Eight Little Piggies

THESE ESSAYS
, volume six in a continuing series, confront history on the broadcast scale of life’s evolution during 3.5 billion years. Since macrocosms are fractals of microcosms, the series also records a personal history. In the sweetest introduction I have ever received (for a talk at the Academy of Natural Sciences in San Francisco) former major league ballplayer and current ecoactivist Bruce Bochte recounted my article on why Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak is the greatest accomplishment in the history of baseball (see Essay 31 in
Bully for Brontosaurus
). He then pointed out that I was working on a 208 monthly essay streak, also unbroken since its inception in January 1974. Over such a long stretch of adulthood, ranging from relative youth (in my early thirties) to distinct middle age (I just passed the half-century mark), many passages must be noted as the ineluctable changes of life unfold. Two aspects of ontogeny seem especially relevant to this continuing series.

First,
Eight Little Piggies
is a book of middle life, and it does contrast, entirely favorably I think (but I am no longer talking to my thirtysomething self), with my youthful
Ever Since Darwin
. I suppose that the major sign of this particular passage lies in my exploration of a traditional essay genre that I had previously shunned—the contemplative and highly personal ruminations in Section 4, “Musings.” These essays, on memory, persistence, and authenticity, talk about the importance of unbroken connections within our own lives and to our ancestral generations—a theme of supreme importance to evolutionists who study a world in which extinction is the ultimate fate of all and prolonged persistence the only meaningful measure of success.

These essays may treat familiar themes, but at least they follow my idiosyncratic procedure of building, via oddly tangential connections, from a small and concrete item or incident to a broad generality—from sitting with my grandfather on some warehouse steps to characteristic pathways of false memory in our favorite stories (Essay 11); from a graveyard and the invisibility of a large factory in Amana, Iowa, to our need for bucolic myths and the false concept of past golden ages (Essay 12); from calling cards and a visit with a 97-year-old paleontologist who knew C. D. Walcott to the importance we place on continuity and nonvicarious experience (Essay 13); and from a breakfast in San Francisco to a taxonomy of authenticity and the role of vernacular customs and architectures in the preservation of regional diversity (Essay 14). All these essays feature our treatment and distortion of historical records—a kind of ultimate subject for any paleontologist!

Second, the six volumes form a sensible series, each with a different central focus appropriate to its time in three ways: stage in my own life, reaction to current events, and position in the developing logic of an extended discourse on evolution and history. The first volume,
Ever Since Darwin
(1977), centers upon the basic explication of Darwinian principles (where else would one start?).
The Panda’s Thumb
(1980) develops the largely unrecognized extensions and corrections of Darwinism that run so counter to many sociocultural hopes and expectations (as in the principle of imperfection embodied in the title example).
Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes
(1983) had an immediate focus that now, and happily, seems a bit outdated (but by no means dead)—the attack of “creation science” (biblical literalism) upon teaching evolution, and our victories both in courtrooms and in cogent and decent argument.
The Flamingo’s Smile
(1985) emphasizes the importance of randomness and unpredictability in the history of life. This theme had a double and immediate origin at two levels—my own bout with cancer at the most personal, and the proposal and successful development of the asteroidal impact theory of mass extinction at the broadest and most general.
Bully for Brontosaurus
(1991), following a longer gap for rumination and synthesis, then put the two central themes together—the mechanics of Darwinism with the unpredictability of complex temporal sequences—to form, finally, a full scale disquisition on the nature of history and its primary theme of contingency (also explored in my intervening
Wonderful Life
, 1989).

I like to think of these volumes as building rather than replacing. The old foci carry over and weave together, tightening up thereby and leaving room for new extensions. Yet one theme of transcendent (and growing) importance has been almost absent (and shamefully so) from my writings heretofore. How can any naturalist, any self-professed lover of diversity, ignore the subject of anthropogenic environmental deterioration and massive extinction of species on our present earth? Oh, I have not entirely bypassed this central concern of my profession. Side comments and paragraphs abound, and even a full essay or two (Essay 29 on nuclear winter in
The Flamingo’s Smile
, for example). But I have never addressed this theme centrally and head on.

