ReVistaReVista HARVARD REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICA • SPRING 2009 The Sky Above, The Earth Below Exploring the Universe DAVID ROCKEFELLER CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY Editor’s LETTER Professor Don Pfister came to my office the other day to discuss this issue of ReVista. I was wearing one of my favorite pieces of jewelry, a black-and-white speckled necklace from Colombia. “Oh, that’s from a tropical tree,” he said with interest, identifying the species. For me, my necklace is a lovely handicraft, a splendid ornament, a sentimental memory. Pfister, who is Curator of the Farlow Herbarium, noticed something I didn’t, the botanical origin of my beads. It made me realize that even though lately I’ve been focusing on the theme of the sky above and the earth below, I remain an urban creature. Geology was the only class I ever got a “D” on in college. I took it to fulfill my science requirement. Yet I remember vividly how the professor took us across the Hudson River to New Jersey with its wind-swept views of Manhattan. There, he showed us Manhattan schist, a very hard rock on which Manhattan is built (I have no idea why we went to New Jersey). Despite that grade, I learned to see rocks in a different way. It’s not that I don’t like nature, dear reader (seeing that much of this issue deals with the 19th century, that feels like an appropriate way to address you). I love to look at “the sky above” and “the earth below,” but usu- ally just as a poetic big picture—the amazing sunset, the towering mountains, the welcome sound of birds in the early spring. I still like to feed pigeons and sparrows, urban memories of exploring the universe. Obviously, with my track record, the idea for this issue therefore did not arise from any particular knowledge about science or nature, but rather with a historical awareness of two important dates. This year, 2009, has been designated the International Year of Astronomy. It also marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Even I know that Darwin looked at the earth below, developing the theory of natural selection in the 19th century. Three hundred years before, Nicolaus Copernicus observed that planets’ motions across the sky could be explained much more simply by assuming the Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun in perfect circle. So I wanted to investigate the links of both men to Latin America. Darwin had traveled throughout the region, exploring such far-off places as the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador and Tierra del Fuego in Chile. Copernicus, a contemporary of Christopher Columbus, never traveled to Latin America, but he might be considered the spiritual godfather of all the astronomers looking out at the starry nights from observatories in Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile, Mexico and throughout the region. I wanted to make this ReVista an issue that would be interesting to those of you who know all the names and species—and to those of us who write songs about butterflies and don’t know a swallow from a seagull. And yet I wasn’t quite sure exactly why I was so fascinated by the explorations of Copernicus and Darwin. That is, not until I walked into Harvard’s Bio Labs to see Professor N. Michelle Holbrook, “Missy,” to discuss the upcoming ReVista. She pointed out to me that both Darwin and Galileo were rebels whose theories shifted the center of the world. With Darwin, she observed, humans ceased to be the center of the earth, and with Copernicus, the earth ceased to be the center of the universe. The Catholic church even placed Copernicus’ book De Revolutionibus with his new scientific theory on the index of prohibited books in 1616 because it contradicted religious beliefs. Darwin’s theory of natural selection still remains controversial among some fundamentalists today. The natural sciences—like the social sciences and the arts—have their own particular way of challenging our premises and transforming the world around us. This ReVista thus is not just a celebration of Darwin and Coper- nicus, but of all the scientists working today and yesterday—and who will be working in the future—to explore the mysteries of the universe, even if they are as simple as the origin of a necklace. HARVARD REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICA • Volume VIII, Number 3 ReVista Published by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies DRCLAS: Merilee S. Grindle, Director • Kathy Eckroad, Associate Director EDITORIAL STAFF: June Carolyn Erlick, Editor in-Chief • Anita Safran, Copy Editor Cover photograph by A. Pasten, Annelie Berner, Clotilde Dedecker, Publications Interns 2COMMUNIQUÉ/www.2communique.com, Design • P & R Publications, Printer A. Gomez and NOAO/AURA/NSF 1730 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA 02138 Telephone: (617) 495-5428 Facsimile: (617) 496-2802 http://www.drclas.harvard.edu/publications/revista The Moon, planet