Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral

252 Pages·2005·2.02 MB·English

by  David Dobbs

ALSO BY DAVID DOBBS
The Northern Forest (with Richard Ober)
The Great Gulf: Fishermen, Scientists, and the Struggle
to Revive the World’s Greatest Fishery

For my father,
Herman Allen Dobbs, Jr.
C
ONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Introduction
PART I
Magpie
CHAPTER ONE:
Neuchâtel
CHAPTER TWO:
Freiburg
CHAPTER THREE:
Cambridge
CHAPTER FOUR:
Fixity
CHAPTER FIVE:
Transmutation
CHAPTER SIX:
Selection
CHAPTER SEVEN:
PART II
A Still Greater Sorrow
CHAPTER EIGHT:
The Pleasure of Gambling
CHAPTER NINE:
To Light: Murray’s Reefs
CHAPTER TEN:
A Question of Science
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
Accrual
CHAPTER TWELVE:
“A Conspiracy of Silence”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
PART III
To Sea
CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
The Last Archipelago
CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
A Connected Account
CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
Eniwetok
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Bibliography
L I
IST OF LLUSTRATIONS

A coral island in the Pacific. From Charles Darwin’s
Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs.
Introduction
In the last half of the nineteenth century, Alexander Agassiz, the smart, quiet son of the
brilliant, famously talkative naturalist Louis Agassiz, entangled himself in an argument over
the genesis of coral reefs that grew into one of the most heated and vital debates in science. To
enter such a dispute went against a deeply ingrained caution. Despite a difficult childhood, the
challenge of emigrating from his native Switzerland to the United States, and staggering
personal losses, Alexander had become one of his generation’s most respected scientists and,
by solving the key engineering problems in a copper mine he partly owned, one of America’s
richest men. But such was his reserve that many colleagues had no idea he was rich, while few
business acquaintances knew he spent most of his time studying starfish and coral reefs.
His modest course was quite unlike the highly public path his father had taken. Louis
Agassiz, a lecturer of fantastic eloquence, stunning memory, and beguiling charm, had won
immense popular fame with his spellbinding account, given in countless talks, books, and
articles, of how zoology’s wonders reflected a divine plan. (A species, said Louis, was “a
thought of God.”) Louis paid a high price for this renown, however, when in 1859 Charles
Darwin’s Origin of Species displaced his creationist explanation of species. Louis’s fierce
resistance to Darwin’s evolution theory cost him his scientific credibility, and his fall was
painful to watch. Alexander tried to avoid scientific debate and any sort of spotlight ever after.
Yet Alexander, who loved the ocean, found the question of coral reefs irresistible. How did
these huge, beautiful forms, composed of the skeletons of tiny animals that could survive only
in shallow water, come to rise on foundations that emerged from the Pacific’s greatest depths?
Did these creatures somehow build these foundations? It seemed unlikely. Yet if not, how did
so many of these platforms– thousands of them reaching just shy of the surface–come to be?
Though this mystery drew the attention of great scientists for decades, a satisfactory answer
proved elusive. Today, of course, the main argument about coral reefs is how to save them, and
only scientists might recall the debate that once raged about their origin. But in the 1800s,
particularly from the 1870s onward, the “coral reef problem,” as it was known, stood as one of
the most difficult and contentious in science. Only the 1860s clash over evolution seemed
comparable.
One reason the coral reef debate reached such a pitch is that it in many ways reprised the
evolutionary debate, engaging many of the same people and ideas. It played out as an eerie
coda to the battle over Darwinism, with strange dissonances, inverted themes, and prominent
soloists playing different instruments, their lines of music sometimes unexpectedly reversed or
turned upside down, as if Bartók had rearranged an operatic score by Wagner. The coral reef
problem did not concern species origin or humankind’s descent. But it posed again the
evolutionary debate’s confounding questions about the importance of evidence, the proper
construction of theory, and the reliability of powerful but abstract ideas.
These were not marginal issues. Indeed, their reexamination during the Victorian era
allowed and often drove the great advances science made in the nineteenth century (and the
twentieth, for that matter) and helped solidify science as a separate discipline. For the five
centuries before the Victorian era, what we now call science– the analysis of how nature
works–had been known as natural philosophy, and it held strong links to theology; for many,
natural philosophy was simply the study of God’s natural works. It was only in the 1800s that