Calculating God

26

The ROM had closed to the public at 6:00; Hollus and I were now walking alone again through the Burgess Shale exhibition.

“I have noticed,” the alien said, “that many of the fossils you have on display are casts.”

“Well, all of these are real,” I said, gesturing at the shales around us. “But, sure, we either trade with other museums, giving them a cast of one of ours that they want in exchange for something we want, or we simply purchase the cast from them.” I paused and pointed straight up. “That T. rex we’ve got in the Discovery Gallery is a cast. Meanwhile, our Parasaurolophus is our most popular trade; we just finished making a cast of it for a museum in Helsinki.”

“I am fascinated by these fossils,” said Hollus. “We do not make physical casts, but we do make high-resolution holographic scans of objects of interest.” She paused. “Would it be permissible for me to scan these fossils.”

“To scan the Burgess Shale specimens?”

“Yes, please,” said Hollus. “The process is noninvasive; no damage is done.”

I scratched where my right sideburn used to be. “I guess that would be all right, but—” For once I was the savvy businessman. “But, as I said, we usually trade or sell casts of our fossils. What could you give us in return?”

Hollus considered for a moment. “I offer you a similarly scanned library of the counterpart of Beta Hydri’s Cambrian explosion.”

Bargaining is the third of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages. That sort of bargaining is usually futile, but at least it had taught me not to easily give up. “I want a comparable scan library of the Delta Pavonis equivalent of the Cambrian explosion, too.” Hollus’s eyestalks moved in a way I’d learned meant she was about to object, but I pressed on. “After all, you’re doubtless going to share the data with the Wreeds, anyway, so they, too, should pay a price for it. And I’ll need two copies of your scans, since I’ll have to give one to the Smithsonian.”

Hollus considered this for a moment, then, eyestalks rippling, she said, “Done.”

“How is the scan performed?” I asked.

“Several of us will have to come down here physically with the equipment,” said Hollus.

“Really? Wow.” I smiled. “It will be good to see you again in the flesh, I mean. How long will the process take?”

She looked around at the cases, as if estimating the magnitude of the task. “About one of your days, I imagine. Scanning at that level of resolution is time-consuming.”

I frowned. “Well, regardless, we’d have to do it when the museum is closed. It’s too much of a security risk to have you here in the flesh when we’re open to the public. And if it’s going to take that long, we’ll have to start on a Sunday evening and continue on through Monday, when the museum is closed all day.” Mike Harris’s latest round of cutbacks had forced us to be open only six days a week. “I suppose there’s no reason to wait. How does this Sunday night sound?”

“When is that?” asked Hollus.

“Two days from now.”

“Yes,” said the alien. “That should work out just fine.”

For me, showering had always simply been a way to quickly get clean — and it was even quicker, now that I had no hair to wash. But for Susan, it was one of her real pleasures. She had to do it quickly on weekdays, but on Saturday mornings, she would spend half an hour or so showering, enjoying the warmth, the wetness, letting the water massage her. While she did so, I lay in bed, staring at the swirls of plaster decorating our bedroom ceiling, thinking. Trying to make sense of it all.

One of my favorite movies is Inherit the Wind — the original version, with Spencer Tracy, Frederic March, and Gene Kelly in the roles modeled after Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, and H. L. Mencken. There’s also been a couple of made-for-TV remakes; I’ll never understand why they remake good movies. Why doesn’t somebody go back and remake bad ones, correcting the mistakes? I’d love to see a decent version of Dune or V. I. Warshawski — or The Phantom Menace, for that matter. But they did remake Inherit the Wind, first with Jason Robards, Kirk Douglas, and good old Darren McGavin, The Night Stalker’s Carl Kolchak himself — in fact, come to think of it, Mencken and Kolchak are pretty darn similar . . . except for the vampires.

But I digress again. Christ, I wish I could concentrate better.

I wish the pain would go away.

I wish — God damn it, how I wish — I could be sure that what I’m thinking is coherent, is reasonable, is what I really think, and not just the result of pain, or my pain medication, confusing my thoughts.

When I first saw Inherit the Wind, I’d laughed smugly at the way Spencer Tracy demolished Fredric March, reducing the fundamentalist to a gibbering idiot on the witness stand. Take that, I thought. Take that.

I used to teach evolution at U of T. I said that before, right? When Darwin first proposed his theory, scientists assumed the fossil record would bear it out: that we would see a gradual progression from form to form, with slow changes accumulating over time, until a new species emerged.

But the fossil record doesn’t show that. Oh, there are transitional forms: Ichthyostega, which seems intermediate between fish and amphibians; Caudipteryx, a melange of dinosaur and bird; even Australopithecus, the quintessential ape-man.

But gradual change? An accumulation of tiny mutations over time? No. Sharks have been sharks for almost four hundred million years; turtles have turted for two hundred million years; snakes have snuck for eighty million years. Indeed, the fossil record is mostly lacking in gradual sequences, in incremental improvements; the only really good vertebrate sequence we’ve got is that of the horse, which is why just about every large museum has a display of equine evolution like the one here at the ROM.

Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge responded, putting forth the theory of punctuated equilibria — punky-E, as we say in the evolution biz. Species are stable for long periods of time, and then suddenly, when environmental conditions change, they rapidly evolve into new forms. Ninety percent of me wanted to believe Stephen and Niles, but ten percent felt it was a bit of a semantic trick, word play like Gould’s “nonoverlapping magisteria” of religion and science, glossing over a thorny issue, in this case that the fossil record didn’t show what Darwin predicted it would, with bafflegab — as though giving a fancy name to the problem was the same as solving it. (Not that Gould was the first to do that: Herbert Spencer’s phrase for the engine of evolution — “survival of the fittest” — was nothing more than a circular definition, since fitness was never pinned down more precisely than simply being that which increased the odds of survival.)

