A Wonderful Life

William Lidden
Aug 28, 2017 · 4 min read
Various organisms uncovered by Charles Doolittle Walcott et al at the site of the Burgess Shale

The contingency of one’s own existence is, to me, an everlasting source of morbid contemplation. The fact that I am sitting here, typing this and experiencing the world, rather than someone else, is in many respects down to dumb luck. Those who believe in divine providence may attribute the fact of their being to the machinations of the Almighty. Far be it from me to claim such insight into the forces that are responsible for the creation of the laws of physics; to pretend to know the mind of God in a matter as trivial as whether or not one particular Homo sapiens is conceived over another seems at best solipsistic. It is also a fact that a study of history, both that of nature and that of humanity, reveals the thread upon which all of us hang, suspended above the maw of oblivion.

I take my title from a book by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, whose Wonderful Life recounts the discovery and re-discovery of the Burgess Shale, a fossil bed in the Canadian Rockies that contains within it artefacts more valuable than any produced by all the goldsmiths in history; the fossilised remains of a large quantity of organisms, petrified in rock some time shortly after the so-called ‘Cambrian Explosion’. Whilst the name evokes a spontaneous and rapid chemical reaction, and the period was certainly so on the time scale of the geological record, the Cambrian Explosion took place over some several million years. The epoch is so named because of the proliferation of large numbers of new evolutionary taxa; groups of organisms that seem to appear comparatively rapidly in the fossil record with little evidence remaining as to why. While more recent discoveries of stromatolite fossils and preserved micro-organisms have redressed the older problem of there having been no fossils of organisms prior to the Cambrian Explosion, the period is still somewhat of a mystery. Perhaps hard exoskeletons, the only easily preserved parts of the many arthropods roaming the seas at the time, evolved rapidly due to an evolutionary arms-race, meaning that fossils that the possibility of being preserved came into existence comparatively fast, with the soft-body preservation of the Burgess and other similar sites being the exception that proves the rule. Perhaps not. The more interesting philosophical point raised by Gould in Wonderful Life is that in those times, any single chordate (the taxonomic class of organism including vertebrates like us) would have been the ancestor of every vertebrate alive today, and every vertebrate that has lived for much of the time since. Had one little chordate worm swum into the mouth of a predatory arthropod rather than its brethren doing so; had it been unable to find a morsel of food; had it been unattractive to a potential mate, then the genetic stock of every single creature with a back bone since that time would have been altered. Perhaps fish, reptiles, birds, mammals, and much later Homo sapiens, would have come into existence as we know them. Again, perhaps not. Even if they had, the genetic material bequeathed to every human by our non-human ancestors would have been markedly different, having come down to us through an entirely different genetic lineage. No person who has ever lived on this planet would have been born. Instead, other names would fill the history books, other people would be printed on our legal tender, and history would likely have taken entirely different turns. The tape of evolution, if rewound, would in all likelihood have unspooled completely differently. All because of the chance life and death of tiny worms, swimming through the primeval seas, hundreds of millions of year ago.

Even without the destruction of one of humanity’s post-Cambrian ancestors, there is no reason to suppose that history should have taken the course that it did. If you live on any continent besides Africa, you owe your existence to small exploratory and colonising expeditions. But for the whim of a handful of ancestors to relocate, neither you nor I, nor anyone we have ever known would be here. There is also the chance nature of the encounters between both of our parents, both sets of their parents, both sets of their parents, and on and on back through all of our ancestors both human and, if you venture back far enough, non-human.

It is true that this life seems, much of the time, somewhat less than wonderful. At times such as those, it is sobering to contemplate these facts; that we get to experience anything at all -let alone the beautiful, intricate and marvellous universe in which we find ourselves — is reason enough to celebrate. To source another biologist; in the opening of his book Unweaving The Rainbow, Richard Dawkins remarks that most of the people that have the possibility to exist, due to the number of different configurations of the human genome, will never exist at all. True enough. Add on to that the fact that for a large portion of our history, those that did exist lived in ignorance and fear; starvation, early death and want — and complaining about life in the year 2017 seems almost gross, even accounting for the horrible suffering that still exists today. Those of us living in industrialised nations have access to luxuries beyond the imaginings of our ancestors of only a few centuries ago. We take these for granted at our peril.

To live whilst being cognisant of these facts is to realise how lucky one is to know the people that we know, and how important and contingent the connections we form are. It is also to realise in the face of death, both of our loved ones’ and of our own, how fortunate we are to have gotten our brief time in the Sun to begin with; how truly unlikely the existence of any one person is, and therefore how marvellous. A wonderful life, indeed.

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