{"id":1723,"date":"2022-06-15T08:28:05","date_gmt":"2022-06-15T12:28:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=1723"},"modified":"2022-06-15T08:28:05","modified_gmt":"2022-06-15T12:28:05","slug":"mammoth-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2022\/06\/15\/mammoth-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"Mammoth Ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with mammoths.\u00a0
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The third president of the United States may be renowned for authoring the Declaration of Independence, founding the University of Virginia, and endlessly tinkering with his dream house at Monticello, but his mind never strayed too far from the possibility that giant prehistoric elephants were still alive and rampaging through North America.\u00a0
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When Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their famous journey of discovery through the Louisiana Territory in 1803, he encouraged them to keep their eyes peeled for mammoths.
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What in the world was driving this obsession?
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One factor was curiosity.\u00a0 Jefferson had a lifelong devotion to natural history, and even set aside a room in the White House to examine the fossilized remains of ancient creatures.\u00a0 But far and away his deepest motivation was something akin to revenge.\u00a0 The president was bound and determined to pop the pompous ego of a certain stuffed shirt French naturalist who had the gall to disrespect America.
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Jefferson\u2019s intellectual sparring partner bore the grandiose name of George Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon.\u00a0 Europeans admired him as one of the brightest scientific lights of his or any age.\u00a0 Buffon worked tirelessly to produce a 46-volume natural history of the world.\u00a0 This was the kind of masterpiece that would ordinarily have thrilled Jefferson.\u00a0 But the Frenchman\u2019s Volume V, which was published in 1766, sent the Virginian off the deep end.\u00a0
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It proposed what Buffon called the Theory of American Degeneracy.\u00a0
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Why, Buffon asked, are American animals so puny?\u00a0 He declared that our bears are smaller and our wolves have less distinguished tails.\u00a0 Why doesn\u2019t the New World boast any extraordinary creatures?\u00a0 You would never see anything like a hippo or a giraffe in New York, Buffon pointed out.\u00a0 And why do the humans who move to America inevitably become so weak and their blood so \u201cwatery\u201d?\u00a0 Buffon theorized that America was simply too cold and too wet for living things to thrive.\u00a0
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Here we should point out that Buffon had never actually been to America.\u00a0 He was relying entirely on the speculations of early explorers.\u00a0 Jefferson, who actually lived in the New World \u2013 and who was considerably taller and more vigorous than most Europeans of his generation \u2013 blew a gasket.\u00a0
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As Cara Giaimo, a freelance writer who specializes in paleontology, observes, there was good reason for Jefferson to be miffed.
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As one of the chief players in the American Experiment, Jefferson was fiercely protective of the thirteen colonies\u2019 global reputation.\u00a0 It was critical for the fledgling republic to earn the respect of the major European powers, not to mention the possibility of joining them in future economic and military partnerships. \u00a0
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Buffon\u2019s Theory of American Degeneracy, besides being insulting, had become pervasive. \u00a0His book was a bestseller.\u00a0 Anyone who was anyone in European intellectual circles seems to have embraced the notion that Americans should simply be pitied or ignored.\u00a0 \u00a0
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Jefferson knew from experience that Buffon was a buffoon.
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He obsessed over statistical tables that contrasted American animals to European animals.\u00a0 Our rabbits are bigger than your rabbits<\/em>.\u00a0 He shipped the skin of a huge mountain lion to Buffon\u2019s house in France.\u00a0 And how does this compare to your Parisian housecats?<\/em>\u00a0
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His ace in the hole, however, was the steady stream of mammoth bones \u2013 including seven-foot tusks and massive jawbones \u2013 that kept turning up in farmers\u2019 fields in the colonies.\u00a0 If only Lewis & Clark could find one grazing beyond the Mississippi River, the debate would be settled.\u00a0
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Scientists at the time had not yet grasped the reality of extinction.\u00a0 Certain species that were once abundant no longer walked the earth.\u00a0 \u00a0Lewis & Clark, unsurprisingly, never saw a mammoth.\u00a0 But they did see colonies of an animal that fascinated and delighted them \u2013 the groundhog. \u00a0Did they ever discover any large creatures that would throttle Buffon\u2019s theories?\u00a0 Let\u2019s just say that after a few close encounters with grizzly bears, no one seriously doubted that America was home to its share of fearsome animals.\u00a0
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The notion that everything in America is smaller and weaker was a wrong-headed idea.\u00a0 But like a lot of wrong-headed ideas, it was very hard to displace once it had been widely accepted.
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Followers of Jesus, if they are sufficiently courageous, will look back with wonderment and horror at some of the wrong-headed ideas that used to be accepted as Gospel truth.
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For hundreds of years, key leaders in the Church confidently taught that the Earth was the center of the solar system; that witches were everywhere, and should be hunted down and executed; that slavery was ordained by God for people of color; and that a benevolent Christian king named Prester John was ruling somewhere in the heart of Africa, waiting to be recruited to lead an all-out apocalyptic war against pagans.\u00a0
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It took a long time for each of these ideas to be debunked.\u00a0
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Here\u2019s another exercise that requires courage.\u00a0 Ask yourself: \u201cOne hundred years from now, what wrong-headed ideas that I currently cherish will cause my great-grandchildren to look back on my life with wonderment and horror?\u201d
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It\u2019s almost impossible to get that one right, for the simple reason that most of us find it difficult to question the ideas we hold most dear \u2013 even if they happen to be seriously off the mark.
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Trapped inside our own far-from-perfect heads, what in the world can we do?
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We can choose to live out Romans 12:2:\u00a0 \u201cDon\u2019t be conformed by the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.\u201d\u00a0 As J.B. Phillips rendered the first phrase in his New Testament translation, \u201cDon\u2019t let the world squeeze you into its mold.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, don\u2019t fall for the next thing you read online or hear from your favorite preacher or talking head.\u00a0
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Take your ideas, biases, assumptions, convictions, conclusions, and presuppositions and lay them before God.\u00a0 Then pray, \u201cLord, help me come to grips with the serious possibility that I might be wrong<\/em>.\u00a0 Please renew my mind through the power of your Word and the indwelling presence of your Holy Spirit.\u201d\u00a0
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The word \u201ctransformed\u201d in Romans 12:2 comes from the Greek verb metamorphizo<\/em>.\u00a0 It takes a metamorphosis \u2013 over many years \u2013 for a human mind to reflect the mind of God.\u00a0 And that process won\u2019t be complete until we\u2019re face to face with Jesus in the next world.\u00a0
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But that doesn\u2019t mean we can\u2019t make surprising progress in the here and now.
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And if we do so, we’ll certainly be able to avoid some mammoth misunderstandings.\u00a0

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Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with mammoths.\u00a0\u00a0The third president of the United States may be renowned for authoring the Declaration of Independence, founding the University of Virginia, and endlessly tinkering with his dream house at Monticello, but his mind never strayed too far from the possibility that giant prehistoric elephants were still alive and rampaging through North America.\u00a0\u00a0When Jefferson dispatched Meriwether… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1724,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[455],"class_list":["post-1723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-renewal-of-the-mind"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1723"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1725,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723\/revisions\/1725"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}