Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History Read Online Free PDF

or inordinate subtlety underlies the reasons for our allegiance to these false iconographies of ladder and cone. They are adopted because they nurture our hopes for a universe of intrinsic meaning defined in our terms. We simply cannot bear the implications of Omar Khayyám’s honesty:
    Into this Universe, and Why not knowing,
Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing:
    And out of it, as Wind along the Waste
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.
    A later quatrain of the Rubáiyát proposes a counteracting strategy, but acknowledges its status as a vain hope:
    Ah Love! could you and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
    Would we not shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mold it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!
    Most myths and early scientific explanations of Western culture pay homage to this “heart’s desire.” Consider the primal tale of Genesis, presenting a world but a few thousand years old, inhabited by humans for all but the first five days, and populated by creatures made for our benefit and subordinate to our needs. Such a geological background could inspire Alexander Pope’s confidence, in the Essay on Man , about the deeper meaning of immediate appearances:
    All Nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good.
    But, as Freud observed, our relationship with science must be paradoxical because we are forced to pay an almost intolerable price for each major gain in knowledge and power—the psychological cost of progressive dethronement from the center of things, and increasing marginality in an uncaring universe. Thus, physics and astronomy relegated our world to a corner of the cosmos, and biology shifted our status from a simulacrum of God to a naked, upright ape.
    To this cosmic redefinition, my profession contributed its own special shock—geology’s most frightening fact, we might say. By the turn of the last century, we knew that the earth had endured for millions of years, and that human existence occupied but the last geological millimicrosecond of this history—the last inch of the cosmic mile, or the last second of the geological year, in our standard pedagogical metaphors.
    We cannot bear the central implication of this brave new world. If humanity arose just yesterday as a small twig on one branch of a flourishing tree, then life may not, in any genuine sense, exist for us or because of us. Perhaps we are only an afterthought, a kind of cosmic accident, just one bauble on the Christmas tree of evolution.
    What options are left in the face of geology’s most frightening fact? Only two, really. We may, as this book advocates, accept the implications and learn to seek the meaning of human life, including the source of morality, in other, more appropriate, domains—either stoically with a sense of loss, or with joy in the challenge if our temperament be optimistic. Or we may continue to seek cosmic comfort in nature by reading life’s history in a distorted light.
    If we elect the second strategy, our maneuvers are severely restricted by our geological history. When we infested all but the first five days of time, the history of life could easily be rendered in our terms. But if we wish to assert human centrality in a world that functioned without us until the last moment, we must somehow grasp all that came before as a grand preparation, a foreshadowing of our eventual origin.
    The old chain of being would provide the greatest comfort, but we now know that the vast majority of “simpler” creatures are not human ancestors or even prototypes, but only collateral branches on life’s tree. The cone of increasing progress and diversity therefore becomes our iconography of choice. The cone implies predictable development from simple to complex, from less to more. Homo sapiens may form only a twig, but if life moves, even fitfully, toward greater complexity and higher