Lens to the Natural World. Kenneth H. Olson
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puncturing and tearing off huge hunks of meat and for breaking bone. Erickson further studied the specimen by having a hydraulic press constructed with metal “teeth” and, with it, duplicated such marks in modern bone. It seems that T. rex had a bite-force of at least 3,300 pounds, which is the largest of any known animal and is the equivalent of having the weight of a good-sized passenger car bearing down upon the teeth.
The information that can be gleaned about the behavior and physiology of an extinct creature, even across tens of millions of years, is quite amazing. The bones of the fearfully great reptiles can now speak in ways never previously imagined, something that is at least part of the explanation for why dinosaurs are striding so large across our culture today.
5 / To Be a Naturalist
On Seeing
As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near as I can to the heart of the world.
John Muir
What does it mean to be a naturalist? Consider this definition: A naturalist is one who studies nature with the intent of greater understanding; who seeks to help or enhance, not harm, the world’s natural processes, and who loves the natural world. So understood, the term can—and I would suggest, should—apply not merely to those who are professional naturalists but in a broad sense, also, to any and every human being.
The science that interests me most is paleontology, and I am drawn also to geology, ecology, and astronomy. In these endeavors, it must be said that I am an amateur. It was not always so, but it is now unusual for an individual to know more than a little about science and also about those things that were known before science came on the scene, because knowledge about our world has so largely become the province of specialists. The scientific approach has produced many results, unlocking aspects of the operations of nature that would never have opened to any other key; modern medicine is an obvious example, and there are numerous others. However, in some arenas, it may not be excessive to say that specialization has been carried to such a length that the situation resembles people down in little grooves, making progress straight ahead, perhaps going a long way in that direction, but the grooves are so deep that they cannot see out of them to all the other grooves. There is the cliché that we “know more and more about less and less.” Not only does the chemist not know what the physicist is doing but the organic chemist can barely talk to the colloid chemist and be understood, or so I’m told, unless they are talking about football and not about their main business.
The result is that we have all these bits and pieces, with few people concerned with connections or with anything like a larger picture, something called a worldview. We have become experts at taking things apart, and this down to smaller and smaller scale, but we are far less adept at putting the pieces back together to produce an integrated frame of reference for the whole. How many courses in business or technology exist for each course in the humanities? Much attention is paid to making a living but much less to making a life. The consequence of having many specialists and almost no generalists is a culture that lacks coherence, one with little in terms of shared outlooks and values and wherein millions struggle with questions of meaning and purpose. Is it possible that amateurs with a broad exposure would have anything to offer here?
The term amateur surely does often signify someone who knows only a little about a subject, who, for example, in the sciences, doesn’t know a proton from a crouton. However, that need not be the case. It can refer, simply, to one who does something else to make a living. In the England of the 1800s, there was little education in the sciences; instead, the great institutions focused upon instructing young gentlemen in the classics: language, literature, and the like. However, natural history was pursued as an avocation by the majority of the English clergy, and there was hardly a study that did not have a cabinet containing a collection of local fossils. One chronicler of the history of science, Eiseley, writes, “It was the amateur who laid the foundations of the science today. The whole philosophy of modern biology was established by such a ‘dabbler’ as Charles Darwin, who never at any time held a professional position in the field.” Of the amateur: “his was the sunrise of science, and it was a sunrise it becomes us ill to forget.”
Darwin had some formal education in biology at Cambridge, but no degree in the subject. He was an amateur naturalist. After graduation, he was in line to enter a course of preparation for the clergy when, instead, he shipped out on the Beagle, being allowed to go along as the ship’s “naturalist.” William “Strata” Smith was a self-educated surveyor who, in 1801, produced the first geological map, this of the entire country of England! At the time, he was scorned by those in powerful positions, but he is now recognized as one of the founders of modern geology. The Austrian monk and amateur botanist Gregor Mendel worked out the basics of genetic inheritance with peas in his monastery garden. Jane Goodall headed for Gombe in central Africa without a college education, and her later work with chimpanzees would capture the attention of millions. Physics and mathematics were the avocations of the young Albert Einstein, who wrote his most important papers while he worked as a mere clerk in a Swiss patent office. “Never lose a holy curiosity,” he said, and he didn’t.
Examples could be multiplied, but consider the case of Joseph Wood Krutch. He was a renowned drama critic, who, for his very serious avocation, studied and wrote a great deal about the plant life of the desert southwest. About such interest, he said:
This is an age of specialists, and I am by nature and as well by habit an amateur. This is a dangerous thing to confess, because specialists are likely to turn up their noses. “What you really mean is,” they say, ”a dilettante—a sort of dabbler of the arts and sciences. You may have a smattering of this or that, but you can’t be a real authority on anything at all”, and I am afraid they are at least partly right. But not long ago, my publisher asked me for a sentence or two to put on a book jacket which would explain what he called my “claim to fame.” And the best I could come up with was this: I think I know more about plant life than any other drama critic and more about the theater than any botanist!
Isn’t it rather grand that he could say that? In addition to highlighting the value of broad knowledge, it becomes still more meaningful if you know that he uses the word amateur in the original or root sense of “a lover.” Our English word comes from the French, which in turn comes from the Latin, amator, “to love.” That is, an amateur is one who does something, not as part of a salaried position and for the monetary reward, but because the activity itself is the reward. She or he is in love with the subject.
Jack Horner has long been a professional paleontologist and educator. He concludes his book Dinosaur Lives by referencing an earlier time: “On a more personal note, for many years I was an amateur collector. If certain aspects of my life had gone differently, I’d still be traipsing through the badlands of Montana searching for dinosaur fossils, motivated by nothing more than the desire to witness something I hadn’t seen before—to be surprised—which, come to think of it, is the same thing that motivates me today.”
An amateur in natural history, then, is not necessarily one with extremely limited knowledge; the main characteristic possessed is that of having a love for this wondrous world of nature, and love will lead to knowledge in one degree or another. Should we not grant that all of us are called to be amateurs in something, and should we not all have in common this interest in the wider world on which we depend for absolutely everything, including life itself? May we never lose that loving sensitivity to the planet we call home.
For it can be lost. A character in an H. G. Wells novel confessed, “There was a time when my little soul shone and was uplifted by the starry enigma of the sky. That has now disappeared. I go out and look at the stars now in the same way that I look at wallpaper.”
Again, this definition: A naturalist is one who studies nature for the purpose of greater understanding; who seeks to help or enhance, not harm, the world’s natural processes, and who loves the natural world. All of that hinges on a prior condition, i.e., that a naturalist has a conscious relationship with nature. In 1845, Thoreau wrote those wonderful words, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential