All attempts to discover a direction and a purpose in the evolution of life on Earth have been handicapped by the fact that this particular scientific discipline had to be purged of a certain kind of teleological thinking that turned out to be invalid. Darwinian theory had to establish itself not only in the fact of theological commitments, but also against the much more subtle opposition of prevailing scientific attitudes deriving from the work of earlier theorists, including the Chevalier de Lamarck and Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus. Darwin’s theory of natural selection, as modified by the introduction of Mendelian genetic theory and Weismannian mutational theory, was missing the notions of purpose and improvement that had been central to earlier theories.
The notion of environmental selection between individuals modified by small random changes killed the supposition that there was any predetermined pattern in evolution, which merely had to unfold over the eons to give rise to eventual perfection. The evolution of “higher” forms of life and the increasing complexity of Earth’s life-systems were seen to be by-products of the interaction between genetic mutation and the competition of whole organisms for resources. Lamarck’s nation that environmental change might be the result of effort on the part of the individual organism was abandoned, and that had considerable implications for hypotheses regarding the moral perfectibility of humankind and the extent to which human beings might influence the future of their descendant species.
These implications of Darwinian theory created a demand in the marketplace of ideas for a metascientific system that would re-establish not only the role but also the power of purposive decision in man’s evolutionary situation. Not only individuals, but whole cultures, have reintroduced variants of neo-Lamarckian philosophy into their evolutionary thought. These have been strongly resisted by representatives of Darwinian orthodoxy as being without foundation in empirical evidence. It is, in fact, true that these speculations belong to the realm of metascience rather than that of empirical science, but they should not be entirely despised on that account, and we should be prepared to recognize the force of the need that generates them. The antagonism between the scientific and metascientific aspects of evolutionary philosophy is historical in origin and is not logically necessary. Orthodox evolutionary theory still leaves sufficient imaginative space for speculation regarding the direction of evolution, and for the attribution of a constructive role for the power of human purposive decisions, provided that these speculations include no empirical claims regarding quasi-Lamarckian genetic systems.
The consequence of this argument is the conclusion that attempts to reintroduce into evolutionary philosophy the notion of evolutionary “goals” are not illegitimate, provided that we recognize that these goals are metascientific constructs designed to give us confidence in our present actions, not prophecies of an inevitable future. We can and must speculate freely about the possible future of humankind, and the more alternatives we can imagine, the more will be the possible meanings we might attribute to our present decisions and predicaments. Only by so doing can we hope to escape from the existential trap threatening us all: the conviction of our utter insignificance and the hopelessness of our situation. We have to overcome that sense of meaninglessness, and the means to do it are provided by our creativity rather than by our expectations of scientific discovery. We must be prepared to accept that responsibility because, in today’s world, we can no longer hope to avoid it.
PART FOUR
PARADISE LOST
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
A million years is not a long time, in evolutionary terms, but rates of evolution can vary considerably from the “normal” horotelic mode. The career of Homo sapiens resulted in drastic changes in the environments available to life on Earth, while the temporary invasion of the La resulted in the introduction of a whole new gene-system. These two factors stepped up the rate of evolution not just by one gear but by two, throwing the rate of turnover in the various specific gene pools into a hypertachytelic mode. A regime of rapid evolutionary change never hitherto realized on Earth’s surface was instituted in the wake of the desertion of Earth by the aliens.
The new regime facilitated changes of a genuinely fundamental nature, resulting in the emergence of new cell types and new kinds of cell interaction. The evolutionary entity that had held unchallenged dominion over Earth for nearly two billion years, the eukaryot cell, was finally faced with new competition. Similarly, the system of genetic information-exchange, sexual reproduction, which had sufficed for the purposes of such entities, when they required any such system, was also faced with competition.
Out of the poisoned areas of Earth’s surface—the regions destroyed by radioactivity and chemical pollution—came new living entities shaped by a fiercer regime of selection than had pertained even to the primordial environment. In the lands thus rendered derelict, life based on eukaryot cells could not survive indefinitely. Animal life died out in such regions very quickly—in a matter of centuries—after a brief period of mutational extravagance. Plant life, more amenable to mutational change and less dependent on the complexities of meiotic chromosome-reassortment, clung to the land for thousands of years and tens of thousands, but steadily declined as the more complex species were eliminated one by one.
In their dying, these plant species provided a new biotic environment, in which primitive saprophytes that could nourish themselves only on dead flesh thrived and multiplied, but the situation was one that could not endure for long. With no new burgeoning of primary production, the saprophytes were faced with dwindling resources, and they too were in the grip of the slow death that sustained them. All life based on complex walled cells replete with membranes and organelles became slowly extinct, leaving only the most primitive life-forms to thrive on the organic humus—the primitive, membraneless prokaryot cells that had enjoyed sole possession of the Earth during the earliest eons of life’s evolution. It was from these cells—from the bacteria and the most primitive of the protists, and from the entities that were not even cells, like viruses and microspheres—that the new order was born.
