petri dish

hollow heads? science, fantasy, and what's as plain as the earth beneath our feet

Newton's Principia Mathematica is rarely remembered today for having sparked speculation that we all go about our days traveling across the shell of what is a hollowed out planet --  but the devoted Edmond Halley improvised just such a theory in 1691 from the Principia as he pondered the mysteries of why the earth's magnetic field changes and the nature of such phenomena as the northern auroras.

Normally, in our surveys of the scientific revolution, we speak of a grand astronomical sweep from Copernicus through Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes that culminates in Newton's restoration of the broken Aristotelian/Ptolemaic cosmos by mathematically divining the universal laws of nature. Halley himself poetically proclaimed the same, and gets recognition for wrestling the Principia out from Newton's study and into publication before the world -- and is noted as well for his own heavenly insights into the nature of comets, recognizing their elliptical periodicity and precisely identifying the cyclical nature of the one that now bears his name. If you're here on earth in 2061 you can see it come round once again . . . about 1000 years after its 1066 appearance, which was recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry, an eleventh century blog. But I digress.

Hollow earth speculation doesn't typically come up when teaching the scientific revolution, even if Halley in his venerable old age points us in this sober portrait not to look above for evidence of his achievements but to look below our feet, perhaps believing at age 80 that it wouldn't hurt to remind attentive minds of some unfinished business that could be taken on. . . not that what he had in mind was students in a 21st-century class in science and popular culture as his epigoni. As I plan for next fall's scipop class (now in improved, hybrid form!), I've been thinking a lot about the ambiguity that attaches itself to nearly every historical and contemporary episode we've grappled with in that class. The official version of the history of science carries with it the aura of progress over time. Science in the vernacular fits awkwardly within that sober frame, and instead tends to be presumed to display degeneration over time: witness the hollow earth, from Halley's hallowed hands to Saturday morning kid's teevee.  

In becoming acquainted with Halley beyond his normal orbit -- in his speculation on the interior physics of our terrestrial planet, and its possible habitation by hollow earth beings -- we followed along with the scheherazadean legacy of hollow-earth thinking as related by David Standish in his book The Hollow Earth. In contrast to the stern geometric proofs of the Principia, Halley's inner-space speculation appears as an eccentric footnote, but whether that's due more to 20th-century perspectives that encountered hollow earthism-primarily in the light of pulp fiction -- making Halley seem a bit too much like an early Edgar Rice Burroughs -- than to his arguments themselves is a fair question. But perhaps Halley can be indulged his hollow earth eccentricities, given his seventeenth-century context and his intrepid pursuit of the realities of magnetism, which was such a mysterious entity. As one present-day commentator suggests: "Today, of course, one can rather easily see the flaws with a hollow Earth theory, but no one can rightfully blame someone living in the seventeenth century for believing such nonsense, especially if it explained certain mysteries." Thus, with just a bit of well-placed condescension what might look like Halleyan nonsense remains respectable -- if a bit on the free-wheeling side of respectable -- and therefore a forefather of the scientific revolution can maintain his rational bona fides. Even still, I'm not betting any serious money on it turning up much in historical surveys of the scientific revolution.

Tales of a hollow earth persist through the next centuries in varying proportions of fact to fictionality (and despite little scientific support). Halley's idea of a race of rational beings populating the hollow space of the interior planet resonated with widely-current ideas up through the nineteenth century about God's omnipotence, in which it was presumed that planets that circle a sun must support sentient life, as does our Earth: God does nothing without purpose, and it is clear, therefore, that God would have placed life on other planets so that they would be inhabited in the same way as is our own -- "the plurality of worlds" hypothesis. (This idea can be seen in works that tackle scientific subjects such as The Christian Philosopher of 1721 by American Cotton Mather, the influential Puritan divine -- and Fellow of the Royal Society.) Mather's popularization of ideas about scripture and science were read well into the next generations, and is a likely source for sparking John Cleves Symmes, Jr.'s fascination with hollow earth theory. Symmes, a former U.S. army officer and frontier trader, began turning out circulars on behalf of hollow earthism in 1818 (with one sent direct to U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams), and spread the good news that the interior could be entered into via holes at the poles. He kept up a vigorous schedule of public talks across the young republic until his death in 1829. The mantle (so to speak ;-) for proselytizing the theory and drumming up support for polar exploration had fallen more and more to an acolyte of Symmes's, J.N. Reynolds, a gifted public lecturer, as was sketched in 1826 by a newspaperman in New York city:

