The Evolution of Jane Read online

  Darwin gathered slugs and prehistoric skulls and dead birds and sent them off to England where fellow natural history enthusiasts examined them and decided that one was a new species, one a subspecies. But how could they tell? Was the wing of one fly slightly bigger than the wings of its cousins? How much bigger did the wing have to be to make the fly a member of a new species? If the wing differed just a smidgen, then perhaps the fly was a member of a subspecies. Or could it simply be an individual of the same species which varied slightly from its peers, a fly with a big wing?

  "What is a species?" I said. "And who says so? And how do they decide?" I glared at Martha.

  She said, "Your shoelace is untied."

  "Nevertheless," I said.

  I tied my shoelace with considerable dignity as Martha began to explain genus and family and class.

  "No, no, I know, I mean, okay, let's say you're a taxonomist, you classify cacti, you are sent a cactus discovered in Borneo—"

  "They don't have cacti in Borneo, I'm sure," said Gloria. "Too wet."

  "A cactus from Tucson is sent to you. You have to examine it in order to classify it. What exactly do you do?"

  "You look at it," Martha said.

  I stood beside Martha, warm and comfortable in my resentment. Yet I would not have dreamed of relinquishing my spot, so close to our guide.

  "Okay," Martha said. "I think you could say that a species is a group of organisms that have similar structure and behavior, will mate with each other, reproduce, and have fertile offspring."

  Jack Cornwall actually raised his hand like a grammar school student, then said, "A horse and a donkey will mate, but they produce mules, which are sterile. Mules are not a separate species. Horses and donkeys are."

  I've never liked a teacher's pet. I prefer to be a teacher's pet. He gave me a big grinning smile, though, which made his eyes narrow in a mischievous way. Jack Cornwall, like all the Cornwalls on this trip, had a big head, like a senator or talk-show host. He offered me a swig from his water bottle, as if to formalize his definition of species and my acceptance of it.

  Martha was by now several hundred feet ahead of us, squatting beside a parched straw-colored stalk.

  "No, thank you," I said.

  In order to classify his huge collection of specimens from his Beagle journey, and to understand natural history better in general, Darwin spent eight years dissecting barnacles so he could learn taxonomy. He peered at barnacles, thousands of barnacles, noting every minute difference. He already knew that variation among individual organisms occurred, and he already believed that it was from these random variations that natural selection took its pick.

  Until his eight barnacle years, he thought this variation must occur because of some unsettling, outside event—a huge change of climate, for instance. It was only after contemplating his barnacles, where he witnessed an infinity of variation, where every swirl in every shell varied just a little from every swirl in every other shell, that Darwin realized that variation, the raw material of natural selection, was everywhere.

  As we followed our guide across the black rocks, I amused myself by observing the Cornwalls in this way, looking for the genetic variation from generation to generation, wondering what variation might have been favored by natural selection, what variation might continue to be favored. Sometimes I think of natural selection as a large hand that comes and gently lifts a characteristic between its thumb and forefinger, the way a mother dog lifts a puppy in her mouth. Natural selection plucks up the variation, then carefully sets it down in the next generation. I know that natural selection is not a hand. It's not really an action at all. It is a passive record, a picture of what characteristics have worked better than other, vanished characteristics. Still, I imagined a large hand tweaking and smoothing, polishing the Cornwalls, neatly tucking in their common traits.

  "Daddy would be so proud of us," said Mrs. Cornwall.

  "Your daddy?" said Dot.

  "Don't be silly. Mommy's daddy."

  The family did share one characteristic, it was true: their big heads. Even Brian, the son-in-law, who was not technically a Cornwall at all. Perhaps I should call him the husband, not the son-in-law. But as he was not married to Mrs. Cornwall and was merely married to Mrs. Cornwall's daughter, he was the Son-in-Law. Mrs. Cornwall was the reference point. In her matriarchal wake trailed her son, Jack, who was about my age; her daughter, Liza, and the son-in-law, Brian, both of whom were in their early thirties; and at the other end of the Cornwalls, the tail end, was Dorothy, Liza and Brian's ten-year-old daughter, a tiny, definite girl, known as Dot. Gloria referred to her as Full Stop. The Cornwalls, who walked in a line, always together, did indeed resemble a sentence, with Mrs. Cornwall playing all the really important parts of speech.

  I was walking along the beach, thinking about the Cornwalls but no longer watching them, when I realized I had fallen behind. Only Gloria, my bustling roommate, was with me, the others having moved on. I must have sighed because she patted me on the arm in a kindly way.

  "The problem of identifying species led Darwin to realize the transmutability of species," she said. "So it's very clever of you to be confused."

  Then she took my picture as I knelt to look at a red and turquoise crab scrambling across the black lava.

  "Sally Lightfoot," I said. I remembered the name from a caption in the guidebook my father had given me. I remembered it because I liked it—a pretty, comical name.

  "Sally Lightfoot. Grapsus grapsus," Gloria said. "Such a pretty little name, don't you think?"

  I nodded.

  "Grapsus grapsus," Gloria continued. "Just as pretty as a name can be."

  There Darwin sat, on his English country estate, his house filled with aquariums, servants, dogs and children, a proper gentleman naturalist, puttering about with his barnacles, peering through a microscope at the swirls of a Cirripedes shell, at the chasm of variation. Amidst his dahlias and governesses and barnacles, Darwin witnessed evolution, read the record of one kind of creature's journey away from its fellow organisms. In his microscope, Darwin saw barnacles that possessed both sexual organs. Then he saw hermaphrodite barnacles with little parasites attached to them. Then he saw barnacles in which those parasites revealed themselves to be tiny, tiny male barnacles. The differentiation of the sexes before his eyes, the birth of sex.

  "Taxonomy is profound," I said.

  "Yes," Gloria said.

  "Did you know that males are really parasites?"

  "Yes," Gloria said.

  Martha pointed out birds and rocks and plants, as did Jack, who seemed to know his way around, though he had never been to the Galapagos before, but had studied up on the islands so thoroughly that Martha had already begun to stand beside plants, say "Jack," and point to some desiccated stems struggling from the sand. Then she would turn, silently, and look cryptically at the horizon.

  "Tiquilia," Jack would say.

  "Close," Martha would say. Or, if he got it right, the flicker of a smile would cross her face.

  "Jack," she said to him now, pointing to a pallid bramble.

  Jack was becoming insufferable.

  The storm petrels were diving into the waves and seemed to be surfing. Pelicans, normally so awkward and odd-looking, now seemed gently ordinary, the only familiar objects on that island. We walked over a rise and were met by a silent lagoon. In this gentle quiet, we saw three pale flamingos. We sat on the sand and watched a spiky black reptile. It was a marine iguana, Martha said, our first endemic Galapagos species, the only truly aquatic iguana in the world, large, lumbering, crusty, a crest of chalky spikes rising from its head, running along its wrinkled back. When it lay down, its belly curved beneath it in a paunch, like an overfed cat.

  "Amyblyrhynchus cristatus," Martha said. "A descendant of the green iguana, the one everybody's brother kept as a pet."

  I thought she might be referring to my brother Andrew, who had an iguana named Ignatz, though Martha didn't look at me as she spoke.
r />   "Green iguanas drifted over to one of these islands, perhaps on a raft of vegetation from one of the rivers of the mainland. When they got here, to this barren place, there was nothing to eat. All the animals, all the plants that found their way here, faced that same problem. They adapted to the new environment in some way. Or they died. The green iguana evolved into the marine iguana when it discovered a new, available niche that it was able to exploit. It developed the ability to digest seaweed. Not by changing its own digestive system, though. It digests its seaweed dinners courtesy of a parasite it carries in its stomach. After a marine iguana has baby marine iguanas, she passes the parasites on to her heirs. An essential legacy. An inheritance carried by saliva."

  We watched the black reptile lumber away.

  "Darwin thought they were hideous," Jeremy Toll, retired gossip, whispered in my ear. "He always said so."

  A sailor on board the Beagle tied a marine iguana to a stone and dangled it in the water from the side of the boat for an hour—a pleasant, boyish way to while away some time, drowning an iguana. Imagine his boyish surprise when he pulled it up and the iguana was as lively as ever. Darwin was a boy, too, when he set sail on the Beagle, an unformed, unfocused youth of twenty-two. In fact, there was only one man over thirty on the voyage. One of Darwin's roommates was fourteen. They were boys, all of them, boys playing with lizards, boys straddling the backs of giant tortoises, rapping their shells to make them go.

