Origins of the Universe and What It All Means

by Carole Firstman

  Question: Hypothetically speaking, had the notion of scientific or medicinal potential occurred to me out there in the boulder fields of Cataviña where I scanned the sand for suspicious-looking mounds, would I have conceded some similar potential benefits to the likes of rattlesnakes, too?

  Answer: Maybe.

  Answer amendment: Even so, such thoughts would not have comforted me in the moment, would not have eliminated the fight or-flight tingle in my palms as I balanced on one foot, listening for the tststststststs of sidewinders. I’m okay with the stolen formaldehyde-soaked scorpion floating in its jar inside my desk drawer (though I admit to a ting of the heebie-jeebies when I jiggle the jar back and forth to feel its forty-plus-year-old body shift limply from side to side). I’m okay with thousands of scorpions in thousands of jars, as a matter of fact, and throw in a few hundred pickled spiders as well. But snakes: no can do. Not dead, not alive, and certainly not loose and unaccounted for, poking stick or not. I fancy myself the Indiana Jones type—allow me an adventure, an impromptu hike in the desert, but please, no snakes.

  Intellectually, I get it: curiosity + scientific inquiry = knowledge.

  Emotionally, not so much: my palms still sweat at the thought of Indiana Jones trapped in the Well of Souls—the secret underground cave containing the Ark of the Covenant—vipers slithering around his torso, between his legs, heaving across his collarbone. I turned seventeen the summer Raiders of the Lost Ark debuted in 1981. I returned to the theater five times during a month-long visit to my father’s house in Southern California, each time to relive Indiana’s adventure vicariously, outrunning Nazis and booby traps and wrath-of-God forces. I remember the expression on Harrison Ford’s face as my friend Lana and I stared up at the big screen, his wide-eyed gaping grimace as he sat momentarily paralyzed with fear in the snake hell of that dark, dangerous cave. Lana’s head flinched backward as she sank lower into the cushioned seat next to mine, and I, too, crouched down involuntarily, turning my head slightly to the right as if viewing from an angle rather than straight on would somehow protect me from the serpents on screen. I remember Lana’s forehead and cheeks illuminated by the screen’s reflection, her expression mirroring my own: lips apart, teeth clenched together, eyebrows arched—the face of fear.

  Eighteen

  We all recognize this face.

  We study it.

  The “face of fear” became a talking point during the nineteenth-century debate surrounding Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, whereupon Darwin conducted his own experiments on facial expressions.1 The nature of his inquiry2 speaks to the universality of Indiana’s facial expression (and is also perhaps testament to Harrison Ford’s acting skills). Lana and I, along with all the other teenagers cowering in the Pomona Triplex Theater that summer afternoon, instantly identified with our hero’s grimace. Our imaginations ran wild with deep-seated recognition.

  The universal-fear concept manifests in all sorts of contemporary artistic endeavors, from movies to television to literature. Like Carl Sagan’s sci-fi novel The Dragons of Eden.3 Or the movie Snakes on a Plane. Or the giant snake in Conan the Barbarian. The list goes on.

  Time and again modern pop culture capitalizes on the universal-fear theme. Consider television’s Fear Factor, where for six seasons NBC offered a weekly $50,000 prize to the contestant who managed to choke down a blended rat smoothie or immerse his head in a box of live, limbless, elongated reptiles: snakes. Several years later, I still remember the lunchtime talk in the teacher’s lounge back in 2006, the day after the blended rat smoothie episode. Who could forget a blended rat smoothie?4

  Recent Gallup Polls reveal that the most common fears in American teenagers in the United States include snakes, rats, public speaking, nuclear war, being alone, going to the dentist, and heights. Ah, snakes and rats. No surprise there. Lana and I could have told you that thirty years ago. What I couldn’t have told you then is that we’re genetically predisposed to fear potentially poisonous, disease-carrying animals that once posed significant danger to early humans. This may account for universal phobias that span cultures and continents. It makes sense if you think about fear as an evolutionary instinct embedded in human consciousness.

  Cute little Chaka and his humanoid clan survived the dangers of nature by adapting to their environs. Sometimes Chaka got lucky, but often he was extraordinarily capable of detecting and deterring the threat of, say, a poisonous snake.

  In the journal Psychological Science, the theory of an innate, visually stimulated fear mechanism is supported by a series of experiments comparing the abilities of adults and three-year-olds to quickly and accurately pinpoint images of snakes among harmless distractions.5 Parents and children identified snakes more rapidly than they detected the other stimuli, despite the gap in age and experience. The study also found that both children and adults who don’t fear snakes are just as good at quickly identifying them as children and adults who do fear snakes.

  So perhaps Chaka’s survival-serving fear hardwired itself into Indiana’s genetic code before Indiana was even a glimmer in George Lucas’s eye.

  Perhaps my parents’ personality traits—even the behaviors that drive me mad—are hardwired into my genetic code. Perhaps we’re not so different, my father and I, my mother and I. Perhaps, at least partially, I resent taking care of them because in reality, behind the resentment, lies fear. Maybe I dread my own decline.

  When I study that old photograph, the one with a potbellied little girl wearing her mother’s bra and the twenty-something mother next to her, I see myself in my mother’s face.

  1. Darwin believed the universal bug-eyed stretched-mouth terror was an instinctive tightening of muscles triggered by an evolved response to fear, a point he sought to prove in the reptile house of the London Zoological Gardens. Trying to remain perfectly calm, he stood as close to the glass as possible while a puff adder lunged toward him on the other side. Each time he grimaced and jumped back, then saddled up again for another go. In his diary he wrote, “My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced,” concluding that ancient instinct still reminisces, untouched by the nuances of modern civilization.

  2. I question Darwin’s scientific method for this particular experiment. Really, Chuck? You’re gonna “prove” what you already believe to be true by using yourself as the subject? No conflict with objectivity there.

  3. The book’s title derives from his thesis that the instinctual mammalian fear of reptiles is a genetic endowment left over from a titanic battle between mammals and reptiles; mammals emerged victorious, at least temporarily, in the evolutionary struggle for dominance, but the remnants of that struggle live on in our myths and subconscious fears.

  4. Of course this show was popular (even if you weren’t interested in the interpersonal dramas bouncing like spears between arguing and posturing reality TV cast members). We could identify with the (albeit artificially created) plight of the players. From the comfort of our La-Z-Boy recliners we indulged our voyeuristic curiosity while vicariously facing our own fears, speculating on our own ability to enter the darkened cave, touch the snake, eat the rat.

  5. “We wanted to know whether preschool children, who have much less experience with natural threats than adults, would detect the presence of snakes as quickly as their parents,” explains University of Virginia graduate student Vanessa LoBue. Children and their parents each viewed nine color photographs on a computer screen and were asked to find the single snake among eight flowers, frogs, or caterpillars, or, alternately, the single non-threatening item among eight snakes.

  Nineteen

  The whispering dread of unspecified, far-in-the-future mortality (or the existential how-will-I-feel-when-my-father-someday-dies-type fear) differs from the palm-tingling fear that snapped through my senses while I hiked the deep sanded gulch of Cataviña, the kind of fear that contorted Indiana Jones’s and Lana’s faces during Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s the latte
r response I question here—I wonder what happened inside my brain the moment I thought I heard a sidewinder. More to the point, what are the neurological mechanics of palm-tingling fear?

  Let’s say you’re home alone watching Raiders of the Lost Ark late in the wee hours. The pitch-black night presses against the uncurtained windows. Then you see it and hear it at the same time: the front door bangs, rattles against the doorframe; the knob jiggles. Your breathing speeds up. Your heart races. Muscles tighten. What if? What if? Your palms tingle.

