Gold Bug Variations

XV

The Natural Kingdom (II)

Q: How big is the biosphere? How high? How wide?

R.G., 5/12/81

Q: What is Life?

E. Schrödinger, 1944, J.B.S. Haldane, 1947

Q: Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

Matthew (?), ca. 80 (?)

A. Classification

Books may be a substantial world, but the world of substance, the blue, species-mad world at year's end outstrips every card catalog I can make for it. If I'm to locate Ressler's code, I must step back and see what the nucleotides are after at beast level. But every system for listing life that I come across is a map at least as unwieldy as the place itself.

In the first nomenclature, what Adam called a creature was what it was—an exact lookup table for the living library. But that perfect equivalence between name and thing was scattered in ten thousand languages, punishment for an overly ambitious engineering project. Schemes to recapture the Ur-order go as far back as I can track. Theophrastus classified plants by human use, not an auspicious second start to naming, but a popular one in the centuries following him. Color, shape, feature, habitat, behavior: successive methods cast makeshift classification nets over a school that will not stay still long enough to be drafted.

I'd thought the gross macrodivision, at least, was secure, until I read of unicellulars neither animal nor plant. A nineteenth-century patch job, Protista is a category so diverse it hardly helps. I watch a fourth kingdom secede: Monera, cells without nuclei. But subdividing still doesn't suffice; later treaties draw up five or six domains. And all this splintering takes place while I'm still at the top of the classifying pyramid.

Descending into phylum, class, and order, I'm swamped in ever more controversial flowcharts. Strata shade off into suborders and superfamilies, overrunning the borders. Seed-bearing plants alone number 200,000 species. At the third rung, a single class, Insecta, exceeds three-quarters of a million species, with thousands more added every year. Tracking these figures for no one's but my ears, I realize that I'd stopped asking, for years now, that first question: how many ways are there of being alive? What is this place? How can I say it?

Bat to banyan, bavarian gentian to baleen whale: I was expelled from childhood the day that living strategies began embarrassing me with their ludicrous profusion. Too immodest, teeming: I could memorize a hundred species a day and die not yet scratching the collection's surface. Species laugh off the most rigorous hierarchy. My Baedekers to the biosphere, government offices packed to exploding with print, strain under the weight of this wild violation of the paperwork reduction act.

A year too late, a life since I last bothered to ask the only thing worth asking, I feel strong enough to take on natural history again. Girlish-strong, discovering that the catalog can never be complete. Made strong by desperation at what's come over the list. However impaired my vocabulary, however late my start, I must have a quick look while there's time. Something's happened, yesterday, this morning, something threatening the whole unclassifiable project, changing the rules of the runaway gamble forever. Something all my reading leads to.

Here, in the isolation of my books — clunky classroom translations of the original — I learn the first principle of natural selection. Living things perpetuate only through glut. How many ways are there of being alive? My answer lies in a block of code programmed to generate more copies of itself than are lost to execution. Speciation, fracturing into every subniche and supercranny, depends on surplus of offspring in every breeding creature on earth, the prodigal gene.

If the volumes are beyond listing, I try at least to locate life's bookends. How large is the envelope? Living cells have been snagged miles high in the stratosphere. Dives into the deepest sea trench, under several atmospheres, turn up diaphanous fictions that explode before they can be brought to the surface. Bacteria thrive in ice currents and boiling ripples. I look for inhospitable places where living things haven't penetrated. Even in the Sahara's desiccating winds, 4 percent humidity, and 33 °C daily temperature swings, scrub dots the dunes, roots descend fifty feet into sand, grains swarm with microorganisms.

North of permanent freeze, caribou run in herds, rabbit and tundra fox find growth enough to gorge on. Extreme south swells with seals, krill, birds. Inland Antarctica, the least habitable place on earth, has its wingless insects, lichen, mold, even two flowering plants that wait the narrow window of weeks when they can colonize this waste. Living membrane can withstand the absence of energy: nematodes have been kept for days close to absolute zero and thawed out happily.

