The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  Perhaps shedding light on the puzzle, while simultaneously rendering the deep Nile oases that aided the fictional journey of Seed’s people more realistic: Branches of the Nile presently flow from Kenya’s Lake Victoria, and from Ethiopia. The “Yellow Nile” formerly flowed from eastern Chad. Five and a half million years ago, winding its way north along the bottom of the great Mediterranean canyon—just as is described in this novel—the Nile really was a natural water bridge across the canyon’s deserts, from Africa to Crete.

  Wang (Alan) Tse-lin’s odyssey is based on the experiences and writings of a real Wang Tse-lin, who disappeared (presumably murdered) during the early stages of China’s civil war. We decided to give this fascinating explorer a more hopeful, “what might have been” future. “Alan’s” discovery, with Pierre Boulle, of a lost branch from the hominid family bush is consistent with his life history. Educated in Chicago, he once wrote a report about his examination of a “Yeren wild man,” killed by hunters in China’s Gansu province. He recorded that the specimen, though apelike, also reminded him of Homo erectus, the tool-making “Peking Man” (a lineage believed to have been extinct since at least 230,000 b.c.). In Tse-lin’s 1940 report, the Yeren was described as “a nursing female, covered in dense grayish-red hair . . . [the] face was narrow with deep-set eyes.” If the report is accurate, then Wang Tse-lin was R. J. MacCready’s real-life predecessor in cryptozoology.

  Beneath the surface of Santorini’s lagoon, the terrain encountered by Cousteau and Dmitri is much as described in this novel. The hydrothermal springs do indeed have a history of emerging and fading, in and around the flooded volcanic crater. One spring is presently rising near the island fragment known as Therasia. During the time in which they remain active, submerged volcanic vents support exotic communities of bacteria and fungi that convert undersea deserts into biological oases. (In the deep Atlantic, we know that some of these microbes, and the eggs of certain sea creatures, can drift along the bottom for several hundred years or more, until they wash up against a friendly vent.)

  The genetics of these microbes are beyond fascinating, as are their practical applications, including pharmaceutical ones. As an example, PCR technology—first used for crime lab DNA testing, and afterward to reveal everything from the ancestry of Neanderthals and Egyptian mummies to the history of your family’s migration routes—came directly from chemicals produced by these extreme-environment microbes (called “extremophiles”). Similarly, the game-changing CRISPR genetic engineering tool, which brings both dreams and nightmares within human grasp, is derived from the mining of bacterial DNA.

  On the genetic frontier, it becomes possible to believe that the cure of all disease is on the horizon—and perhaps even vastly extended, youthful human life-spans. But to whom shall such technology be made available? Who should play God?

  Dream? Or nightmare? Which shall it be?

  Early in the twenty-first century, between two Cold Wars, joint Russian-American-Canadian teams sought out new medicines among extremophiles. From hydrothermal seams near the Jordan Valley to the nooks and crannies of sunken volcanoes in the Azores, new antibiotics became available for study (including one that may act simultaneously against cancer cells). Along the way, two team members were accidentally infected by their subject matter and experienced still-unexplained (and still only anecdotal) spontaneous remissions from untreatable and life-threatening diseases. A third person (by random biological coincidence or not) appeared to have experienced remission as if by secondary (person-to-person) infection. Two cats (out of four) intentionally infected recovered from illness. One of them lasted just three months shy of age twenty-two. Other tests produced mixed results and noneffects, and have informed this fable, including the suggestion that both Yanni and Nora are infectious—which is a story for another time.

  These, and related extremophiles (with regard to biomedical possibilities), are presently being investigated at Droycon Bioconcepts in Saskatchewan and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in the United States. (Present findings in Russia are unknown.)

  The Fatima/Lourdes syndrome: In this tale, by the time Mac, Yanni, and Cousteau arrive at Santorini, the hydrothermal springs have already been associated in people’s minds with the miracle waters of Fatima, Portugal, and Lourdes, France. The connection is understandable and even likely, given that hydrothermal pools have been associated with faith at least as far back as coins minted to honor the cleansing-and-curing goddess, Hygenia, at Israel’s hot springs of Tiberias. Jerusalem’s first-century b.c. healing pools, according to the geochemist Amnon Rosenfeld, were definitely hydrothermal (volcanic) in origin—which is not surprising, because the entire Jordan Valley is a continental spreading center, where a vast new ocean will exist in about 60 million years. Want to see how the Atlantic Ocean began? Simply go to Israel and Jordan and look around.

  The first-century a.d. gospel of John seems to echo Rosenfeld’s geologic findings. In chapter 5 (verses 15–31), and in the manner of the 46th Psalm’s volcano-related “troubled” waters, the Roman springs where Jesus was reported to have “healed a cripple” originated with an angel who “troubled” the waters—as in, having made the springs hot and violent, long before Jesus arrived. It is written that the healings began in that prior time frame. In the gospel, Jesus seems, enigmatically, to shrug off the healing of the cripple and is quoted teaching that the spring was put there, to heal, as the work of God and was not to be seen as the work of Jesus individually. In a related description, the 46th Psalm links “troubled” waters with mountains being thrown into the seas and portions of the earth itself melting (volcanism). The troubled waters, and the volcanic mountains, are also linked with end-time prophecy—which is consistent with the concerns of this fable’s Greek Orthodox adversary, Bishop Marinatos.

  Pierre Boulle did indeed serve as a French secret agent during World War II (for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre). As in this novel, his mind was utterly polymathic, with interests ranging from paleontology and engineering through oceanography and spaceflight. Although we have taken the liberty of improving Boulle’s mastery of English for The Darwin Strain, some of his fiction is well-known in America. The tune he is whistling when Yanni first meets him references Boulle’s novel The Bridge on the River Kwai (based loosely on his experiences as a prisoner of war). He was also, with the aid of Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, co-creator of the Planet of the Apes franchise. Those of you who have used smart phones to look up names and places throughout might already have discovered this and other strange connections (including an intrepid actor named Tucker), coded as a story within the story.

  Descriptions of Santorini and its geology and geography are real, with very few exceptions (the Minotaur death mask and an ancient prehuman grave discovered by Boulle and Alan at the bottom of Fira Quarry). Minoan household artifacts and remains of prehistoric olive gardens have indeed been excavated from the quarry. The island has yielded up several very real, world-class archaeological sites and a submerged port dating back to the Keftiu/Minoans and 18th Dynasty Egypt (about 1630 b.c.). Discoveries include surprisingly advanced technology in ship keel design, earthquake-resistant multistory buildings, and indoor plumbing that involved upper-floor wash closets equipped with bathtubs, showers, and flush toilets. Some members of the Marinatos family, who make cameo appearances in this story, are also quite real. Their work (along with that of Cousteau and University of Rhode Island volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson) has added flesh to the modern world’s view of seventeenth-century b.c. Santorini. That one of the authors has a family connection to the island dating back before it became a tourist attraction (including an ancestor sharing the same World War II French commendation held by Pierre Boulle) aided in providing some of the feel and even sounds and smells of mid-twentieth century Santorini.

