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Journalism of Courage
The story of evolution, you’d think, would amount to pretty much the same narrative no matter how it’s told, whether the chronicle moves forwards linearly, or whether it slides backwards from the present moment. Well, not exactly, says evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Tell it wrong, as it has oft been done, and your are in danger of amplifying the conceit of hindsight.
In this retelling of the origin of life (even that word, life, if fraught with misconception, but more on that later), Dawkins situates his journey backwards in both a literary and dramatic context. He writes: “Backward chronology and forward chronology are each good for different purposes. Go backwards and, no matter where you start, you end up celebrating the unity of life. Go forwards and you extol diversity.”
For starters, this blunts the conceit of hindsight, graphically conveyed in school textbook renditions of evolution, of Homo sapiens sapiens straightening out of a simian fold. Forget the scientific oversights in this simplification, it is also a grossly value-laden depiction: “Man as a magnet, drawing evolution from the past towards his eminence.”
It also gives Dawkins’ journey a framework. He says he nearly opted for a Bunyan model and titled his book Pilgrim’s Regress. But as practically every page of the five-hundred pager eloquently shows, his inspiration was Chaucer. And like Chaucer’s pilgrims, the species travel back in time, joining up at each rendezvous with a common ancestor (or concestor, in his phraseology). At each gathering the “pilgrims” get a chance to tell their story, in his words. And ably supplemented with footnotes. It may appear somewhat incongruous to dwell on footnotes in a book that will for a very long time to come be a definitive text for scholars and laypersons. Genius often proves itself at the peripheries and Dawkins’ asides are proof of his scholarship, the breadth of his vision, and his wit. They tell you how Australopithecus did not originate in Australia, as one would ordinarily infer. Or why if in our long evolutionary journey we had developed eight fingers (or sixteen), computers would have been invented much earlier — because binary logic would have been relatively more accessible. Or how, “Lucy in the sky with diamonds” was playing in a camp in Ethiopia when the famous fossil was discovered, thereby simplifying her christening.
Anyhow, onwards — or backwards, if you prefer — we go, for our first tryst with chimpanzees, thence with gorillas and orang utans, and much later with rodents and rabbitkind, and ever so much later with cauliflowers, to a near conclusive meeting with eubacteria. In the course of this journey we linger over the long reign of the dinosaur and are invited to draw what lessons we can from their seemingly everlasting superiority. (Lessons are there elsewhere for the taking for George W. Bush and his fellow imperialists too.)
Eventually, four billion years later, we gather at our ancient Canterbury and delve into the origin of heredity — not life, Dawkins will have you know. It remains impossible to define life, and what we are seeking when we inquire into our beginnings is heredity.
Dawkins story is exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting. In the end, however, it does not simply deepen understanding of the natural world, it expands the reader’s imagination.
