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riously fallible instruments. (Anyone 
who thinks that claims for direct obser- 
vation possess some special, irrefutable 
status should read Elizabeth Loftis’s 
chilling book on eyewitness testimony.) 
Paleontologists, accepting the reality of 
orthogenesis, were primed to believe 
in Gryphaea' s overcoiling; telegony 
seemed reasonable until Weismann 
challenged it seventy years later. Sec- 
ondly, facts achieve an almost immor- 
tal status once they pass from primary 
documentation into secondary sources, 
particularly textbooks. No medium is 
so conservative as the textbook; errors 
are copied from generation to genera- 
tion and seem to gain support by sheer 
repetition. No one goes back to discov- 
er the fragility of original arguments. 
I am not trying to convey the mes- 
sage that all knowledge is relative and 
that facts can never achieve universal 
approbation — quite the reverse. Rath- 
er, we have to distinguish which kinds 
of factual claims can achieve accep- 
tance and which must remain in limbo. 
The most troublesome facts are single 
cases — the offspring of Lord Morton’s 
mare, the overcoiling of one Gryphaea. 
We must, as William Bateson advised, 
“treasure our exceptions.” But we must 
also be aware that single cases are frag- 
ile, and that sturdy facts are pervasive 
patterns in nature, not individual pecu- 
liarities. Most “classic stories” in sci- 
ence are wrong. 
The need to distinguish sturdy fact 
(pervasive pattern) from shaky factual 
claim (single cases with dubious docu- 
mentation) has never been more evi- 
dent to me than in the current debate 
between evolutionists and those latter- 
day antediluvians who call themselves, 
in the nonsense phrase of the decade, 
“scientific creationists.” The fact of 
evolution is as sturdy as any claim in 
science (which does not mean that it is 
absolutely certain, because nothing is, 
aside from ignorant dogmatics). Its 
sturdiness resides in a pervasive pattern 
detected by several disciplines — for ex- 
ample, the age of the earth and life as af- 
firmed by astronomy and geology, the 
pattern of imperfections in organisms 
that record a history of physical de- 
scent (the primary contribution of biol- 
ogy and the theme of so many of these 
columns). 
Against this pattern, creationists em- 
ploy the destructive, shotgun ap- 
proach — presenting no testable alter- 
native but firing a volley of rhetorical 
criticism in the form of unconnected, 
shaky factual claims — a potpourri (lit- 
erally, a rotten pot, in this case) of non- 
sense that beguiles many people 
because it masquerades in the guise of 
fact and trades upon the false prestige 
of supposedly pure observation. 
The nihilistic strategy goes some- 
thing like this, and it forms effective, if 
ugly, rhetoric: this African carbon- 14 
date is way off, so radioactive decay 
can’t affirm the earth’s antiquity; these 
rocks from Colorado are younger than 
rocks piled on top of them, so geologi- 
cal succession does not record time. 
The individual claims are easy enough 
to refute with a bit of research. Crea- 
tionists themselves have been forced to 
retreat from the more embarrassing 
items. Noted creationist Henry Morris, 
for example, has often cited the sup- 
posed footprints of dinosaurs and hu- 
mans together in rocks of the Paluxy 
River of Texas. But creationist Leonard 
Brand attributes some of the “human” 
prints to erosion and others to a three- 
toed dinosaur. He also adds: “We do 
know that there was a fellow during the 
Depression who carved tracks.” 
Yet each time we explode one crea- 
tionist “fact,” two more are invented to 
take its place. Hercules finally killed 
the Lernaean Hydra, a beast with simi- 
lar tendencies toward proliferation 
after partial destruction. We can de- 
prive creationism of all intellectual re- 
spectability (though not, alas, of some 
popular appeal) by remembering that 
sturdy facts are built from widespread 
patterns and that coherence in struc- 
ture is the sign of strong arguments and 
theories. Unconnected, individual 
items remain shaky until they form a 
pattern or attain a confidence in indi- 
vidual documentation that neither te- 
legony nor overcoiling — not to mention 
any creationist claim — ever achieved. 
If shaky factual claims were always 
easy to dislodge, this column could end 
on a purely optimistic note. But teleg- 
ony lasted for seventy years, and the 
ghost of William Jennings Bryan again 
stalks our nation. If I end with mea- 
sured optimism, however, I do so in 
urging that we focus upon the second 
phrase of what may be Darwin’s most 
famous statement (from the Descent of 
Man): “False facts are highly injurious 
to the progress of science, for they often 
endure long; but false views, if support- 
ed by some evidence, do little harm, for 
every one takes delight in proving their 
falseness.” 
Stephen Jay Gould teaches biology, geol- 
ogy, and the history of science at Har- 
vard University. 
26 
