A narwhal came to Hamburg 340 years ago. It brought with it a story that we long considered finished. Sometimes, however, new methods or fresh perspectives will break down an old puzzle of certainty, driving home that knowledge is rarely final.
I recently found myself standing in front of our two-toothed narwhal once more. I had looked at it often since starting my job at the Museum of Nature in Hamburg. This is an animal that no longer exists in nature. It is merely a piece of history now, preserved, catalogued, and titled “Mona Lisa”. Supposedly, she was the world’s only two-toothed female narwhal. It’s a story that has endured for centuries. Now genomics has comes into play and they whisper to us: It’s actually a male.
Don’t we all love a clear-cut story? Museums are no different there. An exhibit that carries a narrative for centuries becomes a truth in and of itself after a fashion. And yet, this very animal shows us just how fragile knowledge can be. I recently took over as head of the knowledge transfer centre at the LIB – as a science sociologist used to dealing with the uncertainty and provisional nature of knowledge. This case fascinates me less due to the corrected gender assignment but because of its subtle implication for science as an ongoing dialogue between the past and the present, between documents, bones, and methods, and also between error and understanding. We collect, archive, and preserve objects not in order to know everything, but because we can always ask new questions.
Sometimes I wonder what the narwhal collector of 1684 would have said, had someone explained our modern methods to him: DNA analysis, isotopes, our ability to trace an ecological record even from centuries away. Perhaps he would have been amazed. Perhaps it would have sounded like magic to him. Perhaps he would have simply shrugged and said: That’s what knowledge is about – it grows, it shrinks, it changes.
I believe that this attitude is particularly vital in the Anthropocene in particular, where so many decisions depend on scientific knowledge. Rigid preservation of the status quo must be replaced by flexible reflection and adjustment, and an acknowledgment that knowledge is always provisional in nature. Our narwhal shows us that errors are not to be feared. Corrections do not equal failures. Much rather, they show that we’re paying attention. That we’re asking questions. That we’re reordering things time and time again. It shows that we must archive our findings for futures in which new methods and new questions will come along.
Perhaps that is the true beauty of our “Mona Lisa”. It’s not her second tooth. It’s the reminder that knowledge remains a vibrant, at times unsettling, and often surprising process. As we leave the museum at night to go home, the narwhal stays in place, silent and unmoving. And still, in its own way, it continues to tell its story. And we listen, as best we can.
Prof Dr Simone Rödder
Head of Knowledge Transfer LIB