C. EVOLUTION
The envelope is as wide as the space granted by the surplus of generations, sculpted by scarcity. If anything is behind the accumulation of variations, it’s reprimand. Constraint and condemning somehow rebound into bounty. Weeding out increases complexity, like gravity driving a river uphill. I can’t see it; how can the shake-out sieve of death create more, when its most generous judgment is “Not quite”?
My enlightenment arrives in stages, unfolding historically, inaccurately, like the thing it researches. The best classification for gene anthologies must be laid out on the axis of time. Darwin induced the whole before he had adequate foundation. Evolutionary thought evolved only fitfully, by pangenesis. The earliest recorded text I can find already suspects the mutability of living shape. Anaximander, in translation, reads like the Origin, 2,400 years ahead of time. Aristotle blunders up against the notion, then walks bravely away. Linnaeus—worlds later—knew; he could have proclaimed it, incomplete, in rough outline. But he was unwilling to crawl out onto that geneological limb until humanity was ready.
Two and a half millennia after the idea’s appearance, I’m still not ready. Evolution is the most explosive deflation of all time—the capstone of history’s steady objectification of nature. I spend a day of quiet privacy spelling out how this unassuming model worked the most radical intellectual overhaul ever, how this neartautology supplies the crucial cog that biology has aspired toward since its appearance. I trace every step in the synthesis, recheck, give the go-ahead to each subassembly. Still the complete machine lies one step outside credibility. I recapitulate evolution’s four prerequisites in embryo:
1. Excess of issue. Surplus offspring. Seedlings rooting in the nook of an I-beam on the fiftieth floor of a two-year-old plate-glass sky-scraper; maggots overrunning a scrap of meat. Viruses breeding under the electron microscope at Cold Spring Harbor, making Leo Szilard rush outside and pace the porch of his cabin to calm himself. Precisely the state this evening finds me in.
2. Scarcity. Common currency from day one: no amount of goods are ever enough to go around. Not all surplus makes it; none makes good in every case. Death hones away, a missed heartbeat from home.
These first two innocuous tenets are reciprocal. Yet hiding in their sum is the larger part of Darwin’s bugaboo. Too much divided into too little, and something’s got to change. Some die faster than others, a conclusion as inescapable as its result.
3. Variation. Differential dying creates divergence. This is my sticking point tonight. I make the catch only slowly: variation is two-tiered. First: the ten thousand wrigglers in a pound of anchovy spawn are all different. Trivially individual. Even dyed-in-wool creationists admit that poodles differ from Great Danes, let alone wolves. Man too (whatever the nausea of knowing) is not an entity, but five billion disparate creatures with different eyes, hands, and minds. I fell in love with one whose hair, height, voice, fear, and protective narcissism made him unique. I loved one man distinct from all others, or at most, two. Already halfway to difference’s second tier: the difference between Franklin and that anchovy spawn. A difference of some difference—where all the tempest still comes from.
4. Inheritance. Divergence depends on a means of conserving difference. Certain individuals in a varying population solve scarcity better than others. If their advantage is handed down disproportionately, that population changes. Mendel, a great admirer of Darwin’s book, inexplicably never wrote the letter that would have conferred his results to his contemporary. His work, had it been communicated, might have shown far sooner that evolution harbored more than that tautology “Survivors survive.”
Even had a letter been sent, the two great innovations in nineteenth century natural science still would have faced that paradox: more comes from less. Paring away compounds. Something new derives from the not-quite, under no more enlightened guidance than annihilation. The rub starts in that antithesis, conserved difference: the ability accurately to perpetuate lapses. To preserve infidelity faithfully. It has taken Dr. Ressler’s death and Todd’s variation on that theme for me to understand that the word “variation” itself, like “nihilism” and “ineffable,” is among the best of Dr. Ressler’s perpetually sought-after one-word contradictions in terms.