My reluctance reflects no failure of strong feelings. Quite the contrary. If anything, I have desisted because my feelings are too powerful—lying in the domain that Wordsworth described as “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” (and perhaps for words as well). I had never found any distinctive words to convey these common emotions. I could not bear merely to write the shibboleths of the movement—or, even worse, to emote for show, catharsis, or accountability, but with nothing different to add to the hyperabundance of current expostulations.

Perhaps I have finally found something to say that might be helpful, rather than only repetitive.
Eight Little Piggies
includes a section—placed
primus inter pares
—on the sadness of anthropogenic destruction. But if I have finally found a voice, I came to it in my usual way—entirely unanticipated and via a quirky item arising from a personal experience then adumbrated along a forest of tangents. I went to French Polynesia with my son in the summer of 1991 and learned that the island of Moorea had served as the model for Rogers and Hammerstein’s Bali Ha’i of
South Pacific
. I also knew that Moorea, and other adjacent islands, had recently experienced a tragically unnecessary extinction of a large, beautiful, and historically important fauna of land snails (the genus
Partula
) that had been the life’s work of Henry Crampton, a great scholar of land snails who was revered within the profession, if unknown outside. (My technical research is on land snails, so this is my community.)

Finally, I had a place to stand. By focusing on the cruel and ironic erasure of Crampton’s lifelong struggle, rather than only on the animals, I could construct a humanistic reversal for the usual focus on animal victims (primary and perfectly appropriate of course, but so often said by people with a far better sense of the necessary poetry). The Bali Ha’i setting was irresistible, especially with the titular pun of “unenchanted evening.” So I rented
South Pacific
(bless the VCR as a new research tool) and wove a nexus of humanistic references into a piece that tries to construct a reversed, people-centered perspective on the tragedy of extinction. But I could also use the emotionalism of Ezio Pinza and his great song
^*to end with a rereversal and acknowledge—as must be done—the primal (and primary) rights of nature and her beauty. The package worked at least for some people. Of two close colleagues who had studied
Partula
before its extinction on Moorea, the American wrote to tell me that he had been moved to tears, while the Englishman, from the world of stiff upper lips, wrote to inform me that his wife had cried.

I then round out this first section of essays with a most general perspective (though arising from a few squirrels) based on the geologist’s primary theme of time scales and their limited domains of application (Essay 2), followed by a small story about the first death of a marine invertebrate species in our times—just a tale on one level, but also a powerful symbol of impending trouble (Essay 3).

If these two sections on musings and extinctions represent additions based on changing times and personal growth (aging might be a more honest description), the other six sections follow the traditions of previous volumes and tell new stories about new themes (mixed with some golden oldies) in the domains of evolutionary theory and the history of life.

Section 2, “Odd Bits of Vertebrate Anatomy,” takes four central principles for explaining evolutionary legacies and transitions and illustrates them with intriguing peculiarities of restricted parts in vertebrate anatomy: the fact that earliest land vertebrates had up to eight digits per limb and that five is therefore not canonical (the eponym for this entire volume); the tail bend of ichthyosaurs; the evolution of mammalian ear bones from reptilian jaw bones; and why the evolution of swim bladders from lungs (and not vice versa as Darwin assumed and as many texts still proclaim) is neither paradoxical nor contrary to our usual view of evolutionary sequences in vertebrates.

“
Vox Populi
,” title of the next section, is a double entendre. My essays on the central works of individual scientists have always been my personal favorites. They are, literally,
vox populi
as essays about individual scientists. But the title also recalls a trenchant line from Darwin, where he argues that the old motto of
vox populi, vox dei
(the voice of the people is the voice of God) cannot apply to science. This is not a plea for elitism, but a recognition that traditional ways of thought often block understanding. All my essays on individuals try to rescue interesting and honorable (not necessarily correct) effort from the opposite dangers of historical legacy—scorn for enemies and hagiography for heroes (opposite in content perhaps, but eerily similar in debarring our sympathetic understanding).

