According to Sigmund Freud's stratigraphic portrait of modernity, science has produced three dislocating shocks. First, Nicolaus Copernicus bumped us from the center of the universe by making the earth just another planet. Second, Charles Darwin knocked us from the pinnacle of creation by making us just another accidental product of natural history. Finally, Freud himself deposed us from the throne of Cartesian rationality by demonstrating the power of the unconscious. As he put it in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, the ego “is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.”Footnote ¹ There is, however, some irony in Freud's vision. Although his history of science tells a stirring tale of adolescent humiliation—sadly, we are not nearly as important as we thought we were—we nevertheless remain at the narrative center of things. That is, even though science may wound our infantile narcissism, it is still about us inasmuch as the measure of a scientific discovery's significance is how dramatically it affects our self-image.

I think the intuition that science matters when it matters to us is basically sound, so long as it is tempered by the recognition that “us” is notoriously unstable. For one thing, since the decision to include someone as a part of “us” falls out from the messy work of making and remaking groups, it is fully exposed to the sometimes awful contingencies of time and place. Moreover, to be one of “us” often means being tone-deaf to the ways in which groups represent local convictions and native arrangements as universal truths and transcendental necessities. Think of the Spanish colonialists who assumed that the Indians shouting “Ma c'ubah than” were sharing the name of this newly discovered land—rather than politely informing their uninvited guests that “we do not understand your words”—and you begin to get the point.Footnote ² What all of this suggests is that a prescient history of science should have an ear for the taciturn narcissism that masks the profound arbitrariness of the experimental life. Historians of science must keep track of the endless work required to make the ethos of the scientific life appear as though it is implied by “the way things in sheer actuality are.”Footnote ³ Regardless of what one is prepared to say about the universality of scientific discoveries, these breakthroughs only exist because of the peculiar questions that are asked and the distinctive practices that are performed by utterly idiosyncratic historical actors.

In what follows, I would like to discuss two recent books that keep this perspective in mind and thus make suggestive moves toward writing what might be called a history of “narcissistic” science. Although each book is hunting different game, they are united by the suspicion that unmistakably local concerns about biblical anthropology have been at the heart of scientific reflection since the seventeenth century.

I. So Wrong, So Long: Adam and the Epistemic Consequences of Sin

In The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Peter Harrison assembled a sweeping case for rethinking the origins of the Scientific Revolution. Painted in broad strokes, his argument was that the Protestant turn away from allegorical forms of biblical exegesis—and toward interpretive strategies that emphasized scripture's plain sense—“created the conditions which made possible the emergence of modern science” (266). The project was daring, imaginative, and immaculately researched. For The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, Harrison has changed his target but not his method. The book is a model of what probing intelligence, historical curiosity, and impeccable scholarship can accomplish.

This time around the goal is nothing less than a genealogy of empiricism. That is to say, rather than congratulating early modern science for its advocacy of Baconian experimentalism, Harrison sets out to explain why so many seventeenth-century natural philosophers were ready to believe that thinking small actually represented a step forward. After all, as he notes, there were lots of people—especially on the Continent—who “expressed considerable impatience with the mass of observations and experiments demanded by the Baconian regime, and were disappointed by the modesty of the conclusions drawn from them” (242). On his account, this shift in natural philosophical ambition was an unforeseen consequence of the Reformation's turn toward the bleak Augustinian portrait of our post-lapsarian condition.

By Augustine's lights, “whoever maintains that human nature at any period required not the second Adam for its physician, because it was not corrupted in the first Adam, is convicted as an enemy to the grace of God.”Footnote ⁴ Where the thirteenth-century Thomistic synthesis had yielded a surprisingly robust portrait of reason that had remained more or less untouched by sin, the official voices of early modern Christian reform concluded with Augustine that all had been lost with Adam. “Now, after sin, when Adam and Eve see that they are naked, they are made ashamed, and they look for girdles with which to cover their disgrace,” Luther observes in his Lectures on Genesis: “Yet how much greater disgrace is there in this, that the will is impaired, the intellect depraved, and the reason entirely corrupt and altogether changed!”Footnote ⁵ Or, as a philosophy professor of mine liked to joke: Don't think. It can only get you into trouble.

