That early morning in spring, Saeko’s father had rubbed his daughter’s back as she slumped face down on her futon.
“I want to go for a drive, Sae. Will you come with me?” he asked. Despite his all-nighter, his voice was full of energy.
In the end, they went to Cycle Park in Izu, quite a distance from Atami. After Saeko’s father had taken a quick two-hour nap, they zipped merrily towards the Izu skyline.
True to its name, Cycle Park was a theme park dedicated to attractions related to bicycling, organized into a number of zones. There was a zone featuring activities like the Cycle Coaster and Cycle Monorail, a water zone with a swimming pool that opened in the summer, a hot spring area, restaurants, and even a miniature golf course. But the main features of the park were the five-kilometer road bike and two-kilometer off-road mountain bike courses.
The park was full of families enjoying the break.
Saeko’s father scampered about in his casual jeans and jacket, doing his best to accommodate Saeko’s every wish.
“What do you want to do next, Sae?”
He seemed determined to take advantage of the limited time they had together to make up for his absence, and his enthusiasm eclipsed his daughter’s. It was almost exhausting just watching him.
But Saeko loved theme parks, too. The two of them rode the Cycle Coaster, Cycle Helicopter, and Cycle Monorail together before taking on the two-kilometer bike course. By the time they were done, even Saeko’s father was exhausted. In addition to being overworked and having been up all night, he didn’t get much exercise. Finally completely enervated, he sank down onto a bench and slumped his shoulders.
“I guess I’m getting old,” he said with a grimace, regretting his overexertion. For a few minutes he simply sat and rested, but before long his attention focused on the various types of cycles in the plaza in front of them. “Right!” he nodded with conviction, quickly recovering his liveliness.
They were sitting on the edge of what could have been called a bike rink. Ringed with trees, the space was filled with cycles of all sizes and shapes for children to ride as they pleased. Every one of the cycles was unusual in some way, and the children grappled intently with the challenge of riding them.
Compared to standard issue bicycles, the contraptions that populated the rink were almost monstrous. There were bikes with huge front wheels and tiny rear wheels and others that required the rider to pump their entire body up and down over a platform to move forward. There were unicycles, bicycles, tricycles and quadricycles, as well as bikes with oddly shaped handlebars.
Saeko’s father’s eyes lit up, and she could see that he had been seized with a flash of insight. His body incapacitated by exhaustion, he shifted into using his mental powers to stoke his daughter’s imagination.
“Know what, Sae? All those cycles out there are like extinct species.”
Saeko had yet to begin junior high school at the time, and she didn’t fully comprehend what her father meant. But he continued, undeterred.
“When human beings invented the first bicycle, it involved a lot of trial and error. It must have been hard for them to figure out how to build a device that would function welclass="underline" be efficient, fast, and easy to ride. So they tried out all sorts of ideas. Like that one over there, the one with the giant wheel in front and the tiny one in the back. There’s no chain, and the pedals attach directly to the front wheel. But whenever someone managed to build a new, better-functioning model, the older types were abandoned. These earlier versions were never mass-produced. Now they’re nothing but toys for children to play on in places like this. You might say they’re bicycle fossils, like extinct species whose remains can now only be found in museums. See what I mean?”
Saeko listened intently, drawn by the idea of bicycles as fossils.
“There are strange similarities between the things mankind has created and the living organisms born on this planet. I won’t get into the mechanisms that governed the dawn of early life, but I find it unimaginable that they simply arose by coincidence from the stirrings of a thick soup of amino acids. Someday, when you’re older, Sae, I’ll tell you my thoughts on the matter. But for now, just know that we don’t know how it happened.
“Roughly 3.9 billion years ago — less than a billion years after the earth was formed — the first life forms were born. They were prokaryotes, life forms that lacked a cell nucleus, similar to bacteria. They were extremely simple in form, but they were alive nonetheless. For about two billion years after that, these extremely primitive life forms continued to exist with no progress whatsoever. Can you imagine that? No progress at all, for two billion years! That’s a mind-bogglingly long time span! The first life form to finally develop a cell nucleus came into being around 1.5 billion years ago. And then, roughly 600 million years ago came the great explosion of life known as the Cambrian Period. Suddenly, everything changed, and life took on all sorts of diverse forms. The life forms that were born in this period were totally different from anything that had existed previously. They were absolutely hideous by modern-day standards — often you couldn’t tell their tops from their bottoms or their heads from their tails. Around 400 million years ago, the first plants began to grow on land. Amphibians evolved and emerged from the water, the dinosaurs were born and then birds. Then came the mammals, and finally human beings capable of speech. They had a whole animal kingdom similar to the one we have today. But along the way, the overwhelming majority of species didn’t survive. They say that around 99 percent of emergent species are weeded out by natural selection. You’ve heard of the most famous ones, of course.”
Saeko had discussed the topic with her friends at school. The dinosaurs were famous for emerging during the Triassic Period, flourishing during the Jurassic and dying out at the end of the Cretaceous, roughly 65 million years ago. There was no end of speculation as to the cause of their extinction, with various theories attributing their demise to a huge meteor impact, a massive molecular cloud, geological changes, or even continental shifts caused by plate tectonics. But ultimately nobody knew what really happened to them.
“Now, about the tools humankind has invented. Cro-Magnon man was the earliest modern human species, but even before that, simple stone tools were used by paleoanthropic man and primitive man. For example, the first tool created by primitive man was a hand axe made of stone, a little over a million years ago. For about a million years, the hand axe remained in use with no significant advancements. From our modern-day perspective, it’s an unfathomably long time span. Well? Doesn’t it remind you of how the first prokaryotes didn’t evolve at all for 2 billion years? But once civilizations began to emerge in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the banks of the Yellow River, mankind began to produce a vast variety of tools. It’s just like when the prokaryotes finally developed the cell nucleus and began to develop into multicellular organisms, though they still didn’t develop the ability to obtain energy by feeding on other organisms. There was no food chain yet. They were like the plant world. None of them consumed energy in order to move about.
“In the seventeenth century, after Ancient Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance, Newton brought classical mechanics to completion, and then we had the Industrial Revolution in Britain. It’s just like that great explosion of life during the Cambrian when all sorts of animals emerged. Afterwards, the process of mechanization and automation picked up speed, and before you knew it man was making all manner of devices. Take Japan. From the Yayoi Period to the Edo Period, there was very little change in the things people made. Everything really took off in the Meiji Period. Man’s creations don’t continuously evolve. They undergo a long latency period, and when the right time comes, there’s an explosion of variation. And the length of that latency period gets shorter and shorter as we move through time. The advances human civilization made during the nineteenth century don’t even compare to those of the twentieth century in terms of speed.