Acephalous

Internalizing Other's Marms May Be Hazardous To Your Health

Consider the following sentence from George Levine's Darwin Loves You:

"Who," asks Max Weber, "who—aside from certain big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences—still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world?" (33).

It summoned my Inner Soltan.*  Did Weber really write:

Who who—aside from certain big children ...

Of course he didn't.  But I'll be damned if that second "who" didn't trip my alarms.  Why?  Because it doesn't exist!  Levine has committed academic fraud!  He inserted into the sentence a word which did not appear in the original!  I know what you're thinking: "Scott, he did it for the sake of elegance."  I agree.  The correct version is ugly:

"Who," asks Max Weber, "[w]ho—aside from certain big children ... "

But it has the benefit of being correct.  The incorrect version is merely superior prose and that's something for with up which I'll never stand put.

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*I recommend an Inner Soltan to anyone in a field in which the deportment of words is important.  It pre-analyzes your prose and suggests the revisions required to keep the actual Soltan at bay.  Very handy. 

Please Direct Your Eyes to Our Quality Website

We really need the ad revenue.

(What?  The only alternative is that the BBC decided to fire its editors overnight.  Can you think of another scenario in which that slips through?)

New Goal in Life:

To be the first person to cite an article from Homing News and Pigeon Fanciers' Journal in a dissertation submitted in an English department.*

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* Francis Galton's "Notes on Fitting Normal Curves to Distributions of Speeds of Old Homing Pigeons" (6 April 1894): 159-60.  That my discussion will focus on the shuffleboarders of the homing pigeon community is pure gravy.  Sadly, no one has thought to upload the "PASSENGER PIGEONS!" scene from Ghost Dog and my copy is VHS, so this is the most pigeon I can muster.

An Exercise in Understatement*

On why we should study the minute changes of papillary ridges to learn about human development, according to Francis Galton:

We know nothing by observation about the persistence of any internal character, because it is not feasible to dissect a man in his boyhood, and a second or third time in his later life.  ("Discontinuity in Evolution" 366)

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*I almost titled this post "Something Something Something NAZIS!"  Then I remembered how tedious debates about Darwinism/Eugenics/National Socialism tend to be and thought better of it.

In What World Is This Considered Acceptable?

Badly executed theory is responsible for 99.99 percent of instances in which I stare mouth-agape at an academic article.  The other 0.01 percent is when I read something like this in a 1980 Taxon article on "Cladistics in Botany":

One only has to attend a symposium on classification with cladists to discover that in any given case there is usually no consensus of opinion as to what chosen character is apomorphic and which is not; the reason why there is disagreement is that a certain number of works have a certain classification "in their heads" already and, perhaps subconsciously, anticipate the result of a cladistic procedure.  Other biologists disagree because they have something else in mind.  This brings me to another nigger in the wood pile: what is character?  (emphasis mine)

Not the technical answer the author wants, but my definition would include something about resisting the urge to refer to a critical lacuna as "another nigger in the wood pile."  It might even extend to thinking the phrase itself offensive on its face, such that it ought not be thought, much less submitted to peer review. 

How Go the Revisions?

An article I read while revising the Before Adam section of my London chapter informed me:

The pitfall trap is an adaptation of of hunting techniques that dates back to primitive man.  It consist of a plastic cup with a funnel.

I don't buy it ... but I came this close to citing it in my final draft.  I may need sleep.

I Write like Mullets; or, this Post is not about Fish ...

... but it could've been.*  (Consider your blessings counted.)

This post is about 19th Century hubris.  The following was written about somebody:

He was a tolerably good observer and compiler, and surpassed ordinary men, perhaps, in ability to embody in words the results of his observations of various disconnected facts.

Name!  That!  Tolerably-Good-Observer! 

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*I also could've written about Darwin's cheeky marginalia, of which I've enjoyed quite more than I can bear today.  That post would have been about fishes, and would've included this excerpt from G.R. Waterhouse's 9 August 1843 letter to Darwin:

But as the term "natural" certainly has a very vague meaning when thus used, I have no objection to apply the word "useful" instead—But as the word natural for a kind of classification I merely follow others—it is no doubt presumptuous.

