Herman Melville and sharks

You're going to explain how a failed novel sparked a battle between noble whales and demonic sharks. Welcome to PodThis and Learn With Me. I'm Marcus, and I'm Sofia.

It feels that way to us. But we have to look at the literary spark for this rivalry. That was the rediscovery of Moby Dick in the nineteen-twenties. Herman Melville's book had sold fewer than three thousand copies in his lifetime. It was basically forgotten for seventy years before it inspired Bengtsson's essay. How do you think people in the mid-nineteenth century categorized a whale?

That is a common assumption, but it is incorrect. Carl Linnaeus officially moved whales from "fish" to "mammals" in the seventeen-fifty-eight edition of Systema Naturae. But Melville famously rejected that scientific shift. In his writing, he stubbornly insisted that a whale is a "spouting fish with a horizontal tail." He did that so he could pit them directly against sharks in the same category.

He did. He even replaced biological families with a system based on book printing formats. He called the giant Sperm whale a "Folio." Mid-sized whales were "Octavos," and little porpoises were "Duodecimos." It is like organizing a library by the physical size of the paper rather than the subject of the books. The analogy stops working because while book size is a real measurement, it tells you nothing about the actual story inside. Does that classification seem practical to you?

It allowed him to highlight an economic divide. The Sperm Whale provided up to five hundred gallons of "noble" spermaceti. That was a wax-like substance for high-end candles. The shark, on the other hand, only offered vile-smelling liver oil.

That leads us directly into the way their physical bodies actually function.

We should look at how these two creatures are built, especially the shark. When you think about a Great White or a Tiger shark hunting, what kind of intelligence do you imagine is behind those eyes?

That is the standard view, but it is the opposite of what Bengtsson argues. He describes the shark as a biological error. It is a primitive creature that hasn't really developed a mind in the way we would recognize. They have what is called a decentralized nervous system. The nerves are spread through the body, so the muscles can keep acting without the brain's permission.

Not in a conscious way. Bengtsson points out that a shark in a feeding frenzy will continue to eat even if it has been disemboweled. It will keep going even if its brain is pierced by a harpoon. It is less like a hunter and more like a machine with a stuck on-switch. This analogy stops working, though, because a machine eventually breaks down when its parts are damaged. The shark's body keeps functioning through injuries that should be instantly fatal.

In Moby Dick, Melville describes a Shark Massacre where the sharks are so driven by hunger they even bite each other. Queequeg, the harpooner, nearly loses a hand to a shark's jaws that are snapping purely on reflex. If they were calculating, would they swallow a bundle of legal documents?

In seventeen ninety-nine, off the coast of Jamaica, a shark was caught with the incriminating papers of an American ship called the Nancy in its stomach. It hadn't found the evidence. It just mindlessly swallowed them because it is a scavenger that can't stop itself. Based on that, how would you describe their hunger?

That is the core of Bengtsson's argument.

Melville used that library taxonomy to protect the whale’s spirit from cold science. This week, notice if the stories we tell about animals focus on their intelligence or just their mechanical instincts. Keep learning. Keep growing. Thanks for listening.