Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This book forms the foundation for modern biology. What is so interesting about the book is that Darwin recognised that despite all of his work describing steady animal evolution, the first animals themselves seem to have appeared very suddenly in the fossil record, with an initial degree of complexity that is very surprising. You have four billion years of our history without the slightest inkling of an animal and then suddenly nearly all the animal body plans that exist today appear and then gradually evolved.
You say that reading The Sheltering Desert prompted you to read your next choice, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.
Yes. For me (and many others) this book forms the foundation for modern biology. It is all about humans’ concept of themselves. And, considering how long ago it was written, it is surprisingly readable.
Specifically, what Darwin has in mind is a biological analogue of uniformitarianism, which is a theory developed through a combination of James Hutton, John Playfair and Charles Lyell. Charles Lyell was really the one who popularised the idea, and did it in book form. But Hutton, who was a gentleman farmer, made a great observation – he saw that each year part of his farm would erode away. The dirt would be carried by rivers and rain water to the sea. We call it run-off today. Hutton realised that if he went down to the beach he would see sediments that had accumulated as layers and he could measure their thickness.
And then he had this eureka moment and he realised that when you go to a mountain by the sea there are all these layered rocks that are probably analogous to the layers of sediment he saw forming today. He also realised that the layers probably accumulated at the same rate in the past that they do now, so that when you count these thousands of layers of rock you would realise that Earth is very very old. This idea, that the same processes occurring slowly and steadily today also have been active throughout Earth history, slowly but steadily shaping the landscape, is known as uniformitarianism.
And Darwin used the same principles to describe evolution. In Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, he observed speciation occurring today – birds isolated on different islands adapting to their environment and developing new characteristics. So he deduced that slow and steady (uniformitarian) development throughout Earth history (ie, evolution) could explain the myriad animal and plant forms preserved in the fossil record.
A school of thought developed in reaction to uniformitarianism called catastrophism, where people realised that there are occasionally very large events such as a meteorite hitting Earth. In the case of evolution, punctuated equilibrium describes rapid evolutionary development, sometimes in response to sudden environmental change. To me this uniformitarian-catastrophist debate was fascinating, and I sought to observe evidence for both in the geological record. But in my first read of Darwin, one quote in particular stunned me, and continues to inspire much of my work today:
I cannot doubt that all the Silurian trilobites have descended from some one crustacean, which must have lived long before the Silurian age... Consequently, if my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian strata was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably longer than, the whole interval from Silurian to the present day... The case must at present remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.
What is so interesting about this quotation is that he recognised that despite all of his work defining and documenting gradual animal evolution, the first animals themselves seem to have appeared very suddenly and with a remarkable degree of initial complexity. You have four billion years of our history without the slightest inkling of an animal and then suddenly nearly all the animal body plans that exist today appear, and gradually evolve. So Darwin asked why did they suddenly appear? What is missing? Is the fossil record incomplete, or is there something very fundamental about evolution that we do not understand?
How does this help you with what you do?
Well his work really inspired me to study the Cambrian era (which he referred to as Silurian). I can’t help constantly wondering what kind of impact of climate change would have had on animal development and, vice versa, what kind of impact on the environment did early animals have – just like today, with humans having a major impact on the environment.
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Adam Maloof is assistant professor of geology at Princeton University. He spent his childhood summers in Newfoundland and Maine and his interests centre on the relationship between ancient life, climate and geography. He says the most valuable piece of information missing in studies of the modern climate system is a deep understanding of Earth’s past. No one would ever study modern political science without a basic understanding of human history and civilisation, and no one would ever study a modern animal without a basic understanding of evolution. It is the same with the climate and Earth history, the only problem is that you have to study nature and not books to understand Earth history.