Darwin's response?

However different another sex or larva is we call it one species, when we know descent.—When we do not hesitate to call Amphioxus Fish.—

Young Charles is perturbed.  (In my first draft he was "upset," then I remembered he was English.)  Amphioxus is not a fish.  Don't believe me?  Ask my pretentious dissertation:

To Paulina’s question—"Is it a fish?"—[T.H.] Huxley would answer that as "it conforms to the Vertebrate type ... I can see no reason for removing it from the class Pisces."  But conformation to the vertebrate type is different from being, in an ontological sense, a vertebrate, as Huxley everywhere admits in his proposal.  He enumerates the structures in the amphioxus homologous, not identical, to those in vertebrates.  His identification here is typical: "that part of the cerebro-spinal axis of Amphioxus which lies in front of the seventh myotome answers to the preauditory part of the brain in the higher Vertebrata, and the corresponding part of the head to the trabecular region of the skull in them."  The presence of these homologues in the amphioxus is certainly significant—it demonstrates that the animal is related to the progenitor of what Ernst Haeckel [elsewhere] called "the whole stem"—but it does not warrant its inclusion in the stem itself, and as Wharton knew, there is a fundamental problem with any classificatory system which would include the amphioxus among the class Pisces.

All this almost-but-not-quite-a-fish-talk titillates, doesn't it?

It doesn't?  I expect you'll complain about the post-to-footnote ratio too now.  As much as I'd like to put the bulk of my prose in the body of what I write, I can't help but live in the footnotes.  My body graphs uniformly fail to inspire, but that's only because I write like mullets: business up front, party in the rear! 

(Make of that what you will.)

(Only not too much.  This is a family blog.)

You People Suck

Remember a few (months longer than I remembered them being) back when I asked whether I'd knocked your socks off? 

Remember how I played up the interdisciplinary awesomeness of all things blogs?  Then how I did it again a few months later with some folks up at Davis?

I take it all back. 

The punchline to the Wharton introduction was supposed to be that the famous metaphysical philosopher's true talent lay in the biological sciences.  He'd discovered the importance of amphioxus notochords long before anyone else thought to look at them ... but because my head's jammed full of junk, I missed the significance of Wharton's reference. 

The amphioxus was not just some fish—it was an important fish-type-thing.  Possibly the most important fish-type-thing of the late 19th Century. 

Why? 

Because the amphioxus had long been considered one of those all-important missing links.  To quote the I-can't-emphasize-his-importance-enough-type-person Ernst Haeckel—referenced by Wharton in the very paragraph I cite—the amphioxus is important "because it fills the deep gulf between the Invertebrates and the Vertebrates" (76).*

The amphioxus is—quite literally—a liminal figure in the history of science.  Given that my argument in this chapter concerns Wharton's reluctance to wed any particular evolutionary theory because of the excess of liminal figures and ambiguous conclusions, I find your silence on the issue quite alarming.

You're supposed to be helping me.  (In case the subtext of the earlier posts/presentations/roundtables was unclear.)  Yet here I am stuck doing all this work myself. 

I can't say I'm not disappointed. 

Because I am.

That's where I've been the past week: in the archives, reading about these almost-fishes and the many debates they engendered.  This didn't have to happen.  I could've been reading the 3,000 odd posts in my RSS reader.  But you people had to let me down.  Don't think I'll forget this.

Because I won't.

(Unless something more important comes up.  There's only so much trivia a mind can contain ... and petty grudges concerning non-issues are typically the first overboard.)

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*Eddie Izzard is a bad influence.

My First Chapter? Eaten by a Cylon, Thank You Very Much

"Scott's Dissertation" is the name of a folder on my desktop.  Has been for the past three years.  When I migrated my files from my laptop, I copied "Scott's Dissertation" to the external hard drive (a.k.a.); then I copied it from the external hard drive (a.k.a.) to my my new desktop.  I assumed my new "Scott's Dissertation" folder would contain all the files and folders housed in the old one. 

It doesn't. 

The "Chapter One - Introduction" folder is missing. 

It's not on the desktop. 

