damn on the Peace River.
There I dug and dug expecting imminently to find a dinosaur. Nothing doing. I did however find a fossil.
It was a fern. An epiphytic fern. That is a fern that lives on another plant. From what little I knew about the Geology of the Peace River I figured out it was likely to be about 100,000 years old.
{Sidebar — at Dunvegan not more than 200 feet from where I dug that day twenty years later some of the most spectacular dinosaur tracks ever discovered were unearthed. At that was just the beginning. Entire skeletons have been found. Another reason it shouldn’t be flooded. We have no idea if there are more dinosaurs waiting to be discovered.}
I really wanted to show Dr. Schoen what I had found and explain what I had learned about Mary Anning but he had suffered some health crisis and didn’t return to teaching until the following year by which time I had moved away to go to university. We actually never talked again. And his substitute cancelled the entire project.
The main thing I had wanted to tell him was that because of him and Mary Anning I had realized what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a paleontologist. My career of course didn’t follow a straight path (does anyone’s) but I did start off studying paleobotany.
Over the years I have learned much more about Mary Anning than I knew then. I know she still isn’t getting all the credit the evidence suggests she should.
In conversations with Henry De la Beche, who like Mary grew up in Lyme Regis, she shared the idea that from the number and range of dinosaur fossils she had found there must have been a time when dinosaurs roamed the world by the millions. He painted what is his best known work, Duria Antiquior to illustrate her idea. In it dinosaurs of every kind discovered by Mary romp around — it is as if Norman Rockwell had painted “Dinosaurs go on a picnic”.
But it is worth noting that a cartoonist and painter De la Beche has a very legitimate claim for being the person who turned geological theory into a working science. He was knighted for his work which actually included creating and leading The Geological Survey of Great Britain. He also did groundbreaking work on the geology of Jamaica.
It was one short hop from this idea of Mary’s to another. Since there were no dinosaurs left on Earth something bad must have happened and they were all killed. This theory they called Extinction.
Neither Mary or Henry get the credit they deserve because they freely shared the idea with among many others Lyell, Sedgewick, Darwin, Agassiz, and Conybeare.
You probably think of this simply as part of the fabric of the modern world. Species go extinct. But at the time it presented a real challenge to a society dominated by the bible and religion. Because extinction is mentioned nowhere in the origin myth the Bible presents.
Many of the scientists who shaped the sciences of Geology and Paleontology were deeply religions. Realizing their own work proved the Bible was factually untrue troubled them greatly. We can put Lyell, Darwin, Sedgewick, De la Beche, and Agassiz in this camp. But it also shattered some of them completely.
The one that matters is William Conybeare who was an ordained Minister as well as a brilliant paleontologist. He had a crisis of faith and went to his long time collaborator Henry De la Beche for reassurance. Henry had by this point adopted the position held by his friend and their co-collaborator Mary Anning. Born a Dissenter she died an Anglican but throughout her life she remained a devout Christian.
Mary got around her own evidence and theories with an ever changing collection of rationalizations. The one she shared with William Conybeare was that there is nothing to say that the 7 days of creation in the bible happened continuously. There could have been gaps, long gaps. William Conybeare fell in love with the idea and propagated it. Today Evangelical Christians call it Gap Creation and it is the most common form of Creationism.
But there are other competing Creation rationalizations. You will notice I am restraining myself from calling them theories. I don’t believe they are falsifiable and thus can’t be tested and aren’t by any stretch theories. I strongly urge you to read the link below. It is me returning to my ongoing theme of how evangelical Christians are not monolithic.
It points out all the different approaches Evangelical Christians have taken to get around the fossil and scientific evidence that the Bible is at best a poor metaphor for the way the world was born. And how savage the debate over which approach is the one and true Creation Theory has become. In the 30 years since this thesis was written things have become even more complicated and antagonistic.
nce.com/…
What you need to know is that there is evidence each of these ideas sprang from the fertile mind of Mary Anning.
Thus the woman who got screwed out of being the founder of Geology and Paleontology as well as losing credit for the ideas that Dinosaurs once roamed the Earth and then went extinct also got screwed out of credit for being the mind behind the ludicrous ideas that collectively we call Creationism.
I am left with just a few end notes.
A reference for Mary as the inspiration for She Sells Seashells. An idea which is very wide spread in the literature but for which there seems to be no extant evidence.
www.thevintagenews.com/…
And a very good introduction to Mary Anning for those of you who would like to read more.
www.macroevolution.net/…
Lastly, from the author of that introduction, Eugene McCarthy, we have a unique theory that directly challenges the widely accepted Theory of Evolution. Trying to publish and popularize this theory cost Eugene his well earned reputation as a scientist. That is sadly typical of how science reacts to ideas that challenge the dogmatic approach that all that reductionist thinking in the absence of any wider context inevitably produces.
www.macroevolution.net/...
I contend it is the dogmatic and egotistical certainty science as an institution has adopted as its official calling card that has lead to science being held in some contempt by much of the population. It is in a culture of contempt for science that conspiracy theories, Racism, Creationism, and idiocy like the Prosperity Gospel thrive (and by the way — Pentecostals are split down the middle on whether or not they love Prosperity Gospel or think it is dangerous nonsense and you wouldn’t know that from the way the media covers the subject). I maintain we scientists have no-one to blame for all this nonsense but ourselves.
In my lifetime as well as the problems I discussed above like least publishable units, grant chasing rather than pursuing curiosity, and reductionist thinking on meth there has been an incredible trend towards scientific silos. Each silo has developed its own language and culture until science is splintering into separate solitudes that no longer even share a common language. We can no longer mount an effective response to the creeping edge of the irrationality that is swallowing America and for that matter much of the world.
But worse than all of that entire sciences are being abandoned. The one I first joined, Botany is just part of a much larger trend. I have you see become a Dinosaur. I and all my fellow Botanists are confronting our own extinction event. And we are not alone.
www.sciencedirect.com/…
I will leave you with the words with which Dickens so poignantly ends his tribute to Mary Anning.
“The carpenter’s daughter has won a name for herself, and had deserved to win it.“