Editorial

(From 'Charnia' Newsletter, Spring 2004)

There’s always a sense of schadenfreude in not being the last person to get a joke or some fine point in a discussion, though I was annoyed with myself recently to learn that I hadn’t realised why the ammonite genus Hildoceras was so named. The cover of the previous issue of ‘Charnia’ bore a reproduction of a group of fossils found and drawn by Robert Hooke, published posthumously in 1705, though written and etched prior to 1668. Hooke (1635-1703) was a brilliant English polymath who contributed far more than has been realised to science and other fields of discovery. It seemed to me that Hooke really did have some idea about what fossils really were and that he had an understanding about Earth processes.

Voice an opinion contrary to biblical flood myths and you would find yourself accused of heresy and things would soon become very hot for you! So exactly when did free-thinking Earth scientists first evolve? There was a Professor of Chemistry at Oxford, called Robert Plot, who published ‘The Natural History of Oxfordshire’ in 1677. In this scholarly work are Plot’s beautiful drawings of fossils. Sadly, his interpretations of these remains were tainted by prevailing antediluvian and biblical flood mythology. His interpretations may amuse us now, particularly the part of a Megalosaurus thigh bone, which he saw as a exceptional soft-tissue preservation of a pre-Noachian flood human giant, aptly named at the time Scrotum humanum.

So, what made Robert Hooke so unique and why do we appear to know so little of his accomplishments? A student of A-level biology might just know of Hooke’s ‘Micrographia’ if their text contains a reproduced engraving of a flea, published in 1665 and an attentive GCSE science student might be able to tell you something about Hooke’s Law and spring-stretching. Hooke’s output was astounding, yet so little direct evidence survives today.

In 1657 Hooke worked as Robert Boyle’s paid assistant and devised atmospheric pumps. In 1658 Hooke claims to have invented a spring-regulated watch, an invention conventionally credited to Thomas Tompion. Hooke claimed this timepiece as a ‘longitude’ watch – anticipating the Harrison marine chronometer by quite a margin. In addition to spring regulation the timepiece also had a device for stabilising the pendulum in rough motion. In 1663, Hooke was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Hooke and the title page of his most famous book

I am unable to list Hooke’s accomplishments due to lack of space and time. Believe me, the man was highly gifted and a popular figure about London town. He was ultimately in the company of the best of Restoration England and though not gifted with the good looks of his close friend Christopher Wren, he was just as popular. In fact Hooke was pale of complexion, chinless, had a largish head with a mop of long and lank hair, which frequently fell across his face, and also had a pronounced stoop. This description comes from John Aubrey’s ‘Brief Lives’. In fact Aubrey was not in the business of flattery, describing further Hooke’s facial features thus: ‘…his eie full and popping, and not quick.’ Aubrey did say, however, that ‘In fine (which crowns all) he is a person of great suavity and goodness’ and that ‘He is and ever was very temperate’.

In spite of this we know that Hooke was in demand with the ladies and we know what he got up to with his friends Nell, Doll, Betty and Grace (his niece!) from his detailed diary entries. Readers of ‘Charnia’ will be spared the prurient details ..! All in all, our Robert was a bit of a lad and after discussions, experiments and what have you at Gresham College, Hooke and his friends would slope off down the road for a jar or two at the Castle Tavern. Gresham College was founded in 1597 through the legacy of Thomas Gresham to establish a venue for educational lectures for the benefit of local townspeople. Thus, Gresham’s former townhouse eventually became the HQ of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge in 1660.

You can bet your life there was one chap who didn’t get invited to the Castle after Royal Society discourses and that was one Isaac Newton. Newton cared little for socialising and such trivia, neglecting personal appearance and regular meals. Voltaire wrote this interesting description of Newton: ‘Sir Isaac, during the long course of years he enjoyed was never sensible to any passion, was not subject to the common frailties of mankind, nor ever had any commerce with women.’ Well, there you go, just in case you thought that he and Hooke might get on famously, swapping notes, etc.