Newts requisition caves, go pink, lose their eyes. Lungfish solve the formidable flux of tidal flats. Seeds carried in the intestines of migratory birds convert virgin volcanic island. Life lives even inside other forms of itself. Large mammals are walking bestiaries of fungi, mites, fleas, bacterial colonies. A single square inch of my skin hosts ten thousand cells of one bacterium alone. Life survives even my killer city. Dozens of houseguests rustle my cupboards, spread across the shower curtain, bless my bed, raid a refrigerator designed to deny entry. Marsupials knock over my trash cans at night. Peregrine falcons nest under the Verrazano-Narrows.

Some variant of the self-rewriting program succeeds everywhere. Imperialism lies at the heart of my classification problem: life is as particular as each locale it has a foothold in. Any nomenclature I consider founders on the cartographer's one-to-one-scale solution to "How many places are there?" The program ports itself to all four corners, stopping to seed every intermediary, driven by the universal firmware kernel buried inside it. Nothing exceeds like success. Excess of issue. Surplus of offspring. More applicants than vacancies. Overproduction — duplicate, superfluous: waves of generations testing themselves against the landlord. The milt of trout turns whole streams milky. Shrimp are hauled from the ocean in solid blocks. One male ejaculate — on the swings in a dark abandoned playground — releases 300 million half-lives.

I'm convinced of an infinitely moldable instruction set. Shape may be an artificial classification, but how many forms can duplication take? What range of phenotype? After long abstinence, I rediscover the organic paradox, the extremes of living design. Blossoming chaos: a rough estimate of chestnut proteins runs into the tens of thousands. But no algorithm, however long, begins to describe how this tree branches.

Radial, bilateral, transverse; symmetries that change over a life; radical asymmetries. Sea shells unfurl by Fibonacci. Horn, bark, petal: hydrocarbon chains arrange in every conceivable strut, winch, and pylon, ranging over the visible spectrum and beyond into ultraviolet and infrared. Horseshoe crab, butterfly, barnacle, and millipede all belong to the same phylum. Earthworms with seven hearts, ruminants with multiple stomachs, scallops with a line of eyes rimming their shell like party lanterns, animals with two brains, many brains, none. Trees whose limbs root, whose roots blossom, whose leaves.become needles, beakers, flesh traps, detachable emigrants. Animals that expel their organs to eat, that— split down the middle — become their own Siamese twins. Organisms that bud, divide, cross-pollinate. Sedentaries that sprout free swimmers that mate to make sedentaries. Things that breed once and die, that birth perpetually even as they sleep. Females that grow up to become males. Males that convert to females in hard times. Dwarf males that live in the bellies of their mates. Males that bear young. Hermaphrodites.

Extremes in size? I find a figure for my own class: weight difference between blue whale and pygmy shrew. My desk encyclopedia says that Balaenoptera musculus reaches 600,000 kilograms. Suncus etruscus, on the other end, must eat constantly to keep up its gram and a half. The largest mammal is 400 million times heavier than its smallest cousin. And there are creatures 400 million times smaller than the pygmy shrew, smaller than the wavelength of visible light, detectable only in the scatter of electrons. Several thousand could fit inside one human blood cell. Giant sequoias, excluding the immense roots, are three and a half times the longest whale. The Great Barrier Reef is longer than Europe: a composite mass of two hundred species of polyp a fraction of an inch long, a living superspecies spreading in sovereign continent visible from outer space.

Genomes range from a few thousand base pairs for the simplest self-replicating element to a few billion for humans. Genotype spread, less extreme than phenotype ratios, is more dramatic. The length of the program does not express the ripple effect of increasing complexity. The entire genome of a bacteriophage — so simple it only just slips into the most liberal definition of life— could be printed in a book the size of a grocery-store romance. Yesterday, I thought it would be only a matter of time before we mapped out the entire program of such a creature. Today, I discover the feat is already years old: Sanger etal., 1977: the complete 5,375-nucleotide text for the X174 virus deciphered. The simplest-known, perhaps the simplest-possible living program, but a universe beyond the most complex inanimate matter. Nine proteins long, the viral bible is written with an ingenuity beyond the most sophisticated human hackers. The sequence coding for one protein hides the sequence for another, the way the phrase "a lisp in a chromosome" embeds the name of a leafy green.

