I Have Landed (3 page)

By the second criterion, I reach new interpretations, often for material previously unanalyzed at all (bypassed in total silence or relegated to an embarrassingly perfunctory footnote)—as in my all-time favorite evolutionary historical puzzle of why E. Ray Lankester appeared as the only native Englishman at Karl Marx's funeral (essay 6); my first-ever modern exegesis of the bizarre, but internally compelling, reconciliation of Genesis and geology presented by the unknown Isabelle Duncan, even though the chart accompanying her book has become quite famous as an early “scene from deep time” (essay 7); the first analysis based on proper biological understanding of the Lamarckian and recapitulatory theories needed to justify the particular claims of a newly found essay by Sigmund Freud (essay 8); the recognition that the apparently trivial addition of a fifth race (Malay) permitted Blumenbach, in devising a system that became almost universal in application, to make a fundamental alteration in the geometry of racial classification from unranked geographic location to two symmetrical departures from maximal Caucasian beauty (essay 26); and the first published analysis of the first extensive set of fossils ever drawn and printed from a single locality, the 1598 treatise of Bauhin, invoked as a model for inevitable errors in depicting empirical objects when no well-formulated theory of their origin and meaning guides the enterprise (essay 10).

A third category indulges my personal conviction that the joining of two overtly disparate people (in time, temperament, or belief), or two apparently different kinds of events, in a legitimate union based on some deeper commonality, often provides our best insight into a generality transcending the odd yoking. Thus, Church, Darwin, and Humboldt do shout a last joint hurrah in 1859 (essay 5); the stunning anti-Semitism stated so casually and
en passant
in the preface of a famous seventeenth-century pharmacopoeia does link to old ways of thinking, the little-known classification of fossils, and the famous case of the weapon salve (essay 9); the Latin verses used by Fracastoro to name and characterize syphilis in 1530 do contrast in far more than obvious ways to the recent decipherment of the bacterial genome causing the disease (essay 11); Bill Buckner's legs in the 1986 World Series do deeply link to Jim Bowie's Alamo letter, hidden in plain sight, as both become foci for a universal tendency to tell our historical tales in predictably distorted ways (essay 3); and the totally different usage and meaning of the same word
evolution
by astronomers discussing the history of stars and biologists narrating the history of lineages does starkly identify two fundamentally different styles of explanation in science (essay 18).

In a fourth, last, and more self-indulgent category, I can only claim that a purely (and often deeply) personal engagement supplies a different, if quirky,
theme for treating an otherwise common subject, or gaining an orthogonal insight into an old problem. Thus, a different love for Gilbert and Sullivan at age ten (when the entire corpus fell into my permanent memory by pure imbibition) and age fifty leads me to explore a different argument about the general nature of excellence (essay 4); I could develop some arguments that far more learned literary critics had missed about Nabokov and his butterflies because they did not know the rules and culture of professional taxonomy, the great novelist's other (and original) profession (essay 2); the unlikely conjunction of a late-twentieth-century ballplayer with a dying hero at the Alamo does reinforce an important principle about the abstraction behind the stark differences, but how could the linkage even suggest itself, absent a strong amateur's (in the best and literal sense of a lover's) affection for both baseball and history (essay 3); and, finally, T. H. Huxley's dashing wife, passing a grandmother's torch to grandson Julian two generations later does mirror the first words written in terror and exhilaration by my grandfather at age thirteen, fresh off the boat and through Ellis Island, but unknowingly “banked” for a potential realization that required two generations of spadework, and then happened to fall upon me as the firstborn of the relevant cohort—a tale that could not be more personal on the one hand, but that also, at the opposite end of a spectrum toward full generality, evokes the most important evolutionary and historical principle of all the awe and necessity of unbroken continuity (essay 1, my
ave atque vale
).