Why didn’t Newton fit in and where’s this all leading, geologically speaking? Newton was insanely jealous of others’ scientific accomplishments and would do anything to stifle, suppress or sabotage anything that took away the limelight that Newton felt should fall on him. Revenge was a key aspect of Newton’s personality and he didn’t take kindly to criticism, no matter how constructive. In many biographies you’ll find phrases such as ‘Robert Hooke was an opponent of Newton.’ I don’t think that this was the case at all. The more I read about Newton the man the more convinced I become that he was a Grade ‘A’ case of Asperger’s Syndrome

Hooke microscope (c. 1670) and famous flea illustration from 'Micrographia'

Following Robert Hooke’s death in 1703 Newton took over the Presidency of the Royal Society and immediately made plans to move the Society from Gresham College. David and Steven Clark, in their book ‘Newton’s Tyranny’ (Freeman 2001, ISBN 0-7167-4215-2) describe Newton’s actions: ‘He wanted to remove any obvious association of the society with the memory of his late enemy. In this he succeeded. Hooke, one of the great polymaths of a creative age, was forgotten after his death. And this was in large measure due to Newton’s deliberate actions to expunge his works from the consciousness of the Royal Society and thereby from the world of science. Even Hook’s likeness was removed. When the Royal Society was based at Gresham College and prior to Newton’s presidency, a splendid portrait of Hooke had adorned the wall of the society’s meeting room. But this portrait “mysteriously” disappeared in the move of the society to its new premises… Magnificent instruments Hooke had made for the Royal Society – a microscope, lamp, air pump, and arithmetic engine – were also removed from the society. It seems likely that the actions taken to deny Robert Hooke his place in the history of science were the work of Isaac Newton.’ Even here we find that Hooke is described as Newton’s ‘enemy’; I think the term ‘victim’ is more apt.

To make a sweeping generalisation, the male-gender brain is hard-wired for systematising and the female-gender brain for empathising. OK, blokes like to tinker around with mechanisms, such as car engines, or build working models of windmills, etc. and women have highly developed communicating skills required for understanding relationships and winning friends. Asperger sufferers have the male-gender trait developed to pathological extremes. Mild adult cases can often be seen with notebooks and cameras at the far end of railway platforms or peering through aerodrome perimeter fences. These mild cases can often develop ‘collecting’ and other obsessions to extremes. Newton, it seems, had this autistic spectrum disorder and had few or no social skills; a real Norman Bates – No Mates – character and it is to this man that we owe our ignorance of Robert Hooke’s genius for well nigh three hundred years. For example, Hooke developed a calculating engine well before Leibnitz and certainly well before Babbage. Had this contrivance and its design not been trashed by Newton, western science would have no doubt proceeded apace.

Much is now coming to light about Robert Hooke, thanks to researchers such as Stephen Inwood (cf. ‘The Man Who Knew too Much’, MacMillan 2003, ISBN 0-333-78286-0). Hooke was born in 1635 at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. How could anyone coming from such a place not conceive of the Earth’s sedimentary strata as being history read as the pages of a book? Hooke never doubted that the ‘formed stones’ (i.e. fossils) were the remains of former living creatures. In 1668 Hooke delivered to the Royal Society his ‘Lectures and Discourse on Earthquakes’. His theory of the piling-up of sediments and their subsequent collapse or slippage was an attempt to describe earthquakes. He also described uplift and erosion and thus demolished the myth of the biblical flood in that he formed a theory as to why marine fossils could be found inland. After all, he had observed fossil shellfish remains high in the rocks of the Downs on the Isle of Wight. Hooke suggested that it would be possible to ‘raise a chronology out of and… state the intervals of the times wherein such… Catastrophes and Mutations have happened.’ Here then is the true father of historical palaeontology. Perhaps we should thank Newton for the fact that Hooke wasn’t persecuted as a heretic!

The one great geological contemporary of Hooke was the Dane, Nils Steensen, aka Niklaus Steno. Steno carried out fieldwork on fossil successions in Italy though was constrained by his strong religious convictions to condense his geological time scale to fit Old Testament ‘facts’. Steno soon after abandoned geology and became a priest and so concepts such as the Noachian Flood won. Steno, like Hooke, did however establish the principle of superposition.

