Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I must return to the macroscopic world, to Darwin's tautology. Survival of the fittest — Spencer's phrase — has a definite ring. But can it explain that superfluous explosion of self-generating programs? Is the famous, world-altering phrase really a "law"? Survival of those who survive. Disappearance of those who disappear. After-the-fact synopsis of species drift, missing the driving undercurrent, the molecular surge toward diversity as a way of staying around, producing more of the same.

On second look, I see I've misunderstood evolution as badly as my schoolgirl botch of Mendel. Education is wasted on those of school age. Now I find that evolution is not about competition or squeezing out, not a master plan of increasing efficiency. It is a deluge, a cascade of mistaken, tentative, branching, brocaded experiment, secrets seemingly dormant, shouted down from the past, wills and depositions hidden in the attic, how-to treasure maps reading "Tried this; it worked for a while; hang on to it," program-palimpsests reworked beyond recognition, churches renovated so often in a procession of styles that it's impossible to label them Romanesque, gothic, or baroque. It is about one instruction: "Make another similar something; insert this command; run; repeat." It is about the resultant runaway seed-spreading arabesques, unrelated except in all being variations on that theme.

"Struggle for survival," red in tooth and claw, is misleading; low-profile passivity is the strategy of choice in at least as many niches as aggression. "Struggle" carries too much individual emphasis. Selection deals in the economy of individuals, even individual traits. But evolution deals only in populations, demanding not that they struggle but just that they procreate faster than they perish. No upward march, no drive toward perfection. Evolution's move is lateral, spreading out, diversifying until every spot on the nearest-fit curve, every accidental juggle, has been auditioned against experience.

A day's reading makes plain that evolution is profoundly conservative. A species, on energetic grounds, stands to gain nothing by invention. Payoff lies in stable maintenance. Diversity, even more paradoxically, is born in preservation. "Natural selection," like the chemistry of self-replicating molecules, needs fleshing out, bridging. Evolution is circular, post hoc until I can underpin it, link it to the same coding problem I've circled around for months.

11/7: I read about barnacle geese. Beautiful creatures, larger than they should be, aerodynamically improbable, breathtaking in formation flight. Annually, their goslings pay the price of the safety of cliff nests. The flightless chicks throw themselves onto the rocks below, shielded by a centimeter of fluff. A few fledglings survive the massacre, perpetuate the behavior, build new nests next year in the fatal altitudes.

11/8: Exhausted, I watch a nature show shown late enough at night to ensure that only the already disenfranchised fringe will be disturbed by it. The film documents a slime mold so startling it needs seeing to be believed. A single-celled creature coats ponds in green scum. But when its food supply grows scarce, the particles transform. The cells congregate in huge colonies, differentiate, form the parts of a composite beast complete with head and body. The body grows spore cases that crack open and scatter single cells. The show cuts to a squid whose outer skin is an animated Kandinsky, awash in chromatophores that skitter across it in pigment ripples. The voiceover explains, in scientific baritone, that this fluctuating array is a map of the creature's brain activity: a visible neural analog.

Evolution becomes, on second look, an intricate switchboard, paths for passing signals back and forth: generation to generation, species to species, environment to creature, and back again. Life as exchange of mail. I think of the medieval bestiary, Frank's beloved illuminations, circulated in hand manuscripts — the journals of the day. That interpretive system seeing the spectrum of natural form as a mirror of God, eager to alert us to His nature through every living, loaded semaphore in creation-.

The leun slant on hille & he man hunten here. Alle hise fet steppes after him he filleth….

The lion stands on hill and hunts man here. Fills all his footsteps in after him, drags his tail over his tracks so he can't be found. When he sleeps he never closes his eyes. Why?

Welle heg is tat hil that is heven riche. Ure louerd is te leun the liveth ther abuven. Well high is that hill, that is heaven rich.

Our Lord is the lion that liveth there above. No devil can find him; he never sleeps.

The medieval natural kingdom was not indifferent object but pointed symbol. How else to explain the obvious interlocked design? Even its descendant science, stripping the world of every motive, reads like allegory. Even "nature," "evolution," still flirt with immanent purpose.

11/11: I begin to see science as a natural selection of species' postulates about the environment. Today, first U.S. patent for telescope, 1851. Tomorrow: Hooke appointed Royal Society Curator of Experiments, 1662. Empirical survivals for every port of call in the calendar. Survival of the fittest. Die-tosses developing goals; restless invention searching for application.

11/13: I spend the day among the ants, appalled by the Bulldog variety. They feed their sterile workers' eggs to larvae and queen. The queen mates for a day, storing the semen her whole life, from which she produces the entire colony. The Weaver, a near relation, is a bio-universe away. This strain uses its larvae as web spray guns, clasping the grubs in their jaws, coaxing them with antennae, pointing them to spots to sew up. Weavers raise Blue Butterfly caterpillars, nurse them to adulthood, protect them, sacrifice guardians as caterpillar feed, all for nectar emitted by the monster babies.

Flowers inscribed with ultraviolet runways, detectable only by particular bees. Wasps that live parasitically in bee bodies. The Bauhaus finesse of trapdoor spiders. Other spider strains that fish. Fish that shoot insects with water streams; fish that fish with electroluminescent bait. Two-pitch frog calls where males hear the low warning, females the high serenade. More bizarrerie than I feel the outrageousness of what Dr. Ressler was after: a simple generative axiom telling where all of this comes from. Macro-molecular feedback supplies the how without recourse to metaphysical why. Darwin gives the first internally plausible explanation not requiring a leap of faith. But gaps in the fossil record leave incomplete the account of how variety itself comes about. How can pruning produce the irreducible width of the world lab? That's where my friend came in. Ressler was after no less than ancient myth: a physical explanation of variety. How the creatures got their nature. How animate arose from inanimate. How different one can get.

11/14: Monod, Jacques: Chance and Necessity, page 48 of my dog-eared paperback: "[T]he prodigious diversity of macroscopic structures of living beings rests in fact on a profound and no less remarkable unity of microscopic makeup." Many from one. Complexity from the simple first principle. The living world as single event. Speciation is stranger than I've guessed: unstoppable, incoherent, continuous. All the parts of speech proliferated from the first verb. How can that be? Each copy grown precise in design, everything recorded within it geared toward undeniable ends driving every cell, each organelle. How can such clear, formal purpose arise without a purposive designer, no plan more steeped in necessity than chance?

11/16: Twenty-three weeks left; twenty-five with cold showers. Six months to discover how different you can get. To uncover the answer alone, in the seed-spreading core of the self-extending program. To validate that great tautology: survival of those who survive.