Long-term environmental stability? In February, Toronto often has temperatures of twenty degrees Fahrenheit, and the snow can lie hip-deep on the ground. The air is so dry that skin flakes off and lips crack open. Without a bulky sweater and a down-filled parka, a scarf and a tuque, you could easily die from exposure.

Six months later, in August, temperatures in the nineties are common, and breaking one hundred is not unheard of. The air is so laden with humidity that just standing still is enough to cause sweat to pour out of you; the sun is so bright that even a few minutes without my clip-ons and a hat brings on a splitting headache, and the radio often urges the elderly and those with heart conditions to stay indoors.

The theory of punctuated equilibria says the environment stays stable for extended periods of time. In much of the world, the environment isn’t stable for months at a time.

But I soldiered on; we all did — all of us who taught evolution. We incorporated punky-E into our lesson plans, and we shook our heads condescendingly when naive students asked us about missing links.

It wasn’t the first time we’d been smug. Evolutionists had arrogantly folded their arms across their chests back in 1953 when Harold Urey and Stanley Miller created amino acids by putting an electric discharge through a primordial soup — what they thought, then, Earth’s early atmosphere might have been like. Why, we were halfway to creating life in a jar, we thought; the final triumph of evolutionary theory, the proof that it had all started through simple, natural processes. If we zapped the soup just right, full-fledged self-replicating organisms might appear.

Except they never did. We still don’t know how to go from amino acids to self-replication. And we look at the cell under electron microscopes, we see things Darwin never dreamed of, mechanisms like the cilia that turn out to be so incredibly complex in their own right that it’s almost impossible to see how they might have evolved in the step-by-single-step fashion that evolution allows, mechanisms that seemed to have been created full-blown with all their complex, moving parts.

But, well, we ignored the biochemical argument, too — and with equal smugness. I remember old Jonesy handing me an article out of his Skeptical Inquirer once, in which Martin Gardner tried to tear apart Michael Behe, the Lehigh University professor who wrote Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, a strongly presented case for intelligent design. The name Behe, Gardner wasted no time pointing out, rhymes with “tee-hee,” a titter, a giggle, a joke, nothing to take seriously. Just because we couldn’t at the moment see the sequence of steps that might have given rise to cilia — or to the cascade sequence that causes blood to clot, or to the complexity of the human eye, or to the ATP-driven system of cellular metabolism — didn’t mean that such sequences hadn’t occurred.

And, of course, we kept arguing that the universe had to be teeming with life — that there was nothing remarkable about Earth, that it was, in fact, mediocre, that planets like it were, well, as common as the dirt after which we’d named our own world.

But then, in 1988, the first extrasolar planet was discovered, orbiting the star HD 114762. Of course, back then we didn’t think it was a planet; we thought maybe it was a brown-dwarf star. After all, it was nine times as heavy as Jupiter, and it orbited HD 114762 closer than Mercury orbits our sun. But in 1995, another extrasolar planet was discovered, this one at least half as big as Jupiter, and also orbiting its parent, the star 51 Pegasi, closer than Mercury came to Sol. And then more and more were found, all from solar systems unlike our own.

In our solar system, the gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — orbit far away from the central star, and the inner planets are small, rocky worlds. Rather than being a normal planetary system, ours was beginning to look like a freak. And yet the layout of bodies in our system seemed to be crucial to developing and sustaining life. Without the gravitational effects of our giant moon — almost a sister planet, formed early on when an asteroid slammed into our still-molten world — Earth would wobble in an unstable fashion, and our atmosphere would be crushingly dense, like that of Venus. And without Jupiter, patrolling the border between the inner and outer solar system, sweeping up wayward comets and asteroids with its immense gravity, our world would have been hit far more frequently by such objects. A bolide impact apparently almost wiped out all life on Earth sixty-five million years ago; we could not have withstood more frequent bombardment.

Of course, Hollus’s solar system apparently resembled ours, as did the Wreed system. But, nonetheless, systems like Sol’s were extraordinary; the exception, not the rule. And cells aren’t simple; they are enormously complex. And the fossil record, fascinating but frustrating thing that it is, shows evolution proceeding by leaps rather than by the accumulation of gradual changes.

I’ve spent my whole adult life being an uncompromising neo-Darwinian evolutionist. I certainly don’t want to issue a deathbed retraction.

And yet —

And yet perhaps, as Hollus believes, there is more to the puzzle of life.

I know evolution happens; I know it for a fact. I’ve seen the fossils, seen the DNA studies that say that we and chimps have 98.6 percent of our genetic material in common, and therefore must have had a recent common ancestor.

Proceeding by leaps . . .

By . . . perhaps, maybe . . . by quantum leaps.

Newton’s seventeenth-century laws of physics are mostly correct; you can use them to reliably predict all sorts of things. We didn’t discard them; rather, in the twentieth century, we subsumed them into a new, more comprehensive physics, a physics of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Evolution is a nineteenth-century notion, outlined in Darwin’s 1859 book, a book called, in full, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. But the more we learn, the more natural selection seems inadequate on its own as a mechanism for the creation of new species; even our best attempts at artificial, intelligently guided selection apparently aren’t up to the task — all dogs are still Canis familiaris.

And now it’s the start of the twenty-first century. Surely it’s not unreasonable to think that Darwin’s ideas, like Newton’s before them, will be subsumed into a greater whole, a more comprehensive understanding?

Damn it!

God damn it.

I hate it when the pain comes like that — like a knife, slicing into me.

I reached over onto my cluttered night table. Where are my pills? Where are they?