As I’ve men­tioned, I’m read­ing and enjoy­ing Pyne & Pyne’s The Last Lost World, inso­far as it isn’t a “pop­u­lar­iza­tion” of Pleis­tocene pale­on­tol­ogy so much as it is a use­ful and well-​​built con­struc­tion com­bin­ing aspects of lit­er­ary crit­i­cism and sci­ence report­ing to that field. That is, in this book we’re actu­ally talk­ing about nar­ra­tives, and sur­fac­ing the ten­sion in sci­en­tific dis­course between the cre­ation of gen­eral robust facts and obser­va­tions as opposed to the con­tin­u­ously multi-​​scaled dynam­ics of the actual world: the ways in which a “species” becomes “real” for example.

Mid-​​book, I find the fol­low­ing lovely lit­tle pas­sage. In a sense it says: per­haps finally we can pro­ceed mind­fully. Maybe that’s what I’m ask­ing for when I harp so much and often about the lack of sci­ence (and please, some­day, engi­neer­ing) books like this one: that it is time now to be mind­ful of our roles in the world we cre­ate or discover.

It was how that trans­fig­u­ra­tion had hap­pened [from Dar­win to Neo­dar­win­ism] that per­haps holds the most inter­est. In con­clud­ing the Ori­gin of Species Dar­win imag­ined “a tan­gled bank” over­flow­ing with liv­ing forms yet orga­nized by dis­cernible laws, and while full of “grandeur,” a scene that did not result from a pre­formed pat­tern. Yet as Ernst Cas­sirer has argued, “Man can­not escape from his own achieve­ment.” Darwin’s tan­gled bank has been replaced by a “tan­gled web of human expe­ri­ence” that weaves together lan­guage, myth, art, reli­gion, and all the other strands of humanity’s “sym­bolic net.” That pecu­liar capac­ity of human thought remade Darwin’s tan­gled bank into a shelf of braided nar­ra­tives in which the entwin­ing of genomic and geo­graphic data had to play out over a cul­tural land­scape: that was where, to con­tinue the anal­ogy, the selec­tion would take place. The revival of neo-​​Darwinian con­cepts, how­ever, too often brought with it a neo-​​Darwinian sci­en­tism that failed to apply to its own inform­ing con­ceits the per­spec­tive it demanded of oth­ers. In par­tic­u­lar, it made Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion an act of spe­cial creation.

It was a sim­plis­tic nar­ra­tive that assumed that ideas could be dis­cov­ered out of data the way bones could be found in sand­stone or tuff, and it viewed the progress of bio­log­i­cal sci­ence (and archae­ol­ogy) in a way par­ti­sans scorned when oth­ers applied it to their own fields. They did not appre­ci­ate the extent to which their explana­tory ideas, even the the­ory of organic evo­lu­tion, had a long his­tory, and that, like Equ­uus cabal­lus within the equids or Homo sapi­ens among the hominins, the idea was not the intended end prod­uct towards which all research had trended but the selected sur­vivor of ancient stock, a prod­uct of hap­pen­stance, his­tor­i­cal con­tin­gency, and use­ful­ness. Dis­ci­pli­nary his­to­ries tended to be tele­o­log­i­cal, as nar­ra­tive must be; the his­tory of the idea of evo­lu­tion was thus orth­o­genic in ways the theory’s advo­cates denounced when applied to nature.

Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion was less a spe­cial cre­ation, the spark of a divine insight, than it was the rough, imper­fect, best adapted, use­ful, and can­tan­ker­ous out­come of a tedious and often errant chron­i­cle of obser­va­tions and imag­in­ings. It was a pow­er­ful idea, and once dis­cov­ered, des­tined (so it seemed to many) to ram­ify across whole con­ti­nents of learn­ing. It offered a promised con­silience, which could seem the apex to which all prior study had tended. But such appar­ent inevitabil­ity was an inher­ent con­struct of nar­ra­tive, and just as an organism’s traits are not intrin­si­cally bet­ter or worse but bet­ter or more poorly adapted to its set­ting, so it is with ideas. The evo­lu­tion­ary par­a­digm achieved much of its power and reach because it tapped into very old tra­di­tions of thought. Far from being a rad­i­cal inno­va­tion with­out prece­dent, Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion had itself evolved by fits and starts out of one of the hoari­est con­cepts in West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, the Great Chain of Being.