Archaeopteryx, Bird, Fish, Snake

156 – 149 million years ago

The first Archaeopteryx discovered, found in 1861, is the most famous fossil ever (barring maybe some close human relations). It came at the right time, providing dramatic evidence for the theory of evolution.

There may be psychological reasons why Archaeopteryx had the impact it did. Here’s my argument anyway:

According to Jorge Luis Borges, the following is a classification of animals found in a Chinese encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.

• Those that belong to the Emperor
• Embalmed ones
• Those that are trained
• Suckling pigs
• Mermaids (or Sirens)
• Fabulous ones
• Stray dogs
• Those that are included in this classification
• Those that tremble as if they were mad
• Innumerable ones
• Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
• Et cetera
• Those that have just broken a flower vase
• Those that, at a distance, resemble flies

Although some scholars have taken this list seriously (Hi, Michel Foucault!), there’s no evidence that this is anything but a Borgesian joke. Anthropologists have actually spent a lot of time investigating the principles underlying native categorizations of living things, and found they are not nearly as off-the-wall as Borges’ list. These categorizations obey some general principles, not quite the same as modern biologists follow, but not irrational either. Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science is good popular review of ethno-biology, the branch of anthropology that studies different cultures’ theories of biology and systems of classification Did you know there are specialized brain areas that handle animal taxonomy? Or try here for a scholarly treatment.

At the highest level is usually a distinction between plants and animals. This doesn’t necessarily match the biologists’ distinction between Plantae and Animalia, but rather usually follows a distinction between things that don’t and do move under their own power. Even babies seem to make a big distinction between shapes on a screen that get passively knocked around, and shapes that move on their own. i.e. are animated.

Among larger animals (non-bugs/worms) the first large scale groups to receive a label of their own are almost always birds, fish, and snakes, in no particular order. These categories are telling: each represents a variety of locomotion (flying, swimming, slithering) other than the stereotypical mammalian walking/running. (Many folk classifications lump bats with birds and whales with fish, and they may also separate flightless birds like the cassowary from others.) So whether a creature moves on its own, and how it moves are central to folk categorizations of living kinds, even if not to modern scientific taxonomy. And so finding an animal that seems to be a missing link between two (psychologically) major domains of life — birds and terrestrial animals — is going to be a Big Deal, cognitively, upsetting people’s intuitive notions that it takes God’s miraculous intervention to create animals that fly, or to condemn the Serpent to slither.

Reuben, Reuben

Reuben, Reuben, I’ve been thinking
What a fine world this would be
If the men were all transported
Far beyond the northern sea.

Oh, my goodness, gracious, Rachel,
What a strange world this would be
If the men were all transported
Far beyond the northern sea.

Reuben, Reuben, I’ve been thinking
What a great life girls would lead
If they had no men about them
None to tease them, none to heed.

Rachel, Rachel, I’ve been thinking
Life would be so easy then
What a lovely world this would be
If you’d leave it to the men.

Reuben, Reuben, stop your teasing
If you’ve any love for me
I was only just a-fooling
As I thought, of course, you’d see.

Rachel, if you’ll not transport us
I will take you for my wife
And I’ll split with you my money
Every pay day of my life!

(Traditional song, many versions)

I once heard William Hamilton, the evolutionary theorist, give a talk where he suggested, among other things, that human beings might give up sexual reproduction in the future. He was building on a familiar evolutionary puzzle: sex, or more exactly the division between female (large, expensive gametes) and male (small, cheap, mobile/motile gametes) is a very expensive proposition. Imagine a sexually reproducing population in which females average two offspring each, one female, one male. On average, each female is replacing herself in the next generation with one daughter. Now imagine a mutant asexual female. She also gives birth to two offspring, but the offspring are both daughters, clones of their mother. The numbers of this mutant lineage will initially double in every generation, and they will eventually replace the sexually reproducing type entirely. 

