The Great Chain of Life

10. Devolution

10. Devolution A DANGEROUS EXPERIMENT ON THE SPRING MORNING when I began writing this book I might have picked the illustrations for most of my themes within two hundred yards of my window. Just about that far away several colonies of ants were practicing their incredible agriculture, and even closer at hand a jack rabbit who had casually given birth to her young on the bare ground - was exemplifying the socially retarded mammal. A tiny lily pool was teeming with protozoa, and it is quite possible, though I did not look at the moment, that among them were some specimens of Volvox demonstrating how death and sex had been invented. Just below the surface of the ground the large green caterpillars who had grown fat the summer before on the poisonous leaves of a Sacred Datura which I had transplanted for the sake of its huge white trumpet flowers, were sleeping out the big sleep from which they would awake presently looking like somebody 172 THE G REA T C H A I N 0 F L I F E else and proving that in nature the child is not always father to the man. Because I have no lawn I had no dandelions, but my nearest neighbor, who lives not very far away across the desert, does have one. Therefore, of course, and despite all her efforts , she has dandelions too. And thereby hangs another tale. This tale is, for a change, a sinister one. Nothing looks more innocent than a dandelion, but instead of pointing back to an unimaginably remote past as Volvox does dandelions may he pointing forward to a remote possible future. And that future has its disturbing aspects. If Volvox seems to hold the promise of human beings, human traits, and even human values, the dandelion seems to threaten them all. According to those who ought to know, it is one of the "highest~~of all plants. That means, first, that its life mechanisms are among those which evolution has most recently developed ; and, second, that all these recent devices have an extraordinarily high survival value. As a race, dandelions are prospering and inheriting the earth. In fact they are terrifyingly efficient. They suggest something which life may be coming to, instead of, like Volvox, what it came from. But they have achieved their efficiency by casting aside certain of the characteristics, tendencies, and traits that embody what human beings regard as valuable and are prone to think of as "higher" than the mere efficiency of this "high" plant. When Volvox, or something more or less like it, invented sex it took a tremendous step. Biologically, sexuality proved so useful that for many millions of years it accompanied and helped make possible every biological advance. And be- DEVOLUTION 173 cause Volvox, or rather its lost co-inventor of sex, was neither definitely plant nor animal but somewhere in the family tree of plants and animals alike, it could set both plants and animals to developing along the lines sexuality made possible. The egg and the sperm are standard equipment throughout most of the vegetable as well as most of the animal world. Love was the mother of all things - or at least of all living things above the level of the very simplest. Moreover, its psychic consequences were unimaginably portentous. Without sexual love there might never have been love of any other kind. Without it we cannot imagine what either civilization or the inner life of man would have become. It was the sole cause of beauty in flowers, as well perhaps as of the most important part of what men call poetry . But love is not the mother of dandelions. And that is the first of a whole series of sinister things which can be said about them. Love was the mother of the dandelions~ ancestors. It enabled them to become what they now are. But they found that they could get along without it. They turned their backs upon the whole history of living things as it had unrolled since the first days of Volvox. They proved that Sex is not necessary. And they suggest the possibility that in some future no remoter than the past we look back upon it may disappear again - with consequences as far-reaching as those which followed its introduction. That dandelions really are sexless you would never guess from a superficial acquaintance. They bear a...