Posted Sunday morning, April 11, 2021.
The flowers of most common Magnolia trees are pale and without scent for an evolutionary reason. Magnolias evolved millions of years before bees and butterflies and had to rely on beetles for pollination, and beetles aren’t interested in color or scent. Magnolia tree in blossom, via Wikipedia.
Today’s Sunday sermon is by the late and lamented Oliver Sacks, physician, neurologist, writer, and, he wouldn’t have thought incidentally, atheist who, when dying of liver cancer, in terrible pain but still joyfully at work as a writer, didn’t have to resist a deathbed conversion because he didn’t feel the temptation. It strikes me that the sentence at the end of this passage, “we are made of cells, and cells go back to the beginning of life” is a biologist’s version of Carl Sagan’s “We are star stuff”...
Linus Pauling has said that he read [The Origin of the Species] when he was nine. I was not that precocious and could not have followed its “one long argument” at that age. But I had an intimation of Darwin’s vision of the world in our own garden---a garden which, on summer days, was full of flowers and bees buzzing from one flower to another. It was my mother, botanically inclined, who explained to me what the bees were doing, their legs yellow with pollen, and how they and flowers depended on each other.
While most of the flowers in the garden had rich scents and colors, we also had two magnolia trees, with huge but pale and scentless flowers. The magnolia flowers, when ripe, would be crawling with tiny insects, little beetles. Magnolias, my mother explained, was among the most ancient of flowering plants and had appeared nearly a hundred million years ago, at a time when “modern” insects like bees had not yet evolved, so they had to rely on a more ancient insect, a beetle, for pollination. Bees and butterflies, flowers with colors and scents, were not preordained, waiting in the wings---and they might never have appeared. They would develop together, in infinitesimal stages, over millions of years. The idea of a world without bees or butterflies, without scent or color, affected me with a sense of awe.
The notion of such vast eons of time---and the power of tiny, undirected changes which by their accumulation could generate new worlds, worlds of enormous richness and variety---was intoxicating. Evolutionary theory provided...a sense of deep meaning that belief in a divine plan had never achieved. The world that presented itself to us became a transparent surface, through which one could see the whole history of life. The idea that it could have worked out differently, that dinosaurs might still be roaming the earth or that human beings might never have evolved, was a dizzying one. It made life seem all the more precious and a wonderful ongoing adventure (“a glorious accident,” as Stephen Jay Gould called it)---not fixed or predetermined, but always susceptible to change and new experience.
Life on our planet is several billion years old, and we literally embody this deep history in our structures, our behaviors, our instincts, our genes. We humans retain, for example, the remnants of gill arches, much modified from our fishy ancestors and even the neural systems that once controlled gill movement. As Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” We bear, too, an even older past; we are made of cells, and cells go back to the very origin of life.
---from “Darwin and the Meaning of Plants”, one of the essays collected in “The River of Consciousness” by Oliver Sacks.
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Contingently related blogging: "THAT Carl Sagan".
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