  Your brain’s fear response triggers automatically, setting off a chain reaction that culminates with the release of muscle-energizing chemicals. You and Chaka are now one; he’s alive inside your thalamus. His hairy, bare feet kick your neural impulses into hyperdrive. Chaka wonders, Is it a burglar, or is it the wind? His question careens down two paths simultaneously, via the low road and the high road: the low road shoots first and asks questions later, making a beeline for the hypothalamus and activating the fight-or-flight launch sequence (safer to assume it’s a burglar and have it turn out to be the wind than vice versa), while the high road takes more time and delivers a more precise interpretation of events. The longer process, the high road, looks like this:

  Twenty

  Regardless of which path we’re talking about—high or low road—all roads lead to the hypothalamus, which is the fight-or-flight command center of our ancient survival instincts. If we couldn’t feel fear, we wouldn’t survive long. Unfettered curiosity could lead us blindly through an isolated maze of hazards. We’d carelessly handle poisonous snakes, traipse the Cataviña boulder fields without a poking stick, and hang out with tuberculosis-infected coughers. So some of Chaka’s humanoid friends perished before reproducing; others, those who feared the right things, survived to pass on their genes.

  When it comes to fear, what doesn’t kill us just might excite us—the gene-passing, DNA-mixing kind of excitement. When the hypothalamus turns on the fight-or-flight response, the sympathetic nervous system and the adreana-cortical system flood the bloodstream with dozens of hormones: the heart pounds, pupils dilate, veins constrict, glucose increases, skin prickles, certain muscles tense, others relax, oxygen intake increases, attention narrows and locks onto the object in question. The effect can be quite pleasurable, even mimic (ahem) sexual arousal. No wonder so many people see scary movies and ride roller coasters with their dates. No wonder the carnal investigation, groping teenage couples in the back rows of movie theaters or skin-to-skin explorations behind steamy car windows, hands and fingers and tongues searching in the dark.

  Scientific evidence supports the fear-attraction connection. Psychologist Arthur Aron, for instance, conducted a study using the very common fear of heights. One group of men walked across a 450-foot-long, unstable-feeling bridge suspended over a 230-foot drop; another group walked across a perfectly stable-feeling bridge over the same height. At the end of each bridge, the men met Aron’s very beautiful female assistant. She asked each subject a set of questions related to an imaginary study and then gave him her phone number in case he wanted more information. Of the thirty-three men who’d walked across the stable bridge, two called the assistant. Of the thirty-three who’d walked across the swaying bridge, nine called. Aron concluded that the state of fear encourages sexual attraction. Which may account for my (still-lingering) wild crush on Harrison Ford. And my personal all-time record for seeing the same movie in a single theater run. One summer, five times, full ticket price. (Many years have passed since he first played Indiana Jones in 1981, but like a good wine, the man gets better and better with age. Still.) One can only imagine the rollicking good time Chaka initiated when he returned to camp late at night after a harrowing day of dark-cave exploration and rattlesnake scares.

  Curiosity, as a concept, occupies a liminal space: it teeters on both edges of the good-to-bad spectrum, pulls the opposite ends together, magnetizes their polarities until the straight-lined spectrum arches, bends into a circle, fuses, and emerges as a ring, a band without beginning or end. For better or worse, curiosity and fear cohabitate, live as one. They are the Odd Couple of human behavior, the Oscar Madison–Felix Unger, love-hate couple nesting in your brain.

  For Chaka, though, it all worked out (not so for his dearly departed brother, Tuktuk, may he rest in peace). In this case, curiosity led Chaka to new food sources hidden in the dark cave; inside the cave, he grabbed the food but then had to fight off the vipers; thoroughly turned on, he went home and banged Mrs. Chaka (and probably his newly widowed sister-in-law, Mrs. Tuktuk, as well); his offspring (and their offspring and theirs) eventually emerged preprogrammed with a heightened sense of curiosity and willingness for adventure, but also a genetically based innate fear of reptiles, which enabled them to easily discern a rattler among flowers and frogs and shaded dry grass.

  In this I take comfort. It is unlikely that my eight-year-old niece will want to bend over and touch the coiled rattlesnake she might discover beneath my brother’s deck. Genetic programming protects the little girl that carries my parents’ (and her parents’) genes.