How much more complicated can the card deck get? My molecular research only begins to hint. Bacteria trap energy, metabolize and manufacture compounds, sense their environment, go dormant indefinitely, synthesize their own enzymes, Xerox themselves. Their leap beyond viruses is larger than viruses' from inanimate compounds. Larger than the leap from my amateur's notes to Ressler's knowledge.

I read how cells develop distinct nuclei and organelles, acquire the trick of mashing other cells and recycling their parts. I struggle with an unthinkable threshold: the formation of limited partnerships, shared responsibilities. You float, you sting, you prop, you flex, you digest: we feed. Geometric increases in complexity: anagenesis exists. Something rises, flies in the face of entropy. Not better or wider or finer fits; bacteria can already live locked in ice, hot springs, even stratosphere. The code simply learns to do more with the place.

The arrangement of cells into bureaucractic corporations takes me two tiers above X174, itself nine proteins beyond my comprehension. I move into a mystery uninterpretable even in outline. Form — the ravelins of a starfish, the rococo redundancy of crabs— reveals itself as mere vessel for behavior, infinitely more varied. Evade this stimulus. Fly in this formation. Migrate at this moment. Build this burrow. Train your young.

The message, which at the low end of taxonomy began as a simple impulse toward excess, learns to communicate, first to constituent parts, then to coordinated cells within an organism. Up a second slope — classes, orders, families of behavior — the text learns to pass itself between organisms. One more minor magnification lights upon language — a newcomer in the garden dashing off transcripts, elaborate travelogues to no one.

Maybe I'm not congenitally adrift after all. I watch a videotape of the famous gorilla Koko reading a children's book, signing learned hand-words into the empty air. Signing the way I scribble here, for an audience long gone. These notes, my evolving, catch-all phylum, live and die, propagate their own excess. I arrange them, perpetually revising, inventing writing as I go, assembling a classification system large enough to name what Ressler already knew.

How high is the biosphere? How wide? I list degrees and kilometers. I'd do better to steal from Wallace Stevens; classification, after all, is just a record of neighboring plagiarisms. "Life consists of propositions about life." Shape and behavior are guesses at the place where they've been set down. Eons-long accumulation, the organism itself is only a theory of what it might still be. My hyperactive classroom screams out its answers, constantly recanting, amending, reaffirming, anything but silent and archived, fired by the same single fact that keeps me revising. However many un-classifiable ways there are of being alive, there are infinitely more ways of being dead.

B. Ecology

Death too, at the heart of variety. Every message I turn up whispers it in code. There's only so much to go around. The splintering catalog rushes after the same circuit of available energy. Not all miracles make it. Each excess program copy is shaped by limit. Checked by scarcity, populations are pruned in constant edit. And pruning makes the garden proliferate. Death is the mother of experiment.

The earth is a differential engine — gradients of heat, cold, dry, wet, fat, lean. Some terrains snicker at all hope for a meal; others rain continuous free lunch. Even this asymmetry shifts. Currents churn up cold; mountains buckle, wear down in an era or two. Seas recede; poles reverse. The pool is played on a table so warped that players can either shoot or wait for a change in the rules.

The game, I figure out, is to figure out the game. My runaway catalog's every proposition is about the prepositional calculus. Two strange succulents, one African, the other Arizonan, converge by distant routes. Each is a lab transcript, a probe of local conditions. Living diversity maps the diversity of available space. The race for the curve of best fit fractures at every rapid into an alluvial fan.

I pose the naif's Q: Which of these million unclassifiable experiments is the most successful? A first, satellite glance gives the hat tip to my own chromosome set. Five billion, from Sahara nomads to Antarctic scientists. Flexible, omnivorous environment shaper, top of the food chain. But almost upon arrival, it crests in oversuccess, chokes on its own effluent.