A gentleman of this city, who, never having heard the theory of the concentric spheres properly explained, had always viewed it as the wild chimera of a half-disordered imagination, lately attended one of Reynolds' lectures. He went, as he himself confessed, in hopes of hearing something sufficiently absurd to give good exercise to his risibles; but soon felt more inclined to listen than to laugh, and by the time the discourse was finished, became a thorough believer in what he had lately derided. Such sudden conversions, perhaps, are not the most permanent; but they are sufficient to prove that the above theory is more worthy of investigation than ridicule. (Quoted in Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism, p. 125).

Reynolds would come to downplay the hollow earth / polar connection while becoming fired with even greater zeal for exploring the Antarctic regions as ends unto themselves, and he was so successful in selling the possibilities, that he convinced the Congress to fund an exploratory expedition to the regions of the southern polar seas, which set sail in 1838. Sachs sees Reynolds as a powerful embodiment of American Humboldtianism, and argues that it was Reynolds, "perhaps more than any other writer in the first half of the nineteenth century, [who] taught America the cosmopolitan value of seeing the world" (p. 21). But Reynolds's ideas  would reverberate transatlantically as well, if somewhat circuitously -- picked up at home by Edgar Allen Poe in some of his tales, and then translations of Poe's fiction into French caught the eye of Jules Verne, who would write Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864, adding a popular new conduit for hollow earth lore: with it as a foundation of the new (or, to us, classic) genre of science fiction.

Puritan approval, Congressionally-funded voyages, one of the first works of modern science fiction -- the culturally-woven threads of the webs that gird the hollow earth lie not neatly laid out like longitude and latitude, but look something rather disorienting instead, a crazy-quilt line of Brownian motion. Once you get into the middle of this all, how do you determine "what's the bottom line"? Standish, takes a cool-kid kind of stance, introducing his book by stating nonchalantly:

There have been many books recently about important ideas or commodities that have changed the world. This one, I am happy to say, traces the cultural history of an idea that was wrong and changed nothing -- but which has nevertheless had an ongoing appeal (in his Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth's Surface, p. 13).

The cultural history of scientific ideas that were wrong and changed nothing: in my darker moments, this characterization does seem indeed to capture the historical hamster-wheel that marks my scholarly preoccupations with science and popular culture. And yet. . .

The hollow-earth history actually led me back to a novel I'd forgotten about, which had first appeared anonymously, in installments, in the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper in 1880, and was published about a decade later in book form as Mizora (when the author was revealed to be Mary E. Bradley Lane, about whom little is known). In Mizora, Lane fashions an alternate female-only reality that exists inside the Earth (discovered by adventuring through the northern pole) in which science and technology have done away with the biological need for men for procreation, and which supports a utopian society. In some ways, the hollow earth setting can be seen as just another variation on the ancient dodge of fictional utopian islands, the point being the existence of some other unknown place beyond our sight where an author's idealized world can flourish. Worlds had been turned upside down before by social critics, and a world turned inside out was perhaps nothing much different. And yet. . .

I suspect that imaginings about alternative realities were quickened in the last centuries as the strangeness of the terraqueous globe on which we live began to be better-known and to come under livelier scrutiny. The fact that geology holds a less glamorous place in the hierarchy of the sciences in our own time obscures the fascination that pondering the mysteries of the planet which supports our own existence held in ages past. The vigorous trafficking in hollow-earth speculation in the 19th-century might well provide fertile ground for historians to capture glimpses of the ways in which new visions of an active terraqueous globe fascinated a wide range of people, who then turned their curiosity to imagining what sorts of changed environments would support changed forms of human beings, or of the ways in which ancient subterranean life and contemporary terran life might be connected. That is, hollow-earth tales and their ilk may well represent a kind of hidden history of science, where non-specialists play with a protean set of evolutionary-like ideas in public, impinging on the official story in unrecognized ways. Such stories little-resemble the kind of hoary historical set-pieces about evolutionary debate that populate casual remembrance, such as the anecdote about Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce monkeying around about who was on Darwin's team and why or why not. What did evolution from the people look like? Maybe some of the answers are right beneath our feet.

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For more: To delve back into the seventeenth-century debate on the plurality of worlds hypothesis, see Bernard de Fontenelle's charming introduction, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds from 1686, or satisfy your curiosity about what's known scientifically today about the earth's magnetosphere. For a quick explanation of the plurality of worlds hypothesis, see an essay from the Norton Anthology of English Literature. For a short explication of Halley and the hollow earth, see Patricia Fara, "Edmond Halley's last portrait," Notes Rec. R. Soc., 2006, 60:199-201. Professor Duane Griffin in the Geography Dept. at Bucknell has plumbed the scientific aspects of the hollow earth tales: see his "What Curiosity in the Structure: The Hollow Earth in Science" and "Hollow and Habitable Within: Symmes's Theory of Earth's Internal Structure and Polar Geography." Victorian science fiction as forgotten by historians of science is deftly described by Paul Fayter in "Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction," in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman. And yes, the Nazis had their own hollow-earth fantasies; that's a bridge too far for this post.

Images: The Halley portrait is from http://www.biographie.net/Edmond-Halley; the Bayeaux tapestry snip is from the wikipedia article on Halley's comet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tapestry_of_bayeux10.jpg; the Burroughs Tarzan hollow earth cover was from David Standish's book for posting here: http://archive.coasttocoastam.com/gen/page1558.html?theme=light; the Christian Philosopher title page is from the Open Library http://openlibrary.org/books/OL13520105M/The_Christian_philosopher; the last one is by William Reed, a latter-day Symmesian from 1906, posted at John Lienhard's Engines of Ingenuity site at http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2180.htm.

Note: Many of the links were updated and modified on September 4, 2018 | The entry was originally posted on June 12, 2011.

 

the beasts and the birds will teach thee

When you consider the magnitude of the increase in scientific knowledge and technological progress that marks the last century or so it seems logical to claim that "we live in an age of science and technology." At least, that's the conventional wisdom, and a point that Michael Shermer -- founding editor of Skeptic magazine, and the author of Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time -- argues for. And yet, if this actually is the case, he asks:

"why do so many pseudoscientific and non-scientific traditions abound?. . . One may rationalize that compared with the magical thinking of the Middle Ages things are not so bad. But statistically speaking pseudoscientific beliefs are experiencing a revival in the late 20th century" -- with astrology, ESP, communication with the dead and so forth being held as credible by large numbers of people, along with "other popular beliefs of our time that have little to no veracity in evidence includ[ing]: dowsing, the Bermuda triangle, poltergeists, biorhythms, creationism . . . UFOS, emotions in plants, life after death, monsters, graphology, crypto-zoology. . ."

In short, Shermer concludes that such excursions beyond the bounds of intellectual propriety "are more pervasive than most of us like to think, and this is curious considering how far science has come since the Middle Ages" [my emphasis]. This point is one that comes up frequently when the topic of science and popular culture is on the table, and seems so self-evidently sensible that nothing more need be said. But let's take a few minutes to look at the medieval and the modern together and consider some variations on this theme, using the circulation of bestiaries as our point of departure.

Bestiaries were illustrated books of creatures both common and fantastic that were enormously popular during the 12th and 13th centuries. These illustrations were accompanied by descriptions of the entries that combined natural history, legendary stories, and travelers' anecdotes and that imparted religious lessons in allegorical form. The rationale for treating animals in this way came from passages in the Bible that were read as indicating that God had given them particular characteristics that were to serve as lessons for how humans should conduct their lives; see, for example, Job 7:12: "But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the birds of the air, and they shall tell thee/ Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee." These lessons were imparted from animals known to exist in real life such as the peacock and the wolf, and others that were seemingly beyond the reality of everyday experience, such as the phoenix (illustrated above from the Aberdeen Bestiary): 

. . In addition to providing intriguing interpretations of animals, bestiaries offered tales about the existence of bizarre and loathsome creatures, many of which appeared in medieval art. The basilisk, for example, which was equated with the devil, could kill by its very smell, by a glance, or even by the sound of its hissing. The manticore, with the face of a man, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion, possessed a seductive voice likened to the sound of a fine flute. It represented the siren song of temptation that surrounded the Christian soul on its perilous journey through an earthly existence. [Melanie Holcomb, "Animals in Medieval Art," Metropolitan Museum of Art's Timeline of Art History.]