According to Harrison, however, this breed of epistemic despair represents a kind of felix culpa in the history of science. In his judgment, Protestant suspicion about our cognitive faculties marks “the starting point for the methodological discussions of the early modern period and was particularly important in the development of what became known as the experimental philosophy” (87–88). Indeed, he suggests that it was only because of this pessimistic assessment of the mind's tendencies that natural philosophers worried about a productive “method” of inquiry in the first place. Francis Bacon observed in Novum Organon that when the intellect is left to determine its own path it impulsively skips over details and leaps to generalities for one simple reason: it is lazy. A strict regime of epistemic discipline was required to produce reliable results, an instrument of the mind designed explicitly “to either prompt the intellect or deliver it from error.”Footnote ⁶ The Fall of Man makes the case that Augustinian theological anthropology was the midwife to the early modern scientific ideals of experimental observation and inductive reasoning. Or, as Harrison makes the point, “what ultimately drives experimentalism and its relatively modest vision of what can be achieved in the realm of natural philosophy is not a particular conception of God and how he makes his decisions, but rather a view of human nature” (220).

Harrison thinks that by the time Isaac Newton appears on the natural philosophical scene, much of the distinctively theological force behind these epistemological and methodological issues was eclipsed. Virtuosi such as Robert Boyle and John Locke had already elaborated the Augustinian portrait of crooked post-lapsarian reason into a generalized vision of a mind constrained by natural limitations. In Locke's case, for example, he concluded that our “senses, faculties and organs” were very well adapted to the “conveniences of life, and the business we have to do here,” but for this very reason “it appears not that God intended we should have a perfect, clear and adequate” understanding of the world.Footnote ⁷ Broadly speaking, Harrison sees Newton standing at a defining moment in Christian theology's engagement with natural philosophy—the turning point where the previous interest in original sin and its consequences was eclipsed by a physico-theological concern with “design” in the natural world. From this point on, we are told, the “religious legitimacy of new forms of knowledge increasingly came to rest on their capacity to deliver a robustly theistic view of the natural world, rather than whether their methods accorded with a quite specific conception of human nature” (241).

If there is any criticism to make about The Fall of Man, it is that the argument is really about how Augustinian theological anthropology changed the direction of English natural philosophy rather than early modern natural philosophy in general. Yet, Harrison is acutely aware of this fact. As he confesses in the conclusion, his focus on “the development of experimental science in the English context leaves open a number of important questions about experiment and its justifications in Europe during this period” (251). Thus, much like the “blessed fault” that occupied the early Protestant theologians of mind, the book's one limitation is actually a gift of sorts. We now have a new set of historical problems to solve regarding the curious emergence of “science” in the West.

II. Each Second an Heir to the First: Adamic Genealogy and the Birth of Natural History

Over the past decade or so, DNA analysis has put the boot to Mormon theological claims about the Israelite pedigree of Native American Indians or, as the Book of Mormon christened them, the “Lamanites.” Wherever the legendary “lost tribes of Israel” landed, it was not in North America. Although Joseph Smith is perhaps the most familiar practitioner of what might be called “fabulous biblical genealogy,” he was not alone. By the mid-seventeenth century, British colonials in New England, including Thomas Thorowgood (America, or the Probabilities that the Americans are of that Race [1650]), and John Eliot (“The Learned Conjectures of the Reverend John Eliot on the Origins of the Indians” [1653/1654]) were already advancing similar cases for a genealogical link between the American Indians and the ancient Israelites.Footnote ⁸ In the nineteenth century, European colonialists in Africa would postulate various lines of fabulous descent to relate the Hottentots, Xhosa, and Zulus to the lost tribes.Footnote ⁹ No matter where English and European explorers traveled, the wandering Children of Israel always seemed to have arrived there first.

David Livingstone's Adam's Ancestors adds a new and fascinating chapter to the history of fabulous biblical genealogy. Rather than focusing his attention on the earnest attempts of some to link a newly “discovered” people with Abraham and, through him, Adam, Livingstone examines something altogether different: the abiding interest in establishing ties that unite a contemporary community to its ancestral, pre-Adamite roots. That is to say, his project is to document a discourse that folded the orthodox biblical account of human origins from a single set of parents in on itself like a Möbius strip, and searched the horizon for evidence of humans who existed before Adam.

Livingstone's story really begins in the mid-seventeenth century, as the French Protestant Jew Isaac La Peyrère begins to experience the aftershocks that spread across Europe after the publication of Men Before Adam (1665). According to La Peyrère, Adam was not the patriarch of all humanity—just the Jews. So too, the Hebrew scriptures did not provide a truly universal history—they only revealed the history of the Jews and thereby provided the foundation for the Christian message of universal salvation. By this single stroke of exegetical innovation, Livingstone writes, a raft of biblical puzzles could be resolved: “Here was a ready-made explanation for Cain's fear, after his banishment from the Garden of Eden, that he would encounter hostile individuals seeking to kill him; it delivered a population to inhabit the city he built; it provided a possible answer to the question about where his wife came from” (34). Yet, nothing in this world comes for free. The cost of his hermeneutical gambit was that La Peyrère had to transgress the orthodox contention, put in place by Augustine and the Church Fathers, that genealogical descent from Adam was a necessary and sufficient condition for being human.Footnote ¹⁰ The genie of polygenism had been let out of its bottle.

Soon after polygenic explanations of human diversity appeared on the scene, they quickly raised issues that extended well beyond the intricacies of biblical interpretation. The ferment of early modern bodies of naturalist knowledge played a critical role in debates over the plural origins of human races as concerns about theological orthodoxy and heresy were harnessed to discoveries about skeletal structures and cranial capacities. Without putting too fine a point on things, the fundamental question for the Enlightenment-era natural history of human origins was this: based on the available evidence, were the varieties of dark-skinned people fully human, or did they straddle the ontological divide between humans and animals? A great deal rested on how one answered this question, Livingstone notes, because “underlying these scientific preoccupations were fundamentally political fixations: the elaboration of moral maps of the globe, the ethics of plantation economics, and the management of domestic polities” (79). In this way, the accumulation of natural knowledge and the techniques of biblical exegesis joined forces with an eye toward governing populations with increasing precision. Power-knowledge, indeed.

Perhaps the single most intriguing aspect of Adam's Ancestors is Livingstone's claim that pre-Adamic theories were often more appealing after Darwin's “dangerous idea” than before. One often hears—especially in a year that marks the bicentennial of Darwin's birthday, and the sesquicentennial anniversary of The Origin of Species (1859)—that unearthing our evolutionary pedigree meant the death of Adam and Eve. Patricia Williams conveys this message with splendid precision when she writes that, with Darwin, “Adam and Eve do not merely die. A coup supplants them. Their high office and authority pass to critical thought in general and science in particular.”Footnote ¹¹ In contrast to this received wisdom, Livingstone contends that “for a significant body of opinion the coming of evolution meant the birth, not the death, of Adam” (137). In this context, Alexander Winchell's Adamites and Preadamites (1878) provides a theological North Star by which others might navigate a path that harmonizes the natural sciences and the Bible.

Where pre-Adamism had been used previously to buttress the heterodox thesis of human polygenism, it was now modified so that Christians could safely embrace both the seemingly heretical Darwinian Unity of Descent and the solidly orthodox Augustinian Unity of Descent. According to Winchell's inventive strategy, pre-Adamites were used to account for the evolutionary history of early hominids: they were a part of the natural history of the human body's descent with modification. However, Adam was preserved as the discrete source for uniquely human existence because here was where the supernatural history of the soul and its salvation begins. It was now possible to be an innovative Darwinian and a traditional Creationist at the same time—a position, Livingstone points out, that comes awfully close to describing the Catholic Church's current stance on what a theologically sound interpretation of human evolution must preserve.

The irony is that where pre-Adamites once had the pungent whiff of heresy about them, they are now a refuge for conservatives who wish to uphold a biblical scheme of history while acknowledging the insights of modern evolutionary biology. What should one conclude from this unexpected turn of events? “Pre-adamism's migration from heresy to orthodoxy, from its role as a weapon of skepticism to a tool of fundamentalism,” we are told, “speaks to the contingency of theological labeling” (220). This is almost certainly true. Yet, I can't help thinking that there are other, more audacious conclusions to draw as well. As Livingstone has revealed in arresting detail, “The question of human origins was not simply about science and species; it was about society and sex, cultural identity and racial purity. Bloodlines mattered—economically, politically, spiritually” (169). Given the way that the human sciences have functioned as a form of public hygiene, protecting “society” from an ever-expanding catalogue of dangers that has included miscegenation, one of the intriguing questions to emerge from Adam's Ancestors is whether the practices of fabulous biblical genealogy were an essential condition of possibility for the emergence of these sciences. Perhaps it is time to stop thinking that during the “Enlightenment” the nascent human sciences took up the question of descent from Adam with remarkable urgency, and begin thinking that the issue of Adam's ancestors and descendants is what ushered the human sciences into existence in the first place.