A Brief History of Creation (2 page)

The Lost City.

There remained one gaping hole in Russell's theory. Nothing like the environment he was suggesting had ever been found. But all that changed with the discovery of the Lost City.

 

I
N
2009
, the prestigious British science journal
Nature
ran a profile of Mike Russell. It was accompanied by a mock painting of him dressed in the dark robes and black beret of a Renaissance scientist. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the faux painting was Russell's smile. It had a certain
Mona Lisa
–like quality to it, serene and all-knowing, as if he alone held the answer to some great secret.

In less than a decade, the discovery of the Lost City had transformed a man who once sat on the peripheries of origin-of-life research into someone who could be depicted as a modern-day Copernicus in the pages of one of the world's most prestigious science journals. The interesting thing about Russell's newfound celebrity was that so many others had donned the same mantle in the past. The long saga of humanity's quest to solve the riddle of the origin of life is filled with scientists who thought they were on the brink of solving the great mystery, only to see their discoveries and contributions washed away by the acid test of scientific scrutiny. At one time or another, any one of them could easily have taken Russell's place in the
Nature
portrait.

There is something about the question of how life began that sets it apart from just about every other question science has ever tried to answer. It is not like asking how mountains form or what causes water to turn into steam. The question strikes at something deep in the very heart of human existence and at the meaning that may or may not lie behind that existence. It springs from that same intangible yearning that leads human beings to conceive of an all-powerful creator, touching upon not only how we came to be, but
why
we came to be. It is, in a sense, the ultimate question.

It takes a certain kind of iconoclast to grapple with such a question—an individual possessed of a boldness that sometimes borders on hubris. The ranks of these individuals are filled with the some of the most brilliant minds in the long history of science. Their lives have been filled with great moments of triumph and tragedy.

Their stories also teach us something about science itself. No other scientific question has ever provoked such controversy, nor has any so often
stripped science of its veneer of objectivity. As much as we may wish and believe science to be the pure pursuit of truth unencumbered by human prejudice, it exists and has always existed in a world of human beings, with all of their failings and self-deceptions.

This is the story of the appearance of life on Earth. But just as important, it is the story of the evolution of how
we
see the appearance of life on Earth. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is tempting to see it as a story with a clear trajectory. First there is darkness and ignorance. Gradually, this gives way to illumination and knowledge, marching onward in a straight line through Darwin's revelations of the workings of evolution, through the deciphering of the genetic code, and all the way to the unraveling of the cell's inner workings. Yet along that path, there were countless twists and turns. Ideas long discredited have found redemption; science thought incontrovertible has been disproved. More such twists will no doubt occur, for the mystery has not yet been solved. We still don't know how life began. No one was there to witness the event, and almost all of the geological record of that period has long since been erased by billions of years of constant geological change.

What we do know is that by at least three and a half billion years ago, a single-celled living organism appeared on a sterile Earth. We don't know for sure how it got there, but we can infer that it emerged from nonliving matter. An educated human being in the eighteenth century might have laughed at such a notion. Yet a person living in ancient Rome or ancient China or nearly anywhere else in the ancient world would have held beliefs not so strikingly different, at their core, from what we basically believe today. A scientist in the twenty-first century would call the emergence of life from nonlife abiogenesis. A literate Greek around the time of Christ would have called it spontaneous generation. But both understandings are, at root, quite similar. As much as it might surprise us today, throughout most of human history people didn't think that the sudden appearance of life from nonlife was all that miraculous.

A BRIEF
HISTORY OF
CREATION

BY THE ACTION OF YOUR SUN

I am above the forest region, amongst grand rocks & such a torrent as you see in Salvator Rosa's paintings vegetation all a scrub of rhodos. with Pines below me as thick & bad to get through as our Fuegian Fagi on the hill tops, & except the towering peaks of P. S. [perpetual snow] that, here shoot up on all hands there is little difference in the mt scenery—here however the blaze of Rhod. flowers and various colored jungle proclaims a differently constituted region in a naturalist's eye & twenty species here, to one there, always are asking me the vexed question, where do we come from?

—JOSEPH HOOKER,
Letter to Charles Darwin, June 24, 1849

 

N
O ONE KNEW
where the river began. Its source was thought to be somewhere far to the south, beyond the distant land the ancient Egyptians called Nubia. By the time it reached Egypt, the river grew at points to more than 4 miles wide, cutting through the rocky lands that bordered the southern edge of the kingdom and forming a deep canyon some 650 miles long. Then the river hit the great Sahara desert, winding through it like a life-giving road that split the endless sands in two before settling, finally, in the Mediterranean Sea.

The Egyptians didn't have a name for the Nile. There was no need. The river was life, and all life centered on the river. They called it, simply,
iteru
, “the great river.” Their country they called
Kemet
, “dark land.” It was the same word they used for the abundant black soil that collected on the river's banks, deposited there by a massive annual flood. Every year around
July,
iteru
would rise, flooding the plains. Two weeks later, it would recede, leaving behind the nutrient-rich
kemet
. The size of the flood would foretell a year of abundance or famine, life or death.

And every year, as if by clockwork with the rising of the Nile, the frogs would come—thousands upon thousands of them. They were the same frogs that would inspire the story of the ten plagues of Exodus. Just as the Egyptians wondered about the source of the great river, they wondered about the frogs. As far as they could tell, the frogs didn't come from eggs as did the ibises so commonly seen nesting in the tall reeds along the river. Nor did they emerge from the womb of a mother like the water buffalo that grazed on the river's edge. In the eyes of the Egyptians, the frogs simply arose from the waters, a gift of the frog-headed fertility goddess Heket, who was said to swim the Nile during its rising.

There was nothing particularly unusual about the way the ancient Egyptians viewed the frogs of the Nile. Some creatures sprang from a mother's womb. Some hatched from eggs. Some living things just appeared, naturally, from things that were not alive. As far as human beings could
tell, those creatures simply emerged from wood or from old grain, from water or from dust. They could see this phenomenon happening all around them. Insects appeared to spring from fallen trees. Mice appeared in grain. Frogs simply emerged from freshwater.

Ancient Egyptians confront the plague of frogs.

For the ancient Egyptians, the emergence of life from nonlife was no more wondrous than a chick's emergence from an egg. That same belief in a commonplace relationship between life and nonlife shaped the way humans thought about the emergence of the first of things, whether the first chicken, the first owl, or, most important, the first human being. People found the explanation all around them, in all the eggless and parentless creatures they saw in their world.

The creation stories of most religions are remarkably similar in this regard. In the beginning, there is nothing, or at least something close to nothing. For the Hindus, it was an unknowable chaos; for the Chinese, a formless Dao. The Egyptians believed, understandably, that the universe began with only a mass of water, called Nu, which was surrounded by darkness. These formless beginnings are typically followed by a divine process of creation, culminating in the appearance of human beings, often from a natural substance that makes some cultural sense. In Egypt, the original god, Atum, spawned the rest of the gods by masturbating, or, in some versions, making love to his shadow, which earned him the title “the great He-She.” Finally, from the god Ra's tears, human beings emerged—in other words, from water, just like the frogs. For the Norse, the first humans were forged from ice. The Mayans believed human beings emerged from wet clay, as did the ancient Assyrians. In the book of Genesis, “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground.” All of these accounts must have seemed reasonable to their creators. If a frog could simply be brought to life from something like water, why couldn't a human being?

It would be wrong to see these creation myths as merely stories. They reflected the laws of nature as observed by the peoples who adopted them. There is a reason the Norse saw importance in ice, while the desert-dwelling Egyptians centered their story on water. The problem with these accounts
is that they were an end unto themselves. They were unchallengeable. As knowledge of the world grew, such answers could not change.

But there was another way of approaching the question, another way of approaching all questions. This method did not seek to produce an answer, but to produce a conjecture, a hypothesis. This was not truth, but a seed of truth that would, subjected to scrutiny and critical thinking, bloom into a better understanding of the questions that humankind sought to answer. It assumed no role for a divine creator and was based solely on careful observation and deduction. Eventually, experimentation would be added to that list, but this was very early in the history of what we would now call science.

I
N THE SIXTH CENTURY BC
, about two hundred years after the
Iliad
was composed by the blind poet Homer, the earth shook along the Taygetos mountain range that rimmed the Greek city of Sparta. It was an earthquake so massive that, according to the Roman historian Cicero, one peak was “torn away like the stern of a ship in a storm,” crushing the city below and leaving it in ruins. The Spartans themselves, however, were not harmed. In Cicero's account, they had spent the night in the fields of the valley below after being warned by a philosopher who had come from the Anatolian city of Miletus. His name was Anaximander.

The story of Anaximander saving Sparta is almost certainly just a legend. A different account places Anaximander in Sparta setting up a gnomon, a metal rod that served as an early sundial, and makes no mention of the earthquake.
^*
To most ancient Greeks, both stories would have been equally credible. For them, the leap from keeping time to predicting an earthquake wasn't such a huge one. Both must have seemed like magic, just as reading and writing would seem like magic to peoples that didn't possess the technology.

Anaximander was born at an auspicious time in an auspicious place. By the year of his birth in 611 BC, the Greek city of Miletus had become, for a brief spell, one of the greatest city-states in one of the world's greatest empires. Miletus was ideally situated for trade, located on the coast of the southwest corner of the Anatolian peninsula in modern-day Turkey, and near the mouth of the river Maeander, with so many twists and turns that it spawned the word “meander.” The Miletians were sailors of considerable renown, and the city's harbor on the Aegean Sea was always full of trading ships picking up wine and olive oil extracted from the fertile groves that dotted the countryside, or delivering shipments of a Phoenician sea snail called murex. From the murex, the Greeks extracted a valuable purple dye worth its weight in silver. As many as 12,000 snails could be used to produce a single garment. Murex-dyed cloth became associated with wealth, and the color purple became synonymous with royalty. The wealth of Miletus was legendary. The Greek historian Herodotus dubbed the city “the Jewel of Ionia.”