Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

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.