Even if we collide into this wall of history here on Earth, I find it quite incredible that the rest of the solar system is just going to shut up shop and go out of business, let alone the galaxy, let alone the clusters of galaxies.
TM: Here’s a man who thinks the sun is alive!
RS: The sun could undergo tremendous transformation. I’ll concede the entire solar system to you. That leaves an awful lot else, like the rest of the galaxy.
TM: I’ll take it...The galaxy can take care of itself.
RS: The question is whether we’re talking about human destiny on Earth, or the destiny of Earth, or the destiny of the solar system? Or is this about the entire cosmos, countless trillions of galaxies, stars everywhere? I can’t believe that the kind of transformation you’re talking about, or even the implosion of the entire solar system, is going to set out more than the most minute ripples throughout even our own galaxy.
TM: Implicit in that objection is that you really believe that there are millions of light years of space and time filled with spiral galaxies. It could all be a screen. The true size of the cosmic stage is a hotly debated subject, even among the experts. When you say it’s too local, then you attack the universalistic position. We only have two choices—either what you disdainfully call provincialism, or what you disdainfully call universalism. It’s got to be one or the other. I’m uncomfortable with the universal thing myself. However, I’m also uncomfortable with the idea that the universe as described by Newtonian astronomers should go absolutely unchallenged. This anthropic principle that astronomers have begun to allow into their deliberations suggests that maybe the stars aren’t as fixed in their courses as we imagine, and that somehow events on the earth could have a kind of cosmic significance.
RS: The apocalyptic tradition is more like Ralph’s version. It’s not everything suddenly disappearing in a blinding light. It’s a period of transformation followed by the Millennium, a period in which the kingdom of heaven is realized on Earth. That is something that’s lacking from your vision. You don’t think beyond the year 2012.
I, like Ralph, am more inclined to traditional millenarianism, a transitional period followed by the kingdom of heaven on Earth. What I think this could involve is first of all, psychedelics; secondly, the revival of animism; thirdly, mathematical objects visible to all through computers; and fourthly, communication with the stars. Through conscious communication a network of consciousness begins to link up, far beyond the Earth, to other stars, other galaxies. A thousand years to effect this linking up of consciousness throughout the entire cosmos, at the end of which, the true and absolute Eschaton might be possible. Right now it would be confined to Earth, or at most the solar system.
TM: I think that the thousand years should be scaled back by orders of magnitude. It will be more like ten years. The thousand years prophecy was naive by virtue of being made in a different era with less compression of time. We will then build quite naturally toward the revelation of the Eschaton sometime around 2012.
So the work on island dispersal patterns and the statistical mechanics of this process will eventually, I think, play a role in modeling how life is dispersed throughout the galaxy.
CHAPTER 6
AN EVOLUTIONARY LEAP
Terence McKenna: In this conversation, I’d like to talk about Hawaii, the island—what it tells us about evolution, and how it relates to island ecosystems and their evolutionary process. The task falls to me because as chance would have it, in the course of my life I’ve visited most of the major theaters of evolution on the planet that involve the exemplars of the various types of island groups. Hawaii, where we are recording this trialogue, is a group of mid-ocean volcanic islands. The only other mid-ocean volcanic island groups in the world are the Azores, the Canaries and the Seychelles. They offer great contrast to Hawaii, particularly the Seychelles, which as a portion of the Madagascar landmass has been above water some 300 million years, perhaps longer than any other place on the planet. There the evolutionary process offers a dramatic contrast to the far more recent evolution in the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawaiian Islands represent the unique case, because of the size of the volcanic calderas and of the vents beneath the Pacific floor that have created them. In fact, these vents and volcanic conduits are the largest on the planet. What we have in Hawaii is a tectonic plate sliding slowly toward southern Russia and Japan that is crossing over a weak place in the Earth’s crust, a place where the core magma of the planet lies a considerable percentage closer to the surface than anywhere else on earth. The result of this situation is a series of islands formed in the same spot that each, after its volcanic birth, is rafted away on the continental plate towards the northwest.
The life in the Hawaiian Islands shows 30 to 35 million years of endemism using the ordinary rates of gene change that biologists recognize. Nevertheless, geologically speaking, no Hawaiian island is over 12 million years old. The obvious interpretation of these facts is that life arose out here on islands that no longer exist, and as islands rose and fell, the life hopscotched from one island to another. Indeed, the dispersal rate of birds, tree snails, and other organisms moving eastward from Kauai across Oahu, Molokai and Maui to the Big Island, Hawaii itself, shows that this gradient is still operable. The forests of Hawaii have the poorest amount of species in the major islands. Hawaii is species poor because animals are still arriving here from the other islands. Nevertheless because these volcanoes are so huge, Hawaii has a complete range of ecological systems, from sea level to 14,000 feet, virtually the entire range on the planet in which life is able to locate itself. The volcano itself, Mauna Loa, is by volume the world’s largest mountain, because it is already a 14,000 foot mountain when it breaks through to sea level, having risen from the Pacific floor, and in this part of the world the Pacific Ocean is 13,000 feet deep. This mountain was enormous before it ever broke water. It now rises 13,000 feet above sea level, and its sister mountain, Mauna Kea, is shorter by only 120 feet.
What has been created out here is a very closed ecosystem far from any continental landmass. The forms of life that arise here arise on rafted debris or tucked into the feathers of migratory birds or in some other highly improbable fashion. What we see here is a winnowing of continental species based on extreme improbability. As an example, a very common Sierra Nevada wildflower of no great distinction apparently arrived millions of years ago as a single seed on Maui, and by that crossing has created a mutated race of plants that we know as the Hawaiian Silversword, one of the most bizarre endemic plants that the island has produced.
In terms of islands within islands and the fractal adumbration of nature, it’s very evident here. For example, because the island is created by a series of lava flows of varying ages, there is a constant process in which ecosystems become islands by lava flows. And so you have a series of micro-islands of species that develop independently of each other even though they may only be some few miles apart, but separated by a landscape so toxic and desolate that there is very little intermixing of genes. This is thought to have been a formative factor in the evolution of the Hawaiian fruit flies, Drosophila. They of course were very useful in early studies of genetics because the chromosomes of the Hawaiian Drosophila are ten thousand times larger than the ordinary Drosophila. In the era before electron microscopes you could actually color band these with certain dyes.
In terms of extrapolating all of this particular natural history data into some sort of general model, I think what life on the island brings home to us is that the earth itself is an island. I’ve been saying for many years that one of the most revolutionary yet totally trivial and predictable revolutions sure to come in biology is the recognition that models of island isolation or species dispersion across oceans can easily be expanded to the three-dimensional ocean of outer space.
Very clearly viruses, prions, gene fragments, molecularly coded information, percolate between the stars as a statistically very low component of the general cosmic dust and debris. I
ndeed, there have been many attempts to establish this idea, by Fred Hoyle and others. Recently a theory of the cometary origin of life has been put forward. It seems to me perfectly obvious that in time these notions will be embraced; after all, viruses can freeze down to crystalline states that are almost minerals. And as for dispersion between celestial bodies, it’s now generally agreed that a number of meteorites that have been recovered in the Antarctic are in fact fragments of Mars. So the work on island dispersal patterns and the statistical mechanics of this process will eventually, I think, play a role in modeling how life is dispersed throughout the galaxy.
Some of the other islands that I’ve been fortunate enough to relate to are the Indonesian islands, which are the absolute other end of the spectrum of the class of tropical islands. What we have here in Hawaii, as I said, are mid-ocean islands far from continental floras and faunas, while Indonesia is in fact a submerged continent. As recently as 120,000 years ago, Indonesia, from Sumatra to New Guinea, was a single landmass which paleobiologists refer to as Sundaland. In the process of this shallow continent’s subsidence, the sea filled in the low spots, so that today there is a direct correlation between species differentiation on any two Indonesian islands and the depth of the sea between them. This correlation has been shown over and over. One of the great conundrums of nineteenth-century biology was the so-called problem of Wallace’s Line. Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of the principle of natural selection, believed that between the islands of Bali and Lombok and then going west of Celebes you could draw a line which represented the line of convergence between the Austral-Papuan biogeographical zones and the Asian-Malayan zones.
Statistical studies, Ernst Mayr’s principally, have disproved this notion. However, I have collected butterflies and stood in the forests on both sides of Wallace’s Line in several places and I completely understand Wallace’s observation and in fact wonder about Mayr’s conclusion. Wallace concluded that these forests are very different; the bird calls, the butterflies, and the flora all seemed different. But what Mayr seemed to show was that there was no distinct line. There was a gradient from Australia to Malaya in one direction and Malaya to Australia in the other direction. Although I haven’t mentioned the Galapagos, island groups like this are obvious laboratories of speciation. So much so that when Darwin and Wallace and Walter Henry Bates and other nineteenth-century biologists who were grappling with the so-called species problem set out to do their fieldwork, they could not fail to be impressed by this peculiar theme and variation. They could not understand whose fingers strung the harp until they realized that similar populations separated by catastrophe such as the arrival of ocean water or a lava flow, then come under very slightly different selection pressures which cause slightly different physical characteristics to be taken on. In the Amazon Basin for example, you can move 2,000 miles and have only about a 15% replacement in butterfly species. In Indonesia you can cross a strait of water 20 miles wide and have a 17% replacement of butterfly species. Darwin and Wallace visited these places, both continental floras and faunas and the island situations, and through careful observation they finally understood what the mechanism of speciation was. And it’s a wonderful thing, you know. Take for example butterfly diversity, that is a situation where diversity itself confers adaptive advantage. Because birds largely predate upon butterflies, it’s been shown in numerous studies that birds hunt a target image. They have an image of their prey. If through the chance recombination of genes your wing color or wing shape pushes you outside the target spectrum, you will be ignored and survive.
Ralph Abraham: Like us!
