Darwin's Believe it or not

Roughly a third of the way into the sixth chapter of On the Origin of Species, Darwin asserts the following: “I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale” (169). To the right of this passage I scribbled the following: “I think that I would pay to see such a movie.” Sheer sophomorism. One is surprised that I was able to refrain from adding a doodle of the proposed beast. And yet. And yet, as I was reviewing my marginalia and (as is my wont) erasing the snide and flip remarks, I found myself pausing over this particular comment. In some small way it seemed to crystallize my growing sense that there is something to be said on the subject of Darwin and the fantastic.

As was noted in Thursday’s class, Darwin is not a writer who stays along the shores of the known. No, he plays amidst the gaps of our knowledge, plumbs the depths of our ignorance, and, quite occasionally, splashes us with the hypothetical. Often these hypotheticals are quite grand. “[I]f the Malay Archipelago were converted into land, the tropical parts of the Indian Ocean would form a large and perfectly enclosed basin” (271), he supposes at one point, shifting endless mounds of dirt and water with the nib of his pen. Even more fascinating to me, however, are the hypothetical scenarios that stretch the bounds of the possible.

I am a particular fan of Darwin’s idea that “It would suffice to keep up the full number of a tree, which lived on average for a thousand years, if a single seed were produced once in a thousand years, supposing that the seed were never destroyed, and could be ensured to germinate in a fitting place” (68). Darwin introduces this hypothetical tree for a number of reasons. First of all, it is meant to reinforce, by means of exaggeration, his point that “the average number of any animal or plant depends only indirectly on the number of its eggs or seeds” (68), and depends far more directly upon the ability of those eggs or seeds to survive destruction. In this way the supposed tree also helps to reinforce just how competitive and violent nature must be—if a single seed could suffice to keep up the full number of a tree, then the fact that trees produce a huge number of seeds testifies to the difficulty of ensuring said seeds’ survival. I would also like to argue, however, that this imagined tree performs a less obvious function. Namely, it defamiliarizes the shorter-living, seed-spewing trees that are so common to us all. We take for granted that trees produce a great number of seeds, but as Darwin demonstrates, if nature was a little less competitive than it is, our world would play host to a very different type of tree.

If we were going to grant this “story” of the one-seeded tree a genre, we would no doubt place it in the category of fantasy or science fiction. (Two genres that often endeavor to defamiliarize the world, to employ the fantastic in an attempt to make the reader reflect upon the unbelievable nature of the everyday.) That said, what interests me here is not that Darwin would anticipate the techniques of science fiction or modern fantasy in some way. What interests me is how such fantastical images function within the context of this specific book.

To my mind, the idea of a tree that lives a thousand years and delivers only one seed in that time is less fantastical than many of the facts that Darwin offers in other parts of his book. It is at least as easy for me to believe in this mystical tree as it is for me to believe that the organs that once allowed Annelids to breathe now allow insects to fly. It is easier for me to believe in the tree than to believe that water really turned vast stone formations into sediment. How great an artist Darwin must be to make nature seem infinitely stranger than anything that he himself could invent!

And he is an artist. For when I set down his book the world I see seems richer and stranger in much the same way that it does when I set down a great novel. On the Origin of Species defamilarizes the world as a whole. When I set it down and look outside I see an ancient cliff where once I saw pebbles; I hear avian battle cries where once I heard the singing of innocents. His vision of the world is so new and compelling that, even now, a full 150 years after his book’s publication, it allows me to re-envision my surroundings.

The ability to see what others couldn’t, to make leaps that others dare not? Sheer creativity. The ability to help one’s audience gain these very same insights and make these very same leaps? Sheer artistry.