Loren Eiseley: September 3, 1907--July 9, 1977

Perhaps more than any other writer, Loren Eiseley has impressed upon me certain truths about evolution that are both fascinating and frustrating. They aren't new or startling, but he made me grasp them as no other writer had before.

Evolution is not a thing, first of all. I can't hold it in my hand; evolution, instead, is a description of a type of interaction between living creatures and their environment, especially changes in the environment which result in adaptations by some living creatures which then affect the environment in new ways. And so the process continues. The web of life may be a cliche, but what else can one call it.

That's the second point Eiseley has impressed on me. The process continues. I have seen numerous charts that purport to show the evolutionary line that begins with the smallest and earliest living creatures on the one hand and which stretch across the millions of years to finally end with the human species. That's the problem: it doesn't end with the human species. We may be one of the latest, but we aren't the last. Eiseley makes the point again and again in his essays, in his own quiet way, with a story here and a small observation there, and in this way he has convinced me of this. And, that's the frustrating part, as Eiseley notes time and again.

On an expedition in one of the northern plains states, he uncovers a small skull, that of an early ancestor of a rodent. In an essay titled "The Slit," Eiseley says to himself that "the creature had never lived to see a man, and I, what was it I was never going to see?" That's the frustrating part.

Several pages later in the same essay, Eiseley further develops the point when he observes that "We cannot know all that has happened in the past, or the reason for all of these events, any more than we can with surety discern what lies ahead. We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know."

In an essay titled "The Snout," Eiseley, in spite of the ultimate futility of our dreams to know all, goes on to say "It gives one a feeling of confidence to see nature still busy with experiments, still dynamic, and not through nor satisfied because a Devonian fish managed to end as a two-legged character with a straw hat. There are other things brewing and growing in the oceanic vat. It pays to know this. It pays to know there is just as much future as there is past. The only thing that doesn't pay is to be sure of man's own part in it."

However, not everyone shares Eiseley's enthusiasm. Eiseley tells of a conversation he had with a friend, a member of the Explorers Club, who had just returned from a trek through northern Australia.

"'They fell out of the trees,' he said. 'Like rain. And into the boat.'

'Uh?' I said, noncommittally.

'They did so,' he protested, 'and they were hard to catch.'

'Really--' I said.

'We were pushing a dugout up one of the tidal creeks in northern Australia and going fast when smacko we jam this mangrove bush and the things came tumbling down.

'What were they doing sitting up there in bunches? I ask you. It's no place for a fish. Besides that they had a way of sidling off with those popeyes trained on you. I never liked it. Somebody out to keep any eye on them.'

'Why?' I asked.

'I don't know why,' he said impatiently, running a rough, square hand through his hair and wrinkling his forehead. 'I just mean they make you feel that way, is all. A fish belongs in the water. It ought to stay here--just we live on land in houses. Things ought to know their place and stay in it, but those fish have got a way of sidling off. As though they had mental reservations and weren't keeping any contracts. See what I mean?'"

Later, still in the same essay, "The Snout", Eiseley sums up neatly: "The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore. . . . . . . There lies the hope of life. The old ways are exploited and remain, but new things come, new senses try the unfamiliar air. There are small scuttlings and splashings in the dark, and out of it come the first croaking, illiterate voices of the things to be, just as man once croaked and dreamed darkly in that tiny vesicular forebrain. . . We are one of the many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time."



The quotations are from several essays contained in the first book I read by Loren Eiseley--The Immense Journey. It is one of my "Desert Island" books.