The resolution of the paradox that Mendel’s unsent letter would have both clarified and compounded did not come until the demonstration that genes were nucleotide sequences. A rogue protein, synthesized by a slight variation in the master base string, was inheritable. And every variation across the spectrum—fish, fowl, lichen, redwood, redhead—is born in divergent protein. Characteristics stay intact from one generation to the next, but only within a margin of error. A few capriciously altered intervals produce a new tune, a song with crisp shocks of familiar difference hiding in its four notes.
Species’ diverse qualities slip down the world’s gradient unequally. The specific gravity of a place settles the trait-spread into new statistical parfaits. A forbidden secret: the Bible itself is versed in the linguistics of breeding. Only, scarcity prunes more efficiently than any artificial breeder. The gap between Chihuahua and Great Dane is negotiable; the same features are visible, just remixed along a sliding scale. A theist might concede microevolution and still not throw creation itself to the dogs. But variation has a wilder trick, tweaking the quantitative so far that it kicks out something qualitatively new—wolves and sheep from the same bolt of clothing.
In sexual reproduction, rearrangement of parental haplotypes produces a genotype different from either, although cut from the same constituent stuff. If all the carriers of a characteristic fail to reproduce, that trait is lost. But otherwise, it’s a closed system, however unexplorably large. Alleles mix to create unimaginable variety, but the species material remains essentially unchanged. I can rearrange my furniture in countless ways, resulting in a surprise decorating scheme for every day I knew the man, but no new furniture ever enters my place.
Speciation, on the other hand, seems to contradict Mendel’s perpetuated genes. But at molecular level, I trace it to a replicating system complex enough to suffer turbulence, to err. Something new can come about through recombination or mutation. I now have enough molecular biology to find the source of genetic novelty baldly assumed by Darwin: a G grabbing a T in its negative filament instead of its proper C, a sequence of nucleotides pinched out or an intruder taken in and the whole program can change. Terrifying, destructive anarchy, bumping blindly down dead ends and back alleys, when shaped by destruction, can shoot living things into undesignable places.
One changed nucleotide can profoundly alter the function of the protein it helps synthesize. The size of evolutionary steps, the exact scenario for speciation, is still debated. But all variants on the purposive molecule are hazards of evaluated chance. Without molecular mutation, there would be no amendment, no evolution. And yet, most bizarre to me of all, mutations are almost never beneficial. A message, carefully crafted over time, is altered at random. The text will almost certainly suffer, if it remains intelligible at all. The introduction of noise into a signal is much more likely to garble than improve. Failure is lots more probable than anything else going.
Typing too late at night, I begin to insert letters that distort my words diseasterously. Rereading, I piece some alterations back into partial sense. Only an infinitesimally few typos—the lucky comma that leaves a sentence more comprehensible—will produce clean, let alone enhanced final copy. Most swift kicks to my bum radio wreak havoc on its components. But once every few decades, I improve the signal. Mutations cause cancer, stillbirth, blindness, deafness, heart disease, mongolism—everything that can go wrong. Yet faulty copying is the only agency for change. Random tinkering, the source of all horrible mistakes, remains the “hopeful monster,” the Goldschmidt variation.
We walked once in the drifted snow, the three of us, on a day written off, lost, abandoned to the world. Dr. Ressler, against the white background, speculated about the implausibility of
those snow tracks, the creatures that made them. “Birds surely don’t possess compositional sense, musical volition. They sing; that’s all. A species’ song is taught by parent to child. But every so many generations, something is lost in translation. A child muffs his riff, mislearns, wings it. If the mistake— highly unlikely—works a better attraction, this new melody will be taught to more chicks than flock average, and in time the twist becomes status quo. Insertions, deletions, transpositions: gaffs ratified or panned in performance. A species might, over considerable time, whistle its way from a G major scale into the Goldberg Base.”
