We live in an indifferent universe. There is no destiny or plan, and
Nature was not created for our benefit. Yet we’re still here. Our
lineage goes back billions of years to the last common ancestor of all
life on Earth, giving us traits in common with ever single living
organism, and our ancestors have been fortunate enough to persist
through the five worst global catastrophes of all time. At so many
points in the past – whether minor in scale or as devastating as an
asteroid striking the planet – history could have turned out quite
differently, creating circumstances that would have prevented our
evolution. We’ll never know all those alternatives. All we know is what
has actually transpired.
To repeat a line from my book Written in Stone, we are creatures of time and chance. How wonderful is that? Out of all the innumerable possibilities in the history of life on Earth, a string of circumstances billions of years long transpired in such a way as to allow the origin of our species (and also accounts for the loss of all our human relatives along the way). And this unintended state of nature makes a humble bee pollinating a flower, a sunrise, the division of a cell, the jagged outline of a mountain in twilight, the petrified record of the dinosaurs, and everything else in existence all the more spectacular. (Paleontology and natural history are what I love most; we all admire different aspects of nature.) None of that was ordained to exist, and yet evolution and other ongoing natural processes have nonetheless generated phenomena which are not only beautiful, but comprehensible to us.
There is no need for the supernatural to invoke or appreciate wonder. And rather than reducing nature to equations and graphs, I truly believe that science – our ability to actually understand why bees pollinate flowers, why mountains rise, and how remnants of ancient life became locked in stone – makes the world all the more exquisite by not only giving us clues, but new questions to ask.
- Brian Switek
To repeat a line from my book Written in Stone, we are creatures of time and chance. How wonderful is that? Out of all the innumerable possibilities in the history of life on Earth, a string of circumstances billions of years long transpired in such a way as to allow the origin of our species (and also accounts for the loss of all our human relatives along the way). And this unintended state of nature makes a humble bee pollinating a flower, a sunrise, the division of a cell, the jagged outline of a mountain in twilight, the petrified record of the dinosaurs, and everything else in existence all the more spectacular. (Paleontology and natural history are what I love most; we all admire different aspects of nature.) None of that was ordained to exist, and yet evolution and other ongoing natural processes have nonetheless generated phenomena which are not only beautiful, but comprehensible to us.
There is no need for the supernatural to invoke or appreciate wonder. And rather than reducing nature to equations and graphs, I truly believe that science – our ability to actually understand why bees pollinate flowers, why mountains rise, and how remnants of ancient life became locked in stone – makes the world all the more exquisite by not only giving us clues, but new questions to ask.
- Brian Switek
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