The Big Picture Man

To illustrate the difference between culture change and organic evolution, and incidentally to show the power and sweep of convergence, [Kroeber] turned to the powerful imagery of flight: “Thus a comparison of the acquisition of the power of flight respectively by birds in their organic development out of the ancestral reptilian stem some millions of years ago, and by men as a result of cultural progress in the field of invention during the past generation, reveals at once the profound differences of process that inhere in the ambiguous concept of ‘evolution.’ ” These were telling examples. In an era when the middle-aged remembered believing it impossible, heroic powered flight was potent public currency, and the little shaman Archaeopteryx, dancing in German stone, was delicately perfect. To Kroeber the fossil was an object of bemusement. He seldom emphasized “things between”, but kept a sense of them at hand, as in his work in seriation, and when discussing the boundaries of civilizations during the 1950s. His preferred focus was on means and modes – data representations of entities in the record, clusters of data, collections of traits, and nexes of styles, rather than variance. He referred to Archaeopteryx in other writings as well, nonplussed and perhaps a little alarmed by such a perfectly transitory state. At once logically necessary and visually improbable, such a link was not visible to the unaided empiricism of taxonomy or bio-geography. And it would have fallen like Icarus between Kroeber’s stacked towers of traits.