Tiers of Time and Trials of Extrapolationism 1343
in its midst—if Michelangelo had never been born. But how much poorer would our
world have been without the magnificent statue of Moses, furious and disconsolate as
he holds the tablets of the law while his people dance about the golden calf, still
presiding in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli; and without the gigantic fresco of
the Last Judgment, revealing all our blessed humanity in all our earthly sins, and still
covering, in brilliant restoration, a full wall of the Sistine Chapel?
No difference truly separates science and art in this crucial respect. We only
perceive a division because our disparate traditions lead us to focus upon different
scales of the identity. The art historian looks right at Moses and knows the
importance of its individuality. The scientist tends to gaze upon a world ready for
evolution, and then discounts the centrality of a single, admittedly fascinating,
individual named Charles Darwin. But if Darwin had never been born, we would
have suffered the equivalent of a Renaissance without Moses or the Last Judgment—
a biological revolution without the Origin of Species; without the invocation of Julia
Pastrana, the bearded circus lady with two sets of teeth, to illustrate correlation of
growth; without the Galapagos fauna to embody the principle of imperfection to
prove the pathways of history; without pigeons to illustrate artificial selection;
without barnacles to puncture half our pride with their dwarfed males upon the
hermaphrodites.
Most of all, we would have experienced the same biological revolution without
the stunning clarity, illustrated by wonderfully apposite metaphors, of a complex
central logic so brilliantly formulated, and so bristling with implications extending
nearly forever outward, at least well past our current reckoning. In this alternate
world, we would probably be honoring a different and far less compelling founder by
occasional visits to a statue in a musty pantheon, and not by constant dialogue with a
man whose ideas live, breathe, challenge, taunt, and inspire us every day of our lives,
more than a century after his bones came to rest on a cathedral floor at the foot of
whatever persists in the material being of Isaac Newton.
We would be enjoying an evolutionary view of life, but not the specific grandeur
of "this view of life." What can be more ennobling than a factual reality—the
uniquely actualized result among innumerable potentials that did not obtain the most
precious privilege of emergence into concrete existence? And what a stunning piece
of good fortune, that this actuality came to us with all the grace, the moral weight,
and the intellectual power of Darwin's particular struggles and insights, clothing the
structure of his thought in that apotheosis of human achievement—wisdom, which
the Book of Proverbs, citing the same icon that Darwin would borrow more than two
millennia later, called Etz Chayim, the tree of life. "Length of days is in her right
hand," for "she is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her; and happy is every one
that retaineth her."