As I watched, a gold-winged glittering fly, which had been resting below the net, essayed to rise into the sun. Its wings were promptly entrapped. The analogy was complete. Life did bear a relationship to the past and was held in the grasp of the present. The dead in the grass were, figuratively, the sustaining base that controlled the direction of the forces exerted throughout the living web.
The golden fly would perish. Nevertheless, there would be days when the wind would sweep the net away, or when snow would hold the sleeping cemetery in a different, though even more profound, embrace. Everything, in the words of John Muir, tended to be hitched to everything else. Yet this was not all, or life would not have originally engaged itself upon that exploratory adventure we call evolution. The strands of the living web were real; they did check, in degree, the riotous extremes of variation. Fortunately for the advancement of life, the tight-drawn strands sometimes snapped; the archaic reptile gave place to the warm-blooded mammal.
Sometimes it was less the snapping of a thread, even of gossamer, than the secretive discovery of a hidden doorway, found by some blundering creature pushed to the wall by savage competitors in the seemingly impermeable web. An old-fashioned, bog-trapped fish had managed to totter ashore on its fins and find itself safely alone to develop in a new element. A clumsy, leaping reptile had later managed to flounder into the safety of the air.
This is the fascinating rabbit-hole aspect of the living world. Most of its experiments are small, at best localized adjustments that, if anything, draw the mesh of the living screen by degrees ever tighter. Man, once having successfully escaped the net, has busied himself in drawing the meshes together with a strangling intensity exerted upon the rest of life. He now appears to possess the power to tear the net at his pleasure. Yet as I stood in wonder before the entangled tombstone of my friend, it struck me that not even man can escape completely the Laocoön embrace of the living web. Sir Francis Bacon in the early dawn of experimental science had called attention to the fact that nature was capable on occasion of extreme “exuberances,” such as would be well exemplified by human expansion today. It did not escape the Elizabethan philosopher that such irregularities are by the nature of things eventually, in their turn, trapped and confined.
Life as we know it is not limitless in its capacities, above all, in the higher organisms. Actually, its manifestations are confined to a small range on the thermometer. Moreover, life demands water for the maintenance of its interior environment, in quantities hard to come by, if this solar system can be taken as a typical example. Long food chains, from microscopic infusoria to whales, sustain and nourish all manner of strange animals and plants. Man himself is not free from these food chains, though increasingly, and sometimes to his peril, he tampers experimentally with his environment—thus inviting that “violence in the Returne” of which Bacon warned.
Life has survived by distributing itself over innumerable tiny environments. It has mastered such extremes of temperature and pressure as are represented by the abyssal depths of the sea, by deserts where water must be hoarded behind impermeable plant walls, or where breath must be drawn painfully upon Himalayan heights. In these circumstances one fact is self-evident: under such trials life tends to thin out to the point of disappearance.
In that disappearance the forms of the highest nervous complexity are the first to vanish. All mutative changes tend to be directed toward holding the unfavorable outside world at bay and preserving by formidable barriers the life within. The almost complete rejection of that outside world, however—no matter how cleverly the organism has adapted its resources for the purpose of sustaining itself under such inhospitable conditions—spells the end of intense conscious interaction with the environment. One is left with drought-resisting plants, infusoria that can survive desiccation, crabs teetering gingerly over nightmare depths of mud, or a few desert burrowers capable of synthesizing minute quantities of water in their tissues. Still, the tenuous lines of the web of life run up into mountainous heights and descend into the depths of the sea.
The living screen known as the biosphere may best be pictured by dipping some rough-skinned fruit, such as an orange, into water. Upon its withdrawal the wet film adhering to the depressions of the orange gives some idea of the relative thickness of the living membrane that covers most of the planet. It will attenuate toward the poles and upon ice-covered peaks; it will slink underground or disappear in the most extreme and shifting deserts.
It is a tenuous film, nothing more—yet a film of incredible complexity. Life survives through the fact that we possess an oxygen-charged atmosphere, a modest temperature, and the seas so beautifully photographed by the homing astronauts. We rotate in the beneficent light of a minor star. On freezing Pluto, our outermost planet, that star would appear about the size of a nailhead. Even in the auspicious environment of earth, the major portion of the ancestral past is represented only in eroding strata. The net, the living film that at any given moment of earth time seems to hold all the verdant world in an everlasting balance, is secretly woven anew from age to age. The tiny spiders that had worked through a single night amidst the lettered stones of the cemetery had reproduced in miniature the tight-strung gossamer that links us with the remains of our animal past.
We have noted that when Darwin intruded into the Galápagos and observed the biological rarities existing there, his growing suspicion about the reality of evolution was confirmed. By the time he wrote the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, his attention had been occupied by his theory of how evolution had come about; namely, through natural selection. Natural selection was defined as the preservation of favorable genetic variations by means of the winnowing effect of the struggle for existence.
We need not here pursue the intricacies of modern genetic theory. In Darwin’s time the emphasis upon intragroup struggle as a means of evolutionary advance sometimes took on exaggerated forms. It has tended so to re-emerge in simplistic interpretations of modern human problems. In the nineteenth century Moritz Wagner reminded Darwin of the bearing that isolation must exercise upon biological change. Darwin, in turn, responded, “it would have been a strange fact if I had overlooked the importance of isolation seeing that it was such cases as that of the Galápagos Archipelago, which chiefly led me to study the origin of species.”
Nevertheless, by his own confession, he had “oscillated much” between what seemed to be the intense struggle present on the continents compared with the relaxed refuge area of the Galápagos. In reality, natural selection is a broad phrase, so broad that it implies many different kinds of change, or even repression of change, as when no opening exists in the constricting web we have examined. Islands are apt by their seclusion to offer doorways to the unexpected, rents in the living web, opportunities presented to stragglers who might be carrying concealed genetic novelty in their bodies—novelty that might have remained suppressed in a more drastic competitive environment.
Competition may simply suppress what exists only as potential. The first land-walking fish was, by modern standards, an ungainly and inefficient vertebrate. Figuratively, he was a water failure who had managed to climb ashore on a continent where no vertebrates existed. In a time of crisis he had escaped his enemies. For a long time he was in a position to perfect freely responses to his new mode of life. Adaptive radiation and struggle would only emerge later, as our fishy forerunner explored other land environments and began to create, in his turn, a new repressive web.
To have a genetic island there must be in the beginning an isolating barrier. It could be a genuine island, such as has occupied the speculative attention of voyagers since the days of Captain Cook. On the other hand, the “island” may be a mountaintop or the product of a glacial obstruction. An impassable stream may suffice, or the barrier of a season. The boundary may be also singularly present but invisible. Whatever else it may be, it must offer the opportunity of creative genetic change on a large scale if life is to advance. Struggle, of and by itsel
f, does little but sharpen what exists to a superior efficiency. True, it plays an important role in evolution, but it is not necessarily the only, or even the primary, factor in the rare emergence of the completely novel. It must always be remembered that natural selection is one of those convenient magical phrases that can embrace both dramatic change and stultifying biological conservatism.
This morning, on my back lawn, giant mushrooms of a species unfamiliar have pushed up through the grass and leaves. They have the appearance of distorted livers, or of some other unsightly organ. A single fog-filled night has sufficed to produce them. If the weather lasts, there will be more. Probably their spores have been merely waiting—waiting for who knows how long. The visitation of the fog represents a sudden rent in the living screen, an opportunity that fungi, as creatures of the night, are particularly suited to seize. The fact that the season is close onto winter makes their sudden upheaval intensely dramatic. It makes one ask what kind of word spores, what night-fog in the protohuman cranium, induced the emergence of that fantastic neurofungus which is man.
III
Islands can be regarded as something thrust up into recent time out of a primordial past. In a sense, they belong to different times: a crab time or a turtle time, or even a lemur time, as on Madagascar. It is possible to conceive an island that could contain a future time—something not quite in simultaneous relationship with the rest of the world. Perhaps in some obscure way everything living is on a different time plane. As for man, he is the most curious of all; he fits no plane, no visible island. He is bounded by no shore, except a shore of shadows. He has emerged almost as soundlessly as a mushroom in the night.
Islands are also places of extremes. They frequently produce opposites. On them may exist dwarf creations induced by lack of space or food. On the other hand, an open ecological niche, a lack of enemies, and some equally unopposed genetic drift may as readily produce giantism. The celebrated example of the monster Galápagos turtles comes immediately to mind. Man constitutes an even more unique spectacle for, beginning dwarfed and helpless within nature, he has become a Brocken specter as vast, murk-filled, and threatening as that described in old Germanic folk tales. Thomas De Quincey used to maintain that if one crossed oneself, this looming apparition of light and mist would do the same, but with reluctance and, sometimes, with an air of evasion. One may account this as natural in the case of an illusion moving against a cloud bank, but there is, in its delayed, uncertain gesture, a hint of ambiguity and terror projected from the original human climber on the mountain. To the discerning eye there is, thus, about both this creature and his reflection, something partaking of both microscopic and gigantic dimensions.
In some such way man arose upon an island—not on a visible oceanic island but in some hidden forest meadow. Man’s selfhood, his future reality, was produced within the invisible island of his brain—the island clouded in a mist of sound. In this way the net of life was once more wrenched aside so that an impalpable shadow quickly wriggled through its strands into a new, unheard-of dimension of existence. Following this incredible event the natural world subsided once more into its place.
There was, of course, somewhere in the depths of time, a physical location where this episode took place. Unlike the sea barriers that Darwin had found constricting his island novelties, there had now appeared a single island whose shores seemed potentially limitless. This island, no matter where it had physically arisen, had been created by sound vibrating with meaning in the empty air. The island was based on man’s most tremendous tool—the word. By degrees, the word would separate past from present, project the unseen future, contain the absent along with the real, and define them to human advantage. Man was no longer confined, like the animal, to what lay before his eyes or his own immediate attention. He could juxtapose, divide, and rearrange his world mentally. Upon the wilderness of the real, men came to project a phantom domain, the world of culture. In the end, their cities would lie congregated and gleaming like the nerve ganglions of an expanding brain.
