The Flight of the Iguana (4 page)

And thank goodness he did. That sort of stubborn mental contrariety is as precious to our planet as worm castings. It is equally essential that some people
do
think about earthworms, at least sometimes, as it is that
not everyone
does. It is essential not for the worms' sake but for our own.

•   •   •

More and more in recent years, we are all thinking about the same things at the same time. Electromagnetic radiation is chiefly responsible; microwaves, macrowaves, dashing and dancing electrons unite us instantly and constantly with the waves of each
other's brain. We can't step out into the yard without being bonked by a signal that has come caroming off some satellite, and when we step back inside, there's Dan Rather, ready with the day's subject for thought. One day we think about an explosion in the sky above Cape Canaveral. Another day we think about a gutshot pope. On a designated Sunday in January we gather in clusters to focus our thoughts upon the Super Bowl. Occasionally we ponder a matter of somewhat less consequence, like the early returns from the New Hampshire primary or the question of who shot J. R. Ewing. Late in the evening we think about what Ted Koppel thinks it's important we think about. Over large parts of the planet we think quite intently about the World Cup soccer final. My point is not that some of these subjects are trivial while others are undeniably and terrifyingly significant; my point is that we think about them together in great national (sometimes global) waves of wrinkling brows, and on cue. God himself has never summoned so much precisely synchronized, prayerful attention as Mary Lou Retton got for doing back flips. And maybe God is envious. Of course now He too has His own cable network.

The Jesuit philosopher and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin gave a label to this phenomenon. He called it the
noosphere,
and he considered it just wonderful. In Teilhard's view, the noosphere
(noös
being Greek for mind, and the rest by analogy with lithosphere, biosphere, atmosphere) was the ultimate product of organic evolution, the culmination of all nature's progress toward man and perfection—a layer of pure homogenized mind enwrapping the Earth, hovering there above us as “the sphere of reflexion, of conscious invention, of the conscious unity of souls.” It was prescient of him, I think, to have shaped this idea back at a time when even radio was an inestimable new toy. But in my heartfelt opinion, his enthusiasm was misguided. Too much “conscious unity of souls” is unhealthy, probably even pernicious. It yields polarized thought, in the same sense that a
polarized filter yields polarized light: nice neat alignments of attention and interest (which is different from, but a step toward, unanimity of opinion), with everyone smugly in agreement that such-and-such matters are worth contemplation, and that the rest by implication are not. Such unity is a form of overall mental impoverishment. For just one particular instance, it tends to neglect earthworms.

You will have sensed by now that I am a self-righteous crank on this subject. I believe that unanimity is always a bad thing. The prospect of all five billion of us human beings getting our alpha waves into perfect sync appalls me. My own minuscule contribution to the quixotic battle—the battle against homogenization of mind, the battle to preserve a cacophonous disunity of souls, the hopeless fingers-in-ears campaign of abstention from the noosphere—lies chiefly in not owning a television.

Pitiful, I know. It sounds like the most facile sort of pseudointellectual snobbery, I know. It is backward and petulant, and I am missing lots of terrific nature documentaries on the high-minded channels, I know. It's grim work, but somebody's got to do it. Anyway, I am not at all opposed to television. I am merely opposed to the notion that
everybody
should be dutifully, simultaneously plugged in. Maybe someday, for some unforeseeable reason, society will have need of a person who has never seen, say, a video replay of the space shuttle explosion. If so, I'll be ready. It's a personal sacrifice that I've been quite willing to make.

On the other hand, so as not to sound too tediously righteous, I want to confess that I did watch the Super Bowl this year, on a friend's set, thereby merging for three hours my somnolent brain with those millions of somnolent others. It was a sublime waste of time, and I'm glad I did it. Next year I won't.

You yourself can join in the good fight without even unplugging your television. Just take a day or an hour each month to think carefully about something that nobody else deems worthy
of contemplation. Break stride. Wander off mentally. Pick a subject so perversely obscure that it can't help but have neglected significance. If everyone else is thinking about the sad and highly visible deaths of seven astronauts, think about the Scottsboro Boys. If everyone else is thinking about the Super Bowl, think about a quiet little story called “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” If everyone else is busy despising Ferdinand Marcos, devote a few minutes of loathing to Fulgencio Batista. Or think about earthworms.

Think about the Australian species,
Megascolides australis,
that grows ten feet long and as big around as a bratwurst. Think about
Lumbricus terrestris,
familiar to soil scientists as the common European earthworm and to generations of American boyhood as the night crawler, nowadays gathered at night by professional pickers on Canadian golf courses and imported into the U.S. for a total value of $13 million per year. Think about how hard it is to tell front from rear, especially so since they can back up. Think about the curious reproductive arrangement of earthworm species generally, hermaphroditic but not self-fertilizing, so that each one during the act of mating provides sperm for its partner's eggs while receiving back the partner's sperm for its own eggs; now imagine having a full sister whose mother was your father. Think about the fact that these animals can regenerate a lost head. Think about the formation of vegetable mould, and the relentless swallowing, digesting, burrowing, and casting off of waste by which earthworms topple and bury the monuments of defunct civilizations while freshening the soil for new growth. Think about how sometimes it's the little things that turn the world inside out.

Is It a Bird,
Is It a Dinosaur,
or Is It Much More?

For today, a brief verbal Rorschach: What is the thing with feathers?

Don't rush your answer. Take some time. Allow your mind to billow and glide. If you've already said “A bird, of course. A bird is the thing with feathers,” your test results indicate a latent aptitude for work as a punch-press operator. The question is just possibly a good bit more complicated.

Hope, according to Emily Dickinson, is “the thing with feathers” that perches in the soul, singing a tune without words. Woody Allen disagrees. “How wrong Emily Dickinson was!” he has written in a published selection from the Allen notebooks. “Hope is not ‘the thing with feathers.' The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.” It can get highly confusing, as you see, and even more so when you consider that an international group of distinguished paleontologists convened during the summer of 1984 in the small town of Eichstätt, Bavaria, to haggle among themselves on the very same issue. What
is
the thing with feathers?

Those scientists, divided raucously on particulars, did have one point of consensus. They were all concerned with a creature called
Archaeopteryx.

Archaeopteryx
is simply the oldest thing with feathers that mankind has ever unearthed. It was an animal. It is known from just six fossil specimens. It lived about 160 million years ago, in the heyday of the dinosaurs. It was first discovered in the early years of the Darwinian revolution and played a crucial role in giving impetus to that revolution, yet it remains today one of the pivotal unsolved riddles of paleontology. It had a long bony tail, it had teeth, it had the skeletal anatomy of a small dinosaur—and it had feathers, exactly like those of a modern bird.

This much is indisputable, literally written in stone. Say anything more about
Archaeopteryx,
and you have taken a controversial position.

•   •   •

There is no question today, among paleontologists, that birds evolved originally from a line of reptilian ancestors. Skeletal anatomy alone is enough to show a close kinship between modern birds and certain primitive reptiles. But the intermediate stages in that transmogrification are rather more of a mystery. No one knew what sort of creature might have been the missing link between reptile and bird—until the discovery of
Archaeopteryx.

The first
Archaeopteryx
specimen ever recognized was just the impression of a single feather, preserved with startling precision in a piece of limestone. It turned up in 1861 at a rock quarry near the Bavarian village of Solnhofen, not far from Eichstätt, and announced itself to the world like the portentous opening chord of an overture to a wild opera. It had defied the odds, that feather, captured with photographic fidelity in the same fine-grain limestone that made Solnhofen rock highly valued for lithographic printing. It was the size and shape of a primary feather from the wing of a pigeon, and one German scientist wrote of it blandly as evidence of a fossil bird. Then almost immediately there came a related find from the same area of Solnhofen limestone. This one was a full skeleton, thoroughly fledged with the
same sort of feathers; the anatomy otherwise, though, seemed purely dinosaurian. It was dubbed
Archaeopteryx,
a reasonably safe formulation meaning “ancient wing.”

The Origin of Species
had been published just two years before, and the notion of a transitional form between reptiles and birds (between
any
two groups of creatures) was as provocative as any idea in European science. To the anti-Darwinists (mainly churchmen and conservative scientists)
Archaeopteryx
had to be either a bird, period, or a reptile, period, or else it was some sort of sick-minded hoax. To the Darwinists it was precisely the sort of missing-link evidence that could give dramatic support to their theory. What
is
the thing with feathers? The disputation began.

In 1877 a second complete
Archaeopteryx
was uncovered, again from the Solnhofen quarries. Evidently the animal had been fairly abundant in this area during the late Jurassic period, when those fine-grain limestone strata were being laid down. This second full specimen—preserved in a natural pose, showing excellent detail on both bones and feathers—was recognized as a rare scientific treasure and snatched up for a museum in Berlin. One expert has said of it: “The Berlin
Archaeopteryx
may well be the most important natural history specimen in existence, perhaps comparable in value to the Rosetta stone.” Maybe so, but the hieroglyphics in question here still haven't been conclusively deciphered.

Three more specimens have been found in this century, none nearly so graphic as the Berlin fossil, but all nonetheless precious. The second of those had actually been dug up back in 1855 (near Eichstätt, once again) and incorrectly identified for 113 years as a pterodactyl. The last showed only the faintest feather impressions, which were overlooked, and it spent two decades mistakenly labeled as
Compsognathus,
which is a small dinosaur.

To say that
Archaeopteryx
is known from “just six fossil specimens” might be somewhat misleading. For such a delicate creature, a species with small bones and fragile feathers that disappeared
160 million years ago, six decent specimens amounts to a lot. Thanks to a convergence of accidents—six individual deaths, occurring at just the right place and time to be preserved within fine-grain sediments, and later discovered largely because mankind had a commercial reason for excavating those same sediments—
Archaeopteryx
is exceptionally well represented within the fossil record. Between it and the next-oldest bird or bird-like fossil there stretches a gap of ten million years, and not nearly so much is known about that next-oldest relative. Disproportionally well documented,
Archaeopteryx
nevertheless (or maybe therefore) raises a disproportionate number of questions.

To paleontologists this creature is by now a familiar riddle. But, familiar or not, it's still very much a riddle.

•   •   •

How did flight begin among birds?

Why
did it begin?

Were the dinosaurs warm-blooded or cold-blooded?

Is a chicken more closely related to a crocodile or to
Tyrannosaurus rex?

Did feathers come into existence for aerodynamic reasons or as insulation to keep body heat in—or maybe to serve as adjustable reflectors that kept heat
out?