Section 5, “Human Nature” treats the subject that, at least in a legitimately parochial sense, is the most pressing and important at the interface of evolutionary biology and human life: how to avoid the pitfalls of biological determinism (and its unfortunate legacy in social use) and the simple silliness of sociobiology when done in the strictly adaptationist and speculative mode (still the canonical form in pop culture and not at all rare in professional literature)—and to discover what our biological heritage, and the principles of evolutionary change, truly have to tell us about the nature of our mentality and behavior.

The next two sections treat the main body of evolutionary theory, but in a personal and iconoclastic spirit—Section 6 on broad patterns in time and Section 7 on basic Darwinian theory and some important revisions. Section 6 is divided into two parts. The first (Essays 21 and 22) stand together as a duet and try to present a coherent case for the central role of sensible unpredictability as the major feature of life’s history. Essay 21 sets out the necessary and sufficient major condition, and Essay 22 forges a double whammy by adding an equally powerful theme that makes the result even “worse” (for those committed to conventions of progress and predictability), but ever so much more fascinating for those who wish to grasp the richness of sensible history. The second pair of essays continues the wonderful and rapidly developing story of surprises in documenting the vast anatomical explosion that heralded the first flowering of multicellular life (see my book
Wonderful Life
for the basic story).

The essays of Section 7, “Revising and Extending Darwin,” may be the most challenging in the book, but this subject, too often ignored in popular presentations, cannot be bypassed by anyone who wishes to grasp the depth of evolutionary theory. (The low road, too often taken, merely speaks of the power of natural selection and leaves readers with the cardboard view that evolution may be equated with the building of nicely working organic machinery). This section treats principles additional to (and, in important ways, restrictive of) natural selection—internal constraints and historical legacies (Essays 25–27) and randomness as a force for change, not merely as a source of raw material for natural selection (Essay 28). Evolution is much more than a story of matching form to local environments, with increments of general progress slowly accumulating through time—the usual view of pure Darwinian functionalism. Any genealogy is a complex tale of interplay between these Darwinian themes and a set of forces, based on the internal genetic and developmental architecture of organisms, that produce different historical patterns and conceptual meanings. The material may be more difficult, but I have tried to approach this vital subject by concrete example: the coloration of pigeons, fish tails and frog calls, different ranges of morphological variety in domesticated dogs and cats, and the eye tissue of completely blind mole rats.

Perspectives that are reversed or orthogonal to traditional modes form my stock in trade. (I have long argued that conceptual locks are far more powerful than factual lacks as barriers to scientific understanding.) About twenty years ago, I got an idea for such a reversed book on the history of evolutionary thought: I would describe this science via the organisms studied, rather than the folks so engaged. Instead of chapters on Lamarck, Cuvier, Darwin, and Mendel, I would write about trilobites, ammonites, and
Tyrannosaurus
. For a variety of reasons, I never pursued the project to full fruition, but I still like the idea, and putative chapters can stand as full essays. The last section (Section 8 on reversals) offers two such chapters. Essays 29 and 30 are a miniature
Rashomon
—two different perspectives (one based on specimens, the other on iconography) on three major worldviews applied sequentially to the study of
Cephalaspis
, most famous of the earliest vertebrates. (I generally try to expunge redundancy when I gather these several years of monthly essays into a single collection, though I have allowed two pieces to finish with the same wonderful last lines of Darwin’s
Origin of Species
. But in the duet of Essays 29 and 30, the redundancy is studied and intentional, for a pair of such different looks at the same story carries its own power, just as the great Japanese film taught us). The last essay, “A Foot Soldier for Evolution,” tells the story of a clam studied by nearly every important evolutionist from Lamarck on. The title is a double entendre, as organisms are the rank and file of this grand history (my main reason for planning such a book, for history by organisms must be more democratic than chapters on people, where we are driven to rank from Darwin down); and clams, in particular, are Pelecypoda in technical parlance (meaning “hatchet foot”) and therefore truly foot soldiers. The epilogue to this essay provides, at my expense, the most important of all lessons in science—and a fitting end to the book.

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