Bully for Brontosaurus Read Online Free PDF Page A

devoid of hooks upon actual events to count as an explanation in any satisfying sense.
    Darwin, that great beneficiary of a thousand chains of improbable circumstance, came to understand this principle and to grasp thereby the essence of history in its largest domain of geology and life. When America’s great Christian naturalist Asa Gray told Darwin that he was prepared to accept the logic of natural selection but recoiled at the moral implications of a world without divine guidance, Darwin cited history as a resolution. Gray, in obvious distress, had posed the following argument: Science implies lawfulness; laws (like the principle of natural selection) are instituted by God to ensure his benevolent aims in the results of nature; the path of history, however full of apparent sorrow and death, must therefore include purpose. Darwin replied that laws surely exist and that, for all he knew, they might well embody a purpose legitimately labeled divine. But, Darwin continued, laws only regulate the broad outlines of history, “with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.” (Note Darwin’s careful choice of words. He does not mean “random” in the sense of uncaused; he speaks of events so complex and contingent that they fall, by their unpredictability and unrepeatability, into the domain of “what we may call chance.”)
    But where shall we place the boundary between lawlike events and contingent details? Darwin presses Gray further. If God be just, Darwin holds, you could not claim that the improbable death of a man by lightning or the birth of a child with serious mental handicaps represents the general and inevitable way of our world (even though both events have demonstrable physical causes). And if you accept “what we may call chance” (the presence of this man under that tree at that moment) as an explanation for a death, then why not for a birth? And if for the birth of an individual, why not for the origin of a species? And if for the origin of a species, then why not for the evolution of Homo sapiens as well?
    You can see where Darwin’s chain of argument is leading: Human intelligence itself—the transcendent item that, above all else, supposedly reflected God’s benevolence, the rule of law, and the necessary progress of history—might be a detail, and not the predictable outcome of first principles. I wouldn’t push this argument to an absurd extreme. Consciousness in some form might lie in the realm of predictability, or at least reasonable probability. But we care about details. Consciousness in human form—by means of a brain plagued with inherent paths of illogic, and weighted down by odd and dysfunctional inheritances, in a body with two eyes, two legs, and a fleshy upper thigh—is a detail of history, an outcome of a million improbable events, never destined to repeat. We care about George Canning’s sore behind because we sense, in the cascade of consequences, an analogy to our own tenuous existence. We revel in the details of history because they are the source of our being.

2 | Grimm’s Greatest Tale
    WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION of Eng and Chang, who had no choice, no famous brothers have ever been closer than Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, who lived and worked together throughout their long and productive lives. Wilhelm (1786–1859) was the prime mover in collecting the Kinder-und Hausmärchen (fables for the home and for children) that have become a pillar and icon of our culture. (Can you even imagine a world without Rapunzel or Snow White?) Jacob, senior member of the partnership (1785–1863), maintained a primary interest in linguistics and the history of human speech. His Deutsche Grammatik , first published in 1819, became a cornerstone for documenting relationships among Indo-European languages. Late in their lives, after a principled resignation from the University of Göttingen (prompted by the king of Hanover’s repeal of the 1833