Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – June 9, 2006.

The Cornet Conspiracy, eBay and the Periscope Theory of the Acquisition of Knowledge.

Greetings from Gainesville, Florida—home to the University of Florida, and site for the sixth annual meeting of the “Cornet Conspiracy” (“CC06”). I’ll be here for a week, meeting old friends, making new ones—and talking non-stop about cornets, trumpets and music. And, of course, gathering information about the history of cornet design—which is my focal point, my empirical database—for generating and testing general ideas about design evolution—the evolution of material cultural, everyday objects.

The group is a mélange of cornet collectors from a wide variety of walks of life. Some of us are professional musicians. Others, like me, are amateur players. Some are top-notch restorers and builders of musical instruments. Some come from the academic world (including but not exclusively the musical world of academia), while others are lawyers, doctors, teachers—you name it. All of us have a strong passion for these dear old things that have taken on such a bewildering array of shapes and configurations since their beginnings way back in the mid-1820s.

We met on the Internet—specifically on eBay. We got curious about the people that consistently showed up bidding against us on this cornet or that. Who is this “Mr. Musty” or “Cleanhead” anyway? And why are they so intent on getting a particular type of horn? Who is that guy that “sniped” me yesterday—placing a high bid out of the blue with 20 seconds to go on an auction?

So some of us began writing emails to our like-minded competitors—sometimes to complain, but mostly out of sheer curiosity. We struck up electronic acquaintances and soon a loose sort of network emerged—growing to the point that it seemed like a good idea to try to get together, connecting faces to names, doing some horse-trading, swapping stories about our cornets. We gave informal “papers” in favorite subjects (I talked about the evolution of the piston valve at our very first meeting) and played music of a wide variety of styles (one of our members is an accomplished composer and always shows up with one or two new quartets; in addition, we always have at least one jam session—where the gamut from Dixieland to bebop is likely to be heard on a single night).

So eBay brought us together. And, in part, keeps us together. Prices are down now—at least for most cornets—as the law of supply and demand has kicked in with a vengeance (the economic downturn after the dot.com bubble burst and 9/11 hit also of course affected the cornet market along with everything else). You see far fewer instruments for sale at flea markets, antique shops and malls—as sellers turn to eBay to flog their wares.

I learned years ago that it is simply not realistic to try to have “one of everything” in one’s collection. There is simply not enough space in my house nor money in my bank account for that to be a feasible goal. Mine is a research collection: many of my instruments are beat up and battered, some missing parts—and many of them don’t play at all. Just like the trilobite specimens in my office at the American Museum of Natural History—most of which are likewise incomplete and damaged—these old cornet relics are nonetheless valuable for the information they contain. I’ll never forget the day that a venerable instrument “picker” at a flea market handed me a Conn cornet from ca. 1890; missing its valves, this junker seemed utterly worthless, until I saw that it was a design I had never seen before. I still have that horn, even though I have bought several others of the same design that are in much better shape: for it symbolizes to me what valuable lessons one can learn from the most humble of these old “fossil” cornets.

We are surrounded by—bombarded with, actually—information. Most of it we don’t want—like those annoying spam messages. Most of us who are deeply interested in some subject or other—for me, biological and material cultural evolution—do the usual thing: we (1) have a focal group (for me, trilobites and cornets) which reveal patterns of history/evolution; and we (2) read all the available literature on the subject, and (4) pick the brains of all like-minded colleagues, so that we (4) can analyze afresh the dynamics of the evolutionary process—or whatever the issue at hand might be. We seek out, in a very focused way, the information we need.

But serendipity plays a role as well. It can be very productive, in a roundabout sort of way, to step back from testing specific hypotheses, and instead keep your mind open to whatever might be coming down the information highway. I call this the “periscope” model of information gathering. There you are, with your narrow focus on some particular problem or other, and it occurs to you that maybe, just maybe, it would freshen up your mindset if you stuck your mental periscope above the surface and rotated it 360o –just to see what’s there. For example, if you want to see how the media tends to cover evolution (heavy emphasis on the supposed gene-driven basis of the evolutionary process), all you need do is consult the New York Times—especially on Tuesdays, in its Science Times section. No point reading all such articles—but when I feel the need to garner an additional example of this genre, all I need do is wait for next Tuesday. And sometimes what I read surprises me—which is always to the good!

And that has happened with eBay and cornets. Ask the question: what is the true, complete range of variation in cornet design over the past 180 years? The answer is that we cannot ever know for sure—but as with any statistical sample, we can approach complete knowledge the more we explore the system. I have seen almost every cornet model I have ever heard of offered for sale on eBay. eBay gives us a pretty good sampling of the entire gamut of cornet design history. Indeed, none of us in the Cornet Conspiracy had ever seen or heard of the King “Perfecto” model until one popped up on eBay 10 years ago. Turns out there are two radically different “Perfecto” models—and by now most of us in the Cornet Conspiracy owns at least one of the two!

And here is another beautiful thing about eBay. Yes, it is true that none of us can possibly own all makes and models of antique cornets. But the next best thing—thanks to eBay—is that we can download pictures and descriptions of rare and unusual cornets. It would be unethical to publish these pictures—but it’s certainly OK to use them in compiling a database recording all known makers, models and years of manufacture: information readily available on eBay. eBay is thus a very valuable research tool—even if you cannot go to it and ask a specific question at any one moment.

Darwin “let the world come to him” as a young, inexperienced naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle. Though the consequences of sitting back and letting eBay bring the patterns of cornet history to me will no doubt prove to be less epochal than Darwin’s experiences turned out to be, it is nonetheless a key component to my approach to learning as much as I possibly can about cornet evolution—the better to understand the general processes that underline stasis and change in the evolution of ordinary objects.

Stay tuned for more news from CC06!

Niles Eldredge

Previous Blog ::: Blog Index (main) ::: Next Blog