Finally—and how else could I close—if I found a voice and learned so much in three hundred essays (literally “tries” or “attempts”), I owe a debt that cannot be overstated to the corps of readers who supplied will and synergy in three indispensable ways, making this loneliest of all intellectual activities (writing by oneself) a truly collective enterprise. First, for showing me that, contrary to current cynicism and mythology about past golden ages, the abstraction known as “the intelligent layperson” does exist—in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning (indeed to a virtual definition of life as the never-ending capacity so to do); we may be a small minority of Americans, but we still form multitudes in a nation 300 million strong.

Second, for the simple pleasure of fellowship in the knowledge that a finished product, however satisfactory to its author, will not slide into the slough of immediate erasure and despond, but will circulate through dentists' offices, grace the free-magazine shelf of the Bos Wash shuttle flights, and assume an honored place on the reading shelf (often just the toilet top) of numerous American bathrooms.

Third, and most gratifying, for the practical virtues of interaction: As stated explicitly in two of these essays (1 and 7), I depend upon readers to solve puzzles
that my research failed to illuminate. Time and time again, and unabashedly, I simply ask consumers for help—and my reward has always arrived, literally posthaste (quite good enough, for the time scale of this enterprise does not demand e-mail haste). As the first and title essay proves—for the piece itself could not have been written otherwise—I have also received unsolicited information of such personal or intellectual meaning to me that tears became the only appropriate response.

In previous centuries of a Balkanized Western world, with any single nation sworn to enmity toward most others, and with allegiances shifting as quickly as the tides and as surprisingly as the tornado, scholars imagined (and, for the most part, practiced in their “universal” Latin) the existence of a “Republic of Letters” freely conveying the fruits of scholarship in full generosity across any political, military, or ethnic divide. I have found that such a Republic of Letters continues, strong and unabated, allowing me to participate in something truly ecumenical and noble. And, for this above all, I love and admire you all, individually and collectively. I therefore dedicate this last volume “to my readers.”

A
s
A YOUNG CHILD, THINKING AS BIG AS BIG CAN BE AND
getting absolutely nowhere for the effort, I would often lie awake at night, pondering the mysteries of infinity and eternity—and feeling pure awe (in an inchoate, but intense, boyish way) at my utter inability to comprehend. How could time begin? For even if a God created matter at a definite moment, then who made God? An eternity of spirit seemed just as incomprehensible as a temporal sequence of matter with no beginning. And how could space end? For even if a group of intrepid astronauts encountered a brick wall at the end of the universe, what lay beyond the wall? An infinity of wall seemed just as inconceivable as a never-ending extension of stars and galaxies.

I will not defend these naïve formulations today, but I doubt that I have come one iota closer to a personal solution since those boyhood ruminations so long ago. In my philosophical moments—and
not only as an excuse for personal failure, for I see no sign that others have succeeded—I rather suspect that the evolved powers of the human mind may not include the wherewithal for posing such questions in answerable ways (not that we ever would, should, or could halt our inquiries into these ultimates).

However, I confess that in my mature years I have embraced the Dorothean dictum: yea, though I might roam through the pleasures of eternity and the palaces of infinity (not to mention the valley of the shadow of death), when a body craves contact with the brass tacks of a potentially comprehensible reality, I guess there's no place like home. And within the smaller, but still tolerably ample, compass of our planetary home, I would nominate as most worthy of pure awe—a metaphorical miracle, if you will—an aspect of life that most people have never considered, but that strikes me as equal in majesty to our most spiritual projections of infinity and eternity, while falling entirely within the domain of our conceptual understanding and empirical grasp: the continuity of
etz chayim
, the tree of earthly life, for at least 3.5 billion years, without a single microsecond of disruption.

Consider the improbability of such continuity in conventional terms of ordinary probability: Take any phenomenon that begins with a positive value at its inception 3.5 billion years ago, and let the process regulating its existence proceed through time. A line marked zero runs along below the current value. The probability of the phenomenon's descent to zero may be almost incalculably low, but throw the dice of the relevant process billions of times, and the phenomenon just has to hit the zero line eventually.

For most processes, the prospect of such an improbable crossing bodes no permanent ill, because an unlikely crash (a year, for example, when a healthy Mark McGwire hits no home runs at all) will quickly be reversed, and ordinary residence well above the zero line reestablished. But life represents a different kind of ultimately fragile system, utterly dependent upon unbroken continuity. For life, the zero line designates a permanent end, not a temporary embarrassment. If life ever touched that line, for one fleeting moment at any time during 3.5 billion years of sustained history, neither we nor a million species of beetles would grace this planet today. The merest momentary brush with voracious zero dooms all that might have been, forever after.

When we consider the magnitude and complexity of the circumstances required to sustain this continuity for so long, and without exception or forgiveness in each of so many components—well, I may be a rationalist at heart, but if anything in the natural world merits a designation as “awesome,” I nominate the continuity of the tree of life for 3.5 billion years. The earth experienced severe ice ages, but never froze completely, not for a single day. Life fluctuated
through episodes of global extinction, but never crossed the zero line, not for one millisecond. DNA has been working all this time, without an hour of vacation or even a moment of pause to remember the extinct brethren of a billion dead branches shed from an evergrowing tree of life.

When Protagoras, speaking inclusively despite the standard translation, defined “man” as “the measure of all things,” he captured the ambiguity of our feelings and intellect in his implied contrast of diametrically opposite interpretations: the expansion of humanism versus the parochiality of limitation. Eternity and infinity lie too far from the unavoidable standard of our own bodies to secure our comprehension; but life's continuity stands right at the outer border of ultimate fascination: just close enough for intelligibility by the measure of our bodily size and earthly time, but sufficiently far away to inspire maximal awe.

Moreover, we can bring this largest knowable scale further into the circle of our comprehension by comparing the macrocosm of life's tree to the microcosm of our family's genealogy. Our affinity for evolution must originate from the same internal chords of emotion and fascination that drive so many people to trace their bloodlines with such diligence and detail. I do not pretend to know why the documentation of unbroken heredity through generations of forebears brings us so swiftly to tears, and to such a secure sense of rightness, definition, membership, and meaning. I simply accept the primal emotional power we feel when we manage to embed ourselves into something so much larger.

Thus, we may grasp one major reason for evolution's enduring popularity among scientific subjects: our minds must combine the subject's sheer intellectual fascination with an even stronger emotional affinity rooted in a legitimate comparison between the sense of belonging gained from contemplating family genealogies, and the feeling of understanding achieved by locating our tiny little twig on the great tree of life. Evolution, in this sense, is “roots” writ large.

To close this series of three hundred essays in
Natural History
, I therefore offer two microcosmal stories of continuity—two analogs or metaphors for this grandest evolutionary theme of absolutely unbroken continuity, the intellectual and emotional center of “this view of life.”
²
My stories descend in range and importance from a tale about a leader in the founding generation of Darwinism to a story about my grandfather, a Hungarian immigrant who rose from poverty to solvency as a garment worker on the streets of New York City.

Our military services now use the blandishments of commercial jingles to secure a “few good men” (and women), or to entice an unfulfilled soul to “be all that you can be in the army.” In a slight variation, another branch emphasizes external breadth over internal growth: join the navy and see the world.

In days of yore, when reality trumped advertisement, this motto often did propel young men to growth and excitement. In particular, budding naturalists without means could attach themselves to scientific naval surveys by signing on as surgeons, or just as general gofers and bottle washers. Darwin himself had fledged on the
Beagle
, largely in South America, between 1831 and 1836, though he sailed (at least initially) as the captain's gentleman companion rather than as the ship's official naturalist. Thomas Henry Huxley, a man of similar passions but lesser means, decided to emulate his slightly older mentor (Darwin was born in 1809, Huxley in 1825) by signing up as assistant surgeon aboard HMS
Rattlesnake
for a similar circumnavigation, centered mostly on Australian waters, and lasting from 1846 to 1850.