There is, admittedly, very little evidence for this idea, at least in humans. Evolutionary biologists have long suspected that the peacock’s tail and the red deer’s roar are signals of genetic quality, and have amassed much evidence in the support of this theory, most of it weak. The mutational-load explanation of beauty is however consistent with our intuitions – or prejudices – about the distribution of beauty. If deleterious mutations rob us of beauty, they should do so with particular efficacy if we marry our relatives. Most novel mutations are at least partly recessive, and inbreeding should accentuate their negative effects as they become homozygous. There is no doubt that consanguinous marriages have a cost: the children of cousins have a 2 to 4 per cent higher incidence of birth defects than those of unrelated individuals. One wonders if such children would be judged less beautiful than their outbred peers as well. Pakistan, where around 60 per cent of marriages are between first cousins, would be a good place to look. Conversely, people of mixed ancestry, such as Brazilians, should show the aesthetic benefits of concealing their recessive mutations – Que saúde.
What makes physical beauty so wonderful? What enables it to take us by surprise, to prevent us from treating it with indifference no matter how saturated we are by the worlds of advertising and celebrity that have appropriated it, indeed made us suspicious of its power? If the answer that I have sketched contains any truth, then each image of a beautiful face or perfectly turned limb is not really about the subject that it appears to be, but rather what it is not. It is about the imperfections that are absent: the machine errors that arise from the vicissitudes of the womb, childhood, maturity and old age, that are written all over our bodies and that are so ubiquitous that when we see someone who appears to have evaded them, however fleetingly, we pause to look with amazed delight. Beauty, Stendhal says, is only the promise of happiness. Perhaps. But it is equally the recollection of sorrow.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have accumulated many debts while writing this book. My agent, Katinka Matson at Brockman Inc., first saw what Mutants might become. I thank her as well as Karen Murphy at Viking Penguin USA, Maarten Carbo at Contact, Netherlands and, most of all, Michael Fishwick at HarperCollins UK, whose faith in the book’s ultimate existence was tested but never faltered. Robert Lacey, also at HarperCollins, was a wonderful editor. My Dutch translator, Robert Vernooy, was an acute critic. Several friends and colleagues commented on part of the manuscript, among them: Austin Burt, Arnold Heumakers, Barbara van Ijzeren, Marie-France Leroi, Jan-Roelof Oostra, Corinne Pernet and Jonathan Swire. Olivia Judson, Clare Isacke, Jennifer Rohn and Alberto Saez read and commented upon it all; I do not know how to repay them.
Many friends and colleagues answered specific queries, among them: Elizabeth Allen, Alan Ashworth, Peter Beighton, Chin Chiang, François Delange, Frank Dikötter, Saul Dubow, Ademar Freire-Macias, Frietson Galis, Jill Helms, Christiane Hertel, Annemarie Heumakers, Michael Hochberg, Beatrice Howard, Grace Ioannidou, Martin Kemp, Hannelore Kischkewitz, Deborah Posel, Liesbet Rausing, Raymund Roos and John Wilmoth. Jan-Roelof Oostra in Amsterdam and Cédric Cremiere and Jean-Louis Fischer in Paris were especially generous with their expertise in teratology and its history. Véronique Dasen in Fribourg told me about the teratology of the ancient world; Marta Lahr and Robert Foley at Cambridge showed me their wonderful collection of skulls; Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev in Jerusalem told me about the Ovitz family in the Third Reich. I have not been able to do their scholarship justice. My pupils Anne Rigby and Sarah Ahmad told me of things that just had to go into the book; Carolyn Richardson and Irin Maier researched and translated texts. I could not have illustrated the book without the help of Miriam Guttierez-Perez at the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine, London, and Laura Lindgren and Gretchen Worden at the Mütter Museum, Philadelphia.
My greatest debts, however, are to those around me: my colleagues at Imperial and the – sadly neglected – people in my lab; my friends – Austin Burt, Jim Isacke, Olivia Judson, Giorgos Kokkoris, Vasso Koufopanou, Michaelis and Katerina Koutroumanidis, Alexandra Meliadou, Jenny Rohn, Jonathan Swire, Liesbeth Verreijdt; and my family – Marie-France, Harry, Iracema, Joseph, most especially my parents, Antoine and Johanna. But above all it was Clare Isacke who sustained me while writing this book. It is dedicated to her with love.
NOTES
The clinical and developmental genetic literature is both vast and growing. However, I have attempted to give a guide to where the major results can be found and, occasionally, further details on particular topics. Beyond these notes, the most important source for those seeking further information about particular genetic disorders is Mendelian Inheritance in Man, an on-line database authored and edited by Victor A. McKusick and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and supported by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, USA. It contains continually updated descriptions of each disorder, the mutations that cause them, and the clinical genetic literature. MIM can be found at http://www3.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Omim/. To assist those who wish to penetrate this difficult literature I give, for each syndrome and gene, the MIM numbers in bold so: achondroplasia (100800) is caused by mutations in FGFR3 (134934). Neither MIM nor this book should be used for self-diagnosis.
PROLOGUE
xiii Genetics, to quote one popular writer. Steve Jones, whose book The language of the genes (1993), HarperCollins, London, remains the best popular account of human population genetics.
xiv On 15 February 2001. The sequence of the human genome (International Sequencing Consortium 2001).
xv To learn from animals. See Gilbert (2000) p.361 for Leonardo’s cow placenta and Needham (1959) p.65 for Cleopatra’s alleged studies of human development.
CHAPTER I: MUTANTS
3 We had heard that a monster had been born at Ravenna. The monster of Ravenna has been much discussed. See Landucci (1542; 1927) pp.249–50 for a contemporary account of the monster. Jean Céard dicusses its evolution in his edition of Pare’s Des monstres (1573; 1971) PP.153–5; Niccoli (1990) pp.35–51 its political meaning; see also Fischer (1991) pp.54–6 and Daston and Park (1998) pp. 177–82. I suggest that the monster’s disorder is Roberts’s syndrome (268300), but others (Walton et al. 1993; Martinez-Frias 1993) have suggested cyclopia, sirenomelia or else hydrocephalus. All these diagnoses are guesses – which one you favour is a matter of which depiction of the monster you use, and which of its many odd features you believe are real.
6 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My description of Renaissance teratology is indebted to Park and Daston (1981) and Daston and Park (1998), though it has perhaps a more Whiggish flavour than theirs. See Boaistuau (1560, 2000) for a reproduction of an unusually beautiful teratological manuscript of the time, Melancthon and Luther (1523; 1?23) for the Monk-calf, and Paré (1573; 19?2) pp.3–4 for his list of the causes of deformity. For nineteenth-century views on maternal impressions see Gould and Pyle (1?97) and Bondeson (1997) pp.144–69. For the seventeenth-century teratologists see Aldrovandi (1642); the first edition of Liceti’s De monstrorum was published in 1616, but I have worked from the second (1634) edition, a synopsis and French translation of which is given by Houssay (1937). A brief account of Liceti’s life and work is given by Bates (2001).