It's not on the external hard drive (a.k.a.). 

It's not on the laptop. 

I had no choice.  The folder must've disappeared when I was migrating files.  I had to consult the Cylon:

What can I do you for?

Remember that folder on the laptop with my first chapter in it?

Yes.

Any idea where it went?

I ate it.

You ate it?

Did you need it for something?  Hope not because I ate it.

Why would you eat it?

It was there so I ate it.

And this was a good idea?

Probably not.  But it was there so I ate it.  You would eat it too if it was there.

I wouldn't.

You would.  Also: Bird.

Bird?

I look out my window and see the Cylon is correct.  Atop my air conditioner sit two turtledoves.  Their feathers are ruffled and they are looking directly at me.  One cocks its head and charges.  It pecks the window and looks to its left.  The rails of my porch are obscured by a mob of irate turtledoves.

You want to eat bird.

No.

You want to eat bird like I ate chapter.

I don't.

You lie.  Turn in bird instead of chapter.

I need chapters not birds.  I can't turn in a bird.

Why not?

Advisers don't accept birds.  They want chapters.  Search committees don't consider birds.  Jobs are not won on the strength of birds.  I can't turn in a bird.

Too bad.  You go to war with the dissertation you have, not the dissertation you want.

Edith Wharton & Geocentrism & Heliocentrism & Help, Please?

Everyone knows Copernicus killed geocentrism (mostly) during His Revolution, but not everyone knows who killed heliocentrism or when it  even died.  If you happen to know who did, when, with what and where, I think you owe it to the readers of this blog to tell them. 

Were I not too busy parsing Edith Wharton, I would.  But see she writes things which confuse me, like this passage from her autobiography A Backward Glance (1927):

Through [Egerton Winthrop] I first came to know the great French novelists and the French historians and literary critics of the day; but his chief gift was to introduce me to the wonder-world of nineteenth century science. He it was who gave me Wallace's Darwin and Darwinism, and The Origin of Species, and made known to me Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Romanes, Haeckel, Westermarck, and the various popular exponents of the great evolutionary movement. But it is idle to prolong the list, and hopeless to convey to a younger generation the first overwhelming sense of cosmic vastnesses which such "magic casements" let into our little geocentric universe.

As you can see, here Wharton rightly frown on geocentrism.   But then she writes things like this in "The Angel at the Grave" (1901):

In the compressed perspective of Paulina's outlook it stood for a monument of ruined civilizations, and its white portico opened on legendary distances. Its very aspect was impressive to eyes that had first surveyed life from the jig-saw "residence" of a raw-edged Western town. The high-ceilinged rooms, with their paneled walls, their polished mahogany, their portraits of triple-stocked ancestors and of ringleted "females" in crayon, furnished the child with the historic scenery against which a young imagination constructs its vision of the past. To other eyes the cold spotless thinly-furnished interior might have suggested the shuttered mind of a maiden-lady who associates fresh air and sunlight with dust and discoloration; but it is the eye which supplies the coloring-matter, and Paulina's brimmed with the richest hues.

Nevertheless, the House did not immediately dominate her. She had her confused out-reachings toward other centers of sensation, her vague intuition of a heliocentric system; but the attraction of habit, the steady pressure of example, gradually fixed her roving allegiance and she bent her neck to the yoke.

Goes without saying that the heliocentrism that almost saved Paulina from her "compressed perspective" is better than the geocentrism from which "the great evolutionary movement" rescued Wharton and her contemporaries.  The question is, how much better is it?  I don't believe heliocentrism is held in high esteem in 1901, but what I know about the history of astronomy stops short of the Nineteenth Century.  (Such is the perilous life of the autodidact!) 

You can see my general point: Wharton imagines coming into knowledge as analogous to the sneaking suspicion the Earth revolves around the Sun ... only heliocentrism is equally incorrect, inasmuch as it imagines everything in the known universe revolves around the Sun.  Obviously wrong. 

But since my larger argument is that Wharton dramatized scientific conflict in order to avoid creeping obsolescence (boon companion of scientific progress), it matters whether she knew heliocentrism was flawed when she wrote "The Angel at the Grave" in 1900.*