5. Norman
A quarry has been opened . . . and from it a
soft lime is taken for use as fertilizer and chicken feed
—J. J. Galloway
and S. G. Wissler
The slightly yellowed pages are
bound with a brown-orange heavy card stock cover held together with three brass
fasteners that can be slipped through holes then bent back to prevent them from
falling out. You can still buy these kinds of binders, and these kinds of
fasteners, in college bookstores, but this one was obviously purchased in the
1930s because of the student’s name inside. The course is Zoology 1 lab,
section 3, an introduction to animals, mainly invertebrates because most
animals are invertebrates—clams, oysters, crayfish, earthworms—plus the
requisite vertebrate, a frog, of course—and taken during a fall semester. This
lab notebook was graded four times. On October 12, it received an A-; on
November 8, November 28, and December 22, an A each time. A final grade on the
whole notebook was A. Some time between Christmas and three days prior, in
1932, someone studied this notebook very carefully and gave it the highest
grade possible.
There are no obvious erasure
marks on any of the drawings in this notebook. The lines are all exceedingly
fine, with no trace of wobble, no smudge, and no indication—as is so often the
case with students’ pencil sketches—that the artist was plagued by any sense of
uncertainty. He knew exactly how a frog’s liver lay exposed, exactly how a
starfish ovary looked, laid out from the clean cut along an ambulacral groove,
for these pictures were obviously made directly from specimens. The number five
drawing pencil was sharpened with a knife until the lead lay exposed, bare, for
a half inch. The lead itself was then filed to a needle-like point, probably
with an emery board. He drew until the lead was somewhat dull, until the line
itself stimulated some sense of imperfection, or violated intent, when it was
again filed to its characteristic point. He must have owned an eraser; it’s
just not obvious that he ever used it in his depictions of form. Nor is there
evidence in this archival set of drawings that the artist even considered the
possibility that these designs he was reproducing so faithfully, using only his
eyes and hands, were handiwork of a supernatural intelligence.
We do have some indication,
however, that his pencil habits were probably formed early because they were so
completely ingrained. Cleaning out what remains of John Janovy’s drawing
equipment, more than thirty years after his death, I find dozens of pencils,
the wood shaved, the lead exposed and filed to a needle point, in all kinds of
colors and degrees of hardness. I envision him shaving and sharpening these
pencils, carefully, exactly, over a wastebasket, all by himself, alone in an
office, no telephone, no radio, no noise whatsoever except the muffled sound of
traffic seven floors below, to distract a petroleum geologist from his
preparation of an instrument to draw a line on a piece of paper, a line that
reveals how convergence of natural processes leads to the production of those
magic resources that fuel tanks, sending them in a cloud of dust across some
desert terrain, or self-propelled howitzers dug in, lined up, covered with
camouflage netting, recoiling with their own internal explosions, or P-51
Mustangs screaming across the sky, or jeeps straight out of some Bill Mauldin
cartoon. With these finely sharpened pencils, having practiced earlier on frogs
and sea stars, he now studies rocks and draws the lines that point to oil.
Some time during the period from
1931 to 1935, he also sits down at a table in front of what is called a
“dissecting microscope.” If you are going to carefully cut up a mosquito,
taking its wings off, separating its leg joints, and finally pulling out its
salivary glands to see if it is infected with some malarial parasite, then you
need to do this work under magnification. And if you are going to dissect a
core from a mile below a Chambers County, Texas, oil well named Sun Oil #4 in
search of fossil amebas, you must have the same equipment. Jonathan Swift
either had such a microscope, or a fertile imagination, for his descriptions of
the Brobdingnabians’ skin as recorded by Gulliver on his travels among the
giants is remarkably close to what you see beneath the lenses, namely your own
fingers and nails magnified a couple of dozen times, holding tiny needles stuck
in a wooden handle, as you begin your dissection of an insect or a piece of
limestone. Ridges, fingernail cracks, hanging cuticle, a subtle array of human
skin colors to challenge all but the most exquisitely talented Renaissance
painters, all appear under magnification. ‘I do not look the same under this
lens,’ you think, ‘as I look in the mirror.’ Eyes to the microscope, you
realize that this is what you would look like to a beetle, if an insect could
see as clearly as J. Swift. The lens is both literal and metaphorical; your
magnified finger tells you something about yourself that you may not want to
know.
But John Janovy leaves no record
of what his cuticle looked like in 1933; no journal entries record his
introspective lapses, if there were any. Instead, we have the results of his
labor—slides of fossil amebas and ostracods, crustaceans no larger than the
amebas, all comprising data that if you know the rest of this geologist, you can
interpret easily as a lesson about how the world operates. Like a photograph
from the 1930s, hidden in not-quite-forgotten files while the decades slipped
away, or drawings from an undergraduate’s laboratory notebook, these specimens
are tangible evidence for a past, which in turn was a boundary condition for
one tiny component of life on Earth. The past as boundary condition is a
fundamental property of change directed either by choice, as in the case of
individual humans, or by contingency, as in the case of evolving populations,
species, and often nations. Was this lesson about boundary conditions the one
he was being taught in the early 1930, by some professor who’d assigned the
task, or is it one being taught, as I look at these slides seventy years later,
on a daily basis now that I’ve learned to see design as constraint?
It’s easy to answer “yes” to both
those possibilities. The slides are labeled with incomplete, thus tantalizing,
text such as Sun Oil #4 Chambers Barbers Hill 5075-5093 Het zone—indicating
a thin layer of limestone that begins 5075 feet beneath Houston and is characterized
so strongly by a single genus of ameba—Heterostegina—that
it’s commonly known among those learning how to search for oil as the “Het
zone.” What kind of upheaval events had our planet experienced between the
Oligocene interment of a shell barely visible to the unaided eye and its
retrieval, thirty million years later, by an American college student who saw
this activity as essential training if one has chosen finding petroleum as a
profession? The answer is simple: whatever events led to the formation of crude
oil a mile below Houston. And central to our understanding of this process
linking past to future is shape—morphology,
in the scientific vernacular—and a human’s ability to interpret such shape, put
the image into a context built from existing knowledge, and derive from the
beast in its setting a decision that leads to oil. So here we have the meaning
of visual literacy. We see the world, we interpret the vision—understanding the
constraints and opportunities—and then we infer process; then predict future
and, if we can convince someone to give us enough money, we act on our
predictions. Did John know, back in 1933, he was both learning and preserving,
thus passing on, this lesson about how to make a living from the natural world?
I doubt it, but want to believe the answer to this question, too, is “yes.”
If there is any larger reason for
studying the design of ameba shells, it is the broad applicability of this principle:
details and settings may vary, but historical processes tend to be universal,
rather like physical laws. Thus by resurrecting one Oklahoma geologist’s
formative experiences we are reminded of those two basic views of the future,
each demanding a different strategy for arriving in that distant region: there is one, and we must find our place in
it, or, conversely, there is none and
we must therefore build it. John Janovy was clearly of the latter mind.
Evolutionary principles are integral to this vision of what lies ahead. And
among the specimens on a single slide, retrieved from a dusty shoebox in a
garage closet nearly half a century after it was made, are the examples that
teach us creativity. How do amebas, over time, convert a single hollow calcareous
chamber into a diverse array of containers, each with multiple chambers,
assemblages that defy understanding without their development revealed? Again,
the answer is easy to provide but difficult to make happen: play all those
possible variations on a theme and see which ones work. In this case, however,
amebas have engaged, over the previous thirty million years, in the
“evolutionary play upon the ecological stage”—to paraphrase G. Evelyn
Hutchinson’s famous and compelling metaphor.
The theme of these amebas is a
series of chambers, each somewhat larger than the preceding one, secreted by a
single-celled eukaryotic organism, i.e., a cell with a well-formed nucleus
bounded by membranes and containing the instructions, written in DNA, needed to
build a design from calcium carbonate and silicon. The chambers are connected
to one another, and it is tempting to attribute their increasing size to
“need;” i.e., as it grows, the ameba gets larger, thus “needs” a bigger place
in which to live, a larger room for protection. That is a human interpretation
of causality imposed on a single cell floating in the ocean, catching prey with
sheets of filamentous cytoplasm spread out in a microscopic net. There is
absolutely no way to assess the “needs” of amebas except in biochemical terms:
a mixture of pre-formed carbohydrates, amino acids, vitamins, and inorganic
minerals. At this level, the “needs” of an ameba are equal to the “needs” of a
tiger or of the neighbor children playing in a yard across the street. They need
food and water and time, and at the molecular level, “food” is about the same
regardless of whether you catch it in the ocean, or in the jungle, or buy it at
Wall Mart.
The idea of growth being coupled
with a continuing “need” for protection and chambers of increasing size—a
succession of rooms of one’s own—is a concept we impose on a part of nature we
do not know well, if at all. The ancient shells beneath John’s microscope,
however, remind us that although the designs could be, and probably are, tightly
coupled to the amebas’ existence, they also are as diverse as the choices by
which humans build their dwellings. Thus we have the concept of variations on
this theme, and indeed, on any theme, regardless of whether we understand the
underlying causality. In the case of marine amebas, the themes are as follows,
although they are much better illustrated than described: a linear series of
chambers, increasing in size; two linear series attached, and increasing in
size in phase, a coiled set of chambers reminiscent of a Nautilus shell, an agglomeration of globular chambers, grape
cluster-like, but again with chambers of increasing size, a plan in which
succeeding chambers surround and overgrow their existing predecessors, in
effect hiding what’s happened before, to name but a few of the common
variations. If John Janovy taught his son anything as a result of this
posthumous interaction with his college lab specimens, it’s to be patient with,
even appreciative of, extreme diversity. Homogeneity is boring; heterogeneity
is interesting, and microscopic invertebrates are extremely heterogeneous. That
is the take home lesson that survives through the decades when a college kid
decides to, or is allowed to, keep his amebas and eventually give them to his
own child.
These ocean-dwelling amebas thus
provide an easy step into the realm of shape, both literal—the shape of a salt
dome, the shape of a purse, the shape of a woman’s body—and metaphorical—the
shape of the future. That is, we are ready to examine the matter of design in
its most general sense, i.e., the sense that we suspect occupied John’s mind
even as a college student, his eyes glued to the oculars and his magnified
fingers sorting through the dust for fossils. Thus the phrase “these are but a
few of the common variations” could apply easily to all facets of human
existence—war, sex, politics, agriculture, medicine, financial transactions,
paintings of nudes, landscape photographs, basketball games, marriages and
other seemingly committed relationships, diseases, boy-meets-girl
(boy-meets-boy; girl-meets-girl) fiction, murder, unwanted pregnancy, and the
decision-making behavior of elected officials or others with power over the
common good. Like a growing young individual Heterostegina reticulata, adrift in prehistoric oceans that would
eventually become known as the Mediterranean Sea, the “house” you build is the
“house” you live in, and with. The shape of that ameba’s house is, however,
inherited, at least within limits; but the issue for John at his microscope is
whether the shape of whatever house he intends to build, within the house built
for him by the decisions of powerful men of his time, must be as fixed as a set
of genes would dictate.
(JJJr’s note: the “powerful men
of his time” included Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and
Winston Churchill).
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