Repost: "There is a grandeur in this view of life..."

I originally wrote this post off the top of my head, groping (somewhat unsuccessfully) to find the right words to express my enthrallment with natural history. I edited it substantially here without changing the main points of the argument, and I feel that while it could use some improvement it stands as a much better piece of writing as it is now.

Up to my ankles in marl, the July sun blazing overhead, the remnants of an epoch long vanished from this earth see the light of day again for the first time in over 65 million years. There is nothing particularly spectacular about the chocolate-colored bits of bone I dredged out of the greensand, the modest fragments giving me few clues as to the identity of their owner, but whatever this vertebrate was it's remains found their way to the bottom of a sea 100 feet deep, prowled by immense mosasaurs and aquatic crocodiles. They are the whispers of a world that would be alien and unfamiliar should we encounter it today, yet what was once part of the Cretaceous sea-bottom now lies only a few miles away from the heart of Philadelphia. Soaked in sweat and covered in mud, I cannot control the grin on my face or the racing of my heart as I turn over the tiny Maastrichtian bones in my hand; how spectacular are these remains, vestiges of a time when there truly were dragons everywhere.

Moments of joy and fascination in the field are often fleeting, however, and it is all-too-easy to forget what so draws us to the natural world about nature when the culture war over evolution and creationism is ever at the boiling point. The individual battles are fought in public classrooms, sundry media outlets, and (perhaps most notably) the internet, but those who recognize the intricacy, beauty, and power of evolution should not forget to step back every once in a while and look at what inspired great naturalists past and present in the first place. Nature offers up more treasures and holds more mysteries than I could ever fully appreciate during my short tenure on this planet, but without this sense of awe at the great unity and diversity of life science can quickly turn into a rather dry and forbidding set of rote mental exercises.

Aldo Leopold, a naturalist of a sort now seemingly rare, recognized that a sense of wonder is essential to understanding natural history. In his essay "Song of the Gavilan", collected in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold laments how bright minds are often told to ignore the "music" of nature;

There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for the dismemberment is called a university.

A professor may pluck the strings of this own instrument, but never that of another, and if he listens for music he must never admit it to his fellows or to his students. For all are restrained by an ironbound taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets.

Professors serve science and science serves progress. It serves progress so well that many of the more intricate instruments are stepped upon and broken in the rush to spread progress to all backward lands. One by one the parts are thus stricken from the songs of songs. If the professor is able to classify each instrument before it is broken, he is well content.

Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. The great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may. One of the facts hewn to by science is that every river needs more people, and all people need more inventions, and hence more science; the good life depends on the indefinite extension of this chain of logic. That the good life on any river may likewise depend on the perception of its music, and the preservation of some music to perceive, is a form of doubt not yet entertained by science.

It would be a mistake to paint all practicing scientists with such a broad brush, but the danger of becoming so objective that the melodies of songbirds, the fierce toothy maw of Tyrannosaurus, or the astonishing speed of the cheetah becoming reduced to little more than data sets to be collected and compared is a real one. This is strange, especially because it was from wonder in the face of the machinations of nature that science was born; true science emerged as an attempt to explain what had hitherto been subjugated beneath superstition and religion as it exists, not how we may wish it to be. Still, despite the move away from superstition and rude entrance of evolution into the public consciousness, religion still attempts to retain a hold on "the birds of the air," "the beasts of the field," and "every thing that creepeth upon the earth." While it is often quoted in books about evolution to bring out the irony of the passage, God's words to the inconsolable Job describe how the natural world is meant to leave us in awe of God himself;

7 But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee:

8 Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.

9 Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the LORD hath wrought this?

10 In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.
[Job 12:7-10, King James Version]

Clearly we are fully expected to learn from nature, but the lessons learned differ substantially from the content of Genesis or any other book of the Bible. Still, there are seemingly countless flash-animated greeting cards, books, videos, and other resources enforcing the notion that every aggregate of soil, blade of grass, or molecule of water practically screams that life was created ex nihilo by the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible. Such arguments have even become politically fashionable, allowing current presidential candidate John McCain, in an attempt to eat his cake and have it too, to say "I believe in evolution. But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there also" when asked if he "believed" in evolution. Such a notion definitely plays to subjective notions of beauty (as some of my aforementioned examples have as well, to be fair), as McCain did not say "When I look at a lamprey or a hagfish, I see the hand of God at work." The overall association of God with the aesthetically pleasing could explain why Thomas Kinkade paintings, which differ so little that I can scarcely tell one from another, as a staple in evangelical Christian households.

