Budd and Coates found just such an oscillation, hence their well-chosen
title of "nonprogressive evolution." They divided the Cretaceous
into four intervals and then traced the pattern of species changes through
these times (most of their long paper presents technical details of defining
species and inferring genealogical connections among them). They found
that the transition from interval one to interval two featured a differential
production of small-corallite species from large-corallite ancestors and
a southward spread of the bush's geographic range. "Limited speciation
and stasis" then predominated within intervals two and three. Later,
between intervals three and four, large-corallite species tended to radiate
from small-corallite ancestors as the bush became restricted in range
to the Caribbean. The end, in other words, did not leave the bush very
different from its beginnings--the seas came in and the seas went
out, and Montastraea oscillated between prevalence of small-and
large-corallite species within its restricted range. And so it goes for
most groups in most long segments of geological time--lots of evolutionary
change, but no story of clear and persistent direction.
I do
feel the force of Cordelia's dilemma as I write these words. Budd and
Coates's article inspired me to write this essay. Yet my description of
their results occupies only a small portion of this text because nondirectional
evolution doesn't provide the stories that stir our blood and incite our
interest. This is the bias of literary convention that we must struggle
to overcome. How can we interest ourselves sufficiently in the ordinary
and the quotidian? Nearly all of our life so passes nearly all the time
(and thank goodness for that, lest we all be psychological basket cases).
Shall we not find fascination in the earth's daily doings? And how can
we hope to understand the rarer moments that manufacture history's pageant
if we do not recognize and revel in the pervasive substrate?
No
one has illustrated the dilemma better than Cordelia and Lear themselves,
in their last appearance as prisoners in act 5, scene 3. They are about
to be taken away and Lear, through the veil of madness, speaks of forthcoming
time in jail, made almost delightful by the prospect of telling stories
in the heroic and directional mode:
Come, let's away to prison:
...so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins, who's in, and who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.
Sean
O'Casey said that "the stage must be larger than life," for
how can we make adequate drama from the daily doings of shopping, eating,
sleeping, and urinating (in no particular order). If this be so, then
our biases in storytelling augur poorly for an adequate account of life's
real history, for how shall we ever promote the "nothing" that
surrounds us to adequate fascination for notice and documentation? But
then, one of O'Casey's countrymen solved this problem in the greatest
novel of the twentieth century. James Joyce's Ulysses treats one
day in the life of a few ordinary people in 1904, yet no work of literature
has ever taught us more about the nature of humanity and the structure
of thought. May I then close with a kind of literary sacrilege and borrow
the famous last line of Ulysses for a totally different purpose.
Molly Bloom, in her celebrated soliloquy, is, of course, speaking of something
entirely different! But her words make a good answer to a pledge we should
all take: Shall I promise to pay attention to the little, accumulating
events of daily life and not treat them as nothing against the rare and
grandiose moments of history? "yes I said yes I will Yes."
Stephen Jay Gould teaches biology, geology, and the history of science
at Harvard University. |