Life doesn't spring to new complexity. But small bugs, fed back into executing procreation, produce wrinkles, differences that are honed into new profiles of spread and fit. Precursors emerge blindly; purpose itself erodes out of chance. At bottom, no cause: only the life molecule, copying or failing to copy. What good is a blip that doesn't yet function? Some good; even a fractional lung could keep a fraction of tidal-dried fish alive fractionally longer. Lungs are not revealed or inevitable. They are arbitrary inventions, reified in experience. They are postulated, fitfully, across immense pools of genetic potential, invariantly inherited. Or mostly invariant. Life consists of propositions about chance by chance.
In the interplay of scale between variant population, selectable individual, and occasionally stray gene, I find counterpoint enough to create a trio sonata rich beyond all design, exceeding even his hero's compositional ingenuity. All this from that hobgoblin Evolution, that drunk trapping the world into listening to its rambling shaggy dog story full of fabrication, revision, gaps, imploring every so often, "Correct me if I'm wrong."
I trace the steps, the developing embryo recapitulating its own evolutionary history. I follow the observations and inferences, mirror the young man step by step, a canon at the fifth, at a quarter century's distance. His very brain must have been electrified by the nearness of creation. I see Ressler and his love, twenty-seven years ago, listening, lying on his barracks floor in the dark, as if the danger in the notes will not notice them if they only keep still. The fifteenth variation, replication by inversion — the great, halfway watershed — completes itself as they lie in silence. A question, framed by the initial canonic voice, descends frightened down the scale ladder. A measure later, the answer, predetermined by its complement, begins an awful, mirror rise.
For the first time, unmitigated minor, as bitter as a belated gift of roses from an unfaithful lover. Sorrow creeps in, rich, expansive, and beautiful, discolors the set at the midpoint. This slow, inevitable seep is a surrender from which there is no recovery. Acute cut of chromatic, harbinger of half-steps. The meandering question, answered severely at the fifth, tripled by a bass that tries to preserve the sarabande by desperately introducing passing accidentals, combines in harmonies more unforgiving than any until late this century. The life molecule's hovering nearness threatens to sweep over the man I look for, obliterate him.
The bass falters, then fails to translate the Base into distant minors. It capitulates, lapses into the despair of part-writing freedom. The canonic lines cross, impossible for my ear to disentangle. The question begins a long — excessively, over-and-again long— terminal descent into obscurity, broken only by a last, four-note, densely pitched, failed attempt to lift itself before the final fall. The answer, constrained by transcription to rise note by note, continues to do so, long after other motion stops, winding up somewhere without footing, in the far reaches of unsupported space.
The variation ends. Ressler and his love untangle their parts, the silence growing as oppressive as their finally fleshed-out understanding of just how many permutations of the four basic steps — G, A, T, C, is it? — life is condemned to examine, organize, experiment with over time. They feel the delicious, sickening thrill of evolution — lost, not just in its cold, mechanistic causelessness, but in the operation's oppressive size, its ability to go on innovating stray variations pointlessly forever.
I hear that forsaken minor tonight, canonically, at arm's length of three decades. I hear the awful, magnificently patient structure of the Darwinian revolution, more shattering than the sum of its molecular evidence. The reduction of the once animist world has thrown the human spirit into tailspin anxiety, deprived it of soul, except for the soul's distress. Convinced of the facts, I still cannot accommodate, make room in my heart for indifferent statistics. Even accepting, I am as mythless, as bitterly stripped as those who deny the evidence.
Dozing in and out of sleep to talk radio, I hear a recent poll claiming that a bare 9 percent of Americans accept evolution. Yet this debate — amazingly still raging — about the origin of wealth beyond conception is irrelevant. It doesn't matter anymore whether a fraction of the race splits off, chooses to return to a child's Eden. It doesn't matter if 91 percent of my countrymen continue to insist that species were created by father, so long as the entire planet instantly unites in acknowledging that they are, right now, being destroyed chaotically by child. Conservatively: several thousand species extinct a year. Instant, universal acknowledgment is impossible. In the hundred acres of rain forest destroyed each minute I write this, the earth loses species not yet even described in the catalog.
The arbitrarily of our origin cuts us adrift, slack as a severed marionette. In this pivotal moment of development's first dissonance, we are too stunned to see that we are driving the life crystal back into inertness, erasing the rare hypotheticals it took excruciating convolution of chance eons to propose. The situation is hopeless, huge, advanced beyond addressing. Why do I even bother to put this down? No reason. The same reason the gene in me keeps up its random postulate.
"The universe was not pregnant with life," my friend Monod writes, "nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game." The entire, endlessly expandable text, "the replicative structure of DNA: that registry of chance, that tone-deaf conservatory where the noise is preserved along with the music," is a fluke lottery we are losing, rubbing out by the minute. Awful, chromatic awareness fills me with a curatorial resolve. "Think of it," another friend once said. "The proper response ought not to be distress at all. We should feel dumb amazement. Incredulous, gasping gratitude that we've landed the chance at all, the outside chance to be able to comprehend, to save any fraction of it."
D. Heredity
In the last, delicious twist, the width of the restless species catalog depends on the ability of traits to persist in stillness. Evolution is the exception, stability the rule. Variation depends on a larger invariability to begin its trip from home. Procreation is not creative per se. Sex is easily accomplished by anyone with a high school equivalence certificate. I did it myself once, with help. The resulting product, except in exceptional cases, is a rearrangement of existing qualities. Innovation lies beyond even the most conscientious parent.
My mother bore three children, low for the baby boom. She arranged to interleave them by sex, feeling a good mix to be better for development. My father, bravely self-educated, lectured her endlessly about the X and Y chromosomes, how sex determination sat in the male's gamete; she had no say in the matter. She replied, "Yes, dear," and went about sleeping on her left side to make a girl and her right for a boy. The idea that the left ovary produced girls and the right boys had been passed down in her family for generations. No controls, no sample mean. The children were all the empirical evidence she needed. My father calculated the probability of her black magic: one out of eight, impressive but not conclusive. My mother offered to make it one out of sixteen anytime my father was man enough to try.
Now they're both dead. The constituent commands that assembled them — voice, intelligence, even those aggregates of obstinacy and superstition — are cut loose, alleles still intact in daughters, ready for another experiment, another change-partners. What exactly is lost, destroyed, with an individual's death? Just a permutation put to rest. A combination, devastating, never to be reassembled. Its elements remain: eyes, voice, mother, father.