As intriguing as the strange creatures are that turn up in medieval bestiaries, it isn't surprising to modern eyes to find elements of the fantastic contained in what seemingly look like works of medieval natural history, since we assume that in an age of alchemy and astrology a belief in something that can't be captured or witnessed -- like unicorns -- is simply part of a pre-scientific, only partially logical mindset in which magical creatures could be imagined as existing somewhere off the known map in terra incognita. [This description is partly caricature -- in both the ancient and the medieval periods there were some who considered descriptions of such strange beasts to be nothing more than lies or tall tales, and viewed them with a skeptical eye.]

However, at the end of the 20th century on into our own time period, it would seem certain that we live in an "age of science," and that our society would have left such child-like fairy-tale imaginings behind us. Or . . . have we? Let's see what the fantastic birds and beasts contained in modern-day bestiaries can teach thee and me. . .

There are two paths to consider in thinking about "modern-day bestiaries." The first fork in the road leads to fantasy literature, films, and games (think Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft and such) which are enormously popular. These worlds of high fantasy feature magical and mythical zoologies populated by monsters and fabulous animals that make earlier bestiaries seem rather tame in comparison. While the modern-day bestiaries that accompany the worlds of Middle Earth and Dungeon gaming fill a niche designed for entertainment rather than instruction, it is interesting nonetheless to note how many hours that many moderns have spent with dragons and basilisks and elves -- no doubt more than most folks in the middle ages themselves would have. Another interesting aspect of the popularity of high fantasy in an age of science is the fact that fantasy as a genre outsells the literature of wonder that is supposed to be the companion of the rise of the scientific worldview in the 19th and 20th centuries: science fiction. You can find a number of places on the web where vigorous discussions have been held about the reasons why fantasy outsells science fiction (for example, here and here). A characteristic analysis that argues that many fans of fantasy are science/technology averse can be seen with this comment to a thread at sfsignal.com:

"Technology horrifies too many modern men, and our culture, as a whole no longer prizes the use of reason to solve problems. Fantasy is naturally a literature of the heart, in that it deals with problems solved by emotion, or faith, or magical thinking. Frodo does not outsmart Sauron: he prevails because his heart is pure, and because Supernatural Fate intervenes at the last moment. One might think fantasies like LORD OF THE RINGS would appeal only to the most nostalgic of conservative tastes: people who admired the romance and mystique of monarchy. But the sense that modern civilization has poisoned the Earth, that technology is Mephistopheles, that we all need to return to the Earth and Get Back to the Garden is a widespread idea among in academia and in Hollywood. These ideas have a natural resonance with a fairy-tale version of the middle ages: if only magic actually had worked, then we could all live as hobbits or elves, in union with nature, without the factory-smog of Mordor tainting the air."

David Brin, a science fiction author, agrees, in his article "J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress." Reflecting on the popularity of the high fantasy genre, he remarks:

"Indeed, the popularity of this formula is deeply thought-provoking. Millions of people who live in a time of genuine miracles -- in which the great-grandchildren of illiterate peasants may routinely fly through the sky, roam the Internet, view far-off worlds and elect their own leaders -- slip into delighted wonder at the notion of a wizard hitchhiking a ride from an eagle. Many even find themselves yearning for a society of towering lords and loyal, kowtowing vassals.

Wouldn't life seem richer, finer if we still had kings? If the guardians of wisdom kept their wonders locked up in high wizard towers, instead of rushing onto PBS the way our unseemly 'scientists' do today? Weren't miracles more exciting when they were doled out by a precious few, instead of being commercialized, bottled and marketed to the masses for $1.95?

Didn't we stop going to the moon because it had become boring?"

Brin goes on to cite a similar interpretation, from Vivian Sobchack, a professor of film and television studies at UCLA: "Change and technology are so pervasive a part of daily life that for the most part there's no magic to it anymore . . . The promise of science and technology has been normalized. The utopian vision we had didn't come to pass. The magic would have to come from somewhere else, and we found it in fantasy."

Our second path in thinking about "modern bestiaries" leads not away from science but toward science, in the form of what was christened in the 1950s as "cryptozoology": the study of hidden animals -- most famously, such contested entities as the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot. (These unverified critters are called "cryptids" by those who search for them.) Such (elusive? imaginary? mythical?) creatures are well-known beyond the crypto community, given their high-profile starring roles in many a cable special, not to mention untold numbers of newspaper and magazine articles. And these shadowy beasts have a whole new stomping ground in which to roam more widely than ever before, thanks to the ecology of the Internet.

Even though cryptozoology has failed to garner academic respectability, its enthusiasts nonetheless believe that the search for evidence of the existence of cryptids should be considered to fall within a generous understanding of what is meant by scientific exploration, or at least should be understood as proto-science. However, in a piece on the nature of cryptozoology and science, Ben Speers-Roesch notes that although "cryptozoology is usually held to be scientific by its practitioners," most professionals "find it difficult to call cryptozoology science, often with good reason -- much of cryptozoology is rife with credulous thinking and illogical conclusions." A particular problem in regard to its scientific status is the fact that much of the basis for cryptozoological investigations rests on eyewitness reports and anecdotal evidence, which are considered to be mushy grounds to stand on, scientifically.

Roesch argues that "the idea that giant unknown primates, living dinosaurs, huge thunderbirds, and lake monsters share the Earth with us are fantasies that are at odds with a great deal of accepted paleontological and zoological evidence" [my emphasis]. This recalls the remark above, that "fantasy is naturally a literature of the heart," and suggests that cryptozoological ventures, if driven by wishful hopes rather than objective reasons, are matters of the heart, not the head: how could they be scientific then, under any definition?

We are left therefore with the knowledge that an interest in creatures of dubious reality -- that nonetheless inspire wonder because of speculations about their fantastic natures -- is one with a long heritage, with dynamics still visible today, despite the fact that the spread of the scientific worldview should have encouraged us to move beyond an enthusiasm for the mysterious and incredible. How to explain this? Peter Dendle, in a literary exploration that compares medieval bestiaries with modern-day cryptozoological encyclopedias -- "Cryptozoology in the medieval and modern worlds" -- points out that indeed "No age has been without its share of hidden creatures, and confirmation of purported species has been a vital and consciously debated issue among the collectors of human knowledge for thousands of years." But a key difference between then and now is that, for the most part, professional science sees matters such as fantastic creatures as falling outside the realm of real knowledge, suitable only for the rubbish heap of pseudoscience:

"Whereas in the Middle Ages the educated scholar was as likely -- or as unlikely -- as an illiterate peasant to believe in a given unconfirmed species, in the post-Enlightenment world there is a conspicuous disconnect between academic science and popular belief on a surprisingly wide range of topics. The ubiquitous popular belief in ghosts, psychic ability, alien encounters, communication with the dead, and astrology, to name but a sampling of the 'paranormal,' documents a resistance to the canons of belief doled out by the orthodox structures of contemporary academic science."

In fact, Dendle argues (and note the similarity to the arguments above about fantasy),that "Cryptozoology thus fulfills an important role: it represents a quest for magic and wonder in a world many perceive as having lost its mystique."

In the Harry Potter books, the magical world exists not in some long-distant past time, but right alongside the non-magical world of modern-day ordinary folk, who are called "muggles." It's just that muggles can't see this world, since the wizarding community conceived of means to conceal it, including "all magical beasts, beings, and spirits," as described in Newt Scamander's (pseudonym of J.K. Rowling) Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (p. xvi). Magic is presumed not to exist, even though it surrounds the mundane world, the two intersecting only at odd times, as when the "world's largest kelpie continues to evade capture in Loch Ness [since it] appears to have developed a positive thirst for publicity" (p. xvii). Perhaps it's an apt metaphor for where we are today, presumably so long past the middle ages on into the "higher" ages: magic has seemingly disappeared from the cultural map, at least when a scientific overlay is placed on top of it -- and yet it exists even still, for those who have the inclination to spy out its traces on the palimpsest, making it part of their speculative lives, whether in terms of entertainment or their intellectual passions.