  Darwin, the English lad off on a rugged adventure, did think the marine iguanas were hideously ugly. He thought the Galapagos were ugly, too. They are indeed dry and weedy and bare, neither scenic nor sublime, but scrubby and grim, a place of emptiness.

  "But it is a half-finished, rather than an abandoned, desolation, don't you think?" Martha said. "They're like arid island dwarfs that lift themselves from the sea. They look expectant, I think, almost hopeful."

  We swam off the beach in water that had made its way up from Antarctica. The equatorial sea was cold and calm, disturbed only by sea lions hoping to play with us. We had all brought our wet suits, snorkels, and masks, just to test them out, and as I paddled along looking at the sandy bottom, I saw Martha swim by me, a flash of black rubber.

  I started to say, "It's so cold on the equator!" As I opened my mouth, it became evident that I was sucking on a snorkel, that I was underwater, that I could not in fact speak, that I was coughing and spitting out water. I hastily stood up in the shallow water and looked down at the black form swimming around me.

  I said, "I forgot I was underwater!"

  Martha stared back at me with huge round black eyes, a snub nose like a puppy, whiskers swaying in the water. Martha wasn't Martha at all. She was a sea lion.

  The sea lion shot beneath me. I screamed with all the vigor of a lady who sees a mouse. If there had been a chair to jump up on, I would have jumped. I was gasping, my heart pounding. I was absurdly shaken, as if I had been swimming not with a friendly sea lion, not even with a mouse, but with Moby Dick himself.

  Jeremy Toll, surprisingly fit in his wet suit, was standing near me. We looked at each other through our foggy masks.

  "It really startled me," I said. I pointed to the sea lion, now doing somersaults between us. "I thought it was Martha."

  He spit out his snorkel. We watched the fat, slippery animal dash off.

  "I wouldn't tell her that," he said. "If I were you."

  In the panga on the return trip from our first Galapagos island, there was a chilled, relaxed, fulfilled alertness among the group. We each stared back at the island, shivering silently, aware that we had visited a noble monument, like Chartres.

  When we reached the Huxley, one of the crew, a tall gaunt young man with a skinny mustache, waited with a hose at the bottom of the ladder leading up to the deck. He grinned politely as he sprayed each of our legs in turn, washing away the sand. He rinsed off our shoes as well, and threw them in a plastic crate on deck, a great mound of shining black Tevas. Grinning indulgently at our excitement, he exchanged some rapid, amused Spanish with Martha. I had refused to learn Spanish as a child. That was my mother's language. I took French in school instead. As did Martha. Señorita Martha.

  "Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints," Martha said, in explanation of the ritual bath.

  I watched my colleagues lifting their bare feet into the weak trickle, turning to expose their sandy calves, thrilled to have visited a place so peculiar that even its sand must be purified. One island could pollute another island, and so the patched green hose rinsed away any lingering traces. It was oddly satisfying, a rite of purification, not of us but from us.

  I said, "Absolution."

  "If only it were that easy," said Gloria.

  4

  I WENT BACK TO MY cabin and lay down on my bunk, cradled in fatigue, the sting of frigid salt water still on my skin. Gloria stretched out on her bunk, fully dressed, a sleeping exhibit of ecological artifacts. I have read that once an organism starts up the evolutionary tree in one direction, as much as it branches out and changes along the way, it cannot retrace its steps or leap over to someone else's branch. Human beings will change, undoubtedly, but they will not gradually turn into reptiles, except metaphorically, of course. But Ms. Steinham, as her students apparently called her, and as she sometimes referred to herself, flew in the face of this information. She appeared to encompass all the branches of evolution at once. Her earrings were feathers, her necklace was shells, her bracelet was seeds. She was adorned with claws and suede pouches and tiny gourds. Her hat was printed with tropical fish. Wrapped around her, a cloth of a primitive African pattern created an ostentatiously primitive skirt. Her shoes had been woven by an aboriginal Asiatic desert tribe. Her socks, though, were knee socks and they were nylon. She lay on her back, her hands folded lightly across her ample breasts, like the stone coffin lid of a medieval queen.

