This View of Life 



The Persistently Rat Earth 



Irrationality and dogmatism are foes of both science and religion 



by Stephen Jay Gould 



The mortal remains of the Venerable 

 Bede (673-735) lie in Durham Cathedral, 

 under a tombstone with an epitaph that 

 must win all prizes for a "no nonsense" ap- 

 proach to death. In rhyming Latin dog- 

 gerel, the vault proclaims: Hac sunt in 

 fossa, Baedae venerabilis ossa — "the 

 bones of the Venerable Bede lie in this 

 grave" (fossa is, literally, a "ditch" or a 

 "trough," but we will let this gentler read- 

 ing stand). 



In the taxonomy of Western history that 

 I learned as a child, Bede shone as a rare 

 light in the Dark Ages between Roman 

 grandeur and a slow medieval recovery 

 culminating in the renewed glory of the 

 Renaissance. Bede's fame rests upon his 

 scriptural commentaries and his Historia 

 ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesias- 

 tical History of the English People), com- 

 pleted in 732. Chronology sets the basis of 

 good history, and Bede preceded his great 

 work with two treatises on the reckoning 

 and sequencing of time — De temporibus 

 (On Times) in 703, and De temponim ra- 

 tione (On the Measurement of Times) in 

 725. 



Bede's chronologies had their greatest 

 influence in popularizing our inconvenient 

 system of dividing recent time into B.C. 

 and A.D. on opposite sides of Christ's sup- 

 posed nativity (almost surely incorrectly 

 determined, as Herod had died by this 

 time of transition and could not have seen 

 the Wise Men or slaughtered the innocent 

 at the onset of year one). In his chronolo- 

 gies, Bede sought to order the events of 

 Christian history, but the primary motive 

 and purpose of his calculations centered 

 on a different, and persistently vexatious, 

 problem in ecclesiastical timing — the 

 reckoning of Easter. The complex defini- 

 tion of this holiday — the first Sunday fol- 

 lowing the first full moon that occurs on or 

 after the vernal equinox — requires consid- 



erable astronomical sophistication, for 

 both lunar and seasonal cycles must be 

 known with precision. 



Such computations entail a theory of 

 the heavens, and Bede clearly presented 

 his classical conception of the earth as a 

 sphere at the hub of the cosmos — orbis in 

 medio totius mundi positus (an orb placed 

 in the center of the universe). Lest anyone 

 misconstrue his intent, Bede then explic- 

 itly stated that he meant a three-dimen- 

 sional sphere, not a flat plate. Moreover, he 

 added, our planetary sphere may be con- 

 sidered as perfect because even the highest 

 mountains produce no more than an im- 

 perceptible ripple on a globe of such great 

 diameter. 



I also once learned that most other ec- 

 clesiastical scholars of the benighted Dark 

 Ages had refuted Aristotle's notion of a 

 spherical earth and had depicted our home 

 as a flat, or at most a gently curved, plate. 

 Didn't we all hear the legend of Columbus 

 at Salamanca, trying to convince the 

 learned clerics that he would reach the In- 

 dies and not fall off an ultimate edge? 



The human mind seems to work as a 

 categorizing device (perhaps even, as 

 many French structuralists argue, as a di- 

 chotomizing machine, constantly parti- 

 tioning the world into dualities of raw and 

 cooked [nature versus culmre], male and 

 female, material and spiritual, and so 

 forth). This deeply (perhaps innately) in- 

 grained habit of thought causes us particu- 

 lar trouble when we need to analyze the 

 many continua that form so conspicuous a 

 part of our surrounding world. Continua 

 are rarely so smooth and gradual in their 

 flux that we cannot specify certain points 

 or episodes as decidedly more interesting, 

 or more tumultuous in their rates of 

 change, than the vast majority of moments 

 along the sequence. We therefore falsely 

 choose these crucial episodes as bound- 



aries for fixed categories, and we veil na- 

 mre's continuity in the wrappings of our 

 mental habits. (If I may venture into a 

 "hot" area mentioned before in these 

 columns, the abortion debate in contempo- 

 rary America suffers greatly under this 

 ertor when partisans try to find a moment, 

 usually construed as fertihzation, for the 

 unambiguous origin of a human being. 

 But no such moment exists in this true 

 continuum; fertilization may be a more in- 

 teresting episode than most, but so is the 

 initiation of quickening, or the first per- 

 ceived motion of the fetus in the womb — 

 and quickening set the favored criterion of 

 personhood through most of classical and 

 ecclesiastical history.) 



We must also remember anoflier insidi- 

 ous aspect of our tendency to divide con- 

 tinua into fixed categories. These divisions 

 are not neutral; they are established for 

 definite purposes by partisans of particular 

 viewpoints. Moreover, since many con- 

 tinua are temporal, and since we have a 

 lamentable tendency to view our own age 

 as best, our divisions often saddle the past 

 with pejorative names, while designating 

 successively more modem epochs with 

 words of light and progress. As an obvious 

 example, many people (including yours 

 truly) view die great medieval cathedrals 

 of Europe as the most awesome of all 

 human constructions. (For me — and I say 

 this as a humanist and nontheist — 

 Chartres is off-scale, a place of mystery 

 and magic, not truly of this world. 

 Chartres is not just better than Amiens or 

 Rheims or Notre Dame de Paris.) Yet we 

 designate the style of these buildings as 

 "Gothic" — originally a pejorative term 

 (traced to seventeenth-century origin in 

 the Oxford English Dictionary) apphed by 

 self-styled sophisticates who viewed me- 

 dieval times as a barbaric interlude be- 

 tween the classical forms of Greece and 



12 Natural History 3/94 