The question of what to make of the persistence of the fantastic, the magical, and the wondrous isn't going to be solved by consigning these facts of human life to the realm of pseudoscience. After a hundred years of working the problem that way, it doesn't seem to have borne much fruit. Like the medieval readers of the bestiaries, I think we will have to listen to the beasts and the birds, and try to discern what they have to teach us. To be continued, then . . .

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For more: Note: A recent report indicates that only 72% of Americans are scientifically illiterate today --  that is, unable "to understand approximately 20 of 31 scientific concepts and terms similar to those that would be found in articles that appear in the New York Times weekly science section and in an episode of the PBS program NOVA" -- as compared to 90% in 1988. At the same time, however, the survey reveals that there has been an "unsettling growth in the belief in pseudoscience." See also the chapter in the 2006 NSF Science and Engineering Indicators report on "Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Understanding." For historical background on, and examples of, bestiaries, in addition to the beautifully reproduced Aberdeen Bestiary noted above, see David Badke's The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages; the Getty Center's bestiary pages; the University of Wisconsin's reproduction of T.H. White's The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts (1960) -- which for a long while was the only English translation available of a medieval bestiary; and a recent exhibition on Bestiaries by the Bibliotheque nationale de France. It turns out that the phrase we all think appeared on early maps -- "here be dragons" -- is one of those historical myths that is hard to shake: see Erin C. Blake's essay, "Where Be 'Here Be Dragons'?" at maphist.nl (a discussion group on the history of cartography), and for more, see Michael Livingston's "Modern Medieval Map Myths: the Flat World, Ancient Sea-Kings, and Dragons" at strangehorizons.com. Don't know much about Dungeons and Dragons? Then catch up with Peter Bebergal's "How 'Dungeons' Changed the World" from the Boston Globe in 2004 (the 30th anniversary of D&D's introduction). For introductions to cryptozoology see here and here.)

Images: The phoenix picture from the Aberdeen Bestiary is located at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/comment/56rbirdf.hti; for the 1987 D&D pamphlet cover, see the Dungeons and Dragons online archive at http://home.flash.net/~brenfrow/dd/dd-ac10.htm; the Tolkien picture is the cover of The Tolkien Bestiary by David Day; and the Harry Potter book cover is from the UK -- a BBC Children's book: Harry Potter: Magical Creatures Hanging Pop-Up from amazon.co.uk http://www.amazon.co.uk/Harry-Potter-Magical-Creatures-Childrens/dp/1405902051. The "photo" of the Loch Ness monster, now largely held to be a hoax, is reproduced on the PBS companion website for the video "The Beast of Loch Ness," at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lochness/legend3.html.

amen and evolution

Okay, we're regrouping after spring break, and finishing up with some of our thinking about images of scientists, with a focus on the 1950s. One juxtaposition I thought I would try out this semester was science television for kids -- Watch Mr. Wizard, Don Herbert's classic series that ran from 1951 to 1964 in its initial incarnation -- and science television for grown-ups -- Frank Capra's Hemo, the Magnificent (1957), the second of three documentaries on current scientific knowledge that he wrote and directed (he also produced a fourth), underwritten by Bell Telephone Laboratories.

I still think it is an interesting pair to use as a point of comparison but we never got to that discussion because I ended up giving over more time to an aspect of Hemo that turned out to be really puzzling for those who watched it: the fact that a documentary on a scientific topic -- blood and human physiology -- contained a key subtheme about the compatibility of science and religion, and made a number of deliberate religious references that assumed both the correctness of evolutionary theory and its compatibility with a sense of the divine, and, indeed, with Christianity.

There's a lot going on in Hemo, but when I've shown it a time or two before what audiences usually find most startling are the religious references woven throughout the presentation, so I was prepared for that. But I haven't watched it with students since the recent ratcheting-up of the hostility toward the teaching of evolution that has re-emerged with such power due to the shift of framing opposition to evolution as promoting "intelligent design" (the period, for many of the students, of their junior high school and/or high school years). In discussing with my students how such a view as Capra's could seem commonsensical in the 1950s but so odd to our sensibilities today, it turned out that it was kind of hard for the students to find a way to begin to unravel the question because the existence of the film itself, with its easy self-assurance about the the mutual embrace of two realms most of the students have been continually told are at war with each other, seemed so improbable.

It was almost like we had come upon some strange creature out of a medieval bestiary that had a lion's head and a eagle's body and horse's legs or whatever -- a hybrid entity that shouldn't exist because it was full of category mistakes. But there it was, a memento of 1950s popular culture that reached a large and approving American television audience in its 9 p.m. broadcast slot on CBS (beating out the other shows on NBC and ABC) and that also had a vigorous afterlife on the a-v circuit in public schools throughout the U.S. (I first saw it myself in a high school physiology class in tenth grade, I think, circa 1974). But then Capra himself was a hybrid figure -- he earned an undergraduate degree from Cal Tech in chemical engineering in 1918, went on to a celebrated career in the arts as a film director, and was a deeply committed Catholic. (See the excellent chapter discussing Capra and the Bell Science films, "'Almost a Message From God Himself,'" in Jame's Gilbert's fascinating book, Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science / U of Chicago Press, 1997).

The plot structure of the film is that a writer has created a set of cartoon figures -- forest creatures and a Greek God, Hemo, who is the personification of blood -- who come to life on a "magic screen". These representatives of the "soul" (art, and poetry, and nature itself) interact with Mr. Fiction Writer (a cigarette-smoking shirtsleeves wise-guy type who stands in for the general public) and with Dr. Research (yes, that's his name . . . he is actually an English professor from USC named Frank Baxter, balding, bespectacled, dressed in a gray flannel suit), as we are guided through the technicalities of how our heart works and the ins and outs of the circulatory system. The topic wouldn't seem to lend itself to much more than a discussion of body mechanics (which it does, by creating a fascinatingly baroque world of anthropomorphized mechanical animations to display human physiology in all of its cyborg glory -- but that's another story for another day).

Christianity pervades Hemo in ways both large and small. The film is framed at the beginning and at the end by biblical quotations, opening with an epigraph from Leviticus: "For the Life of the Flesh is in the blood." It ends with Hemo making a grand declaration:

"One of your greatest physicists, Max Planck, said that over the temple of science should be written the words: 'Ye must have faith.' Your great Apostle Paul wrote to his new church in Thessalonica: 'Prove all things: hold fast that which is good.' A scientist says, 'have faith.' A saint says, 'prove all things.' Together they spell 'hope.'"

And there are side-by-side images of (St.?) Planck and (Dr.?) Paul (with a cross), emerging from a dark background as a radiant luminosity spills forth and a musical hallelujah chorus jubilates. Can I hear an amen? Amen. Thanks.

Even more interesting to me is how the core mythos of the film merges the scientific and the divine through the vehicle of the concept of humanity's ancient ocean ancestry. The pivotal moment in the film occurs when Hemo challenges Dr. Research to describe him correctly in two words or else reveal science's profound ignorance of the truth despite knowing many facts. Dr. Research's confident response is that "the two words that best describe you and connect you with the mystical origins and traditions of life are: sea water." He offers a theory that our bodily fluid possesses the same attributes "of sea water as it was nearly 400 million years ago when life emerged from the sea and began to crawl on land." He explains that:

'A billion and a half or two billion years ago life is presumed to have originated in the warmth of tropical waters as a minute single-celled aquatic organism . . . [this] primeval cell absorbed its food and oxygen directly from the sea and passed out its carbon dioxide and other wastes to the warm ocean. . . Then something wonderful happened, obeying a great plan not given to us to know, groups of these cells came together to live as colonies and new animals were born.'

As life evolved, so too did our internal bodily fluids, which allowed us to carry the sea that had birthed us at creation's beginning inside of ourselves, as we became kind of like living aquariums containing the Paleozoic sea for all time. As Dr. Research proclaims, "In the beginning, Hemo was the sea."

