Q: Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
Matthew (?), ca. 80 (?)
A. Classification
Books may be a substantial world, but the world of substance, the blue, species-mad world at year's end outstrips every card catalog I can make for it. If I'm to locate Ressler's code, I must step back and see what the nucleotides are after at beast level. But every system for listing life that I come across is a map at least as unwieldy as the place itself.
In the first nomenclature, what Adam called a creature was what it was—an exact lookup table for the living library. But that perfect equivalence between name and thing was scattered in ten thousand languages, punishment for an overly ambitious engineering project. Schemes to recapture the Ur-order go as far back as I can track. Theophrastus classified plants by human use, not an auspicious second start to naming, but a popular one in the centuries following him. Color, shape, feature, habitat, behavior: successive methods cast makeshift classification nets over a school that will not stay still long enough to be drafted.
I'd thought the gross macrodivision, at least, was secure, until I read of unicellulars neither animal nor plant. A nineteenth-century patch job, Protista is a category so diverse it hardly helps. I watch a fourth kingdom secede: Monera, cells without nuclei. But subdividing still doesn't suffice; later treaties draw up five or six domains. And all this splintering takes place while I'm still at the top of the classifying pyramid.
Descending into phylum, class, and order, I'm swamped in ever more controversial flowcharts. Strata shade off into suborders and superfamilies, overrunning the borders. Seed-bearing plants alone number 200,000 species. At the third rung, a single class, Insecta, exceeds three-quarters of a million species, with thousands more added every year. Tracking these figures for no one's but my ears, I realize that I'd stopped asking, for years now, that first question: how many ways are there of being alive? What is this place? How can I say it?
Bat to banyan, bavarian gentian to baleen whale: I was expelled from childhood the day that living strategies began embarrassing me with their ludicrous profusion. Too immodest, teeming: I could memorize a hundred species a day and die not yet scratching the collection's surface. Species laugh off the most rigorous hierarchy. My Baedekers to the biosphere, government offices packed to exploding with print, strain under the weight of this wild violation of the paperwork reduction act.
A year too late, a life since I last bothered to ask the only thing worth asking, I feel strong enough to take on natural history again. Girlish-strong, discovering that the catalog can never be complete. Made strong by desperation at what's come over the list. However impaired my vocabulary, however late my start, I must have a quick look while there's time. Something's happened, yesterday, this morning, something threatening the whole unclassifiable project, changing the rules of the runaway gamble forever. Something all my reading leads to.
Here, in the isolation of my books — clunky classroom translations of the original — I learn the first principle of natural selection. Living things perpetuate only through glut. How many ways are there of being alive? My answer lies in a block of code programmed to generate more copies of itself than are lost to execution. Speciation, fracturing into every subniche and supercranny, depends on surplus of offspring in every breeding creature on earth, the prodigal gene.
If the volumes are beyond listing, I try at least to locate life's bookends. How large is the envelope? Living cells have been snagged miles high in the stratosphere. Dives into the deepest sea trench, under several atmospheres, turn up diaphanous fictions that explode before they can be brought to the surface. Bacteria thrive in ice currents and boiling ripples. I look for inhospitable places where living things haven't penetrated. Even in the Sahara's desiccating winds, 4 percent humidity, and 33 °C daily temperature swings, scrub dots the dunes, roots descend fifty feet into sand, grains swarm with microorganisms.
North of permanent freeze, caribou run in herds, rabbit and tundra fox find growth enough to gorge on. Extreme south swells with seals, krill, birds. Inland Antarctica, the least habitable place on earth, has its wingless insects, lichen, mold, even two flowering plants that wait the narrow window of weeks when they can colonize this waste. Living membrane can withstand the absence of energy: nematodes have been kept for days close to absolute zero and thawed out happily.
Newts requisition caves, go pink, lose their eyes. Lungfish solve the formidable flux of tidal flats. Seeds carried in the intestines of migratory birds convert virgin volcanic island. Life lives even inside other forms of itself. Large mammals are walking bestiaries of fungi, mites, fleas, bacterial colonies. A single square inch of my skin hosts ten thousand cells of one bacterium alone. Life survives even my killer city. Dozens of houseguests rustle my cupboards, spread across the shower curtain, bless my bed, raid a refrigerator designed to deny entry. Marsupials knock over my trash cans at night. Peregrine falcons nest under the Verrazano-Narrows.
Some variant of the self-rewriting program succeeds everywhere. Imperialism lies at the heart of my classification problem: life is as particular as each locale it has a foothold in. Any nomenclature I consider founders on the cartographer's one-to-one-scale solution to "How many places are there?" The program ports itself to all four corners, stopping to seed every intermediary, driven by the universal firmware kernel buried inside it. Nothing exceeds like success. Excess of issue. Surplus of offspring. More applicants than vacancies. Overproduction — duplicate, superfluous: waves of generations testing themselves against the landlord. The milt of trout turns whole streams milky. Shrimp are hauled from the ocean in solid blocks. One male ejaculate — on the swings in a dark abandoned playground — releases 300 million half-lives.
I'm convinced of an infinitely moldable instruction set. Shape may be an artificial classification, but how many forms can duplication take? What range of phenotype? After long abstinence, I rediscover the organic paradox, the extremes of living design. Blossoming chaos: a rough estimate of chestnut proteins runs into the tens of thousands. But no algorithm, however long, begins to describe how this tree branches.
Radial, bilateral, transverse; symmetries that change over a life; radical asymmetries. Sea shells unfurl by Fibonacci. Horn, bark, petaclass="underline" hydrocarbon chains arrange in every conceivable strut, winch, and pylon, ranging over the visible spectrum and beyond into ultraviolet and infrared. Horseshoe crab, butterfly, barnacle, and millipede all belong to the same phylum. Earthworms with seven hearts, ruminants with multiple stomachs, scallops with a line of eyes rimming their shell like party lanterns, animals with two brains, many brains, none. Trees whose limbs root, whose roots blossom, whose leaves.become needles, beakers, flesh traps, detachable emigrants. Animals that expel their organs to eat, that— split down the middle — become their own Siamese twins. Organisms that bud, divide, cross-pollinate. Sedentaries that sprout free swimmers that mate to make sedentaries. Things that breed once and die, that birth perpetually even as they sleep. Females that grow up to become males. Males that convert to females in hard times. Dwarf males that live in the bellies of their mates. Males that bear young. Hermaphrodites.
Extremes in size? I find a figure for my own class: weight difference between blue whale and pygmy shrew. My desk encyclopedia says that Balaenoptera musculus reaches 600,000 kilograms. Suncus etruscus, on the other end, must eat constantly to keep up its gram and a half. The largest mammal is 400 million times heavier than its smallest cousin. And there are creatures 400 million times smaller than the pygmy shrew, smaller than the wavelength of visible light, detectable only in the scatter of electrons. Several thousand could fit inside one human blood cell. Giant sequoias, excluding the immense roots, are three and a half times the longest whale. The Great Barrier Reef is longer than Europe: a composite mass of two hundred species of polyp a fraction of an inch long, a living superspecies spreading in sovereign continent visible from outer space.