DESCENT, WITH MODIFICATIONS

WE SAW EVERYTHING, AND EVERYTHING WAS UNAFRAID of us.

I am not a churchgoer. If I am anything it would be a lapsed Druid. I am a geologist who likes to touch rocks. To hold them. To smell them. But there is no way to talk about the Galápagos without remembering one of the most powerful stories, and oldest.

Which came first, the Bible or the Galápagos? Who wrote the book of Genesis? It wasn’t Darwin, though he’d read it inside and out.

I was there three weeks. I was there for a century. I was there for one breath—one inhalation. One day I swam alongside a ten-ton whale shark, and beheld the eye of the world’s largest fish, chilled to the bone, and kicked like mad to keep from being swallowed: Jonah, redux.

Shearwaters, petrels. Tropic birds, frigate birds, the males with their fantastic red gulars; boobies: birds in outrageous numbers, but not yet so much the clamant diversity of other places; so many of the Galápagos are still in the first day, first morning, with everything still sorting itself out—the woodpecker finch picking up twigs to dig out insects from within the pulp of rotting trees. The little ground and tree finches, each of them beginning to specialize. Experimenting with the great bounty of this one place on earth, where the sun’s presence is an unquestioned constant, delivering millennium after millennium the same amount of energy, and the rich cold-water currents delivering their same bounty, every day, to the doorstep of the creation.

As if the world was made not for the coming of man, but for birds. As if there once was or still is a Bird God. As if someday maybe there will be a Man-and-Woman God, but that here, in Day Two, or whatever hour it is, the world and its stories wheel around the axis of birds and their strivings and desires, not ours.

Will the story of the seven days be the same, again and again, for all species, no matter at what point they join the spectacle, the party?

Hardly anything eats anything else here, yet. There’s one species of hawk, the Galápagos hawk, that hunts in cooperative packs. Cooperation: Darwin wasn’t looking for that, so didn’t see it, I think.

War has not yet arrived here. There’s intraspecies strife, but between the nations of other species, barely yet at all.

I think Darwin saw evolution and initial competition because he wanted to see it—also because here, on this utterly new, just-made land, he could not miss it. But what we have done with that idea—hewing only to the idea that strength and domination is all, desperately all, that neither tenderness nor wisdom matter, nor, for that matter, luck, that only survival matters, rather than, say, the dignity of the moment—could he have suspected the brutal ideological shortcuts the coming world would make with what was once an elegant idea?

Yeah, the strong are going to kick ass, but is there not another and perhaps larger dynamic at play across the long term?

What is meeker than a turtle?

I also wonder if, in watching things move earnestly forward, Darwin missed a countercurrent of things going backward. I wonder if he sensed this. I find it interesting that his initial title wasn’t On the Origin of Species, but rather, Descent, With Modifications.

Sometimes we overlook things most when we are staring right at them.

How did we get here, and why are we here? We know in our heart of hearts that we are neither all-powerful nor, really, all that smart.

Is it chance, or something else? It is surely not natural selection. If anything, unnatural selection. We defy evolution. Are we ourselves descending—sinking—while other species—the Galápagos mockingbird, for instance—are quietly, meekly, continuing to ascend?

We can understand the spots on the whale shark and the beaks of the little finches, and the marine iguanas that dive beneath the sea to gnaw on the steady equatorial bounty of tidewater algae. Anyone can understand the flightless cormorants of the Galápagos, giving up their gift of flight to remain evolutionary homebodies, diving for fish all day long. Each morning they hold their stubby wings to the morning sun to warm themselves before plunging back into the cold rich currents—and it looks absolutely as if the cormorants are beseeching the sun, praying to the sun, hurry up, get rid of these wings, I don’t need them and they’re not working out.

The islands are so new. The islands are still on Day Two or Three, I think. Darwin’s science was dead-on for a new garden, but I’m wondering, and hoping, that he might have missed things.

Other questions I would have for the young captain: Why do we love beauty—why does beauty exist, and what, oh what are we going to do, if anything, about any of it?

Day One, there’s a big old ocean, and the lake o’ fire beneath us makes a seam, comes roaring up in the precise middle of the earth, builds a little garden—so little—on the equator. Let there be land.