Unless … There must be some advantage to sexual reproduction to make up for this huge disadvantage. One possibility is that sex somehow makes it easier to avoid the accumulation of deleterious mutations. Another possibility, which Hamilton was pushing, is that sex gives an advantage to host species in their evolutionary arms races with parasites. A species consisting of lots of genetically uniform clones is more vulnerable to pathogens. 

However … (and this is where Hamilton was going) a species that has developed medical technology to the point that it no longer has to worry so much about infectious disease might be able to dispense with sexual reproduction. So Hamilton pondered a germ-free hygienic future in which the clonal offspring of one or more fit, fecund, philoprogenitive females replaced the rest of the human race.

And … minus the evolutionary theorizing, some science fiction writers have imagined futures without a division between men and women. John Wyndham, writing back in the 1950s imagined a world in which a plague had wiped out men, and the surviving women carried on high tech reproduction without men in an ant-like caste society. Wyndham thought this was a bad thing, but for some feminist science fiction writers in the 1970s – Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr. – a world without men was imagined as a utopia.

The most sustained piece of world-building of a society without “men” and “women” comes from Ursula Le Guin. The aliens on the planet Winter are much like humans on Earth, but they are hermaphrodites. Most of the time they are neuter, with underdeveloped male and female organs. But during kemmer (estrus, the breeding season), two individuals will pair off and develop complementary sexual characters and sexual desires. One member of the pair will temporarily develop as a female, the other as a male. They will copulate much as we do, and the female member of the pair will conceive and eventually give birth. The next time kemmer rolls around, the former female may develop as a male, and her former (and formerly male) partner (or another) may develop as a female.

Le Guin, the daughter of two anthropologists, gives us a richly developed thick description of the culture of Winter, not a utopia, but just another world, different from our own in some ways, similar in others. But what’s missing from her story is much consideration of the evolutionary dynamics underlying the exotic (to us) reproductive biology. In Le Guin’s scheme, the female member of a pair is still putting more energy than the male into producing a child. We have to expect that there will be considerable jockeying, both physiological and psychological, over who, in each reproductive episode, takes on the more burdensome role. On Winter, the Battle of the Sexes will still be fought, albeit on different terrain.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Reuben, Reuben is a comic novel about the Battle of the Sexes in 1950s suburban Connecticut. The novel centers on the priapic poet Gowan MacGland, (obviously modeled on Dylan Thomas), who takes advantage of an American tour to enjoy the opportunities available to an alpha small-gamete-producer. Up to a point, anyway: the terrible lesson he learns is never, ever, ever cuckold your dentist.

Central Dogma blues

3.40 – 3.23 billion years ago

[T]he Darwinian process may be described as a chapter of accidents. As such, it seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration, to such casually picturesque changes as an avalanche may make in a mountain landscape, or a railway accident in a human figure. If it be … a truth of science, then the stars of heaven, the showers and dew, the winter and summer, the fire and heat, the mountains and hills, may no longer be called to exalt the Lord with us by praise; their work is to modify all things by blindly starving and murdering everything that is not lucky enough to survive in the universal struggle for hogwash.

.George Bernard Shaw. Back to Methusaleh. Preface iv

A broken symmetry lies at the heart of life, ruling out Bernard Shaw’s preferred mechanism of change, Lamarckian evolution through the inheritance of acquired traits. “Lamarck … held as his fundamental proposition that living organisms changed because they wanted to. As he stated it, the great factor in Evolution is use and disuse.” (Back to Methusaleh, preface ii)

Shaw was not attacking Darwin himself. He knew that Darwin accepted the inheritance of acquired traits as one mechanism of evolution. In fact Darwin put a lot of ingenuity into trying figuring out how the process might work. But this was all wasted effort on Darwin’s part. In Shaw’s day, August Weismann had countered Lamarck, arguing that the inheritance of acquired traits was ruled out by one great asymmetry: the separation of germ plasm (destined to pass on to the next generation) from soma (destined to perish).

With the discovery of the DNA double helix, biologists came to recognize an even more profound, more ancient asymmetry. This asymmetry is codified as the Central Dogma of molecular biology: information passes from nucleic acids (the basis of genetic inheritance) to proteins, but not vice versa. 

The Central Dogma may be a predictable, inescapable result of selection acting at multiple levels, both within and among protocells, at the very origin of life, assigning some molecules the necessary but dead-end job of catalysis, giving others a shot at immortality as replicators. 

We developed a model consisting of a population of protocells, each containing a population of replicating catalytic molecules. The molecules are assumed to face a trade-off between serving as catalysts and serving as templates. This trade-off causes conflicting multilevel selection: serving as catalysts is favoured by selection between protocells, whereas serving as templates is favoured by selection between molecules within protocells. This conflict induces informatic and catalytic symmetry breaking, whereby the molecules differentiate into genomes and enzymes, establishing the central dogma. 

The origin of the central dogma through conflicting multilevel selection

Earlier on Logarithmic History, I noted that broken symmetries – female and male, predator and prey, ruler and ruled – are often morally fraught. This applies to the great asymmetry at the center of natural selection. Darwin put a positive spin on it: “From the war of nature, from famine and death, most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows,” but a many people have found it hard to accept this view of life. In Shaw’s day it was perhaps still possible to hold out hope that Lamarckian evolution provided a gentler path for progressive evolution. And for much of the twentieth century, social scientists tried to quarantine natural selection, allowing it a role in human physical evolution, while sticking to a blank slate view of mind and culture. But there is one more twist in the story: in the twenty first century, the rules of the game may change entirely, as new reproductive technologies present the promise, and peril, of finally overturning the Central Dogma. 

Sexual Turing test

A footnote to the preceding post, jumping off the Logarithmic History timeline for a bit:

[T]he ‘imitation game” … is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either “X is A and Y is B” or “X is B and Y is A.” The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B … the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten.

Alan Turing Computing machinery and intelligence

Ted Gioia proposes that the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature should have gone to Elena Ferrante. A great choice, but one that also presents a problem: we’re not quite sure who “Elena Ferrante” is. She prefers anonymity and only makes herself available for interviews remotely. 

Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet seems to display a deep knowledge of daily life in Naples from the 1950s on. The fictional narrator is a woman, and a complicated friendship between two women is the great theme of the tetralogy. So it came as something of a shock when an Italian journalist, Claudio Gatti, provided pretty strong evidence, from financial and real estate records, pointing toward Anita Raja, a professional translator, as a likely candidate for Ferrante. Raja’s biography is nothing like “Ferrante”’s: she is the daughter of a Polish Jewish refugee and an Italian magistrate, and only lived in Naples up to age three. But the story may be even more complicated: Anita Raja is married to the Naples-born writer Domenico Starnone. Italian critics have noted stylistic similarities between Ferrante’s work and Starnone’s, and recently several computer stylometric analyses point to Starnone as far and away the most likely author of “Ferrante’s” work. So some combination of Raja and Starnone seems likely.

Maybe somewhat teasingly, as the fictional narrator of the Neapolitan novels establishes herself as a successful author, one of the pieces that makes her reputation is an essay on male novelists (Flaubert, Tolstoy) entering the consciousness of female characters.

A lot of the reaction to the news about the likely identity of Ferrante has been negative: people who have a proprietary feeling about her work haven’t wanted to hear that she may be other than what she seemed. For what it’s worth, the imitation game has sometimes been played in the other direction. For a long time, the identity of “James Tiptree, Jr.”, the author of a number of striking science fiction stories, was uncertain. In the introduction to an anthology of Tiptree stories, Robert Silverberg, an established science fiction writer, wrote:

It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.

Robert Silverberg, Introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise

James Tiptree, Jr. was the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon. She took Silverberg’s remarks as a tribute to her writerly abilities. 

Fiction is all about pretending, and some people are very good at it. I recommend both Ferrante and Tiptree. Both are very much concerned with sex and relations between men and women. Both can be intense and disturbing.

The first Nobel

1903 – 1909

(First Nobel for Literature, that is)

The Nobel Prize in Literature goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Nobel Prize Committee decided to look beyond the sciences. The first prize was to be awarded in 1901. There wasn’t much question who deserved it. Leo Tolstoy was still alive. He was not only the greatest novelist ever, probably, but also an imposing moral figure, a champion of non-violent resistance who would eventually inspire Gandhi and Martin Luther King. So the first Nobel Prize in Literature went to …

Sully Prudhomme

No, I haven’t read anything of his. Have you?

Next year they could still have awarded the prize to Tolstoy, although it would have been pretty embarrassing to have him getting it only after Prudhomme. So instead the prize went to the historian Theodore Mommsen. Thus began a century-plus long tradition of hit-and-miss awards. In some years, the awardees were acknowledged great writers. In other years, the winners were less well-known, but arguably merited the wider recognition that came with the prize. But many of the choices – and omissions – were just plain weird.

In response to all these wasted opportunities, Ted Gioia, musician, music historian, and author, offered his own list of authors who should have gotten the prize, year by year up to 2015, with a generous representation of popular writers as well as more literary ones. At least by one metric, he did a great job: among authors mentioned on this blog,

• 10 appear on Gioa’s list but not on the actual winner list (Conrad, Joyce, Brecht, Borges, Tolkien, Dick, Larkin, Heinlein, Doctor Seuss (Theodor Geisel), and Joni Mitchell).
• 1 appears on the actual winner list but not on Gioa’s list (Bertrand Russell).
• 1 appears on both lists (Shaw).

Here’s a link to The Nobel Prize in Literature from an Alternative Universe. And here’s the list below:

YEAR	ACTUAL WINNER	ALTERNATIVE REALITY WINNER
1901	Sully Prudhomme	Leo Tolstoy
1902	Theodor Mommsen	George Meredith
1903	Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson	Anton Chekhov
1904	Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray	Jules Verne
1905	Henryk Sienkiewicz	Henrik Ibsen
1906	Giosuè Carducci	Mark Twain
1907	Rudyard Kipling	Rudyard Kipling
1908	Rudolf Eucken	John Millington Synge
1909	Selma Lagerlöf	August Strindberg
1910	Paul Heyse	W.S. Gilbert
1911	Maurice Maeterlinck	Henry James
1912	Gerhart Hauptmann	William Dean Howells
1913	Rabindranath Tagore	Georg Trakl
1915	Romain Rolland	Guillaume Apollinaire
1916	Verner von Heidenstam	Sigmund Freud
1917	Karl Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan	Joseph Conrad
1919	Carl Spitteler	Thomas Hardy
1920	Knut Hamsun	Rainer Maria Rilke
1921	Anatole France	Marcel Proust
1922	Jacinto Benavente	Franz Kafka
1923	William Butler Yeats	William Butler Yeats
1924	Wladyslaw Reymont	Miguel de Unamuno
1925	George Bernard Shaw	George Bernard Shaw
1926	Grazia Deledda	Arthur Conan Doyle
1927	Henri Bergson	Constantine P. Cavafy
1928	Sigrid Undset	Edith Wharton
1929	Thomas Mann	Thomas Mann
1930	Sinclair Lewis	F. Scott Fitzgerald
1931	Erik Axel Karlfeldt	G. K. Chesterton
1932	John Galsworthy	Zane Grey
1933	Ivan Bunin	Stefan Zweig
1934	Luigi Pirandello	Luigi Pirandello
1936	Eugene O’Neill	Eugene O’Neill
1937	Roger Martin du Gard	James Joyce
1938	Pearl Buck	Virginia Woolf
1939	Frans Eemil Sillanpää	Robert Musil
1944	Johannes V. Jensen	W. H. Auden
1945	Gabriela Mistral	George Orwell
1946	Hermann Hesse	Hermann Broch
1947	André Gide	André Gide
1948	T.S. Eliot	T.S. Eliot
1949	William Faulkner	William Faulkner
1950	Bertrand Russell	Ludwig Wittgenstein
1951	Pär Lagerkvist	Dorothy Parker
1952	François Mauriac	Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
1953	Winston Churchill	Wallace Stevens
1954	Ernest Hemingway	Ernest Hemingway
1955	Halldòr Laxness	Bertolt Brecht
1956	Juan Ramón Jiménez	Raymond Chandler
1957	Albert Camus	Albert Camus
1958	Boris Pasternak	E. M. Forster
1959	Salvatore Quasimodo	Cole Porter
1960	Saint-John Perse	Ian Fleming
1961	Ivo Andric	William Carlos Willaims
1962	John Steinbeck	John Steinbeck
1963	Giorgios Seferis	Giorgios Seferis
1964	Jean-Paul Sartre	Jean-Paul Sartre
1965	Mikhail Sholokhov	Jack Kerouac
1966	Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nelly Sachs	Agatha Christie, Jorge Luis Borges
1967	Miguel Angel Asturias	Vladimir Nabokov
1968	Yasunari Kawabata	Yukio Mishima
1969	Samuel Beckett	Samuel Beckett
1970	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1971	Pablo Neruda	Pablo Neruda
1972	Heinrich Böll	J.R.R. Tolkien
1973	Patrick White	Lionel Trilling
1974	Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson	John Lennon, Paul McCartney
1975	Eugenio Montale	Eugenio Montale
1976	Saul Bellow	Saul Bellow
1977	Vicente Aleixandre	Tennessee Williams
1978	Isaac Bashevis Singer	Isaac Bashevis Singer
1979	Odysseus Elytis	Philip K. Dick
1980	Czeslaw Milosz	Czeslaw Milosz
1981	Elias Canetti	Elias Canetti
1982	Gabriel García Márquez	Gabriel García Márquez
1983	William Golding	Graham Greene
1984	Jaroslav Seifert	Italo Calvino
1985	Claude Simon	Philip Larkin
1986	Wole Soyinka	Eugene Ionesco
1987	Joseph Brodsky	Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein
1988	Naguib Mahfouz	Salman Rushdie
1989	Camilo José Cela	Theodor Seuss Geisel
1990	Octavio Paz	Octavio Paz
1991	Nadine Gordimer	Muriel Spark
1992	Derek Walcott	Bob Dylan
1993	Toni Morrison	Ralph Ellison
1994	Kenzaburo Oe	Stephen Sondheim
1995	Seamus Heaney	Isaiah Berlin
1996	Wislawa Szymborska	Stanisław Lem
1997	Dario Fo	Hunter Thompson
1998	José Saramago	Roberto Bolaño
1999	Günter Grass	Tom Stoppard
2000	Gao Xingjian	Robert Ludlum
2001	V. S. Naipaul	V. S. Naipaul
2002	Imre Kertész	John le Carré
2003	J. M. Coetzee	David Foster Wallace
2004	Elfriede Jelinek	John Updike
2005	Harold Pinter	Milan Kundera
2006	Orhan Pamuk	Philip Roth
2007	Doris Lessing	J.K. Rowling
2008	Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio	Don DeLillo
2009	Herta Mueller	Ian McEwan
2010	Mario Vargas Llosa	Mario Vargas Llosa
2011	Tomas Tranströmer	Stephen King
2012	Mo Yan	Haruki Murakami
2013	Alice Munro	Joni Mitchell
2014	Patrick Modiano	Karl Ove Knausgård
2015	Svetlana Alexievich	Elena Ferrante

Gradualism

1824 – 1836

Charles Lyell’s great work, Principles of Geology, came out between 1831 and 1833. Lyell advocated an uncompromising uniformitarianism: the same geological forces at work today, causing small changes over the course of lifetimes, were at work in the past, causing massive changes over the course of geological ages. We’ve seen over the course of this blog that uniformitarianism is not a completely reliable guide either to geology or to human history, which have been punctuated often enough by catastrophes – asteroid strikes, continent-scale floods, volcanic eruptions, and devastating wars and plagues. But the theory is nonetheless at least part of the story of history, and Lyell’s work was deservedly influential.

