The Full Moon and Darwin

(A bit late, but here is an old posting from Connecticut, in early February of this year…)

There was a full moon a few nights ago, and the snow in our backyard late that night glowed in a way that was almost phosphorescent, and formed haunting shadows of trees on the smooth white surface.

The latest theories say that the stuff of the moon was once the outer crust of the early earth, but was blasted off by a massive collision with another planet the size of Mars. Less than a billion years later life began on earth, and from that time on has survived hundreds of other catastrophic collisions, the most recent big ones being a ten-mile wide asteroid around 250 million years ago, which blasted out a crater almost 300 miles wide and wiped out 90 percent of all life on earth, and then a much much smaller one about 60 million years ago which killed off most of the dinosaurs and other land-based creatures on earth…

…with the exception of a few little shrew-like mammals that later sprung back and evolved, so Darwin says, into dogs, cats, lemurs… and human beings. That of course was not the end of the story. For example, the people of the Clovis culture lived here in North America just 12 thousand years ago but were suddenly wiped out, along with woolly mammoths and other creatures, all at once. A strange layer of burned ground found in Clovis-related sites makes many researchers proposes that a huge cluster of comets hit the atmosphere and set the entire northern continent on fire, and everyone on it. And yet a few survived…

There really is no more debate about evolution among serious scientists. Evolution is not merely one of several competing alternative “theories”. Darwin’s essential hypothesis about the origin of new species is not only supported by its ability to explain observations, but (as the true test of a scientific theory) has also made predictions — predictions which alternative hypotheses would not have been able to make — and these predictions were later verified. This is an interesting fact that I only learned recently while Gigi and I were once again out at the Yale Peabody Museum. In the section on early man, there were some letters between Darwin and some paleoanthropologists, about some recent fossils of man-like ape creatures found in northern America. If the theory of evolution were true, they concluded, the migration patterns of humans would lead one to predict that they should find ape-like fossils much closer and more similar to humans near where all major migrations appear to have begun: in Africa.

Much later, these predictions were proved correct, as were many others, such as the thousands of long-dead “missing links”, that evolution predicted would be found between hundreds of similar species still alive today.

I guess the point of all this is that by comparison with 10 mile wide asteroid collisions, the little economic downturn we are facing in the current microsecond of geological time is very unlikely to have a lasting impact. We will learn, adapt (or be replaced). Darwin, who was born 200 years ago this year, was right. As the character Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldbloom) said in the movie Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.”