  Gloria fascinated me. How could her mother let her go out of the house like that? Her mother was dead. That was the only explanation. I stared at her, and I wondered if I was glad I had come on the trip or not. It was an adventure, as I had hoped. There were boobies and volcanoes. There was Gloria. Even Darwin didn't get to meet someone quite like Gloria. And there was Martha. If Darwin had discovered Martha, I thought, if he had dipped her in formaldehyde and pinned her to a board, what would he have seen? An intelligent, enthusiastic young guide? Or an alienated, cold misanthrope who had moved to a desert and lived in the solitude of crowds of strangers?

  No matter how many times I looked back at my friendship with Martha, and at its untimely demise, I could not decipher it. I lay on my bunk, closed my eyes, and tried to picture Martha's face as it now was. Instead, I kept seeing her as a sixteen-year-old, so that when I finally did conjure up the adult Martha, it was hard not to regard her as an old-looking sixteen-year-old, someone who had weathered a terrible tragedy which had prematurely aged her.

  I was being ungenerous. And petty. I was quite conscious of it. I was disappointed that Martha hadn't, against all odds, immediately poured out her heart to me. Martha had once defined the world for me. Now that she was a naturalist and guide, it was clear that she would still define the world, at least this little world that I had temporarily joined. Friendship is context, at least ours was. It was what ordered the world. And even though I was an adult myself, even though it had been so many years, even though I had made many friends in the interim, I could somehow not let go of that first real friendship. Particularly when it turned up next to me at dinner.

  Martha sat beside me in the dining room, with its large, slightly bleary windows, booths of gleaming varnished wood, and benches of pink leatherette. Gloria and the middle-aged couple named Tommaso sat across from us. I could see from their demeanor that Martha's choice of me as a dining partner, and even her proximity, had elevated my status aboard ship, as if we were dining at the court of Versailles.

  "What have you been doing all this time?" I said to Martha. "You kind of disappeared."
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  "I went to school in Oregon. I told you. Botany."

  "No, I meant before."

  Martha smiled and looked thoughtful. "Before? Before, I guess I was home."

  She went to get dinner, which was laid out on a buffet table, and we all rose from our tables to follow her.

  "Pork chops?" said Mrs. Tommaso. "Is that native food or tourist food?"

  "Depends on who's eating it, I suppose," said Gloria.

  "I didn't know you got married," Martha said to me when we sat down.

  "It was sort of a blip on the radar screen. I barely knew I got married."

  "My parents are divorced."

  "I know. I was really surprised."

  "Mmm. No blip, that," Martha said. "Time flies," she said after a pause.

  I wanted to say more, to ask more. But Martha had closed up shop. She drank her coffee and read over some notes she'd brought with her.

  There are other people on this boat, I thought. I looked at Gloria. It was a good thing visitors were not allowed to remove anything from the Galapagos, I thought, not just for the islands, but for Gloria Steinham's wardrobe, which was already sufficiently embellished by all those sticks and stones and bird feathers and bits of clay she must have picked up on other, less restricted trips. Because she could not collect specimens this time, she was a most avid photographer. The thought occurred to me that when she got home and had the photos developed, she would wear them.

  "It's funny that species means money," she said.

  Species. What didn't species mean? But then, what did it mean? When we had returned from our field trip, Gloria, who in addition to her remarkable wardrobe had brought a considerable library on board with her, showed me one book that said the individual, not the species, was the unit of evolution, and another that said the species was, but then another warned that a species should not be confused with a taxon. (This was discouraging. Since I didn't know what a taxon was, there was every probability that I confused them daily.) Some scientists thought the clues to a species lay in an animal's form, others in its DNA, others in its ancestry. One group said that geographical isolation was necessary to form a species, another said that reproductive isolation, not geographical isolation, was the key. One group said that when we speak of survival of the fittest, a fit organism is one that is best suited to cope with life's exigencies. That made sense to me. But then another book said that fit meant reproductive success. A fit organism was one that left more copies of its genes to the next generation. That made sense to me, too. These two points of view were said to be at odds with each other, the basis of a heated scientific feud, so I obviously had a lot to learn. And what did either view have to do with one branch of a family tree splitting off from its parent branch, or with one friend splitting off from another? What did either have to do with speciation, which was the real mystery, the only mystery, the mystery of mysteries?