Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (47 page)

King’s
The Tommyknockers
(1987) fractures a tradition in science fiction by treating extraterrestrial “higher intelligences” not as superior in general, wiser, or more powerful, but merely as quirky hangers-on in the great Darwinian game of adaptation by differential reproductive success in certain environments. (King refers to this persistence as “dumb evolution”; I just call it Darwinism.)
*
Such equivocal success by endless and immediate adjustment breeds contingency, which then becomes the controlling theme of
The Tommyknockers
—as the aliens fail in their plans for earth, thanks largely to evasive action by one usually ineffective, cynical, and dipsomaniacal English professor. King muses on the nature of controlling events in contingent sequences, and on their level of perceived importance at various scales:

Kurt Vonnegut’s
Galápagos
(1985) is an even more conscious and direct commentary on the meaning of evolution from a writer’s standpoint. I feel especially gratified that a cruise to the Galápagos, a major source of Vonnegut’s decision to write the book, should have suggested contingency as the cardinal theme taught by Darwin’s geographic shrine. In Vonnegut’s novel, the pathways of history may be broadly constrained by such general principles as natural selection, but contingency has so much maneuvering room within these boundaries that any particular outcome owes more to a quirky series of antecedent events than to channels set by nature’s laws.
Galápagos
, in fact, is a novel about the nature of history in Darwin’s world. I would (and do) assign it to students in science courses as a guide to understanding the meaning of contingency.

In
Galápagos
, the holocaust of depopulation arrives by the relatively mild route of a bacterium that destroys human egg cells. This scourge first gains a toehold by striking women at the annual international book fair in Frankfurt, but quickly spreads throughout the world, sterilizing all but an isolated remnant of
Homo sapiens
. Human survival becomes concentrated in a tiny and motley group carried by boat beyond the reach of the bacterium to the isolated Galápagos—the last of the Kanka-bono Indians plus a tourist and adventurer or two. Their survival and curious propagation proceeds through a wacky series of contingencies, yet all future human history now resides with this tiny remnant:

Contingency has also been an important theme in films, both recent and classic. In
Back to the Future
(1985) Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), a teen-ager transported back in time to the high school attended by his parents, must struggle to reconstitute the past as it actually happened, after his accidental intrusion threatens to alter the initial run of the tape (when his mother, in an interesting variation on Oedipus, develops a crush on him). The events that McFly must rectify seem to be tiny occurrences of absolutely no moment, but he knows that nothing could be more important, since failure will result in that ultimate of consequences, his own erasure, because his parents will never meet.

The greatest expression of contingency—my nomination as the holotype
*
of the genre—comes near the end of Frank Capra’s masterpiece,
It’s a Wonderful Life
(1946). George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) has led a life of self-abnegation because his basic decency made him defer personal dreams to offer support for family and town. His precarious building and loan association has been driven to bankruptcy and charged with fraud through the scheming of the town skinflint and robber baron, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore). George, in despair, decides to drown himself, but Clarence Odbody, his guardian angel, intervenes by throwing himself into the water first, knowing that George’s decency will demand another’s rescue in preference to immediate suicide. Clarence then tries to cheer George up by the direct route: “You just don’t know all that you’ve done”; but George replies: “If it hadn’t been for me, everybody’d be a lot better off.… I suppose it would have been better if I’d never been born at all.”

Clarence, in a flash of inspiration, grants George his wish and shows him an alternative version of life in his town of Bedford Falls, replayed in his complete absence. This magnificent ten-minute scene is both a highlight of cinematic history and the finest illustration that I have ever encountered for the basic principle of contingency—a replay of the tape yielding an entirely different but equally sensible outcome; small and apparently insignificant changes, George’s absence among others, lead to cascades of accumulating difference.

Everything in the replay without George makes perfect sense in terms of personalities and economic forces, but this alternative world is bleak and cynical, even cruel, while George, by his own apparently insignificant life, had imbued his surroundings with kindness and attendant success for his beneficiaries. Bedford Falls, his idyllic piece of small-town America, is now filled with bars, pool halls, and gambling joints; it has been renamed Pottersville, because the Bailey Building and Loan failed in George’s absence and his unscrupulous rival took over the property and changed the town’s name. A graveyard now occupies the community of small homes that George had financed at low interest and with endless forgiveness of debts. George’s uncle, in despair at bankruptcy, is in an insane asylum; his mother, hard and cold, runs a poor boarding house; his wife is an aging spinster working in the town library; a hundred men lay dead on a sunken transport, because his brother drowned without George to rescue him, and never grew up to save the ship and win the Medal of Honor.

The wily angel, clinching his case, then pronounces the doctrine of contingency: “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives, and when he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he? … You see, George, you really had a wonderful life.”

Contingency is both the watchword and lesson of the new interpretation of the Burgess Shale. The fascination and transforming power of the Burgess message—a fantastic explosion of early disparity followed by decimation, perhaps largely by lottery—lies in its affirmation of history as the chief determinant of life’s directions.

Walcott’s earlier and diametrically opposite view located the pattern of life’s history firmly in the other and more conventional style of scientific explanation—direct predictability and subsumption under invariant laws of nature. Moreover, Walcott’s view of invariant law would now be dismissed as more an expression of cultural tradition and personal preference than an accurate expression of nature’s patterns. For as we have seen, Walcott read life’s history as the fulfillment of a divine purpose guaranteed to yield human consciousness after a long history of gradual and stately progress. The Burgess organisms had to be primitive versions of later improvements, and life had to move forward from this restricted and simple beginning.

The new view, on the other hand, is rooted in contingency. With so many Burgess possibilities of apparently equivalent anatomical promise—over twenty arthropod designs later decimated to four survivors, perhaps fifteen or more unique anatomies available for recruitment as major branches, or phyla, of life’s tree—our modern pattern of anatomical disparity is thrown into the lap of contingency. The modern order was not guaranteed by basic laws (natural selection, mechanical superiority in anatomical design), or even by lower-level generalities of ecology or evolutionary theory. The modern order is largely a product of contingency. Like Bedford Falls with George Bailey, life had a sensible and resolvable history, generally pleasing to us since we did manage to arise, just a geological minute ago. But, like Pottersville without George Bailey, any replay, altered by an apparently insignificant jot or tittle at the outset, would have yielded an equally sensible and resolvable outcome of entirely different form, but most displeasing to our vanity in the absence of self-conscious life. (Though, needless to say, our nonexistent vanity would scarcely be an issue in any such alternative world.) By providing a maximum set of anatomically proficient possibilities right at the outset, the Burgess Shale becomes our centerpiece for the controlling power of contingency in setting the pattern of life’s history and current composition.

Finally, if you will accept my argument that contingency is not only resolvable and important, but also fascinating in a special sort of way, then the Burgess not only reverses our general ideas about the source of pattern—it also fills us with a new kind of amazement (also a
frisson
for the improbability of the event) at the fact that humans ever evolved at all. We came
this close
(put your thumb about a millimeter away from your index finger), thousands and thousands of times, to erasure by the veering of history down another sensible channel. Replay the tape a million times from a Burgess beginning, and I doubt that anything like
Homo sapiens
would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life.

A final point about predictability versus contingency: Am I really arguing that nothing about life’s history could be predicted, or might follow directly from general laws of nature? Of course not; the question that we face is one of scale, or level of focus. Life exhibits a structure obedient to physical principles. We do not live amidst a chaos of historical circumstance unaffected by anything accessible to the “scientific method” as traditionally conceived. I suspect that the origin of life on earth was virtually inevitable, given the chemical composition of early oceans and atmospheres, and the physical principles of self-organizing systems. Much about the basic form of multicellular organisms must be constrained by rules of construction and good design. The laws of surfaces and volumes, first recognized by Galileo, require that large organisms evolve different shapes from smaller relatives in order to maintain the same relative surface area. Similarly, bilateral symmetry can be expected in mobile organisms built by cellular division. (The Burgess weird wonders are bilaterally symmetrical.)

But these phenomena, rich and extensive though they are, lie too far from the details that interest us about life’s history. Invariant laws of nature impact the general forms and functions of organisms; they set the channels in which organic design must evolve. But the channels are so broad relative to the details that fascinate us! The physical channels do not specify arthropods, annelids, mollusks, and vertebrates, but, at most, bilaterally symmetrical organisms based on repeated parts. The boundaries of the channels retreat even further into the distance when we ask the essential questions about our own origin: Why did mammals evolve among vertebrates? Why did primates take to the trees? Why did the tiny twig that produced
Homo sapiens
arise and survive in Africa? When we set our focus upon the level of detail that regulates most common questions about the history of life, contingency dominates and the predictability of general form recedes to an irrelevant background.

Charles Darwin recognized this central distinction between
laws in the background
and
contingency in the details
in a celebrated exchange of letters with the devout Christian evolutionist Asa Gray. Gray, the Harvard botanist, was inclined to support not only Darwin’s demonstration of evolution but also his principle of natural selection as its mechanism. But Gray was worried about the implications for Christian faith and the meaning of life. He particularly fretted that Darwin’s view left no room for rule by law, and portrayed nature as shaped entirely by blind chance.

Darwin, in his profound reply, acknowledged the existence of general laws that regulate life in a broad sense. These laws, he argued, addressing Gray’s chief concern, might even (for all we know) reflect some higher purpose in the universe. But the natural world is full of details, and these form the primary subject matter of biology. Many of these details are “cruel” when measured, inappropriately, by human moral standards. He wrote to Gray: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.” How, then, could the nonmorality of details be reconciled with a universe whose general laws might reflect some higher purpose? Darwin replied that the details lay in a realm of contingency undirected by laws that set the channels. The universe, Darwin replied to Gray, runs by law, “with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.”

And so, ultimately, the question of questions boils down to the placement of the boundary between predictability under invariant law and the multifarious possibilities of historical contingency. Traditionalists like Walcott would place the boundary so low that all major patterns of life’s history fall above the line into the realm of predictability (and, for him, direct manifestation of divine intentions). But I envision a boundary sitting so high that almost every interesting event of life’s history falls into the realm of contingency. I regard the new interpretation of the Burgess Shale as nature’s finest argument for placing the boundary this high.