Life doesn’t spring to new complexity. But small bugs, fed back into executing procreation, produce wrinkles, differences that are honed into new profiles of spread and fit. Precursors emerge blindly; purpose itself erodes out of chance. At bottom, no cause: only the life molecule, copying or failing to copy. What good is a blip that doesn’t yet function? Some good; even a fractional lung could keep a fraction of tidal-dried fish alive fractionally longer. Lungs are not revealed or inevitable. They are arbitrary inventions, reified in experience. They are postulated, fitfully, across immense pools of genetic potential, invariantly inherited. Or mostly invariant. Life consists of propositions about chance by chance.
In the interplay of scale between variant population, selectable individual, and occasionally stray gene, I find counterpoint enough to create a trio sonata rich beyond all design, exceeding even his hero’s compositional ingenuity. All this from that hobgoblin Evolution, that drunk trapping the world into listening to its rambling shaggy dog story full of fabrication, revision, gaps, imploring every so often, “Correct me if I’m wrong.”
I trace the steps, the developing embryo recapitulating its own evolutionary history. I follow the observations and inferences, mirror the young man step by step, a canon at the fifth, at a quarter century’s distance. His very brain must have been electrified by the nearness of creation. I see Ressler and his love, twenty-seven years ago, listening, lying on his barracks floor in the dark, as if the danger in the notes will not notice them if they only keep still. The fifteenth variation, replication by inversion— the great, halfway watershed—completes itself as they lie in silence. A question, framed by the initial canonic voice, descends frightened down the scale ladder. A measure later, the answer, predetermined by its complement, begins an awful, mirror rise.
For the first time, unmitigated minor, as bitter as a belated gift of roses from an unfaithful lover. Sorrow creeps in, rich, expansive, and beautiful, discolors the set at the midpoint. This slow, inevitable seep is a surrender from which there is no recovery. Acute cut of chromatic, harbinger of half-steps. The meandering question, answered severely at the fifth, tripled by a bass that tries to preserve the sarabande by desperately introducing passing accidentals, combines in harmonies more unforgiving than any until late this century. The life molecule’s hovering nearness threatens to sweep over the man I look for, obliterate him.
The bass falters, then fails to translate the Base into distant minors. It capitulates, lapses into the despair of part-writing freedom. The canonic lines cross, impossible for my ear to disentangle. The question begins a long—excessively, over-and-again long—terminal descent into obscurity, broken only by a last, four-note, densely pitched, failed attempt to lift itself before the final fall. The answer, constrained by transcription to rise note by note, continues to do so, long after other motion stops, winding up somewhere without footing, in the far reaches of unsupported space.
The variation ends. Ressler and his love untangle their parts, the silence growing as oppressive as their finally fleshed-out understanding of just how many permutations of the four basic steps—G, A, T, C, is it?—life is condemned to examine, organize, experiment with over time. They feel the delicious, sickening thrill of evolution—lost, not just in its cold, mechanistic causelessness, but in the operation’s oppressive size, its ability to go on innovating stray variations pointlessly forever.
I hear that forsaken minor tonight, canonically, at arm’s length of three decades. I hear the awful, magnificently patient structure of the Darwinian revolution, more shattering than the sum of its molecular evidence. The reduction of the once animist world has thrown the human spirit into tailspin anxiety, deprived it of soul, except for the soul’s distress. Convinced of the facts, I still cannot accommodate, make room in my heart for indifferent statistics. Even accepting, I am as mythless, as bitterly stripped as those who deny the evidence.
Dozing in and out of sleep to talk radio, I hear a recent poll claiming that a bare 9 percent of Americans accept evolution. Yet this debate— amazingly still raging—about the origin of wealth beyond conception is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter anymore whether a fraction of the race splits off, chooses to return to a child’s Eden. It doesn’t matter if 91 percent of my countrymen continue to insist that species were created by father, so long as the entire planet instantly unites in acknowledging that they are, right now, being destroyed chaotically by child. Conservatively: several thousand species extinct a year. Instant, universal acknowledgment is impossible. In the hundred acres of rain forest destroyed each minute I write this, the earth loses species not yet even described in the catalog.