My second candidate is grass. As widespread as man, greater in biomass. And it rarely annihilates its own niche. A good enough solution to have diversified into five hundred genera, five thousand species: corn, wheat, rice, bamboo, sorghum, reed, oats, timothy, fescue, Kentucky blue. It encourages others to cultivate it, the sweet, sugarcane smell of global success. But even grass is colossally one-upped by Insecta. I trace a range greater than grass and man combined. Undivertable clouds, a single species can outnumber all humans a hundredfold. And Insecta contains as many different species as there are humans in Lower Manhattan.

Then I discover bacteria. They coat every cubic meter of the planet. A gram of soil can contain 100 million. Every cycle required for life involves them integrally. They have remained essentially unchanged since emergence, three billion or more years ago. They make their way inside every large organism. The successes of the pyramid's cap depend inextricably on success at the base. Their success is the success of the animate code, the living engine's linchpin. Supremacy of the sheet of cells spread passively over earth's surface is measured in tens of thousands of duplicating tons per second.

"Success" mutated from Ur-roots sub and cedere, to follow after. Its hold on my English mind is a loaded model where B competes with, bests, and replaces A. The word warps my research. Scarcity undeniably demands competition, but living success does not mean beating out all comers. Cooperation of ever tighter skeins ties the web together, interanimates the nets of success. Emerson came remarkably close for an American: "All are needed by each one; /Nothing is fair or good alone." That one I learned as a schoolgirl. Successful hunters are not too good at killing, and successful prey must be pared and pruned.

The word I need is not "to follow after." I need another etymology: parasitism, helotism, commensalism, mutualism, dulosis, symbiosis. Local labels for the ways one solution requires another, from the bribes of fruit trees to the bacteria in my gut. Joint solutions everywhere, from ants and their domestic aphid farms to lichen, a single plant formed of two organisms that feed and water each other, breed and reproduce together.

One remarkable night, snowed solidly into a New Hampshire cottage, Dr. Ressler laid it out. "Mimicry is also an interlock. A snapping turtle's tongue depends on the shape of a fly. The beetle that borrows the look of a thorn lives off the rose's solution. Half a dozen harmless snakes ape the bands of a coral without paying to produce the poison. Jammed frequencies of passed semaphores, real, faked, intercepted, abused: everybody trafficking on the river dabbles in this pidgin." His speech was soft because the night was late, the kerosene flame revealed the blanketed world outside, and we knew we were going nowhere the next day.

"Every animal cell is itself a contract. A primitive cell may have co-opted a bacterium, enslaved it as the first mitochondrion, a genetically independent cell enclave. Believe me, we're all in this together. No cheating this economy. The books must balance. No," he said, breathing, his face obscured by the lamp, on the far side of the room where Frank and I lay touching. "The world is a single, self-buffering, interdependent organism. Or has been until this moment. Individual persistence is not the issue. Neither is species stability. If permanence were the criterion, nothing in the animate world could come close to the runaway success of rocks."

I would trade what's left of my savings to hear his monologue again, to jot down even a draft of a rough transcript of what he said. But he and his words have gone the way of probabilities, back into the loop. Death has returned him to school. I mimic him now, live off his solution.

"Why can't we speak that pidgin more fluidly than we do? Speak it the way everything else lives it? The definition of life we've lived with for too long is flawed. We presuppose the ability to tell haphazard from designed. The whole community is about to go under, pulled in by our error. Why do we want to revoke the contract, scatter it like a nuisance cobweb, simplify it with asphalt? Because we still believe, despite all the evidence, that the place was made. And what's made, by definition, can be improved. But suppose the whole, tentative, respiring, symbiotic message is no more improvable than chance. The superorganism takes its local shape — each part at the mercy of all others — because that is the configuration that chance conditions permit. Design might benefit from human ingenuity. Conditional fit cannot.

"Oh, it's worse than you think. Worse for us. Worse for you two." He looked at us as if at two crosses in a French cemetery dated a day after V-E. "Your generation, everyone from now on, faces the most serious shake-up in history. Because my generation," oblique mention of his departure from science, "has already killed life for you. I mean the old definition, the vitalist idea. We did something twenty years ago that people haven't gathered yet. It's all mechanism now. Self-creation. The game has changed. Only we haven't responded."