Bacteria are capable of immensely prolific reproduction, and survive selective regimes that kill anything more complex. In the debris of the declining life-system, the bacteria were unconquerable. They changed in themselves generation by generation, but they survived such change easily. Bacteriophage viruses thrived along with them, and the metamorphoses of the hosts were matched by the metamorphoses of the parasites. From this regime of rapidly-changing commensalism came new forms of commensalism.
The new life did not emerge out of the old by mutation, natural selection and lineal descent, as all the entities in the ancient life-system had descended from the earliest eukaryot cells, and those cells from prokaryot ancestors. The new organisms arose by symbiosis and symbiotic synthesis, by the fusion of genetic systems into super-systems whose main property was the ability to absorb and maintain yet more systems and thus acquire protean hyper-adaptability.
The simplest cell of all in the ancient life-system was prokaryot in kind, carrying a single chromosome—a self-replicating system of genes coding for the building of an elementary cell. Parasitic upon these systems were viruses, which attached themselves to the bacterial chromosome so that as the bacterium made more bacteria it also made more viruses, and sometimes subverting the manufacturing capability of the cell, so that it made viruses instead of more bacteria, dismantling itself to provide the raw material. Increasing complexity within this system consisted in adding more genes to the basic chromosome, and more chromosomes, to code first for more elaborate individual cells, and later for extremely elaborate multicellular reproductive machines. The new life-system, however, developed its complexity in a different way, by increasing versatility. The number of chromosomes in the new organisms multiplied not so that more elaborate engines of reproduction might be built, but instead so that the individual cell could vastly increase its adaptability as an individual. The result was a type of cell th
at did not need complex reproductive strategies, because it was itself immortal, and which could extend itself not by replication but by infinite growth as a coenocyte.
In these organisms there was potential for Earth to be reborn. It was not long—perhaps a few hundred thousand years—before the coenocytes discovered the utility of tissue-differentiation and membrane-packaging and began to make full use of their protean potential, but they remained, essentially, things that grew rather than things that replicated themselves, and even as they divided their bodies into millions of different parts they remained single individuals. When they met cells of the ancient type, they simply absorbed them into the whole. When they met one another, they absorbed one another.
The adaptability that had proved competent to deal with the selective regime of hard radiation was far more than competent to deal with the regions of Earth that had not been so despoiled. The new life came out of the lands that had given it birth, and began to devour the entire life-system of Earth. It did so unhurriedly, having all the time in the world to explore its possibilities. Eventually, it would dominate the surface of Earth more completely than the ancient system could ever have done, although it would be a dominion of a very different kind from that achieved by the older system.
In the old biocosm there had been individuals, and thus competition between individuals, and thus complex behavioural strategies, and thus—ultimately—intelligence. In the new biocosm there were no individuals, but only life. There was no competition, save for that between the system and the vicissitudes of its environment. There was no behavioral strategy, save for that of the system as a whole, which was simply to survive and to grow, not to reproduce. There was no conceivable need for the evolution of intelligence.
And thus it was that third-phase life assumed command of the planet called Earth.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
He huddled into the crack in the bare red rock, hiding his eyes from the wind-driven sand. The motes that clung to his skin seemed to grip his flesh and to stick to one another, forming a crystal patina as if they were living things. On his exposed arm and shoulder the sand collected until it formed a kind of outer tegument—a jeweled sheath that would have been welcome if it had protected his skin, but which somehow did not.
The wind screamed as it crossed the butte, searching for him, desperate to pluck him from his poor shelter, to tumble him over the bare rock, to break his bones, to cover him with silica until he was nothing but a human silhouette in crystal scale.
From the wind, though, he could hide. The wind was only the hot air which surrounded him. The other force was inside him, sucking from within, a parasite in his very soul that was trying to work its metamorphic magic in the essence of his being. He could feel his flesh creeping as though it were softening into viscous liquid. He could feel the sluggish tide in his fluids, always rising in his belly.
He forced himself to look up, forced his eyes open, exposing their tenderness to the hostility of the maddened wind. He forced himself to look into the infinite blue deep that was the sky, searching for the fugitive vision that once had guided him towards the horizon.
He found it: a shifting pattern, cut out of vapor or of pure light; a mirage created by refraction in the layers of the atmosphere. It was never there for more than a few moments, and now, as he tried to fix his attention upon it, it dissolved. He had never managed to perceive shape in it, attribute any meaning to it.
He closed his eyes and bowed his head, knowing that it would take tantalizing advantage of his surrender to reformulate itself.
