My Ishmael (Ishmael 3) - Page 23

“There’s no need or reason to go through the process in detail. It will be enough if you see and understand even a few of its results. For example, I would recommend to your attention a creature that made its appearance on Calliope some ten million years ago, a quilled lizard with a long snout suitable for browsing in anthills. When I say that it made its appearance, I don’t mean that it had no predecessor. Of course it did—I trust you understand that.”

I said I did.

“This quilled lizard (let’s call it a porcuzard) was nevertheless a strange creature—or would certainly seem strange to you or me, as does the porcupine or the anteater. Now let me ask what your expectation is for this creature. Is it your expectation that it will be a successful addition to the community of life on Calliope?”

I said I didn’t have any basis for an expectation. How could I? Ishmael nodded as if he could see the sense in this reply.

“Let’s transpose the matter to a locale closer to home. Suppose biologists were to discover a porcuzard living in the deepest jungles of New Guinea. Such a thing is not at all impossible. New species are being discovered all the time.”

“Okay.”

“What would be your expectation in this case? Would you expect a creature like this to be a successful inhabitant of the jungles of New Guinea?”

“Certainly. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“That’s not the question I’m exploring here, Julie. The question I’m exploring is: What is your expectation? And you’ve answered that: You expect it to be successful. The next question is, why do you expect it to be successful?”

“Because … if it weren’t successful, then it wouldn’t be there at all.”

“Where would it be?”

“It would be nowhere. It would have disappeared.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because … Because failures disappear. Don’t they?”

“In this case, Julie, I’d rather you answered this yourself. Do failures disappear or not?”

“They disappear. They have to. If a species is here, then it obviously can’t be a failure.”

“Exactly. No matter how strange it may look to us. Thus a flightless bird like the emu, improbable as it seems, is successful—where it is, for the time being. This doesn’t constitute a guarantee for the lifetime of the planet. The dodo was a success—where it was, when it was. Then conditions changed, and it could no longer succeed—where it was, when it was—so it failed and disappeared.”

“I understand.”

“This is a fundamental fact: The community of life that we see here at any given time isn’t just a random collection. It’s a collection of successes. It’s the remainder that is left over when the failures have disappeared.”

“Right.”

“Now let’s return to Calliope. I’ll ask again what your expectation is for the porcuzard.”

“My expectation is that it’s a success, because if it was a failure, it wouldn’t be there at all.”

“That’s right. No species emerges by failing. What the community brings forth are successes—species that are able to cope with the conditions around them. This is why I say that the process we observe here is overwhelmingly likely to be the process observed everywhere. At any given moment communities anywhere will be largely composed of species that work.”

“Yeah, I don’t see how it could be any other way.”

“At the same time, however, any given species in the community might be declining. Come back in twenty years, and it may be gone. But that doesn’t invalidate our general expectations. Any given species may go out of existence by failing, but it certainly didn’t come into existence by failing. No species comes into existence by failing. That’s simply unthinkable.”

“Yes, I see that.”

“Now back to Calliope again. Here is a picture of porcuzard reproductive life. They are entirely promiscuous. Neither males nor females recognize their young, but females recognize their home nest and will nurse any pup in that nest. If a female finds the unguarded nest of another porcuzard inside her home territory, she’ll enter that nest and kill any pups she finds.”

I asked why she would do that.

“Her intentions can’t be known, of course, but killing these pups does in fact tend to increase her own reproductive success. With these pups gone, her own pups are more likely to carry her genes into the gene pool. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I think so. Maybe a little vaguely, but I think so.”

Tags: Daniel Quinn Ishmael Classics
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