  Twenty-One

  From the makeshift sign, I followed my father’s trail of footsteps through the sandy gulch, making good use of my poking stick. I hadn’t seen him since he darted into the maze of rock pilings, but the trail soon rose out of the dangerously loose sands of the gulch and onto higher, firmer terrain. While I was still on high alert for sidewinders, fear loosened its grip on my hypothalamus and wiggled its tail in some other lobe, tantalizing my brain, tickling me with the promise of adventure, of exploration and discovery.

  In a way it was like reliving the past, reenacting a version of the scorpion-collecting treks of my childhood—or just as easily, I could have inserted our faces (mine and my father’s) in a Land of the Lost fantasy; instead of rushing through the rapids in a blow-up raft and plunging through a dinosaur-day time warp vortex like Father (and Will) and Holly did during each Saturday morning’s opening credits, we trudged through Mexican desert sands and climbed the boulders in search of a certain dark cave.

  As I’ve said, it probably wasn’t the Mexican cave paintings themselves that mattered so much—what they looked like, I mean, or their shapes or intended meanings. It was the journey that mattered. And more specifically, it was the fact that this hike, this impromptu diversion from the highway, evolved spontaneously. My father had “heard about the trail from someone,” he’d said, “or else I read about it somewhere.” Based on that scrap of information, we asked the locals if they knew what we were searching for, if they knew where we could find the cave paintings.

  And here we were.

  The sun had moved slightly to the west by the time I caught up to my father. Several more makeshift signs pointed me in the right direction through the maze of boulders, and when I arrived at the base of a particularly high piling, maybe a hundred feet tall, my father called down to me, shouting and waving his arms overhead. I climbed up with ease. At the top of the rock pile we found the respaldo overhang, a cave-like shelter that had been formed when a massive boulder came to rest on smaller surrounding boulders. We stepped into a shallow tunnel that was perhaps ten feet deep, six feet wide and five feet tall. The ceiling and sloping sides of the cave were covered in pictographs, overlapping images painted in red, orange, yellow, black, and white.

  We sat for a long while in the shaded overhang, sipping from our canteens and gazing silently at the faded amorphous shapes stained into the granite walls. I didn’t know what the pictures were supposed to represent or how to interpret them. It did appear to me, though, that this artwork had been created over a long stretch of time. Layers of images overlapped, with vivid lines—perhaps the most recent—covering bits of faded images beneath, and fainter images still beneath those. I imagine these walls had been decorated over time by many generations of indigenous kinsmen, extended family members from long-lost tribes who reigned for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

  I tried to make sense
of these tantalizing pictures. A yellow circle with black lines radiating outward: perhaps a sun. A red circle outlining a larger red circle: maybe an eclipsed moon. A cloud shape filled with dots: a rare, impending storm. A long yellow cylinder, narrowed to a point at both ends, with claw-like protrusions reaching outward from the belly: could be a scorpion. Two squiggly lines paralleling each other, trailing up the wall, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top: a path. My brain tried to assign meaning to the chaos of images, but they were impossible to interpret.

  My father and I didn’t talk much, at least not then. We just sort of sat. Nodded, sipped.

  “I have so many things I want to tell you,” my father finally said.

  “Hmm?”

  “About the origins of life and the universe and what it all means.”

  Here he picked up the thread of what had been, since the onset of this road trip several days before, his ongoing monologue about the Big Bang, the chemical composition of the sun, the diameter of Jupiter, the evolution of life on Earth, the anatomy of scorpions prehistoric and present, the loves of his life unrequited and otherwise, career accomplishments and regrets, the impossibility of God, the impossibility of a universe without God, his hope for immortality—if not via the dogma of organized religion, then how? An associative, non-linear discourse that circled around itself and repeated many times—a soliloquy I’d hear for years to come, often verbatim, other times expanded, reframed, reimagined, re-questioned, re-answered. Curiosity pulses through my father’s veins—his whole life has been a search for something more, a quest to answer his own intellectual queries, a series of questions that lead one to another, culminating with perhaps the biggest question of all: why are we here, us humans on Earth?