The arbitrarity of our origin cuts us adrift, slack as a severed marionette. In this pivotal moment of development’s first dissonance, we are too stunned to see that we are driving the life crystal back into inertness, erasing the rare hypotheticals it took excruciating convolution of chance eons to propose. The situation is hopeless, huge, advanced beyond addressing. Why do I even bother to put this down? No reason. The same reason the gene in me keeps up its random postulate.
“The universe was not pregnant with life,” my friend Monod writes, “nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game.” The entire, endlessly expandable text, “the replicative structure of DNA: that registry of chance, that tone-deaf conservatory where the noise is preserved along with the music,” is a fluke lottery we are losing, rubbing out by the minute. Awful, chromatic awareness fills me with a curatorial resolve. “Think of it,” another friend once said. “The proper response ought not to be distress at all. We should feel dumb amazement. Incredulous, gasping gratitude that we’ve landed the chance at all, the outside chance to be able to comprehend, to save any fraction of it.”
D. HEREDITY
In the last, delicious twist, the width of the restless species catalog depends on the ability of traits to persist in stillness. Evolution is the exception, stability the rule. Variation depends on a larger invariability to begin its trip from home. Procreation is not creative per se. Sex is easily accomplished by anyone with a high school equivalence certificate. I did it myself once, with help. The resulting product, except in exceptional cases, is a rearrangement of existing qualities. Innovation lies beyond even the most conscientious parent.
My mother bore three children, low for the baby boom. She arranged to interleave them by sex, feeling a good mix to be better for development. My father, bravely self-educated, lectured her endlessly about the X and Y chromosomes, how sex determination sat in the male’s gamete; she had no say in the matter. She replied, “Yes, dear,” and went about sleeping on her left side to make a girl and her right for a boy. The idea that the left ovary produced girls and the right boys had been passed down in her family for generations. No controls, no sample mean. The children were all the empirical evidence she needed. My father calculated the probability of her black magic: one out of eight, impressive but not conclusive. My mother offered to make it one out of sixteen anytime my father was man enough to try.
Now they’re both dead. The constituent commands that assembled them—voice, intelligence, even those aggregates of obstinacy and superstition—are cut loose, alleles still intact in daughters, ready for another experiment, another change-partners. What exactly is lost, destroyed, with an individual’s death? Just a permutation put to rest. A combination, devastating, never to be reassembled.
Its elements remain: eyes, voice, mother, father.
Meiosis, necrosis: the arcs of the ancient cycle of recirculation I’m caught in for good. Both carry on, mesmerized, churning out tireless rearrangements on the first little nitrogen, methane, lightning spark. Carry on, despite long since filling the entire surface of the earth with velvet and scum, as if some fabulous combination were just around the next chromosomal bend, waiting to be revealed. But there is no revelation. Only endless surplus versus harm.
To the population, the gene, birth and death carry no last word. Only in the chest of the next of kin does that partnership make any inroads. Slow, conservative, migratory. Once, a colt, I spoke that language. I’ve forgotten it all, the years I spent hungry and astonished, nights by flashlight over the illustrated encyclopedia describing mysterious, interlocked systems— water cycle, nitrogen fixation, circulation of blood, food chain. Winter weekends, whole summers out in the woods, in empty lots, in our immense, dark backyard, examining the scat of rabbits, catching bizarre electrical arthropoda in jars, convinced, sensing firsthand the terrible expanse of the place.
I remembered it this morning, to ruinous expense, so long after first elaborating the thought. It suddenly was not enough to rehash natural selection. I had to go put my hands on the gene, on evolving population, invariant heredity. I knew it would cost, that my carefully guarded nest egg would suffer. I boarded the inbound, not knowing what part of the unclassifiable, branching catalog I was after, but knowing that the biome was midtown. I found myself on the stairs to the Met, but could not bring myself to go in. Not without the one I once arranged to meet there, should we ever be separated.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 40