The night was silver and deepest blue. Outside, in the drifted conifers, owls sat dusted in branches, their eyes night-wise to the least run of rodents beneath them. Foxes scoured the surrounding hills. Tufts of grass poked above the snow like dangerous shoals, while rock outcrops were slowly digested by a two-celled limited partnership. All the while, underground, below the frost line, life waited its rechance. That night Dr. Ressler telegraphed me a part of the genetic code I just now unfold. All of this soft, conjoined precision — mutable, always slightly mistaken — was self-assembling, self-adjusting, self-nurturing information.

I thought I had the gist, on that oil-lamp evening, snowbound. I thought he was faulting science for letting the gene out of the bottle, disenchanting the natural kingdom, turning the impenetrable magnificence of the ecosystem into spent anagram. Two years later, alone, with time to think, I see he was saying the opposite. We've dismantled the biosphere out of fear. We suffer not from too much science but from terrified rejection of observation. Pattern can produce purpose, but it does so without final causes. Destination, design, is a lie stripped off twenty years ago. The only ethic left is random play, trial and error. We go on in shock, not yet disabused of success, not yet ready to save ourselves by looking.

Hopeless, he hoped that we might reconvene on higher ground, in an ecology of knowledge. Learning to hear the underwriting îune might at last affirm our own derivation from the theme. Adenine, thymine, a hundred thousand commensal genes, owls, foxes, the silver and blue forest of pines. His hope was simply that learning the layout of the place, the links — identifying how matter made its escape from matter and passed irretrievably through this spreading gene — might rejoin us to the superorganism at the source. Life, ordered irregularity, aperiodic crystal, signal in a field of noise, required that wonder and reverence, both coded for, beat out success if anything is to survive.

He hinted at a new discourse, a new definition. But tonight it feels like a recovery. The only, truly unequivocal success is the aperiodic crystal itself. Accustomed from long training to viewing life from the molecular level, my friend based his hope on our acquiring an awareness of the explosive potential of the genome, its implausible beauty. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear would know that the string is big, an ample world for expression. And anyone who once adds up the living number must act ecologically, commensally forever.

I read a throwaway bit that, like the last tumbler waiting to turn over, brings home the idea for good. Huge stretches of code called introns — in fox, owl, grasses, lichen, cabin captives — have no identifiable function. They've been carried along inside, a free rider, for a billion years. I suddenly see DNA as an ingenious parasite, a creature that has struck up symbiosis with every scaffolding it has ever invented; organisms are only the necessary evil, the way DNA has hit upon to make more DNA. To get out and see the world. Which is the most successful strain of life? A defective question, one I now relegate to the bin of exhausted fits. Life is the sole strain, perpetually becoming, a single, diversified proposition that succeeds altogether or not at all.

I check the etymology for his "pidgin." Thought to be an English derangement of the Chinese pronunciation of the English word "business." But if this business is a business at all, it must be a lending library — huge, conglomerate, multinational, underfunded, overinvested. Ecology consists of identifying, checking out, poring over, marking up, and returning all existing solutions. Passing them around. Running down another reference, another key, another published breakthrough. No competition, no success, no survival of the fittest. The word I am looking for, the language of life, is circulation.

C. Evolution

The envelope is as wide as the space granted by the surplus of generations, sculpted by scarcity. If anything is behind the accumulation of variations, it's reprimand. Constraint and condemning somehow rebound into bounty. Weeding out increases complexity, like gravity driving a river uphill. I can't see it; how can the shake-out sieve of death create more, when its most generous judgment is "Not quite"?

My enlightenment arrives in stages, unfolding historically, inaccurately, like the thing it researches. The best classification for gene anthologies must be laid out on the axis of time. Darwin induced the whole before he had adequate foundation. Evolutionary thought evolved only fitfully, by pangenesis. The earliest recorded text I can find already suspects the mutability of living shape. Anaximander, in translation, reads like the Origin, 2,400 years ahead of time. Aristotle blunders up against the notion, then walks bravely away. Linnaeus — worlds later — knew; he could have proclaimed it, incomplete, in rough outline. But he was unwilling to crawl out onto that geneological limb until humanity was ready.