Venus, the bright SUBSCRIPTIONS AND READER FORUM: [email protected] star Spica and planet Jupiter areseen THIS ISSUE OF REVISTA IS MADE POSSIBLE THROUGH THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF BANCO SANTANDER (in descending order) over Cerro Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. ISSN 1541–1443 Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile in September 2005. The Sky Above, The Earth Below The Art of Good Seeing AN INTRODUCTION BY N. MICHELE HOLBROOK “ We had gone a few miles upriver and now were standing on the riverbank, his ability to see so much more than the non-botanical mortals and in front of us, on the other side, the forest was rising like a wall. We who stand beside him. looked in silence and then Schultes said, as if speaking to himself, ‘I know I first experienced this widening gaze when, as a Harvard every tree, every single tree one can see from here.’” undergraduate, I spent a year working as a research assistant at — Anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff of his 1952 encounter with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. At first all Richard Evans Schultes, Harvard College class of 1938* was green. Only with study, with time, did the forest come into focus. Only then did I see the feathery, grey-green branches of T THE heart OF SCIENTIFIC EXPLoration AND DISCOVERY IS AN Xylopia, the unequal petioles that signaled Capparis, the ribbed ability to see deeply into the unknown. Whether through a trunks of Quararibea. Not surprisingly, the ability to distinguish telescope or across a river, the scientific gaze transforms these “endless forms most beautiful,” to quote from the final sen- A these depths into shapes and patterns that shed both mean- tence in The Origin of Species, was like a drug, bringing with ing and light. When Schultes, one of the greatest botanical explor- it the desire to claim, with knowledge and name, more territory. ers and ethnobotanists ever to have lived, says “I know every And yet the more my eyes became accustomed to the ‘green,’ the tree,” it is not of ownership or possession that he speaks, but of more visible became all that I had yet to see. *SCHULTES was Later PROFESSOR OF BotanY at Harvard. QUOTED IN ONE RIVER, EXPLORATIONS AND SPRING 2009• ReVista 3 DISCOVERIES IN THE AMAZON RAIN FOREST, BY WADE Davis (SIMON & SCHUSTER, 1996) THE SKY ABOVE, THE EARTH BELOW Previous page, View of Punta Arenas, Chile; above, various species of frogs, including tree frogs (from Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature); right, Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR) and Gemini South telescopes on Cerro Pachón as seen from Cerro Tololo in June 2006. 4 ReVista• SPRING 2009 previous page : courtes Y of dona L D pfister ABOVE,FROM Art FORMS IN NATURE, DOVER PUBLications NY 1974 INTRODUCTION I suspect that the young Charles Darwin had a similar expe- The practice of science is deeply connected to how one sees rience when, in 1832, he arrived in Brazil. Although he later the natural world. Thus, when astronomer Robert Kirshner (p. 55) described his earliest forays in fairly general terms: “Delight itself, describes northern Chile as a place of “good seeing,” I think however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist of this as referring to more than the clarity of the air and the who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian for- absence of artificial light. Good seeing is also a state of mind. est,” his notes and journals are filled with data, numbers, details Good seeing involves a delight in the appearance of new things — all of which speak to his increasing ability to see and claim and the clarity that comes from stepping outside of one’s daily the world around him. For the young Darwin, it was a world routine. Therein lies the value of exploration for the scientist, replete with capybaras and musical frogs, icebergs and Indians, whether it be traveling by sail around the world or by plane to volcanoes and red snow, flycatchers and finches. But for all his Chile. For Darwin, the Galápagos Islands proved to be a place enormous powers of observation, the heavens — both astronomi- of “good seeing,” although even this was a near-miss. Darwin cal and metaphorical — seem to fall outside of Darwin’s realm. writes that despite the Vice-Governor “declaring that the tortoises Indeed the lack of interest in astronomical phenomena is striking differed from the different islands, and that he could with cer- in Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. tainty tell from which island any one was brought, I did not for The irony of this is that Darwin’s theory of the mutability of some time pay sufficient attention to this statement, and I had species was seen by many as treading exactly on the ”heavens” already partially mingled together the collections from two of through its displacement of humans from the centrality conferred the islands.” by special creation.