Words would eventually raise specters so vast that man cowered and whimpered, where, as an animal, he had seen nothing either to reverence or to fear. Words expressed in substance would widen his powers; words, because he used them ill, would occasionally torture and imprison him. They would also lift him into regions of great light. Even the barbarian north, far from the white cities of the Mediterranean, would come to speak in wonder of the skald who could unlock the “word hoard.” In our day this phantom island has embraced the planet, a world from which man has begun to eye the farther stars.
Isolation has produced man just as, on the Atlantic island of South Trinidad, there has emerged, as recorded by the late Apsley Cherry-Garrard, another and most eerie world, a world completely usurped by land crabs. Here, instead of a universe dominated by huge but harmless tortoises, the explorer encountered a nightmare. “The crabs,” he recounted, “peep out at you from every nook and boulder. Their dead staring eyes follow your every step as if to say, ‘If only you will drop down we will do the rest.’ To lie down and sleep on any part of the island would be suicidal. . . . No matter how many are in sight they are all looking at you, and they follow step by step with a sickening deliberation.”
Such remarkably confined but distinct worlds upon a single planet are infinitely informative. Because they are geologically younger than the planet itself, they tell us that life’s power to create the new is still smoldering unseen about us in the living present. Darwin saw in the Galápagos Islands a reptilian world that had drowsed its antique way into the present. In a sense, Darwin was correct, but the islands are more than this. They are, in miniature, an alternative to the world we know, just as the nightmare crabs upon South Trinidad present an unthinkable alternative to ourselves. Each of these island worlds has taken through chance a different turning at some point in the past; each possesses an emergent novelty. In none has man twice appeared save as a wandering intruder from outside. Man belongs to his own island in nature, the invisible one of a growing genetic isolation about whose origins we know little.
Biological time never creates the same world twice, but out of its clefts and fissures creep, at long intervals, surprisingly original creatures whose destinies can never be anticipated before they arrive. It was so when the first Crossopterygian lungfish inched painfully into the new medium of the air. It was equally true when the first pre-ice-age man-apes drew an abstract line in speech between today and tomorrow. Out of just so much they would succeed in constructing a world.
Impelled by the rising flame of consciousness, they would ingest more than simple food. They would, instead, feed upon the contingent and the possible within their minds. They would step beyond the nature from which they had arisen and eventually turn upon her the level objective gaze of a stranger. The rift so created is widening in our time. It is as though our self-created island were adrift on lawless currents like that same Galápagos Archipelago which seemed, to the old navigators, to set all their calculations at nought.
Over a century ago Thoreau, who had a sensitive ear for the tread of any overgrown Brocken specter in the shape of man, admitted that he would gladly fall “into some crevice along with leaves and acorns.” The percipient philosopher felt the need for a renewed hermitage, a natural spot for hibernation. He was seeking a way back through the leafy curtain that has swung behind us, never to open again. Man had broken through that network of strangling vines by the magical utterance of the first word. In that guttural achievement he had created his destiny and taken leave of his kindred. There would be no way of return save perhaps one: through the power of imaginative insight, which has been manifested among a few great naturalists.
IV
Much has been spoken of oceanic islands as providing the haven, the sheltering crevice, the bleak and empty quarter in which potentially new forms of life might find the refuge necessary for immediate survival. In the words of one student of island faunas, Sherwin Carlquist, these creatu
res, far from being the ripe products of the war of nature, frequently represent, instead, the “inefficient, the unafraid and the obsolescent.” How, then, can they be said to have any bearing upon the struggle for existence on the continents—the world where even the astute and perceptive Darwin had difficulty in explaining how the naked and physically inefficient protohumans had survived the claws of the great carnivores?
So puzzled had Darwin found himself that he had hesitated as to whether ancestral man might have been originally a genuine island product. Torn between viewing man as a weak creature needing protection in his early beginnings, or, on the other hand, attempting to visualize him as a fanged gorilloid monster fully equipped for the war of nature on the African land mass, the great biologist had failed to quite perceive the outlines of that invisibly expanding universe which man had unconsciously created out of airy nothing.
As we have seen, it is the wet fish gasping in the harsh air on the shore, the warm-blooded mammal roving unchecked through the torpor of the reptilian night, the lizard-bird launching into a moment of ill-aimed flight that shatter all purely competitive assumptions. These singular events reveal escapes through the living screen, penetrated, one would have to say in retrospect, by the “overspecialized” and the seemingly “inefficient,” the creatures driven to the wall. Only after their triumphant planetary radiation is something new observed to have arisen in solitude and silence.
We begin in infancy with a universe that our minds constantly strive to subdue to the rational. But just as we seem to have achieved that triumph, some part of observed nature persists in breaking out once more into the unexpected. No greater surprise could have been anticipated than protoman’s first stumbling venture into the hitherto unglimpsed ghostland of shifting symbols, that puzzling realm which Darwin vainly sought upon some real island in a more substantial sea. Reality has a way of hiding even from its most gifted observers.
The Unexpected Universe Page 13