Robin Colgrove, February 15, 2009
The Story of Life
Our selves are made of stories.
This seems to be a very old idea, appearing in one form or another in many contexts
across the centuries. In modern cognitive science terms, the notion has been
phrased in ways such as: The Self is a story that the brain creates -and continuously
edits- in order to coordinate the body's response to the world. No wonder, then,
that stories are so powerful and so central to our experience of being human.
Some stories we make consciously for ourselves. Some we learn from others. Some
are codified into Scripture. Some stories, though, are told to us by nature
herself. Learning to listen to these tales and to learn from them has always
been an important path along the way to wisdom.
In the modern era, we have taken the project of learning nature's stories -of
enticing her to reveal them in ever greater depth and detail- and made it into
a grand and global enterprise. This is science.
Many of the most profound and important of nature's stories can only really
be told in her native language of mathematics, a tongue many find forbidding.
One of the greatest, though, is easily spoken in the vernacular, accessible
to anyone willing to think clearly about the natural world around them. This
is the story of Life of Earth.
Though others had heard bits and pieces of the story of Life, it was Charles
Darwin who first appreciated the full sweep of the tale. It was in Darwin's
great work, On the Origin of Species, where the characters, plots and themes
of the story were first put clearly into words for all to see.
It is truly an amazing saga, vast and wonderful, whose full scope may be beyond
human understanding. It is also subtle and mysterious, though, which is why
no one really heard it clearly for many thousands of years, even though the
evidence was all around us. Stretching across billions of years and across the
entire planet, it unites all living creatures into one great family and shows
how from simple beginnings all the wonder and majesty of Life arises.
As people, we share an innate desire to know where we came from, how we got
here, and where we fit into the grand scheme of existence. No surprise, then,
that creation stories appear within all the great religious traditions. The
creation story that Nature tells of Life on Earth, of Biological Evolution,
is greater, though, than the tales we make up ourselves, simply because nature
itself is so much greater and more profound than our own limited imaginations.
Darwin saw this, and ended the last chapter of On the Origin of Species with
a reflection, writing "There is a grandeur in this view of Life."
The story of Evolution is a powerful one, one that every thinking person should
know, both for its sheer beauty, and in addition because without it we can never
really fully understand ourselves.
The Tree of Life
Hanging on the wall above my desk in my office at the Hosptial is a portrait
of the young Charles Darwin, just married, recently back from the Vogage of
the Beagle, but still decades away from publishing "On the Origin of Species".
I often ask new students whether they know who it is. They almost never do,
until I say, you would know it immediately if the portrait was from 30 years
later. I think it is interesting to see in the face of the young man, the embryo
of the iconic Darwin we know from his old age.
In 1859, as the Origin of Species was being published, Theodore Parker, namesake
of our church, was resigning from his ministry here due to failing health. He
traveled to Florence, hoping to be rejuvenated by the milder climate, but he
died only the next year, in 1860. As an intellectual, Parker would certainly
have heard about Darwin's book, which created a sensation upon its release.
If Parker wrote anything about it, though, it has been lost.
We do, on the other hand, have written proof that Darwin knew about Theodore
Parker: In a letter in 1850 to his mentor, Charles Lyell, one of the founders
of modern Geology, Darwin writes "Many thanks for the Theodore Parker."
(believed to be a reference to an essay of Parker's advocating the abolition
of slavery -a position strongly shared by Darwin.)
Though their styles were quite different, another trait Parker and Darwin shared
was that both were powerful storytellers. By the time of the publication of
the Origin of Species, Darwin had become a firm, almost harsh critic of the
tradition of using stories from nature to teach moral lessons. For every brave
lion or industrious ant, he pointed out, there were terrible creatures who made
their livings with theft, treachery, enslavement of others, or causing horrible
misery to their prey. From natural selection, nature becomes whatever works,
be it butterfly wings or Ebola virus.
Nonetheless, though Darwin probably did not think of himself in these terms,
he was also a masterful teller of tales, using examples from nature to make
deep and surprising points about the biological world -many with profound implications
for our understanding of our own place in it. These are stories worth knowing,
as they help inform our spiritual sense of connection to the great tree of Life.