Two and a half millennia after the idea's appearance, I'm still not ready. Evolution is the most explosive deflation of all time— the capstone of history's steady objectification of nature. I spend a day of quiet privacy spelling out how this unassuming model worked the most radical intellectual overhaul ever, how this near-tautology supplies the crucial cog that biology has aspired toward since its appearance. I trace every step in the synthesis, recheck, give the go-ahead to each subassembly. Still the complete machine lies one step outside credibility. I recapitulate evolution's four prerequisites in embryo:

1. Excess of issue. Surplus offspring. Seedlings rooting in the nook of an I-beam on the fiftieth floor of a two-year-old plate-glass skyscraper; maggots overrunning a scrap of meat. Viruses breeding under the electron microscope at Cold Spring Harbor, making Leo Szilard rush outside and pace the porch of his cabin to calm himself.

Precisely the state this evening finds me in.

2. Scarcity. Common currency from day one: no amount of goods are ever enough to go around. Not all surplus makes it; none makes good in every case. Death hones away, a missed heartbeat from home.

These first two innocuous tenets are reciprocal. Yet hiding in their sum is the larger part of Darwin's bugaboo. Too much divided into too little, and something's got to change. Some die faster than others, a conclusion as inescapable as its result.

3. Variation. Differential dying creates divergence. This is my sticking point tonight. I make the catch only slowly: variation is two-tiered. First: the ten thousand wrigglers in a pound of anchovy spawn are all different. Trivially individual. Even dyed-in-wool creationists admit that poodles differ from Great Danes, let alone wolves. Man too (whatever the nausea of knowing) is not an entity, but five billion disparate creatures with different eyes, hands, and minds. I fell in love with one whose hair, height, voice, fear, and protective narcissism made him unique. I loved one man distinct from all others, or at most, two. Already halfway to difference's second tier: the difference between Franklin and that anchovy spawn. A difference of some difference — where all the tempest still comes from.

4. Inheritance. Divergence depends on a means of conserving difference. Certain individuals in a varying population solve scarcity better than others. If their advantage is handed down disproportionately, that population changes. Mendel, a great admirer of Darwin's book, inexplicably never wrote the letter that would have conferred his results to his contemporary. His work, had it been communicated, might have shown far sooner that evolution harbored more than that tautology "Survivors survive."

Even had a letter been sent, the two great innovations in nineteenth century natural science still would have faced that paradox: more comes from less. Paring away compounds. Something new derives from the not-quite, under no more enlightened guidance than annihilation. The rub starts in that antithesis, conserved difference: the ability accurately to perpetuate lapses. To preserve infidelity faithfully, it has taken Dr, Ressler's death and Todd's variation on that theme for me to understand that the word "variation" itself, like "nihilism" and "ineffable," is among the best of Dr. Ressler's perpetually sought-after one-word contradictions in terms.

The resolution of the paradox that Mendel's unsent letter would have both clarified and compounded did not come until the demonstration that genes were nucleotide sequences. A rogue protein, synthesized by a slight variation in the master base string, was inheritable. And every variation across the spectrum — fish, fowl, lichen, redwood, redhead — is born in divergent protein. Characteristics stay intact from one generation to the next, but only within a margin of error. A few capriciously altered intervals produce a new tune, a song with crisp shocks of familiar difference hiding in its four notes.

Species' diverse qualities slip down the world's gradient unequally. The specific gravity of a place settles the trait-spread into new statistical parfaits. A forbidden secret: the Bible itself is versed in the linguistics of breeding. Only, scarcity prunes more efficiently than any artificial breeder. The gap between Chihuahua and Great Dane is negotiable; the same features are visible, just remixed along a sliding scale. A theist might concede microevolution and still not throw creation itself to the dogs. But variation has a wilder trick, tweaking the quantitative so far that it kicks out something qualitatively new — wolves and sheep from the same bolt of clothing.

