A family grudge against Darwinism
“Reef MADNESS” is a story of lively scientific inquiry constructed around a core of personal sadness and feelings of inadequacy. The elements of that core belonged to Alexander Agassiz, the son of Louis Agassiz, the immigrant Swiss scientist of whom fellow (and younger) Harvard professor William James said no American since Benjamin Franklin had so embodied his country’s spirit or captured its imagination.
The elder Agassiz, a Swiss, went to Harvard after having developed his theory of the Ice Age, in which glaciers covered Europe and sculpted the Alps. In the U.S. during the 1840s and later, Louis Agassiz spoke for a newly vigorous United States then flexing its muscles against centuries of European tradition and superior education. It was his misfortune, though, to take the losing side in the furious arguments that arose when, in 1859, Charles Darwin published “The Origin of Species.”
Louis Agassiz, and much of the world, believed that God had created the species of creatures in the world just as they are today. As Darwin explained it, “God’s will ... had nothing to do with it,” David Dobbs writes, “and there was no plan to speak of. We got here by dumb luck and ruthless competition.”
Dobbs gives a lively account of the controversy that arose so swiftly in England, the U.S. and Europe after “The Origin of Species” was published. Dobbs, a freelance historian and writer, nicely puts the scientific developments of the age into their broader cultural contexts.
Louis Agassiz brought his son Alexander with him as he established the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. The younger Agassiz later undertook the running of it. He seems to have been deeply wounded, in Dobbs’ account, by his father’s bitter fight with Darwinism. For this, or other reasons one can only speculate about, Alexander Agassiz spent the last 30 years of his life and a great deal of money trying to disprove a theory Darwin had propounded a generation before “The Origin of Species” appeared.
Alexander Agassiz’s money came from the lucrative Calumet copper mine he revived in Michigan. He built an oceanfront mansion in Newport, R.I., and financed the ships and expeditions he hoped would upset Darwin’s theory of the nature of coral islands, reefs and atolls in tropical waters.
From his rather limited observations during the voyage of the HMS Beagle in the 1830s, Darwin concluded that these islands were built by living coral organisms on top of volcanoes subsiding -- gradually -- into the tropical seas.
For three decades, Alexander Agassiz, who had been profoundly shaken by the nearly simultaneous deaths of his wife and mother, and the earlier death of his father and a daughter, told friends that he would publish evidence showing that Darwin was just plain wrong about the reefs. Agassiz propounded a complex set of supposed reef origins that included shaping by currents and lifting by rising land masses.
But after his death in 1910, no manuscripts or any other traces of such writings were ever found.
Controversy about the reefs continued through the first half of the 20th century. Then in 1950, the U.S. Navy, preparing for atomic tests, drilled deep into Eniwetok Atoll. Those soundings, which struck volcanic rock, proved that Darwin was right.
Dobbs’ “Reef Madness” is a clearly written account that provides a good picture of science, especially in its American variety, just as it was overturning traditional, religious views of the universe. The book also does an especially nice job of exploring the ways scientists observe data and imagine conclusions.
Anthony Day is a contributing writer to Book Review.
