万物简史 第100期:势不两立的科学(1)

6 SCIENCE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW 第六章 势不两立的科学 IN 1787, SOMEONE in New Jerseyexactly who now seems to be forgottenfound an enormous thighbone sticking out of a stream bank at a place called Woodbury Creek. The bone clearly didn't bel

万物简史 第102期:势不两立的科学(3)

Not surprisingly, such aspersions were indignantly met in America. Thomas Jefferson incorporated a furious (and, unless the context is understood, quite bewildering) rebuttal in his Notes on the State of Virginia, and induced his New Hampshire friend

万物简史 第112期:势不两立的科学(13)

Unaware that disappointment was going to be a continuing feature of his life, Mantell continued hunting for fossilshe found another giant, the Hylaeosaurus, in 1833and purchasing others from quarrymen and farmers until he had probably the largest fos

万物简史 第105期:势不两立的科学(6)

In the same yearin fact, the same monththat the aristocratic and celebrated Cuvier was propounding his extinction theories in Paris, on the other side of the English Channel a rather more obscure Englishman was having an insight into the value of fos

万物简史 第106期:势不两立的科学(7)

Unfortunately, having had his insight, Smith was curiously uninterested in understanding why rocks were laid down in the way they were. I have left off puzzling about the origin of Strata and content myself with knowing that it is so, he recorded. Th

万物简史 第107期:势不两立的科学(8)

So by the early years of the nineteenth century, fossils had taken on a certain inescapable importance, which makes Wistar's failure to see the significance of his dinosaur bone all the more unfortunate. Suddenly, in any case, bones were turning up a

万物简史 第108期:势不两立的科学(9)

By this time, however, paleontological momentum had moved to England. In 1812, at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, an extraordinary child named Mary Anningaged eleven, twelve, or thirteen, depending on whose account you readfound a strange fossilized

万物简史 第110期:势不两立的科学(11)

Aware that his finding would entirely upend what was understood about the past, and urged by his friend the Reverend William Bucklandhe of the gowns and experimental appetiteto proceed with caution, Mantell devoted three painstaking years to seeking

万物简史 第111期:势不两立的科学(12)

Mantell prepared a paper for delivery to the Royal Society. Unfortunately it emerged that another dinosaur had been found at a quarry in Oxfordshire and had just been formally describedby the Reverend Buckland, the very man who had urged him not to w

万物简史 第113期:势不两立的科学(14)

In the district of Sydenham in south London, at a place called Crystal Palace Park, there stands a strange and forgotten sight: the world's first life-sized models of dinosaurs. Not many people travel there these days, but once this was one of the mo

万物简史 第115期:势不两立的科学(16)

Owen swiftly distinguished himself with his powers of organization and deduction. At the same time he showed himself to be a peerless anatomist with instincts for reconstruction almost on a par with the great Cuvier in Paris. He become such an expert

万物简史 第116期:势不两立的科学(17)

Owen was not an attractive person, in appearance or in temperament. A photograph from his late middle years shows him as gaunt and sinister, like the villain in a Victorian melodrama, with long, lank hair and bulging eyesa face to frighten babies. In

万物简史 第117期:势不两立的科学(18)

He did not hesitate to persecute those whom he disliked. Early in his career Owen used his influence at the Zoological Society to blackball a young man named Robert Grant whose only crime was to have shown promise as a fellow anatomist. Grant was ast

万物简史 第118期:势不两立的科学(19)

Capitalizing on Mantell's enfeebled state, Owen set about systematically expunging Mantell's contributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had named years before and claiming credit for their discovery for himself. Mantell continued to

万物简史 第119期:势不两立的科学(20)

By this stage, however, Owen's transgressions were beginning to catch up with him. His undoing began when a committee of the Royal Societya committee of which he happened to be chairmandecided to award him its highest honor, the Royal Medal, for a pa

万物简史 第109期:势不两立的科学(10)

It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of paleontology than Mary Anning, but in fact there was one who came painfully close. His name was Gideon Algernon Mantell and he was a country doctor in Sussex. 在古生物学史上

万物简史 第121期:势不两立的科学(22)

Still, his altruism in general toward his fellow man did not deflect him from more personal rivalries. One of his last official acts was to lobby against a proposal to erect a statue in memory of Charles Darwin. In this he failedthough he did achieve

万物简史 第122期:势不两立的科学(23)

They began as mutual friends and admirers, even naming fossil species after each other, and spent a pleasant week together in 1868. However, something then went wrong between themnobody is quite sure whatand by the following year they had developed a

万物简史 第123期:势不两立的科学(24)

Cope was born more directly into privilegehis father was a rich Philadelphia businessmanand was by far the more adventurous of the two. In the summer of 1876 in Montana while George Armstrong Custer and his troops were being cut down at Little Big Ho

万物简史 第124期:势不两立的科学(25)

It also marked the start of a war between the two that became increasingly bitter, underhand, and often ridiculous. They sometimes stooped to one team's diggers throwing rocks at the other team's. Cope was caught at one point jimmying open crates tha