In sexual reproduction, rearrangement of parental haplotypes produces a genotype different from either, although cut from the same constituent stuff. If all the carriers of a characteristic fail to reproduce, that trait is lost. But otherwise, it's a closed system, however unexplorably large. Alleles mix to create unimaginable variety, but the species material remains essentially unchanged. I can rearrange my furniture in countless ways, resulting in a surprise decorating scheme for every day I knew the man, but no new furniture ever enters my place.

Speciation, on the other hand, seems to contradict Mendel's perpetuated genes. But at molecular level, I trace it to a replicating system complex enough to suffer turbulence, to err. Something new can come about through recombination or mutation. I now have enough molecular biology to find the source of genetic novelty baldly assumed by Darwin: a G grabbing a T in its negative filament instead of its proper C, a sequence of nucleotides pinched Out or an intruder taken in and the whole program can change.

Terrifying, destructive anarchy, bumping blindly down dead ends and back alleys, when shaped by destruction, can shoot living things into undesignable places.

One changed nucleotide can profoundly alter the function of the protein it helps synthesize. The size of evolutionary steps, the exact scenario for speciation, is still debated. But all variants on the purposive molecule are hazards of evaluated chance. Without molecular mutation, there would be no amendment, no evolution. And yet, most bizarre to me of all, mutations are almost never beneficial. A message, carefully crafted over time, is altered at random. The text will almost certainly suffer, if it remains intelligible at all. The introduction of noise into a signal is much more likely to garble than improve. Failure is lots more probable than anything else going.

Typing too late at night, I begin to insert letters that distort my words diseasterously. Rereading, I piece some alterations back into partial sense. Only an infinitesimally few typos — the lucky comma that leaves a sentence more comprehensible — will produce clean, let alone enhanced final copy. Most swift kicks to my bum radio wreak havoc on its components. But once every few decades, I improve the signal. Mutations cause cancer, stillbirth, blindness, deafness, heart disease, mongolism — everything that can go wrong. Yet faulty copying is the only agency for change. Random tinkering, the source of all horrible mistakes, remains the "hopeful monster," the Goldschmidt variation.

We walked once in the drifted snow, the three of us, on a day written off, lost, abandoned to the world. Dr. Ressler, against the white background, speculated about the implausibility of those snow tracks, the creatures that made them. "Birds surely don't possess compositional sense, musical volition. They sing; that's all. A species' song is taught by parent to child. But every so many generations, something is lost in translation. A child muffs his riff, mislearns, wings it. If the mistake — highly unlikely — works a better attraction, this new melody will be taught to more chicks than flock average, and in time the twist becomes status quo. Insertions, deletions, transpositions: gaffs ratified or panned in performance. A species might, over considerable time, whistle its way from a G major scale into the Goldberg Base."

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.

Meiosis, necrosis: the arcs of the ancient cycle of recirculation I'm caught in for good. Both carry on, mesmerized, churning out tireless rearrangements on the first little nitrogen, methane, lightning spark. Carry on, despite long since filling the entire surface of the earth with velvet and scum, as if some fabulous combination were just around the next chromosomal bend, waiting to be revealed. But there is no revelation. Only endless surplus versus harm.

To the population, the gene, birth and death carry no last word. Only in the chest of the next of kin does that partnership make any inroads. Slow, conservative, migratory. Once, a colt, I spoke that language. I've forgotten it all, the years I spent hungry and astonished, nights by flashlight over the illustrated encyclopedia describing mysterious, interlocked systems — water cycle, nitrogen fixation, circulation of blood, food chain. Winter weekends, whole summers out in the woods, in empty lots, in our immense, dark backyard, examining the scat of rabbits, catching bizarre electrical arthropoda in jars, convinced, sensing firsthand the terrible expanse of the place.

I remembered it this morning, to ruinous expense, so long after first elaborating the thought. It suddenly was not enough to rehash natural selection. I had to go put my hands on the gene, on evolving population, invariant heredity. I knew it would cost, that my carefully guarded nest egg would suffer. I boarded the inbound, not knowing what part of the unclassífiable, branching catalog I was after, but knowing that the biome was midtown. I found myself on the stairs to the Met, but could not bring myself to go in. Not without the one I once arranged to meet there, should we ever be separated.