TM: And so variety itself becomes a premium in the evolutionary game. Novelty itself then is preserved because novelty confers an adaptive advantage in this situation, for birds and butterflies. I think the implications of these things lie close to the surface. Earth is a small island, we are making great changes in its ecological parameters, and we are affecting plant and animal populations. By studying how evolution has shaped island groups, we can appreciate our own small cosmic island and perhaps eventually draw politically empowering conclusions from that.
Rupert Sheldrake: What a wonderful overview, Terence! A real delight.
There remains a major evolutionary puzzle. Islands have a tremendous role in speciation, as all evolutionists believe. Both Darwin and Wallace provided classic examples. Then in places where there are contacts through island chains the flora can be extremely rich in species, as in the Malaysian-Indonesian archipelago, one of the great creation centers of species in the world. That’s the kind of tropical forest I know best, having lived in Malaysia. From what you’ve said, this evolutionary creativity arises from a combination of isolation on islands, plus mingling of two totally radically different floras, giving rise to all sorts of new possibilities and combinations.
TM: And the process was pumped by the repetitive comings and goings of the sea, which repeatedly created island populations and then reunited them.
RS: And presumably also pumped by the ice ages not only through changes in sea level, but also through the compression of all forms of life towards the tropics, followed by a poleward migration of species at the end of each ice age. All this makes sense for the center of evolutionary creativity in the Malaysian-Indonesian archipelago. The problem is that it doesn’t explain that other great center of evolutionary creativity, the Amazon basin.
TM: The answer is very simple. It has simply been above ground a very long time. In other words, the Malaysian-Austro-Papuan situation is fairly recent; probably the map has looked as it does no more than seven or eight million years. The Amazon on the other hand has been above water 280 to 300 million years. So simply being in the tropics with three, four, five breeding seasons a year for many organisms, and never being inundated by seawater or catastrophe allowed that incredible climatic speciation on a continental landmass. You’re right, it didn’t happen as far as we know in Africa, although Africa’s so heavily impacted by human beings that any notion of its original natural history is impossible. But that’s the short answer, that it was above water a long, long time.
RS: But then we have two methods of prolific evolution. One depends on being around a long time, as in the case of the Amazon. The other depends on isolation, climatic pumping, mixing of gene pools and so on.
TM: What pumped the Amazon situation on a micro level is the meandering of rivers. You see, it’s very hard in a climaxed forest situation for any new species to gain a foothold. But because rivers meander and destroy forests and create sandbars and the intermediate zone of uninhabited land, so-called pioneer species can move in there. And that’s where the speciation is taking place. Carl Sauer estimated that before the advances of human culture it was the meandering rivers that were the main force for modern plant evolution on this planet. A vast amount of shifting of boundaries goes on, and it’s in that shifting boundary zone that mutants, new forms, can get hold. That’s why a pioneer plant species will have the following characteristics. It will be an annual and it will be a prolific seeder. It will be herbaceous, not woody. In short, it will be a weed. And that’s what a weed is, a pioneer species, a tremendously predatory species designed for open land, utterly unable to compete in the forest, but in open land able to take over very well.
RS: Yes, but while isolation, new environments and so on, explain one side of evolution, I think there’s another side which Darwinism can’t explain, because it puts too much emphasis on natural selection. J.C. Willis, the great British botanist who worked in Ceylon and knew the Asian flora well started off as a keen Darwinian, but was forced to the conclusion that much evolution took place by divergent mutation, rather than natural selection. For example, in Ceylon and India there are many species of water plants in the family Podostemaceae that live in streams with leaves that float on water, with many different leaf forms. Any attempt to account for a particular leaf form in terms of adaptation to water flow fails because leaves of quite different s
hape seem to do just as well, and can flourish side by side.
TM: Well, the Hawaiian Hapu here is an excellent example. Here we have the two tree ferns, two distinct species, distributed in a ratio of 50-50. One has little black stems with stickers and the other has a fuzzy brown soft stem. What selective pressure caused stickers to work for one and not to work for the other, when they’re standing right next to each other? Seems to me there must be drift of genes or simply variety for its own sake.
RS: Life is constantly trying out new forms. Unsuccessful novelties are weeded out by natural selection. A few are a wild success. But many novel forms may work equally well, and survive equally well, like the two species of tree ferns in your Hawaiian forest. There may just be lots of equivalent species, where you’ve got novelty for novelty’s sake. They are not all closely shaped and sculpted by natural selection.
RA: Well, getting back to Hawaii here, it seems, if I understood you right, that what’s unique about Hawaii is the Hawaiian Islands are young, and they’re maximally oceanic islands, far from any continents. And the process of the population of a new island from a neighboring island is visible, even in the present, and then we see a certain pattern is repeated over and over again, even in the course of a century. So it seems to me that these different examples you were talking about conflate two different processes more or less projected upon the same screen. One is a purely biogeographical process that could at least be imagined to be operating the same way without any evolution. We have only the same species that were found on Maui suddenly appearing on Hawaii by a process of dispersal. Some species are successful at pioneering, and help create an ecology suitable for the second species, and their space-time patterns are developed one upon another, very interesting fractal movies that to begin with would have nothing to do with evolution.
The Evolutionary Mind Page 11
