The Evolutionary World: How Adaptation Explains Everything from Seashells to Civilization

487 Pages·2010·1.39 MB·English

by  Geerat J. Vermeij

THE
EVOLUTIONARY
WORLD
How Adaptation Explains Everything from Seashells to Civilization

GEERAT J. VERMEIJ

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS ST. MARTIN'S PRESS SS NEW YORK

To Alfred G. Fischer and
Egbert G. Leigh Jr., two great mentors
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments

CHAPTER ONE: The Evolutionary Way of Knowing
CHAPTER TWO: Deciphering Nature's Codebook
CHAPTER THREE: On Imperfection
CHAPTER FOUR: Taming Unpredictability
CHAPTER FIVE: The Evolution of Order
CHAPTER SIX: The Complexity of Life and the Origin of Meaning
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Secrets of Grass: Interdependence and Its Discontents
CHAPTER EIGHT: Nature's Housing Market, or Why Nothing Happens in
Isolation
CHAPTER NINE: Dispatches from a Warmer World
CHAPTER TEN: The Search for Sources and Sinks
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Invaders, Incumbents, and a Changing of the Guard
CHAPTER TWELVE: The Arrow of Time and the Struggle for Life
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: History and the Human Future

Suggested Further Reading
Notes
PREFACE

This book is a personal, and in many ways an unconventional,
look at evolution, an idea so powerful, so beautiful, and so
far-reaching in its implications for human existence, that every
educated person can be enriched and enlightened by it.
Evolution—descent with modification—is a concept that organizes,
explains, and predicts a multitude of unconnected facts and
phenomena of life in nature past and present. It provides a
coherent framework for understanding where we came from,
where we are going, and how we and the rest of living nature
create bewildering complexity, a world of meaning, and
surpassing beauty. Quite simply, evolution has outgrown its
original home in biology and geology. It is the foundation of a
worldview in which environments, genes, organic architecture,
physiology, chance, the economic struggle for life, and historical
narrative come together to illuminate how we live in the world.
Yet evolution is often misunderstood, misconstrued, despised,
and even denied by hundreds of millions of people. Skeptics
harbor legitimate questions and reservations as well as ill-founded
grievances. Some find random mutation and selection insufficient
to account for adaptation. Others underestimate, or seem
unaware of, the power of living and inanimate parts of nature
acting together to create new structures with novel properties, and
therefore wonder whether evolution can explain complexity,
especially the origin of the mental and moral traits that seem to set
humans apart from other forms of life. Many reject a world in
which order, meaning, and beauty arise unintentionally through
the action of simple, observable processes operating over eons of
time. For them, evolution taking place without the initiation or
intervention of a supernatural being robs life of all purpose and
meaning and rips all the moral and ethical fabric from human
society. To these skeptics, science in general, and evolutionary
science in particular, is cold, clinically sterile, impersonal, and
emotionally impenetrable.
The challenge for scientists like me, and one of the goals of
this book, is not only to demystify evolution, but also to show how
understanding its mechanisms and consequences yields an
emotionally satisfying, aesthetically pleasing, and deeply
meaningful worldview in which the human condition is bathed in a
new light. In his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, the American
philosopher Daniel Dennett characterized evolution as "universal
acid" to emphasize the power of evolutionary thinking to penetrate
every nook of human knowledge. But this is a grim image, a
metaphor that calls to mind the satanic power feared by doubters
and deniers. Evolution is not some corrosive agent, but a
universal elixir that enriches those willing to taste it.
I want readers of this book to come away with a firmer grasp
of the grandeur of evolution—its facts, mechanisms, puzzles,
directions, and implications— but above all, I want them to
glimpse the love of the living world that an exploration of
evolutionary concepts can elicit.
There may not be a gene for the appreciation of nature, but
my family's enjoyment and knowledge of things in the wild were
certainly infectious. Growing up in the Netherlands, I was drawn to
the meadows and alder thickets of the low-lying countryside
around Gouda, to the sound of the wind through the poplars along
the dike, and to the prospect of an approaching thunderstorm. I
spent many happy hours sorting the shells I gathered on the wide
sandy beach at Scheveningen. On those all-too-rare weekends
when I was allowed to come home from boarding school, there
would often be a new book about nature, laboriously hand
transcribed into Braille by my mother, waiting for me.
After immigrating to the United States in 1955, I began to
collect seashells in earnest. At first, shells appealed to me chiefly
as exquisite hand-sized pieces of sculpture, embodying the
perfection and harmony I expected to find in the nonhuman world
of nature; but as curiosity grew into passion, I began to realize that
some places, notably the warm seas of the tropics, produced
wonders of such beauty and intricacy that I could scarcely imagine
how living clams and snails could fashion them, especially given
the much less ornate shells familiar to me from the North Sea. As I
contemplated my shells and the other objects I was collecting—
feathers, seeds, dried plants, minerals, and even samples of
wood—the ideas about evolution that I encountered in books
about Charles Darwin and other great naturalists of the past
seeped almost unnoticed into a receptive mind that was hungry
for big ideas.
When I arrived at Princeton as a freshman in 1965, brilliant
and generous professors introduced me to evolution as science.
Through classroom lectures, after-class discussions, and above
all field trips—to New Jersey's shore and pine barrens, New
Hampshire's Mount Washington, the Paleozoic rocks of
Pennsylvania and New York, and the forests and mountains of
Costa Rica—they impressed upon me the reality that living things
are engaged in what Darwin called the struggle for life, which is
the centerpiece of his theory of evolution by natural selection.
Shells were no longer mere variations on a theme of spiral
architecture; they told stories of lives led in places near and far
and at times often remote from our own. Their shapes reflected
evolutionary heritage as well as the challenges and opportunities
to which shell builders were adapted. By piecing their stories
together, it would be possible to reconstruct a history of evolving
life and its ever-changing surroundings. I found this to be a
thrilling prospect: I could combine a passion for nature, including
my particular infatuation for all things molluscan, with a search for
big explanatory ideas in science.
I was hardly the first to follow the path from a childhood love
of nature to the more disciplined endeavor of evolutionary science.
Many of the great evolutionists, from Charles Darwin to Harvard
biologist and ant specialist Edward O. Wilson, built their illustrious
discoveries on a foundation of observing and collecting the
productions of nature. But for them, observation largely meant