The Evolution of Jane (6 page)

"
I
am an only child," Gloria said.

Perhaps in the remote Barlow past, there had been a question of primogeniture—the three Barlows, triplet chicks, trying to grab all the food, trying to push one another out of the family circle, a circle of death, a circle of bright bird lime. The feud could have started there. That was a perfectly reasonable place for a feud to start.

"The parents continue to look after all of their chicks, but the oldest is busy appropriating all the food. The younger chicks weaken from starvation. Finally, the oldest, plump and robust, is able to shove his frail little siblings right out of the nest. He pushes them across the white line. One step across that line and the parents no longer recognize their chicks. The oldest literally pushes them out of the family circle."

The boobies were genetically programmed to fight for their food, to push their own flesh and blood out of the nest. It was a family feud of sorts, an inherited one. The Barlow family feud had been passed along conscientiously from generation to generation, too. Perhaps it was passed along with the DNA. Long ago one brother had shoved another out of the family business, out of the circle of Cuban sugar. The feud was genetic! Martha and I had inherited it!

If this theory were valid, Martha had stopped being my friend because she had to. The family feud had reached down another generation. Martha and I were never meant to be friends. Our families, our backgrounds, forbade it. Ours was a doomed friendship, right from the beginning, as doomed as that of Romeo and Juliet. As doomed as the youngest chick in a loop of white excrement.

There was a tautological aspect to this solution—the feud deciphering the feud. But fate is tautological, isn't it? And so I allowed myself the luxury of imagining the feud reaching, inexorably, through the ages, to pluck Martha from me, to put us at opposite ends of the room, the way our seventh-grade homeroom teacher did.

Martha was telling another story. That was how the natural world confronted her, as practical and complicated and beautiful as a nineteenth-century novel—the life of a yellow, smiling land iguana unfolded in all its Trollopian detail. She continued walking along the beach, pointing out birds and silver crackly plants, her manner both casual and excited, friendly in a bossy way, as if we'd dropped in on her unexpectedly and she genuinely wanted us to stay for dinner. There was something gracious and complete about Martha, the Galapagos hostess. If she had taken out a cigarette, lit it with a gold lighter, and offered us martinis, she could not have been more debonair.

The group walked behind her, everyone politely trying to edge closer, to advance in the line without seeming to, to elbow ahead without offending the competing members of the group. I was no exception. When in the Galapagos, do as the species do. In one brilliant strategic shove, I nonchalantly passed all of the Cornwalls, the multigenerational family of five who stuck together and could therefore, I reasoned, be treated as a single obstacle, thus diminishing my pushy rudeness from a factor of five to a factor of one. This maneuver put me in front of Jack Cornwall (who, even on second inspection, or was it third? was quite nice-looking), and more important, it put me directly beside Martha, from which privileged position I thought about how annoyed I was. No, not annoyed, angry. Annoyed is a mosquito.

Martha looked very much the same as she had when she was sixteen. She was thinner, her skin weathered and tanned, her hair short and bleached by the sun, but the confidence, the tart delight in her own judgment that had marked her as a worthy companion from the first moment I saw her galloping an imaginary horse across her lawn, remained as powerful as ever. It struck me as almost a crime that these attributes had been denied me all these years just because their proprietor had capriciously decided not to be my friend.

As I've said, no one sympathizes when you lose a friend unless the friend has died. I felt myself wishing Martha dead at that moment, partly as a crude and direct expression of anger, partly so that everyone would properly recognize the magnitude of my loss.

"So, Martha," I said. My voice sounded more petulant than I had anticipated. "What
is
a species, anyway?"

What
is
a species, anyway, Martha? It was a challenge, a glove across the face of her leadership and scientific expertise. Drop me and leave me, like a penny, not worth the trouble of picking up, devalued and dull? Well, then, I would ask her the hard questions. I couldn't bring myself to ask any personal hard questions, but I felt that this species problem would do nicely. It had troubled Darwin. It could trouble her.

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.

"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.