PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN ALMOST MENTIONED IN WALDEN: PROFESSOR JEAN LOUIS RODOLPHE AGASSIZ, THE AMERICAN LYSENKO “I have always suspected Agassiz of superficiality & wretched reasoning powers; but I think such men do immense good in their way. See how he stirred up all Europe about Glaciers.” — Charles Darwin, commenting on Louis Agassiz’s pseudoscientific political agenda, in a private letter to Thomas Henry Huxley on September 26, 1857 HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROFESSOR LOUIS AGASSIZ PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN THE THREE “SCIENTISM-ISTS” Over the years the Thoreau Society has brushed up against a number of public intellectuals out of Harvard, professors who have traded on their credentials as scientists in order to profess that they knew, better than we know, how it is that we ought to live. First Professor Agassiz, whom Thoreau had mentioned in WALDEN, gave serieses of public lectures in downtown Boston about the Godliness of human enslavement, defending his friends the Southern slavemasters against the unrighteous attacks being made upon them by people like Thoreau and Darwin who did not understand the exigencies of human biology. Then Professor Skinner took time off from raising his daughter in a cage, and time off from developing an early generation of “smart bombs” in which pigeons were trained to peck at screens inside a nose-cone until they blew themselves up, to write a book WALDEN II which was twice as good as Thoreau’s WALDEN. The burden of WALDEN II is that human freedom is a wrong goal. We should all be training each other by behavioristic operant conditioning to be good little cogs in a friction-free local social engine. We need to get beyond false ideals like freedom and dignity. Professor Skinner came out to Concord and lectured us. He let us know that he kept a copy of Thoreau’s WALDEN in the glove compartment of his car, and every once in awhile when he had a chance he would dip into it and pick out one sentence to muse upon entirely at random. It is such a wonderful piece of writing, he pointed out, that it makes no difference in what sequence you consider its sentences. It would make just as much sense to him if he read the last sentence first and the first sentence last (we listened to this, and thought “What a great Thoreauvian you are, Professor Skinner, you are so wise and profound”). Then along came Professor Wilson, with his sociobiology. We are a social species and like all social species, we are being trained by evolution to care for one another. What works for ants will work for human beings, as ant wars and human wars get deselected through the general selection drift toward more and more altruistic behavior more and more of the time. The more biodiversity there is, the safer the planet will become for life. The more we go with evolution and do things the natural way, the kinder and more considerate and tolerant we will become toward one another. What great things to offer the unwashed public, on the lecture circuit! We awarded this Thoreauvian our Thoreau Medal. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROFESSOR LOUIS AGASSIZ PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN (I’m going to attempt to make a case, in these three chronological studies of three lives of public intellectuals, that although a tradition of Evolutionary Ethics captivates both Harvard University in Cambridge and the Thoreau Society in Concord, this attitude of scientism was something that Henry Thoreau himself had found deeply disquieting.) It has been claimed that there are no 2d acts in American lives. Of these three “scientism-ists,” Professor Agassiz did not get a 2d act in which to be sorry he had believed in racial enslavement because God gave him a crab-shaped brain aneurysm that did not disturb his equanimity but caused him to suddenly fall down. Professor Skinner was never reproached by his daughter Deborah Skinner Buzan for having kept her inside what he classified as an “heir conditioner,” nor did his trained pigeons ever point out to him that a truly “smart” bomb would be one that would refuse to go off: “You’re insane, right? –Blow myself up? –Would I want to do that?” However, it seems that God is now granting Professor Wilson a 2d act! In his old age he has repented of what he told us about the inevitability of altruism. He now acknowledges all that to have been a just-so story. He made it up out of whole cloth. (His colleagues are so enraged at him for his belated “change of heart” that literally hundreds of them have been signing letters telling him that he ought to have retired long ago and is making himself an embarrassment.) “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The People of Walden HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROFESSOR LOUIS AGASSIZ PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 1794 May: Volume I of Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s ZOONOMIA, a medical textbook punctuated with the author’s reflections on philosophy, natural history, and human life, was published (in this, Chapter 39 was an open espousal of the fact of biological evolution, in that he had all life as arising from “one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality”).1 THE SCIENCE OF 1794 1. Although Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s grandson Charles Robert would read ZOONOMIA at the age of 16 or 17, he would report later in life that the poem had been without effect on his mind. He hadn’t even retained a memory of what his family’s motto E conchis omnia was, or what it signified. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROFESSOR LOUIS AGASSIZ PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN Organic life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves; First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing. This poem would be honored (and advertised) by the Pope by being placed on the INDEX EXPURGATORIUS. This must not be read by any faithful Catholic! It would appear in many editions, including three Irish editions and four American editions, and in addition would be widely translated into other languages. Its author would brag that it made him one hell of a lot of money! Some birds have acquired harder beaks to crack nuts, as the parrot. Others have acquired beaks adapted to break the harder seeds, as sparrows. Others for the softer seeds of flowers, or the buds of trees as the finches. Other birds have acquired long beaks to penetrate the moister soils in search of roots, as woodcocks; and others broad ones to filtrate the water of lakes, and to retain aquatic insects. All of which seem to have been gradually produced during many generations by the perpetual endeavour of the creatures to supply the want of food. When his grandson Charles Robert Darwin would write his biography, he would observe that: The “Zoonomia” is largely devoted to medicine, and my father thought that it had much influenced medical practice in England; he was of course a partial, yt naturally a more observant judge than others on this point. The book when published was extensively read by the medical men of the day, and the author was highly esteemed by them as a practitioner. Well, you may inquire, if Dr. Erasmus Darwin had the idea that life forms had evolved, then why isn’t he the one whom we recognize as the creator of the theory of evolution, rather than his grandson Charles? The simple answer is that all Erasmus had going for him was the power of poetry. He didn’t got no proof. Even when his grandson Charles Darwin read this poem in his youth, he wasn’t much impressed. Erasmus hadn’t been able to suggest a mechanism which would make this idea that life forms had evolved and were continuing to evolve into an idea that possessed scientific necessity. It would be left for his grandson Charles actually to dope out the nature of this mechanism, and provide this proof. Not that being supplied with scientific proof is always enough! Professor Louis Agassiz, for instance, at Harvard College, twenty miles as the crow flies from Henry Thoreau, would be forced to choose between Darwin’s proof and his own ingrained belief in the natural rightness of human slavery — and so of course this Harvard man would close his eyes to the scientific proof and insist upon his embrace of the natural rightness of human slavery. You can just look at these blacks and know that they are separate from us, and inferior to us. (And his buddy Waldo Emerson, having his minor children being educated by Agassiz, would exhibit the same “Negrophobia.”) Note that Dr. Erasmus Darwin was first with the theory that the moon originated in being split apart from the earth. He has clear priority over his grandson George Darwin, who usually gets all the credit for origination of this hypothesis. Gnomes! how you shriek’d! when through the troubled air Roar’d the fierce din of elemental war; HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROFESSOR LOUIS AGASSIZ PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN When rose the continents, and sunk the main, And Earth’s huge sphere exploding burst in twain.— Gnomes! how you gazed! when from her wounded side Where now the South-Sea heaves its waste of tide, Rose on swift wheels the Moon’s refulgent car, Circling the solar orb, a sister star, Dimpled with vales, with shining hills emboss’d, And roll’d round Earth her airless realms of frost.