  Among the great geographic astonishments of all time is the realization that Santorini, Crete, and the islands of Ionian Greece were once densely forested mountaintops, overlooking a
vast desert. Through this desert flowed an extension of the Nile, two miles below the port of Fira and the present-day surface of the Mediterranean. Once the West African continental plate rammed into Spain and, much like the hood of a car crumpling in ultra-slow motion during a collision against a concrete wall—the “moment” this happened, a rock-solid dam was pushed up across the Strait of Gibraltar. What happened next probably developed rapidly (as seas and rivers measure time). If the strait were dammed under today’s Mediterranean evaporation rates, the entire sea would dry out to a depth of two miles in “only” seven hundred years. For a while, more than 5.3 million years ago, the River Nile spilled over waterfalls so wide, and so tall, that they would have banished Niagara Falls forever to the little leagues. The Nile Falls tore through bare bedrock and ground it down to fine silt. Water slashed the earth like a sword, from Alexandria all the way south to Aswan, and created Egypt’s version of the Colorado River and Grand Canyon. All those uncounted cubic miles of rock, hewn down to river silt, washed northward along the Mediterranean salt flats, laying down riverbanks of fertile, mineral-rich mud, as far away as Crete and the edge of the Devil’s Hole. The former was a giant mountain, the latter a dwarf sea more than a half mile deep.

  The weather patterns and oases of the deep Nile and its surroundings are based on sound scientific speculation, about a world that actually did exist in 5.33 million b.c. and which was as alien to us as another planet orbiting some far-flung star. South African mines more than two miles deep have provided a sense of how falling water droplets (raindrops) and other objects behave in an atmosphere twice the density of sea-level air, and how easily flight might be evolved under such conditions. That an unexpected animal type—in this case the phylum Mollusca (clams, slugs, squids, and their cousins)—could become the dominant life-form in an isolated, extreme environment does not lack precedent. Nearly a mile beneath the Atlantic’s Atlantis Fracture Zone, white carbonate pinnacles of hydrothermal rock stand tall enough to rival the Washington Monument. Aside from creating one of the most beautiful natural vistas on earth (either above or under the sea), the pinnacles are, like our city skyscrapers, mostly empty space. The pinnacles themselves have given birth to whole ecosystems based primarily on flatworms and tiny shrimplike ostracods (the latter, famous as fossils, are mostly extinct everywhere else).

  Called the “Lost City” vents, these pinnacles were the real-life inspiration for wildlife populating this tale’s deep Mediterranean oases.

  We are not the first to have proposed a collapsed Gibraltar Dam, and a Mediterranean Eden lost to a prehistoric deluge. The credit for that goes to the Roman historian and explorer Pliny the Elder. In his third volume of Historia Naturalis, he suggested that the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar) had broken, and the collapse of a natural dam “allowed the entrance of the ocean where it was before excluded.” In this manner, a whole world disappeared, like Plato’s Atlantis.

  Pliny had other ideas relevant to our trilogy of fables. He knew of different elephant species once “produced” and until “recently” still being produced or evolved in Africa and India, and even on small islands in between: “As Nature is desirous, as it were, to make an exhibition for herself.” Based upon bones of tiny elephants found on Crete and other Greek islands, it was easy to see how animals became isolated and were changed after surviving Pliny’s flood. In Syria, fourth century b.c. coins dedicated to King Seleucus depict Athena surveying a herd of elephants standing only half the height of people. Some are represented either with horns on their heads or with multiple trunks. Pliny understood this and other changes in the shapes of living creatures—understood this, and more. Even before he was born, the emperor Octavian/Augustus had explored the concept of species rising and then falling into extinction. Offshore of modern day Sorrento, Italy, he had built a famous Hall of Giants that actually reads (as described in The Twelve Caesars, Augustus—paragraph 74) like history’s first-known dinosaur museum: “At Capri,” wrote the Roman historian Suetonius, “Augustus had collected the huge skeletons of extinct sea and land monsters popularly known as ‘giants’ bones.” At least one Augustan coin depicts a creature with ridges running the length of its spine, along with a curious mixture of sauropod and birdlike features—as if fleshed out from a skeleton by an ancient Roman predecessor of Charles R. Knight.

  You may find it a bit odd to be reading about concepts of extinction and evolution dating back to ancient Rome and the Greek islands. But these ideas far antedated Darwin. What Darwin added was the first mathematical model describing rates and modes of change (biology’s equivalent to Einstein’s core equations defining rates and modes for mass-energy, relativity, and the ultimate fate of the universe). What Darwin gave us was the basic skeleton to which knowledge of genetics later applied flesh and form—in essence, some core equations defining the ultimate biological fate of earth.

  The bio-computational leaps made by some of the wildlife in this story, at least in the case of the cephalopods, have in real life been turning out to be a little stranger than we humans have imagined. It becomes possible now to wonder if cephalopod evolution toward greater intelligence even needs a “Darwin Strain.” After we introduced an intensely symbiotic, bio-computational microbe in The Himalayan Codex (involving feedback regulation by constantly shifting RNA software), the April 6, 2017, issue of the journal Cell published a paper in which scientific understanding was (once again) catching up with and perhaps exceeding fiction: the discovery of rapid RNA editing in cephalopods. This involved extensive recoding specific to three of the most intelligent, behaviorally complex octopus and cuttlefish species presently known. More than 60 percent of the proteins governing the neurochemistry and structure of their brains is subject to essentially continual RNA recoding—with the potential, as in this fable, to leapfrog over some of the usual mathematics in Darwinian variation and selection. By contrast, other animals, running the spectrum from fruit flies to dolphins and us, have recoding taking place in one small fraction of 1 percent of our RNA. Viewed in this light, an octopus not only begins to look more alien than ever before, but it finally turns the textbook dogma of DNA and RNA being the genetic hardware completely on its head. We’ve had it backward all along. DNA and RNA are the software, not the hardware. (Protein is the hardware.)

  The real-life behavior of cephalopods, and especially as observed among certain cuttlefish and octopus species, is fantastic almost beyond words. In this fable, we have (for the “Kraken”) increased known cephalopod abilities to match some old legends dating back past Viking Kraken stories and Pliny’s “polypus,” all the way back through myths about Homer’s description of a shape-shifting, self-camouflaging sea monster with features quite reminiscent of cephalopods.

  When describing cephalopod behavior in the field and in the lab, there was no need to exaggerate. Two very good nonfiction introductions to these wonders of the world are Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus (Atria, 2015) and Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016). Though they are traditionally believed to be solitary animals, Godfrey-Smith has recorded two first occurrences of an octopus species forming communities—apparently as an opportunistic consequence of human activity in the sea (garbage dumping), leading to a rudimentary but expanding form of architecture.

  In a region of the Indian Ocean where the Pearl was reported to have been sunk by a “squid,” Jacques Cousteau and his fellow ocean explorer Arthur C. Clarke really did encounter a little cephalopod that darted at their face-masks with the startling mimicry of a poisonous lionfish. After the divers flinched, it dropped to the bottom, instantly changing shape and color to match the surrounding coral. The camouflaging capabilities of known cephalopods are nothing short of amazing. We know of a cuttlefish that, when placed in a laboratory test tank with checkerboard flooring, shifted with astonishing rapidity to a checkerboard pattern that rendered it somewhere between completely invisible and the tr
anslucence of glass with mild flaws (depending on viewing angle and whether the animal decided to move). Most scuba divers have probably been watched by a cephalopod at very close range and never known it.

  In the Atlantic, at the hydrothermal vents of Menez Gwen, a large Humboldt squid, about the size of a man, attacked the bright lights of a Russian Mir-1 submersible in 2003, causing some damage. NASA’s Kevin Hand was aboard to film the incident. A characteristic of Humboldt squids is that they flash stripes and geometric shapes across their bodies, sometimes flashing as alternating groups of animals, to create visual confusion. The Mir incident occurred at a depth of little more than a half mile. The animal was first sighted lurking on the other side of swirling, partly obscuring and blurring veils of hydrothermal water. Flashing suddenly to pure white (interpreted more as an indicator of curiosity than angry red), “it came at the Mir like a torpedo and started smacking and pulling at the lights.” When the Humboldt was finished, it retreated toward the warm veils, spread out all ten arms to make itself look quite large—“Felt like it was giving us the finger, times ten”—then darted away and vanished.