Perhaps there are some on the fringe that would prefer to think of a tapeworm or liver fluke when contemplating the glory of God, but the vast majority of creeping, crawling, sucking, oozing, and pulsating things on the planet are not generally thought of as being "first in the ways of God." Even Darwin expressed his doubts about a Creator that was seemingly so cruel as to speak into existence organisms that are seemingly without mercy in their habits. In a famous letter to the American botanist Asa Gray, Darwin confided;

I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their [larvae] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

There once was a view that nature is filled with goodness or pleasurable things, however, notably supported by William Paley in his book Natural Theology. Beyond his famous "Watchmaker Argument" (its description reading like a playbook for the modern incarnation of intelligent design despite it's age) one of Paley's core arguments is that the ability to feel pleasure (and not only pain) is positive evidence of a beneficent Creator. Unfortunately for Paley, the "Argument from Pleasure" is no longer entertained in the realm natural history, especially since Darwin helped usher humanity (albeit kicking and screaming) into was an understanding of nature that is neither inherently good nor evil. The world is not "for" mankind just as it is not expressly for the benefit of water beetles, Cape Buffalo, or the Northern Flicker. If it were otherwise the world could perhaps divided into creatures that were "good" and others that were "evil," but no clear distinction exists nor has it ever; attributing such labels to the world around us only speaks to our own ignorance and hubris. Indeed, we are but one surviving example of a more diverse past lineage, the privileged position we give ourselves among the rest of organic beings belying our insecurity over our loneliness on this planet.

At this point, anyone who has been entranced by the natural world can likely empathize with much of what I've written here, but sometimes I wonder if those who propose that Homo sapiens started it's tenure on earth as a pile of dirt and a stolen rib have truly followed the advice of their own holy book and let the earth speak to them. While I have no doubt such individuals "appreciate" nature on some level, a poster of some far-flung locale at sunset with a Psalm printed on it is not indicative of a true understanding of nature. Such a superficial fondness expressed in an enjoyment of a sunset with no thought to what actually makes the colors dance across the sky is intellectually impoverished indeed, a mindset that still looks to the heavens for signs and miracles but does not wonder why the heavenly heralds move the way they do. Many aspects of the living natural world may be aesthetically pleasing to our senses as well, but we are still very much a part of the motley organization of life that that we often try and set ourselves apart from and even the most repulsive or disgusting of creatures has a worth that does not rely on our "refined" tastes. When an animal dies, insects and bacteria take advantage of the bonanza, putrefying and decomposing the body , beginning a process in which matter and energy while be redistributed to the natural world in a new form. If special circumstances occur, it may well see the light of day again as a fossil, but more likely than not it was be completely broken up, the accumulation of energy and elements in its body being transferred into other organisms and into the ground, allowing different forms of life to flourish. This does not make a maggot-ridden, decomposing carcass any more attractive (or smell any more fragrant), but if we can gain insight into even the most revolting natural processes, allowing our sense of awe to be free from our rather superficial requirements of beauty, we can gain an understanding of nature that is far richer and rewarding than a shallower view alone can offer.

Perhaps my words are only those of a young man, "green" in terms of experience and landlocked in a land of impervious surface and strip malls. Such inexperience may hinder my perceptions, but when I look closely at nature I see neither angels nor demons, God and the Devil being absent from the crashing of the waves along the shore or the lighting strikes of a late-August thunderstorm. This does not mean, however, that I view nature as being divorced from any sense of awe or deeper emotional feeling; superstitious explanations may satisfy small minds for a moment, but they cannot compare with the simultaneously enigmatic and accessible phenomena of the natural world. While science may proceed and operate by a rigorous procedure founded on the bedrock of objectivity, if we are to be truly honest the ever-increasing collection of information about the natural world we so strive to possess owes to our joys and wonderment as much as any heady notions of "intellectual progress" that are often invoked. Indeed, science is not undertaken by robots, unfeeling data collectors storing endless streams of numbers that are incomprehensible to the uninitiated; nature serves to inspire as well as educate, and we would do well to train our ears to hear the "music" found in it.

This post is a bit of a throw-away, however, as Charles Darwin succinctly summed up the thesis of this argument long ago;

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having originally been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. - Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection