Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan Read Free Book Online

been reunited
* Although not in consequence of some policy of conscious altruism Any individual that goes along with the stromatolitic arrangement is much more likely to find itself safely on the inside rather than perilously on the outside A communal policy benefits most constituent cells—not entirely risk-free, since those on the outside will be fried, but as if a cost-benefit analysis had been performed for the average cell

Chapter 3
     

“WHAT MAKEST THOU?”
     

Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou?
    Isaiah 45:9
     

T he world and everything in it was made for us, as we were made for God:
    For the last few thousand years, and especially since the end of the Middle Ages, this proud, self-confident assertion was increasingly common belief, held by Emperor and slave, Pope and parish priest. The Earth was a lavishly decorated stage set, designed by an ingenious if inscrutable Director, who had managed to round up, from only He knew where, a multitudinous supporting cast of toucans and mealy bugs, eels, voles, elms, yaks, and much, much more. He placed them all before us, in their opening night costumes. They were ours to do with as we pleased: drag our burdens, pull our plows, guard our homes, produce milk for our babies, offer up their flesh for our dinner tables, and provide useful instruction—bumblebees, for example, on the virtues not just of hard work, but of hereditary monarchy. Why He thought we needed hundreds of distinct species of ticks and roaches, when one or two would have been more than sufficient, why there are more species of beetles than any other kind of being on Earth, no one could say. No matter; the composite effect of life’s extravagant diversity could only be understood by postulating a Maker, not all of whose reasons we could grasp, who had created the stage, the scenery, and the subsidiary players for our benefit. For thousands of years, virtually everyone, theologian and scientist alike, found this, both emotionally and intellectually, a satisfying account.
    The man who wrecked this consensus did so with the utmost reluctance. He was no ideologue bent on kicking in the door of the Establishment, no firebrand. If not for a bit of happenstance he would probably have passed his days as a well-liked Church of England parson in a nineteenth-century rural, picture-postcard village. Instead he ignited a firestorm 1 that destroyed more of the old order than any violent political upheaval ever had. Through the astonishingly powerful method of science, this gentleman who was known to find livelyconversation too taxing, somehow became the revolutionary’s revolutionary. For more than a century, the mere mention of his name has been sufficient to unsettle the pious and rouse the bookburners from their fitful slumbers.
    ——
     
    Charles Darwin was born at Shrewsbury, England, on February 12, 1809, the fifth child of Robert Waring Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood. The Darwin and Wedgwood families were allied through the close friendship of their patriarchs, Erasmus Darwin, the noted author, physician, and inventor, and Josiah Wedgwood, who had risen from poverty to found the Wedgwood pottery dynasty. These two men shared radically progressive views, even going so far as to side with the rebellious colonies in the American Revolution. “He who allows oppression,” Erasmus wrote, “shares the crime.” 2
    Their club was called The Lunar Society, because it met only during the full moon when the late-night ride home would be well-lit and therefore less dangerous. Among its members were William Small, who had taught Thomas Jefferson science (at the College of William and Mary in Virginia and whom Jefferson singled out as having “probably fixed the destinies” of his life); James Watt, whose steam engines powered the British Empire; the chemist Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen; and an expert on electricity named Benjamin Franklin.
    The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge