The end?

Before Sunday passes, a brief overview of the rest of the essays in the The Immense Journey.

The Slit

"Through how many dimensions and how many media will life have to pass? Down how many roads among the stars must man propel himself in search of the final secret? The journey is difficult, immense, at times impossible, yet that will not deter some of us from attempting it. We cannot know all that has happened in the past, or the reason for all of these events, any more than we can with surety discern what lies ahead. We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know."

The Flow of the River

"If there is magic on this planet it is contained in water. (...) As for men, those myriad little detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life, what were they but a way that water has of going about beyond the reach of rivers? I, too, was a microcosm of pouring rivulets and floating driftwood gnawed by the mysterious animalcules of my own creation." 

The Great Deeps

"All of the tremendous differences between living forms have been achieved only by the elaboration of devices for the maintenance of that inner nourishing liquidity in which cells can live and grow within a certain narrow range of tolerance. Nor for nothing has the composition of mammalian blood led to our description as 'walking sacks of sea water.' Nor for nothing did the great French physiologist Bernard comment that 'the stability of the interior environment is the condition of free life.'"

The Snout

"The day of the Snout was over three hundred million years ago. Not long since I read a book in which a prominent scientist spoke cheerfully of some ten billion years of future time remaining to us. He pointed out happily the things that man might do throughout that period. Fish in the sea, I thought, birds in the air. The climb all far behind us, the species fixed and sure. There is something wrong with our worldview. It is still Ptolemaic, though the sun is no longer believed to revolve around the earth. We teach the past, we see farther backward into time than any race before us, but we stop at the present, or, at best, we project far into the future idealized versions of ourselves. We see through human eyes alone. We see ourselves as the culmination and the end, and if we do indeed consider our passing, we think that sunlight will go with us and the earth be dark. We are the end. For us continents rose and feel, for us the waters and the air were mastered, for us the great living web has pulsated and gown more intricate. (...) Perhaps the old road through the marsh should tell us. We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time." 

How Flowers Changed the World

"Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable. (...) The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world and made it ours."

Man of the Future

"We men of today are insatiably curious about ourselves and desperately in need of reassurance. Beneath our boisterous self-confidence is fear– a growing fear of the future we are in the process of creating." 

Little Men and Flying Saucers

"Darwin saw clearly that the succession of life on this planet was not a formal pattern imposed from without, or moving moving exclusively in one direction. Whatever else life might be, it was adjustable and not fixed. It worked its way through difficult environments. It modified and then, if necessary, it modified again, along roads which would never be retraced. Every creature alive is the product of a unique history. The statistical probability of its precise reduplication on another planet is so small to be meaningless. Life, even cellular life, may exist out yonder in the dark. But high or low in nature, it will not wear the shape of man. That shape is the evolutionary product of a strange, long wandering through the attics of the forrest roof, and so great are the chances of failure, that nothing precisely and identically human is likely ever to come that way again. (...) In the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever."

The Bird and the Machine

"This is the great age, make no mistake about it; the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with the atom bomb, and the brain they say now is just another type of more complicated feedback system. The engineers have its basic principles worked out; it's mechanical, you know; nothing to get superstitious about; and man can always improve on nature once he gets the idea. (...) On the other hand the machine does not bleed, ache, hang for hours in the empty sky in a torment of hope to learn the fate of another machine, nor does it cry out with joy nor dance in the air with the fierce passion of a bird."

All quotes taken from The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley, a Vintage Book edition, 1959.

The hoax, man's lonely and supreme ascent, and the brain

This month seems to have fled past me. Yet before March closes, and feeling April is upon us, I want to speak a little more about Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey. Today, Friday 29th of March, I bring somewhat and briefly into focus 3 essays from the book.
1. The Real Secret of Piltdown
2. The Maze
3. The Dream Animal
These essays caught my attention because each of them deals with lingering scientific issues and pertinent inquiries. All three of the essays are related to one another, specifically in the manner in which they deal with man's lonely and supreme ascent.

Starting with the first one on the list, "The Real Secret of Piltdown" discusses the Piltdown Hoax (the greatest hoax in the history of science). This hoax, subsequently provides the thesis question of the essay, how did man get his brain? Through the arguments of Charles Darwin and his fellow contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace, Eiseley expands the matter on the development of the human brain, which is explored through it's variants. A.R. Wallace, a scientist, proponent of natural selection and evolution "challenged the whole Darwinian position on man by insisting that artistic, mathematical, and musical abilities could not be explained on the basis of natural selection and the struggle for existence." This is the challenge that is met head on between Darwin,Wallace and also Eiseley in this essay, keeping the focus on the central point: how, why, when, where is the development of the brain. Add to Loren Eiseley's exploration within the arguments, scientific discoveries and the advancements at the disposal of current scientific inquiries, it suffices to say that the same author adds"today we can make a partial answer to Wallace's question. Since the exposure of the Piltdown hoax all of the evidence at out command– and it is considerable– points to man, in his present form, as being one of the youngest and newest of all earth's swarming inhabitants."

"Man of today, the atomic manipulator, the  aeronaut who flies faster than sound, has precisely the same brain and body as his ancestors of twenty thousand years ago who painted the last Ice Age mammoths on the walls of caves in France."

The next gleam of reason following Eiseley's argument, is the sensible conclusion that "it is man's ideas that have evolved and changed the world about him." From this statement the human being is proved to be a creature dependent on society, unable to develop alone.

"Creature of dream, he has created an invisible world of ideas, beliefs, habits, and customs which buttress him about and replace for him the precise instincts of the lower creatures. (...) The profound shock of the leap from animal to human status is echoing still in the depths of our subconscious minds. It is a transition which would seem to have demanded considerable rapidity of adjustment in order for human beings to have survived, and it also involved the growth of prolonged bonds of affection in the sub-human family, because otherwise its naked, helpless offspring would have perished. (...) Man's competition, it would thus appear, may have been much less with his own kind than with the dire necessity of building about him a world of ideas to replace his lost animal environment.

I am sure it can be derived from the previous paragraphs briefly covering "The Secret of Piltdown", a denotation that these three essays are dense and layered with information. The following two essays are no exception.

Source: http://library.thinkquest.org/29178/media/treeolif.jpg

"The Maze" covers the controversy piqued within the scientific community which followed the publishing of the previous Piltdown essay. It leads to present before the reader the Oreopithecus (the enigma), and his usage for providing the missing link previously deviated by the Piltdown hoax. From here stemmed two divergent schools concerning the search for the the crucial puzzle piece that will unite the tree of life, "the school of the little-man and that of the ape-man." In the end, the Oreopithecus is proven not to lead towards the missing puzzle piece. In the least, it is far less likely for the Oreopithecus to be the evidence that has long been searched for.

"The Dream Animal" picks up the recurrent exploration of "the mystery which enshrouds the rise of the human brain." Loren Eiseley uses   Progeria, premature aging, a curious and relatively unknown disease, to reveal how it is an indication of an internal clock "capable of running fast or slow, shortening life or extending it and, like the more visible portions of our anatomy, being subjected to evolutionary selection." This clock has paved the path for the growth of rare, particular and specialized organs. Included within the bracket of these organs is the human brain. This organ grows with greater rapidity than our nearest living relative, the great apes.

"When we are born, our brain size is about 330 cubic centimeters, only slightly larger than that of a gorilla baby. This is why human and anthropoid young look so appealingly similar in their earliest infancy. A little later, an amazing development takes place in the human offspring. In the first year of life its brain trebles in size. It is this peculiar leap, unlike anything else we know in the animal world, which gives man his uniquely human qualities. When the leap fails, as in those rare instances where the brain does not grow, microcephaly, "pinheadedness", is the result, and the child is then an idiot."

The essay proceeds to place in perspective the minute's clock of what is known of human evolution in comparison to the Astronomical clock, which spans a much, much longer millennia. Will we find the key to our human brain clock?

"For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the chill waters, that he had before him an immense journey. Perhaps that same foreboding still troubles the hearts of those who walk out of a crowded room and stare with relief into the abyss of space so long as there is a star to be seen twinkling across those miles of emptiness."

Personally, all three essays offer great insight and information to be pondered. They both dually echo the previous essay spoken of a week or so back, The Secret of Life, as well as answer many lingering questions concerning our human journey. Aside from the density of information in the essays, I want to transmit the enlightenment they provide, the benefit enjoyed while reading them, the delight, the sensible, the educational element found while reading line after line of Eiseley's words.

I know I've filled this article more than usual but I hope I have conveyed wonder, and that you, reader, are infected and propelled to read Loren Eiseley, he is definitely worth the time.

"one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind"

The Secret of Life and its' multitudinous alleyways. This last article in The Immense Journey deals with the search for the secret, the key that would unlock the enigma. Within the pages the essay develops is the longing to discover the unanswered questions and the dead ends reached in the trajectory, yet towards the end there gleams a tiny speck of hope for the journey. This search is not merely concerning our origins but the tiny components that make up the earth, ourselves and organic beings around us, spanning eons back into the birth of this planet earth.

"...the wonderful correlation of parts, the perfect adaptiation to purpose, the individually vanished and yet persisting pattern..."

"It seemed clear that life was a material manifestation. Somewhere, somehow, sometime, in the mysterious chemisty of carbon, the long march toward the talking animal had begun."

Honestly, aside from the faulty dead ends described in the article, the misconceptions of having found the key by respected scientists, and the sensationalization of the search by the media, the article circles around the same theme: the search for the key to the secret of life and Loren Eiseley's own attitude and actions towards the search.

 "Nevertheless, as the years passed, the secret remained locked in its living jelly, in spite of larger microscopes and more formidable means of dissection."

One aspect I found interesting is the mention of the media, and how it disproportions the work of scientists and confounds the public. It is sadly comical that the same problems faced today in biology, archaeology, anthropology, physics, and scientific endeavors were being faced early on. Explicitly, media interpretation and the sensationalization of discoveries and scientific endeavors. I have no doubt in my mind that a great percentage of the world population has misconceptions concerning how evolution works, and what has been discovered concerning the evolution of this rock, the human species along with the other species.
This problem is related to the formation of kids in society, much like Michio Kaku and Neil Degrasse Tyson and others vociferate. Like this video:


I will end with some quotes from Loren Eiseley's essay.

"I am sure now that life is not what it is purported to be and that nature, in the canny words of a Scotch theologue, 'is not as natural as it looks.' (...) If the day comes when the slime of the laboratory for the first time crawls under man's direction, we shall have great need of humbleness."

*All quotes are from Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey, Vintage Books 1959 edition. Title quote by Thomas Hardy, which is included in the end of Eiseley's essay.