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Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, aligned himself with President Bush when he said "the theory of intelligent design as well as evolution should be taught in public schools." (1)
He had predecessors:
Mr. Scopes, the jury has found you guilty under this indictment, charging you with having taught in the schools of Rhea County ... a theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man, and teaches instead thereof that man has descended from a lower order of animals. (Verdict rendered by Judge John T. Raulston in trial of Tennessee v. John Scopes, July 17, 1925.) (2)
We say, pronounce, sentence, and declare that you Galileo ... have rendered yourself in the judgment of this Holy Office vehemently suspect of heresy, namely ... that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world ... Consequently we order that the book Dialogue of Galileo Galilei be prohibited by public edict. We condemn you to formal imprisonment in this Holy Office. (Judgment of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, August 22, 1633.) (3)
President Bush and Dr. Frist (Harvard Medical School, 1978) have been far more tolerant than their predecessors in dictating the texts of science. After all, they didn’t put Darwin’s On the Origin of Species on the Index of Forbidden Books or sentence James Watson to Gitmo. Nevertheless, most scientists remain persuaded that intelligent design is a euphemism for creation science: mutton served as lamb. One suspects that if the Holy See had not forgiven Galileo in 1993, our leaders might insist that American children be taught that the sun revolves around the earth—taught alongside Galileo’s heliocentric theory, of course.
That’s not such a far-fetched notion. We might recall that it took 23 years for the Supreme Court (Epperson v. Arkansas, 1968) to decide that it was unconstitutional for a state, "to prevent its teachers from discussing the theory of evolution." (4)
We might also recall that in 1663 the Inquisition forced Galileo to recant. Riddled with gout and beaten in spirit, the 70 year-old astronomer withdrew.
My false opinion that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable ... and that the Earth is not the center of the same and that it moves ... and after it had been notified to me that said doctrine was contrary to Holy Writ. (5)
It wasn’t the first time Galileo had been accused of heresy. Twenty years earlier Galileo had obtained evidence that Copernicus was right; he’d based his conclusions on telescopic images of sunspots projected on sheets of white paper. In the course of these heretical observations, he was drawn into the ranks of the world’s first scientific academy, Prince Frederigo Cesi’s Accademia dei Lincei (the Lynxes), founded in 1603. As the sixth member of the Lynxes, Galileo sought Cesi’s help in publishing his discovery, but ran into censorship problems with his History and Demonstrations Concerning Sunspots and their Phenomena. Cesi suggested publication of the sunspot observations in the form of letters addressed to another Linceian, Marcus Welser of Augsburg. Looking for an epigraph that might mollify the clerics, Galileo had counted on a passage on the Heavens from Matthew to do the trick—that didn’t work. Cesi then advised Galileo to duck under the censorship bar by omitting scriptural references altogether, and a quotation from Horace was substituted (6)
. With Horace at the mast, the sunspot letters were published in 1613 under the imprint of the Linceian Academy and soon "brought the question of the earth’s motion to the attention of practically everyone in Italy who could read." (7)
It is not by chance that Galileo picked Horace’s "Ode on Endurance" (Book III, Ode II) to introduce his volume.
Virtus, recludens immeritis mori
Caelum, negata temptat iter via,
Coetusque vulgaris et udam Spernit humum
fugiente pinna. (8)
(But Worth opens wide the gates of heaven
to those who have done immortal things.
Escaping the masses and damp earth itself,
Worth raises the worthy on beating wings.)
Ever since the Renaissance, Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65–8 BCE) has been a favorite poet of rational minds. One hopes he will remain so in our era of Dr. Frist, to remind us of what was lost when the Dark Ages eclipsed the glory that was Greece and the Grandeur that was Rome. Happily, Horace was revived when monkish dogma yielded to the New Science of the 17th century. In his 1620 manifesto, The Great Instauration, Francis Bacon echoed Horace:
For I admit nothing but on the faith of eyes, or at least of careful and severe examination, so that nothing is exaggerated for wonder's sake, but what I state is sound and without mixture of fables or vanity (9)
The "faith of the eye" is a paraphrase of Horace’s allusion to the eye of the lynx, the animal with the keenest vision (6)
. The faith of the eye, a reliance on the evidence of things newly seen, connects Galileo Galilei with Robert Hooke, the microscope with the telescope, and Italian fossils with the origin of species. The faith of the eye also connects the first two societies of experimental science, the Lincei of Rome (1603) with the Royal Society of London (1662). How apt, then, that Horace also provided the motto of the Royal Society as the Great Instauration became the New Science. Nullius in Verba, the motto of the Royal Society to this day, derives from Horace’s "To Maecenas," a skeptic’s creed if ever there were one:
Ac ne forte roges quo me duce, quo lare tuter,
nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri,
quo me cumque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes. (10)
(And if by chance you ask what direction I follow,
I am bound by the words of no master,
and will tack through the storm to safe harbor.)
Hooke’s Micrographia, published by the Royal Society in 1665, sports on its title page a further quote from Horace’s First Epistle:
Non possis oculo quantum contendere Linceus, non
tamen idcirco contemnas lippus inungui ... (10)
(While your eyes can’tmatch the vision of a lynx,
you’ll salve them with medicine when swollen.)
The epigraph is a clear tribute by the Royals to their predecessors, the Lynxes of Rome. Indeed, Hooke’s Micrographia is a record of observations made of creatures great and small with the microscope, an instrument that extends the range of the human eye to rival that of the lynx. When Hooke introduced the results of his research to the public, he again paid homage to Galileo, the Celestial Observer:
For the members of this Society having before their eyes so many fatal instances of the errors and falsehoods, in which the greatest part of mankind has so long wandered, ... have begun anew to correct all Hypotheses by sense, as seamen do their dead Reckoning by Coelestial Observations; and to this purpose it has been their principal indeavour to enlarge & strengthen the Senses by Medicine, and by such outward Instruments as are proper for their particular works. By this means they find some reason to suspect that those [phenomena] confessed to be occult, are performed by the small machines of Nature. (11)
The outward instrument Hooke used to examine the small machines of nature in Micrographia was the compound microscope. With it, Hooke first saw that living matter (i.e., cork) was partitioned into smaller units that resembled the cells of monks. That’s how cell biology began. The instrument he used was a version of one that Galileo had introduced fifty years earlier and called an occhialino, and for which Galileo’s fellow Lincean, Giovanni Faber, had proposed the name we recognize today, Microscopium (1625) (12). Later that year Francesco Stelluti, another Linceian, made the first engravings of natural structures obtained by means of the new instrument: detailed and still ravishingly beautiful images of bees in his Melissographia (13). Stelluti, more politic by far than Cesi or Galileo, dedicated his folio to Pope Urban VII of the Barberini family, whose family distintivo(coat of arms) sported honeybees.
Hooke appreciated that the Lynxes were first on the micrographical map and gave "Francisco Stelluto" full credit, in the course of correcting Stelluti’s notions of how fossils arose (14)
. With Cesi, Stelluti had collected many hundreds of specimens of fossil woods, animals and pyrites, and on Cesi’s death—the year of Galileo’s trial—published a small volume based on their joint studies, Trattato del Legno Fossile Minerale. Stelluti claimed that fossils were not generated from of any plant or living thing, but only from a type of clay, which slowly became transformed into wood (15)
. Stelluti’s notion that fossils were never alive may—or may not—have been designed to placate the Inquisition. We’ll never know; Intelligent Design had laid down the law: life came from clay. In contrast, Hooke correctly deduced that living things fossilized in the Umbrian rocks of "Spolleto"—or elsewhere—might be traces of vanished life: life turned into clay or stone. We now appreciate that the Stelluti/Hooke controversy was the beginning of the search for the origin of species: what we now call the fossil evidence for evolution. That line of investigation led to Darwin in Down House and to John Scopes down home in Tennessee.
In the hands of Linceans and Royals, telescope and microscope were the tools that made it possible to decipher the small machines of nature. Nowadays, the tools we use are legion. Look at the abundance of figures and tables printed in any issue of The FASEB Journal. What a feast is presented to "careful and severe examination" à la Hooke! Look at those gene sequences spilled from machines, the fluorescent transgenes traced in living cells, the X-ray diffraction patterns or those NMR squiggles, the microchips and FISH! Our charge as scientists is to keep the faith of the eye, the oculo quantum Linceus, as opposed to "exaggeration for wonder’s sake." In the sphere of art and belief, a sense of intelligent design may have inspired masterpieces like the Bach B-Minor Mass or the Sistine Chapel. But, ever since Galileo, the notion of intelligent design has lost its place in the universal sphere of science. Nullius in verba magistri, say we.
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