The idea of the oceanic origins of blood (and of life itself) is an extended sequence in the film, portraying a vision of how evolution proceeded, picturing as well the emergence of sea creatures onto land ("Obeying," Dr. Research relates, "some reason known only to God") as the progenitors (eventually) of human complexity. In response to this grand explanatory theme, Mr. Fiction Writer begins to glower and visibly tense up, you can just feel him itching for a cigarette :-) Greatly disturbed, he gets into Dr. Research's face, protesting: "Now wait a minute, Doc, wait a minute . . . are you trying to say that I'm descended from some kind of sea gnat?" He looks like he's ready to punch out the mild-mannered grandfatherly scientist then and there. Dr. Research reassures him that "you have a human spirit that separates you entirely from the animal world" (with a special dramatic emphasis on the word "human".) And here Mr. Fiction Writer relaxes, pleased, even as Hemo did when Dr. Research correctly identified his essential nature.

The scientist returns to the integrating oceanic rhetoric, summing up the intellectual journey he has taken us on by stating that "there is great mystery and great wonder in the fact that our body -- this temple of the spirit -- is built of billions of highly specialized individual cells like minute tropical sea animals." This extended sequence in itself secures the concept that the search for scientific knowledge is not a threat to religious sensibility as a foundational grounding, even if you had ignored the opening and closing scenes.          

As the students pointed out, it would certainly be unusual today for a science documentary to weave religious points throughout the presentation, as it is customary to say that the spiritual and the scientific belong in separate spheres -- an indication, perhaps, of how the early years of television had not settled into the status quo formats that would typify the science documentary genre we are more familiar with today through programs such as NOVA. One student suggested that perhaps the views presented of evolution and faith being compatible were mainstream views back a generation or so ago and might even be the same today -- perhaps it's not the people who changed, but the way the discussion is conducted. Another student, a zoology major, kept shaking his head and he gave a little laugh, explaining how odd it was to see the religious and the scientific brought side by side so graphically at the end with the figures of Planck and Paul . . . but that it also struck home deeply because it came close to describing his own perspective, one that he had never seen articulated so assertively in a public forum before.

When we think that there is only one story to tell -- that of a long endless war between evolutionary thinking and religious understanding -- we mischaracterize the complexity and the diversity of evolutionary ideas in popular culture from the 19th century on out. It almost felt to me this time that if I had described the film to my students, but didn't have it to show them as proof, they wouldn't have believed me that the "amen and evolution" presented in Hemo could have plausibly existed. "In the end," Gilbert notes, "Capra did not have to build bridges between science and religion; they were already there, and he had only to walk his films across them" (p. 223). Recognizing that this bridge in fact has existed in the not-so-distant past and then asking what happened to it is one of the historical questions bequeathed to us, and an example of why thinking about the issue of science and popular culture matters.

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For more: For a contemporary take on the Bell Science films, see David Templeton's "Weird Science? Are Dr. Frank Baxter and Those Wacky Bell Science Films Ready for a Comeback?" and for an historical analysis see Gilbert's book Redeeming Science, noted above. The films themselves are available on DVD from Image Entertainment (see also "Our Mr. Sun", Capra's first Bell science film, for similar themes to Hemo). For an excellent introduction to the scientific question of life arising from the oceans, see Carl Zimmer's At the Water's Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore and Then Went Back to Sea (Free Press, 1999). For a juxtaposition of what exists on both sides of the great divide in current views on evolution and religion, see a discussion of how evolutionary theory (the "e-word") is avoided in science teaching in Arkansas: Jason R. Wiles' thought-provoking exploration, "The missing link: Scientist discovers that evolution is missing from Arkansas classrooms", Arkansas Times, 3/23/2006) . . . and last year's opening of the Museum of Earth History in the Arkansan Ozarks, which contains exhibits that explain how dinosaurs lived in co-existence with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (and how some of the reptilian descendants later found room on Noah's Ark). The funding, design concept, and installation for the museum were provided by the Creation Truth Foundation of Noble, Oklahoma -- for more, see the press release.

Image: Still from Hemo, the Magnificent (animation by William T. Hurtz), http://www.cinefilevideo.com/images/content/hemo_the_magnificent.jpg