Niklaus Steno

In the 1300s the Frenchman Jean Buridan suggested that earth history had a cycle of ‘a hundred thousand million years perhaps’ and that this amount of time was ‘required for all the planets, stars, sun and moon to return to their original configuration in the sky’. That’s refreshing thinking in an era when English monarchs (well, one anyway) met their demise through the insertion of a red hot poker in their fundament – it was also dangerous thinking when biblical orthodoxy came down like a ton of bricks on anyone who dared to suggest that the natural order of things was other than the printed dogma of the bible. This French philosopher is perhaps best known for ‘Buridan’s Ass’; this concerns a theoretical and potentially starving donkey and if you want to know more you’re going to have to look it up yourself! Suffice to say that Buridan was a student of William of Ockham, of Occam’s Razor fame.

Was Robert Hooke familiar with Buridan’s writing? Hooke was an avid bibliophile and the answer is perhaps ‘yes’.  Buridan destroyed the Aristotelian idea that Earth history repeated on a 36,000 year cycle. Buridan’s reasoning was that a quarter of this cycle of change would be expected since the time of the Ancient Egyptians. Obviously, in 6,000 years historical records show no major orogenies, transgressions or recessions. Hooke developed theories concerning such time frames and polar wandering due to precession. The Monument in Pudding Lane, London, was Hooke’s observatory for the measurement of this phenomenon. Not so long ago, Section C listened to a talk linking precession and other Earthly wobblings to repeated sedimentary deposition and climatic patterns

The original Gresham College before it was demolished

Now, let’s see if we can get back to the plot, if there ever was one. Gresham College exists today, though at premises in Holborn. The original college, which survived the Great Fire, has long gone and stood close to where the Westminster Tower is today, at the corner of Old Broad Street and Wormwood Street. The Royal Society’s HQ today is at Burlington House, off Piccadilly and was in the news recently over the non-appointment of Lady Susan Greenfield, baroness and Member of the House of Lords. Susan Greenfield is perhaps better known as Director of the Royal Institution and Oxford Professor of Pharmacology and for her work on Alzheimer’s disease. Lady Greenfield’s rejection by the Royal Society was the only name to be leaked from the 535 original nominations for this year. Ah, I hear you say, a whiff of testosterone emanating from Burlington House? Or could it be a touch of Asperger’s, or both?  In Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 story ‘Kim’ you’ll find this: ‘Nine men out of ten would flee from a Royal Society soiree in extremity of boredom.’ In this politically correct and enlightened day and age it’s all a bit embarrassing. I recall that Jocelyn Bell, discoverer of pulsars, got the slow-hand clap from her undergraduate classmates whenever she attended physics lectures – she was the only female undergraduate. Not only that, Jocelyn Bell didn’t get the credit for her discovery through Nobel Prize recognition – her supervisor did! I could develop this theme further by mentioning Rosalind Franklin, the real discoverer of the helical nature of the DNA molecule. However, I shall return momentarily to the autism spectrum disorder mentioned above. In 1944 Hans Asperger wrote of the extreme male brain, ‘The autistic personality is an extreme variant of male intelligence. Even within the normal variation, we find typical sex differences in intelligence… In the autistic individual, the male pattern is exaggerated to the extreme.’ It wasn’t until 1997 that his hypothesis was fully researched and dubbed a syndrome.

Over a thousand years before Robert Hooke’s time Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, was busy dealing with a local snake population explosion. The story is that nuns would not dare to venture out of the priory for fear of the snakes. Hilda is reputed to have decapitated a good many (of the snakes) throwing the dead serpents over the cliff. Enterprising local craftsmen carved snake-heads onto fossil ammonites found in the cliff and these ‘formed stones’ were sold as evidence of the miracle performed by St. Hilda in ridding the place of snakes. Such nonsense persisted for a long, long time to explain fossil remains, the Devil’s Toe-nail being a good example. That is, until someone comes along with a fresh, science-based approach, like Robert Hooke. Mind you, recently there was the Fred Hoyle – Archaeopteryx debacle, but that’s another story.

Hildoceras bifrons

Graham Stocks