Instead, I walked back through the living park and on to 53rd, the Museum of Modern Art. Time to see how Brueghel had evolved, survived, passed down to my own generation. All morning I discovered again that every observer's notebook, every act of seeing even the harshest, most politically indicting, alienated, abstract, cynical acrylic, is a frightened, desperate, amazed recapitulation of the natural kingdom. More: an effort to mimic it. Always inexhaustibly to recombine, to classify.

I stood in front of Paul Klee's Twittering Machine, a created thing at once both mechanism and inexplicable bird. It had been so long since I'd looked at anything but genetics that the sleight of hand seemed crammed with associations. I thought of Emily Dickinson's secret reaction to Darwin, five years after the publication of the Origin. Split the Lark — and you'll find the Music. Loose the Flood — you shall find it patent. Now, do you doubt that your bird was true?

On the train back, I knew it would have to be poetry for me, as well. I scribbled my fllle de Klee on the back of a MOMA flyer:

star start itself seeds blueprint climb: egg alone and only gear for eatrock lichen or unlacing umbel veil, chance, the sole mode assay-able: tumult of twittering ovation is all word forward can enlist to move embryo to ember, or drive cold scale from first bird.

It smacks of effusion and will embarrass me by next week. It contributes less than nothing to my understanding of Ressler's aborted bid for love, discovery, the Swedish Sweepstakes. But as poetry, it doesn't have to be good. It only has to contain a testable guess about being alive, the incomprehensible ability.

Back in my apartment I remember two things I long ago lost words for. The paradoxical breakout of life from mere preservation to runaway self-threat depends on two subtle phenomena. First, information represented in a certain way emerges as instruction. As in the gene, all observation is a command to observe. Dr. Ressler once showed me how an ordinary drinking glass is a data structure informing liquid where to go. The information in the life molecule is a similar vessel, informing itself how to describe the condition it finds itself in.

Second, small initial changes ripple into large differences. The constricted initial alphabet of four letters produces a journey many million species long. The only astonishment great enough to replace that ectomized maker: all this proliferation results from one universal and apostolic genetic code. The fantastic diversity of outward form doesn't begin to anticipate the leaping, snaking, wild logic that develops in response to the far more complex internal, intracellular environment. Once DNA began to speak, not only the carrying medium but the message itself was susceptible to evolution. Even to approximate that polyphonic, perpetual baying, I'll have to go back down, square off against the living, purposive program incorporated in the enzyme.

Tonight in History—12/9/38: A coelacanth caught off Africa, a third of a billion years after it was supposed to have vanished from the earth. Not the first extinct animal to return from living fossil-hood, nor the last. Far stranger things are afoot. Quaggas rebuilt from the residual ghost in their zebra cousins. Frogs cloned. Talk of reviving mastodons from single frozen cells. I sit at my desk, overwhelmed but still among those throwing their insufficient efforts against the unlistable world.

I know nothing about the place. But the nothing I've ascertained has already changed everything. I learn that I live in an evening when all ethics has been shocked by the sudden realization of accident. I must ask not how many kinds of life there can be, nor even how there can be so many kinds of life. I must learn how, out of all the capricious kinds of cosmos there might have been, ours could have lucked, against all odds, into that one arrangement capable of supporting life, let alone life that grew to pose the hypothetical in the first place. How quantum physics allowed room for a rearrangement capable of learning the outside chance hidden in quantum physics. How this tone-deaf conservatory could produce the Goldbergs.

I review the record of care we've given a spark we once thought was lit for our express warming. I feel sick beyond debilitation to think what will come, how much more desperate the ethic of tending is, now that we know that the whole exploding catalog rests on inanimate, chance self-ignition. The three-billion-year project of the purposeful molecule has just now succeeded in confirming its own worst fear: this outside event need not have happened, and perhaps never should have. We've all but destroyed what once seemed carefully designed for our dominion. Left with a diminished, far more miraculous place — banyans, bivalves, blue whales, all from base pairs — what hope is there that heart can evolve, beat to it, keep it beating?