The Immense Journey, by Loren Eiseley

I was rearranging some bookshelves and — in a dusty back corner, behind a framed Buddha —  I found a small paperback copy of The Immense Journey, by Loren Eiseley. I read the book over twenty years ago and I remember enjoying it, but haven’t seen it since.

When I opened the book, it became obvious that it was published before acid-free paper: the pages looked frangible, with yellow-brown discoloration at the outer edges.

I’ve always been a compulsive note-jotter, and there were quite a few passages marked in the book, including the author’s thoughts about a theoretical ancestor of Homo sapiens…

“It began as such things always begin — in the ooze of unnoticed swamps, in the darkness of eclipsed moons. It began with a strangled gasping for air.

The pond was a place of reek and corruption, of fetid smells and oxygen-starved fish breathing through laboring gills. At times the slowly contracting circle of the water left little windrows of minnows who skittered desperately to escape the sun, but who died, nevertheless, in the fat, warm mud. It was a place of low life. In it the human brain began.

There were strange snouts in those waters, strange barbels nuzzling the bottom ooze, and there was time — three hundred million years of it — but mostly, I think, it was the ooze. By day the temperature in the world outside the pond rose to a frightful intensity; at night the sun went down in smoking red. Dust storms marched in incessant progression across a wilderness whose plants were the plants of long ago. Leafless and weird and stiff they lingered by the water, while over vast areas of grassless uplands the winds blew until red stones took on the polish of reflecting mirrors. There was nothing to hold the land in place. Winds howled, dust clouds rolled, and brief erratic torrents choked with silt ran down to the sea. It was a time of dizzying contrasts, a time of change.

On the oily surface of the pond, from time to time a snout thrust upward, took in air with a queer grunting inspiration, and swirled back to the bottom. The pond was doomed, the water was foul, and the oxygen almost gone, but the creature would not die. It could breathe air direct through a little accessory lung, and it could walk. In all that weird and lifeless landscape, it was the only thing that could. It walked rarely and under protest, but that was not surprising. The creature was a fish.

In the passage of days, the pond became a puddle, but the Snout survived. There was dew one dark night and a coolness in the empty stream bed. When the sun rose next morning the pond was an empty place of cracked mud, but the Snout did not lie there. He had gone. Down stream there were other ponds. He breathed air for a few hours and hobbled slowly along on the stumps of heavy fins.

It was an uncanny business if there had been anyone there to see. It was a journey best not observed in daylight, it was something that needed swamps and shadows and the touch of the night dew. It was a monstrous penetration of a forbidden element, and the Snout kept his face from the light. It was just as well, though the face should not be mocked. In three hundred million years it would be our own.”

from The Snout, in The Immense Journey (p.49 – 51)

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

 

The Selfish Gene, a book review

Richard Dawkins became famous due to the success of The Selfish Gene (1976), which is now a classic popular science book. Its main theme is that natural selection develops at the gene level, not at the level of the individual. In fact, he goes as far as to say that “…we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.” [p. 2]. The replicators (the genes within DNA) developed longevity, fecundity, and high-fidelity, and  they drive the robotic machines.

The ‘selfish’ aspect of Dawkin’s thesis is meant in a metaphoric sense: genes are not consciously selfish, but it would appear as though they are to an outside observer. And, indeed, Dawkins points out that altruism is a required element for the continuance of the replicator (Dawkins biggest hurdle with many critics was the term selfish; in retrospect, he admits — in the introduction to the 30^th anniversary edition — that The Immortal Gene may have served him better as a title).

Later in the book, Dawkins explains that the evolution of the brain has created beings that are able to rise above the control of the ‘selfish gene’, and he coins another term for beings that have attained this level of evolution: the selfish meme.

Dawkins is a persuasive writer and he builds his case well by using scientific examples in layman’s language, but at times his tautologies feel top heavy, as if they were built on an invisible foundation (a certain behavior must be due to selfish genes because all behavior is due to selfish genes).

There are some fascinating facts sprinkled throughout the book and there is an abundance of food for thought, but I cringed when Dawkins began to philosophize (he admits he is not a philosopher, yet this does not stop him from moralizing); in particular, I found his diatribes against religion off-putting. I’m not going to spend time here arguing for (or against) religion, but I think Dawkins could have let his thesis stand on its own (he should have made his points and moved on) without attacking a belief system that is not truly disprovable; after all, Dawkins’ theory is really just another belief system.

If you plan to read the book I would recommend acquiring at least the second edition (updated with corrections and extra material, including excellent Endnotes), which enriches the reading experience.

The Selfish Gene is an enjoyable read, with a few sections I had to slog through, and some unfortunate sections I could have done without, but it was intellectually stimulating.

Recommended.

.

.

.

 

The redundant male

The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins,  is an intriguing, popular-science book; as I was crawling my way through it yesterday, I came across a brief blurb concerning the female greenfly; a species that can produce asexually:

“Female greenflies can bear live, fatherless, female offspring, each one containing all the genes of its mother … … an embryo in the mother’s ‘womb’ may have an even smaller embryo inside her own womb. So a female greenfly may give birth to a daughter and a grand-daughter simultaneously, both of them being equivalent to her own identical twins…” (from Chapter 3; Immortal coils, p. 43 in the 30^th anniversary issue).

For any and all ultra-feminists out there, you may want to delve into a book cited by Dawkins (in his excellent Endnotes, on p. 275): The Redundant Male, by Jeremy Cherfas and John Gribbin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

 

Darwin and Giant Armadillos

Luiz Claudio Marigo/naturepl.com

“In the course of his geologic studies, Darwin came across many fossils of extinct mammals.  Among the most interesting to him were those of giant armadillos. Nowhere else in the world were surviving species of these strange armored mammals found. Was it only a coincidence that extinct armadillos were also found buried in these same South American plains? Here again Darwin encountered tangible evidence of change and history.”

from Biology, by Helena Curtis (Worth Publishers, Inc., 4th edition, pg. 882-883)

The giant armadillo is the largest existing armadillo species (it grows up to 1.5 meters in length (~ 5 feet), with a weight up to 25 kg (~ 60 lbs)), although the extinct glyptodont — which  evolved during the Miocene era in South America — was considerably larger (close to the size of a Volkswagen beetle). At one time, the giant armadillo was spread over most of the tropical forests and grasslands east of the Andes, from Venezuela to Argentina; currently, due to over-hunting and the loss of habitat to human development and agriculture, the species is at risk of extinction.

.

.

.