The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers

Author:Richard Powers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Published: 2013-01-26T16:00:00+00:00

C. Evolution

The envelope is as wide as the space granted by the surplus of generations, sculpted by scarcity. If anything is behind the accumulation of variations, it's reprimand. Constraint and condemning somehow rebound into bounty. Weeding out increases complexity, like gravity driving a river uphill. I can't see it; how can the shake-out sieve of death create more, when its most generous judgment is "Not quite"?

My enlightenment arrives in stages, unfolding historically, inaccurately, like the thing it researches. The best classification for gene anthologies must be laid out on the axis of time. Darwin induced the whole before he had adequate foundation. Evolutionary thought evolved only fitfully, by pangenesis. The earliest recorded text I can find already suspects the mutability of living shape. Anaximander, in translation, reads like the Origin, 2,400 years ahead of time. Aristotle blunders up against the notion, then walks bravely away. Linnaeus-worlds later-knew; he could have proclaimed it, incomplete, in rough outline. But he was unwilling to crawl out onto that geneological limb until humanity was ready.

Two and a half millennia after the idea's appearance, I'm still not ready. Evolution is the most explosive deflation of all time- the capstone of history's steady objectification of nature. I spend a day of quiet privacy spelling out how this unassuming model worked the most radical intellectual overhaul ever, how this near-tautology supplies the crucial cog that biology has aspired toward since its appearance. I trace every step in the synthesis, recheck, give the go-ahead to each subassembly. Still the complete machine lies one step outside credibility. I recapitulate evolution's four prerequisites in embryo:

1. Excess of issue. Surplus offspring. Seedlings rooting in the nook of an I-beam on the fiftieth floor of a two-year-old plate-glass skyscraper; maggots overrunning a scrap of meat. Viruses breeding under the electron microscope at Cold Spring Harbor, making Leo Szilard rush outside and pace the porch of his cabin to calm himself. Precisely the state this evening finds me in.

2. Scarcity. Common currency from day one: no amount of goods are ever enough to go around. Not all surplus makes it; none makes good in every case. Death hones away, a missed heartbeat from home.

These first two innocuous tenets are reciprocal. Yet hiding in their sum is the larger part of Darwin's bugaboo. Too much divided into too little, and something's got to change. Some die faster than others, a conclusion as inescapable as its result.

3. Variation. Differential dying creates divergence. This is my sticking point tonight. I make the catch only slowly: variation is two-tiered. First: the ten thousand wrigglers in a pound of anchovy spawn are all different. Trivially individual. Even dyed-in-wool creationists admit that poodles differ from Great Danes, let alone wolves. Man too (whatever the nausea of knowing) is not an entity, but five billion disparate creatures with different eyes, hands, and minds. I fell in love with one whose hair, height, voice, fear, and protective narcissism made him unique. I loved one man distinct from all others, or at most, two.

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