Things start drifting in. Iguanas clinging to driftwood, holding their mouths open to the sky during the rainy season. Tortoises, bobbing along like coconuts, until they make random landfall. Were they the fittest, or did they just float well? They’d have been lost without the guidance of those equatorial currents. Day Two, a multitude of fishes, and fowl in the skies by the tens of thousands. The drift of seeds and insects.

I forget how the rest of it goes—every creeping thing working its way to the garden. I may be mixing stories now, about the lamb lying down with the lion, but you see a significant absence of predation here, in this garden that is younger even than we are; some of the islands are only 30,000 years old, while we, at 180,000 years, are like teenagers.

I wonder if we humans are as if at Day Seven, compared to the islands’ still being Day One or Two.

I don’t blame Darwin for seeing only evolution, not devolution; he did the best he could, in only a few months. He came to these islands with an idea, at the end of a long journey, and, still a young man, saw what he wanted to see, and maybe he saw too what he did not want to see. His wife was worried that what he was proposing was blasphemy, and that consequently he might not meet her in heaven. He fretted about it, tried to sit on his suspicions, until another scientist, Alfred Wallace, clued in to the same idea and made plans to publish his same hypothesis. Spurred by competition, Darwin released his idea, and the rest was history.

They say that Darwin was never quite the same: that he’d lost his faith, reasoning that a truly omnipotent God would have made only one finch, not five or six, and certainly not seven or eight. As if that God could barely make heaven and earth, and a sprinkling of inhabitants, but then, exhausted by His labors, could go no further.

Is there an evolutionary path for faith?

It seems so strange to me: to think that the Grand Designer could make or dream or nurture only one kind of bird, or tortoise, or anything, rather than making many rooms in the mansion, for as many as cared to dwell, sought to dwell, yearned—in the brief, clamant condition of life—to dwell.

I wish I could ask Darwin what he was really thinking.

The return to an earlier hour of Day One or Two—another great inundation—might be a long way off. It might be another forty or fifty years before the last of the world’s sweet ice is gone, and gardens such as the Galápagos sink back beneath the warming sea. The Galápagos—birthplace of one of the biggest ideas that ever got into our heads, treasure vault museum-place for who we are and how we think about the world, and ourselves—will hit reset in the story, will return as if to Day One, Ocean—and, in a planet gone suddenly all soft and watery, like an unboiled egg, the earth’s rotation will no longer be quite as taut. It’s possible that the variance in precession will cause us to wobble slightly, canting us one-trillionth of a degree away from the sun’s steady gaze, resulting in the great sheets of ice and hard-heartedness, misery, casting themselves over the green world, where once—once—we had bounty . . .

I’m a good worrier.

What does it mean, that we are wrecking yet another of our little gardens—maybe no more or no less important than any other garden—and yet, from a historical perspective—the unnatural history of us—maybe the most important shrine to our strange intellect and worrisome consciousness of self?

The Galápagos aren’t the only thing that will go underwater from the melting ice. And not all of the islands will be submerged. The iguanas and tortoises can climb to the highest peaks of the volcanic cones and calderas. But the islands will be smaller. Much that is still being made here will be lost. Those cute little penguins, zipping around underwater, chasing sardines—the world’s only tropical penguins—won’t like the warmer ocean currents; they’ll be at risk of baking in their own exertions, like fat little sausages. And it’s true, if we survive the new burning, the coming fire, we can study evolution—or devolution—in other places: newer places, older places, larger places, smaller places. This will just be one more loss, among so many. The doors to this museum, this cathedral, will be lost, covered over with sand and algae, moss and barnacles. But we can still tell stories about what we lost.

It’s all there, in the Good Book, is the thing. Noah’s ark—one and two of everything—came down the gangplank here, after clinging to the life rafts of driftwood. There are even poison apples in the Galápagos, brought here from the mainland in the bellies of iguanas, apples which only the tortoises can eat. Man must not bite into them.

Mr. Darwin: How did we get here, and why do we love beauty, if not to nurture in us stewardship for all the other places and beings around and beyond us?

I don’t think we earned it. I think it was given to us. What are we going to do about it?