One of the first of these tales was about the power of humble and tiny actions
carried out across vast stretches of time to accomplish amazing things. Darwin
studied the effects of English earthworms, slowly and patiently chewing in the
dirt. He was able to show that these humble and "lowly" creatures
were likely to be responsible for the creation over millions of years of much
of the deep, rich topsoil of England. At first, it boggles the mind to imagine
that such small creatures could do such great things -but that was exactly Darwin's
point. He was showing that the world is much, much older than our place in it,
or our imagination of it; that human imagination fails when confronted with
such huge scales of space and time, and that far from dominion over "lower"
forms of life, we owe our lives to them. And just as the tiny mouths of earthworms
can transform barren rock into deep soil, unimaginable as it seems, the minute
changes from generation to generation brought about by Natural Selection can
create the incredible diversity of life we see around us.
Even more than earthworms, Darwin had a passion for orchids. He studied the
wild, flamboyant varieties of orchid flowers, correctly recognizing them as
organs of reproduction under powerful sexual selection. Although I am no expert
in this field, I have long suspected that orchids in part gave a proper Victorian
gentleman like Darwin a way to discuss the very real power of sexual forces
in evolution without too much blushing on the part of his readers. Darwin's
other point, though, about orchid flowers was about co-evolution: the flowers
are the way they are because of the ways the pollinating bees and hummingbirds
are -and vice versa. Darwin was actually the first to predict the existence
of a hummingbird whose proboscis must be just so, because there was an orchid
whose flower it would just fit into. We are all in this evolution business together,
and a major part of what makes us fit or not is how we fit with our fellow living
creatures.
Another of Darwin's favorite creatures were barnacles, and over many years of
study he became one the era's great experts on this humble creature. In particular,
he studied the embryological process through which the minute barnacle larvae
mature into the adults so familiar to seafaring nations everywhere. Much to
his initial surprise, he realized that these creatures were most related not
-as was then believed- to shelled mollusks like clams but rather to crustaceans
like crabs and lobsters. Here, he was showing both the power of evolution to
radically transform the body of a species, but also in a more subtle point showing
the unity and family relations between animals that seem nothing like one another.
The implied message was that one could keep right on going with this, till all
life, no matter how different appearing, could be encompassed in one great,
branching tree.
And it may be this, the Great Tree of Life, that is the most powerful story
Darwin leaves us. Rather than each form of life being a special, independent,
isolated creation, we are all of us, from blue-green algae to blue whales, but
tiny twigs on the end of the thick, bristling branches of a great Tree: not
separate, but joined by our shared ancestry; not higher and lower in a chain
but all supported out at the tips by the deeper and deeper branches that precede
us.
The only figure in "The Origin of Species" is a phylogenetic tree,
showing the branching pattern of relatedness of different species. One of the
stunning successes of evolutionary theory came with the advent of molecular
biology, when the mechanisms of heredity were discovered and the structure of
the genetic material revealed. And there it was, right in the blueprints for
life that we have learned to read in the DNA of creatures great and small: the
changes from organism to organism in the sequences of DNA show the patterns
of the branches of a tree, with closely related organisms having more similar
patterns of DNA just as they are closer twigs on the tree of Life. This finding,
that all life shares the same underlying molecular blueprints -with instructions
varying in relation to how closely they are related in ancestry- is a simply
breathtaking confirmation of the reality of Evolution. All life on Earth is
one magnificent Family Tree
At the conclusion of the Origin of Species, Darwin points out the grandeur of
evolution, recognizing at some level that this is something people need -not
a physical need, but a spiritual need. Just as powerful as the desire for grandeur,
reverence and awe, though, is the spiritual craving for a sense of connectedness
to one another, and to something majestic, much greater than ourselves. By showing
how to hear the story that Life is telling us, Darwin gave us a strong and true
path to fulfill this spiritual hunger: through the study of nature, we can and
we should feel connected to the aeons-old majesty of all Life
-because we are.