He knew that he must not stay in the crevice. Even while he rested, the desert was changing. The crack was slowly closing, forcing him out on threat of enclosure and permanent imprisonment. He had to expose himself once more on the scorching face of the ragged rock-formation, where the wind would harry him and scratch him with its arrows of sand. He pulled himself free and began to stagger across the plain.
All around him was a forest of dendritic shapes, like tropical corals left high and dry by an ocean that had evaporated or drained away. In the branches, little points of light were dancing, like the ghosts of tiny fish, as if the desert were dreaming of the time when it had been an ocean bed. Glittering salts had crystallized out on the combs and stems in stratified layers, and where the dendrites were scarred or the branches broken off it was possible to see multicolored growth-rings that testified to the passage not of years but of eons.
Sometimes the fingers of the coral limbs reached for him as he passed close by, but they never brushed his skin.
The sun stood still in the sky, denying him the night.
The sand swam about his body in loose fluid plates, trying to link up and to gather particles enough to turn him into a crystalline statue: one more twisted entity among the dendrite corals, spawning colored growth-rings eternally.
Deep inside him he felt the slithering sensation, the echo of ophidian existence that tried perpetually to assert itself within his mind, fought to fuse his legs together and make him squirm and slither his way across the rock, sidewinding without regard for pain or time or will...living by means of poison fangs and the reflexive strike.
He dared not scream lest the sound blot out his consciousness and send his mind recoiling back into reptilian calm.
Time expelled him, again and again and again; but always he returned to live in his dream of hell through all eternity, while the world that had given him birth was born again as a vengeful organism that sought, like the desert, to dissolve him and smear his identity across the whole surface of creation.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The machine, too, was third-phase life of a kind. He, too, grew by absorption, without there being any theoretical limit to his total size. He was immortal, and did not replicate himself to produce other entities with their own separate individuality. Everything he made remained part of himself. In only one respect was he unlike the third-phase life that evolved on Earth and countless other worlds: he was not mindless. His mind, however, was a byproduct of his ontogeny, and he had never ceased to feel that it was, perhaps, a superfluity and an incongruity, inappropriate to his mode of existence. Paradoxically, that core of self-doubt was the source of all his motivation. It was the one aspect of his being that sustained his identity against the haunting fear of purposelessness.
When the La abandoned Earth, leaving behind the disaffected members of their own species, they put the planet into quarantine, placing a network of defenses in orbit around it far more elaborate than the one mounted by the machine before they came. This network had a dual function: to keep other visitors away from Earth, and to confine that which was already on the planet’s surface, including the machine. The machine was untroubled by this, because he knew that in time, after a few hundred thousand years, he would be able to subvert those defences, and incorporate them into himself.
In the meantime, there was much to be done in his inherited kingdom, the surface of the Earth.
Parts of him began the erection of a series of gigantic domes in the foothills of the Argentinian Andes. The first enclosed the valley where Scapelhorn and his allies, and their descendants, lived throughout the third and fourth millennia.
The immediate purpose of the dome was to seal off a controlled environment, free from fallout and plague, in order to preserve the human colony. In the long-term, it would provide an enclave against the advance of third-phase life. Underneath the domes, the old Earth could be maintained for the time-travelers, and for the machine. The plates of the dome were made of glass, the interstices of metal, and both the glass and the metal were equipped with mechanical nerve-nets, which made them part of the body of the machine.
The building of the domes took thirteen thousand years, and by the time the last of them was finished there were no humans living an ordinary life beneath the first. Scapelhorn’s community, despite being protected, had never thrived. The mutational load built up in the genes during the centuries that followed the atom
ic wars was too great, and the birth-rate never matched the death-rate, in spite of all that the machine could do in providing a healthy environment. With the exception of the time-travelers, the human race became extinct while the domes were under construction.
While parts of him built the domes, other parts of the machine went far and wide across the face of the Earth, some scavenging for the materials he needed in order to grow and build factories to provide the means for his future growth, and others searching for the human-shaped lesions left by the time-jumpers. Over the first few centuries, he built a catalogue of such lesions, and measured them all, to estimate the time that each time-jumper would return. By the time the third millennium began, no time-traveler emerged without a robot to meet him.
Some, of course, did not return at all. Many returned only to die, because of the poisons and mutations that were already incorporated into their being, but some were healthy, and these he invited to the Andean valleys and the domes. Only a few refused—and they went on through time to their inevitable deaths.
By the end of the eighth millennium, all the remaining jumpers were gathered into his enclave. There he attended to their needs every time they awoke. As time went by, some died, some vanished and some decided to live out their lives in ordinary time. Once there were no other humans under the domes, however, very few decided to live mundane lives until they were very old. Most spent only a few days eating, sleeping and breathing at each awakening, and most became increasingly parsimonious with their days as they went further into the future.
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