Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms Read Free Page B

John Paul II) illuminate the old and overly discussed issue of proper relationships between science and religion (chapter 14). (2) By gaining the “right” to addressa large and general issue through the new perspective of previously unapplied detail (as in the examples of chapters 5 and 13, previously discussed, and chapter 10 on the relevance of new data about the multiplicity of human species until 30,000–40,000 years ago and the consequent oddity of our current status as a single species spread throughout the globe) for a discussion of predictabilityversus historical contingency in the evolution of self-conscious life on Earth.
    4. “Promotion” to an essay may depend upon the coalescence of details into a general theme worthy of report, but sometimes those details, all by themselves, become arresting enough to merit treatment entirely for their own value (and then I will confess to using the emerging generality as an excuse for almost baroqueattention to the details). I do value the theme eventually addressed, but don’t you adore, entirely for their own sake as stories, the four tales of conventional prey that devour their predators (chapter 21), or the excruciatingly intricate and beautiful details of the bizarrely complex life cycle of the barnacle parasite, the “root-head” Sacculina (chapter 19)? And, as my personal favorite (andhere I do rest my case), how could anyone but a dolt not be moved by the fact that we know about the giant deer’s hump only because paleolithic cave painters left us a record—and that no other even potential source of evidence exists (chapter 9). I tell this story within a perfectly valid and sufficiently interesting context of discourse on biological adaptation as a general evolutionary principle,but don’t you thrill to the notion of this kind of gift provided by such distant forebears; and aren’t you riveted by the details of these rare images, and the story of their discovery and recognition?
    The foregoing discussion accounts for all individual bits in this eighth piece of my series. But just as the “two bits” of legend represented a cut from a totality called a “piece of eight,” 1 mybits have no coherence or valid generality without an overarching rationale or coordinating theme to make them whole. I pay my homage to evolution in the preface to every volume of this series, and will now do so again. Of all general themes in science, no other could be so rich, so deep, so fascinating in extension, or so troubling (to our deepest hopes and prejudices) in implication. Therefore,for an essayist in need of a ligature for disparate thoughts and subjects, no binder could possibly be more appropriate—in fascination and legitimacy—than evolution, the concept that inspired the great biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky to remark, in one of the most widely quoted statements of twentieth-century science, that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
    Moreover,and finally, with this series’ emphasis on a humanistic natural history—an account of evolution that focuses as much on how we come to know and understand this great principle as on how such a process shapes the history of life—we encounter an endless recursion that provides even greater scope and interest to the subject. The wondrously peculiar human brain arose as a product of evolution, repletewith odd (and often misleading) modes of reasoning originally developed for other purposes, or for no explicit purpose at all. This brain then discovers the central truth of evolution, but also constructs human cultures and societies, replete with hopes and prejudices that predispose us toward rejecting many modes and implications of the very process that created us. And thus, in a kind ofalmost cosmically wicked recursion, evolution builds the brain, and the brain invents both the culture that must face evolution and the modes of reasoning that might elucidate the process of its own creation.