In 1837 Charles Darwin, a careful reader of Lyell, published a short article entitled On the Formation of Mould. This would eventually led to his last book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. Darwin’s work on soil formation was Lyellianism in miniature. He demonstrated, through a combination of careful reasoning and experiment, that the surface layer of pasture soil is formed by earthworms. “Although the conclusion may appear at first startling, it will be difficult to deny the probability that every particle of earth forming the bed from which the turf in old pasturelands springs, has passed through the intestines of worms.” Reading Darwin on worms you get the feeling he identifies with his humble subjects, gradually remaking the world through their patient industry.

The doctrine of progress through gradual change was appealing for more than just scientific reasons. In the 1830s, English liberals (of whom Darwin was one) were attempting to reform their society gradually, without the violence of the French Revolution, and without turning over politics to a Great Man in the style of Napoleon. (Darwin was also a gradualist with regard to his own work: he came up with the theory of natural selection in 1838, but England at the time wasn’t ready for anything so radical, and he didn’t publish On The Origin of Species for another twenty years.)

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), a friend of Darwin’s, set her greatest novel, Middlemarch, around the time of the Reform Act of 1832, which moved England one big step closer to a genuinely representative government. The novel’s heroine, Dorothea Brooke, might in another age have been a famous saint, another Theresa of Avila. In the England of her time she has another fate. Here is the famous conclusion of the novel, a paean to gradualism and the cumulative force of small deeds:

Her full nature … spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Of cannibals

Three of these men [Tupi Indians from Brazil], ignorant of the price they will pay some day … ignorant of the fact that of this intercourse will come their ruin … poor wretches …were at Rouen, at the time the late King Charles IX was there [in 1562]. The king talked to them for a long time; they were shown our ways, our splendor, the aspect of a fine city. After that someone asked their opinion, and wanted to know what they had found most amazing. They mentioned three things, of which I have forgotten the third, and I am very sorry for it; but I still remember two of them. They said that in the first place they thought it very strange that so many grown men, bearded, strong, and armed, who were around the king (it is likely that they were talking about the Swiss of his guard) should submit to obey a child, and that one of them was not chosen to command instead. Second (they have a way in their language of speaking of men as halves of one another), they had noticed that there were among us men full and gorged with all sorts of good things, and that their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that these needy halves could endure such an injustice, and did not take the others by the throat, or set fire to their houses.

I had a very long talk with one of them. … When I asked him what profit he gained from his superior position among his people (for he was a captain, and our sailors called him king), he told me that it was to march foremost in war. … Did all his authority expire with the war? He said that this much remained, that when he visited the villages dependent on him, they made paths for him through the underbrush by which he might pass quite comfortably.

All this is not too bad – but what’s the use? They don’t wear breeches.

Of Cannibals. Essays of Montaigne

Pox

Contact between the Old World and the New was a disaster for the latter. Conquest, mass killing, and enslavement were part of the story, but even more important was the introduction of a whole slew of epidemic diseases – measles, tetanus, typhus, typhoid, diphtheria, influenza, pneumonia, whooping cough, dysentery, and smallpox. In the century and a half after Columbus, the Americas probably lost more than 90% of their native population

The flow of diseases wasn’t entirely one way. In Europe, syphilis is first recorded  in Naples, in 1495. It almost certainly came from the Americas, brought back with Columbus’s crew. Columbus himself may have been an early victim. In the Americas, syphilis may have been spread largely through skin contact, but the Old World version was mostly sexually transmitted. The disease initially showed itself in spectacular, gruesome boils and skin lesions, and killed quickly, but eventually evolved to a more slowly progressing version that left victims alive for decades while gradually destroying their circulatory and nervous systems, often ending in insanity.

Above: Names for syphilis

Deborah Hayden’s book Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis is a popular overview of the subject. Part of the book is given over to identifying likely cases in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of course retrospective diagnosis is difficult, a matter of probabilities, not certainties, but Hayden argues that there is good evidence for syphilis for each of the following:

• Ludwig van Beethoven
• Franz Schubert
• Jane Austen*
• Robert Schumann
• Charles Baudelaire
• Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln
• Gustave Flaubert
• Guy de Maupassant
• Vincent van Gogh
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Oscar Wilde
• Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
• James Joyce
• Adolf Hitler **

Was syphilis as important for European art and literature as drugs were for rock music?

* Just kidding. Sorry.

** Hitler reportedly tested negative for syphilis on the Wassermann test, but Hayden notes that the test isn’t very reliable for the later stages of the disease.

Philology

1445 – 1477

“Just don’t take any course where you have to read Beowulf.“Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) to Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) in “Annie Hall”

It seems difficult for people nowadays to get a handle on the intellectual side of the Renaissance. The Age of Discovery, sure. The Scientific Revolution, sure. But the Renaissance was in full swing in Italy before Columbus and da Gama, well before Copernicus and Galileo. Even before Gutenberg. So what was the big deal? Or was it such a big deal (apart from the amazing art, of course)?

A lot of the problem is that we’ve lost touch with one of the great intellectual achievements of the last 600 years, the discipline of philology. Below is a Google Ngram showing the fortunes of two academic words, philology and ecology (i.e. their frequencies in English language books).

Most  everyone today has some idea what ecology is, while even educated people are likely to draw a blank on philology. But, as the figure suggests, it wasn’t always that way. In his excellent recent book Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Humanities, James Turner writes (p. x)

It used to be chic, dashing … Philology reigned as king of the sciences, the pride of the first great modern universities. … It meant far more than the study of old texts. Its explorations ranged from the religion of ancient Israel through the lays of medieval troubadours to the tongues of American Indians – and to rampant theorizing about the origin of language itself.

Philology’s golden age was the nineteenth century. This blog has covered just a few of its achievements – the reconstuction of Proto-Indo-European language and culture, and the Higher Criticism of the Bible. Philology flourished especially Germany, and its decline had partly to do with the special path of Germany in the twentieth century. But philology was also at the center of the Italian Renaissance, allowing a much clearer view of the Classical past. Famously, in the 1440s, Lorenzo Valla used a close study of language to demonstrate that the Donation of Constantine, in which the East Roman Emperor supposedly granted the pope authority over the West Roman empire, was a medieval fake.

And philology puts in a good showing in two of the twentieth century’s literary masterworks. In Episode 14, “The Oxen of the Sun,” in Joyce’s Ulysses, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, as the course of a pregnancy is narrated in a historical succession of English prose styles. And The Lord of the Rings might be considered a work of philological science fiction; rather than turn to physics or biology to build his imagined world, ala Poul Anderson or Hal Clement, Tolkien turned to the science of philology. In The Road to Middle Earth, Tom Shippey does justice to this side of Tolkien’s romance. (Tolkien however lost the battle to keep philology at the center of the Oxford English curriculum.)

“The Accursed Kings”

George R. R. Martin is a fan, so is Vladimir Putin. 

Iron kings and strangled queens, battles and betrayals, lies and lust, the curse of the Templars, the doom of a great dynasty – and all of it (well, most of it) straight from the pages of history, and believe me, the Starks and the Lannisters have nothing on the Capets and Plantagenets. Whether you are a history buff or a fantasy fan, Druon’s epic will keep you turning pages. This was the original game of thrones.

George R. R. Martin

“The Accursed Kings” is a seven book series (although you can skip the last) by Maurice Druon about 14^th century France. It’s based on real history, with real historical characters. The arc is tragic: King Phillip IV, “the Fair,” brings a curse on his house with his persecution of the Knights Templar and the.novels trace the decline of the Capetians up to the beginning of the Hundred Years War.

The novels are a great read. While they aren’t all that well-known in the English-speaking world, they very popular in France. 

They’re popular in Russia, too. Putin is one fan, having visited Druon in France several times, and praised his books enthusiastically. And so … are the lawless struggles of late medieval France one template for Putin’s rule?