colossus like Quetzalcoatlus could not light on trees; that would cause frequent injury or actual fracture to the wings. The largest specimen of flying bird known is a certain extinct vulture with a wingspan of nearly seven meters; doubling its size quadruples the force needed to rise into the air. The large flying reptiles could not take off by running, either, because their legs were too short and weak.
When the charge of “primitivism” as the cause of extinction was dropped, the opposite replaced it — overspecialization. The reptiles died out, supposedly, because they were too narrowly adapted to their environment; they perished because of a change in climate.
Climatic changes have indeed occurred in the history of the Earth. Everyone knows about the ice ages. The extinction of life at the junction of the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods was also preceded by a cooling; but the cooling did not lead to an ice age. What is more important, no change of climate ever caused the massive extinction of so many species of animals and plants at once. Their fossil remains suddenly vanish in the geological strata of the next period. The figures show that no animal survived whose body weight exceeded twenty kilograms. Never before had there been such a global annihilation. Many invertebrates became extinct then, on land and in the sea almost simultaneously. It was like a biblical plague: day turned into night, and the darkness lasted about two years. Not only could the Sun not be seen anywhere on the Earth’s surface, but its rays provided less illumination than does the full moon. All the large diurnal animals died out. But the small, ratlike mammals, nocturnal scavengers, survived. Out of these remnants of the great zoocide, new species arose during the Tertiary, including the one that bore the fruit of anthropogenesis. The darkness, cutting the Earth off from the Sun’s energy, destroyed most of the green vegetation, since it made photosynthesis impossible. A multitude of algae also died.
I cannot go into more detail now, but, though the mechanism and the consequences of the catastrophe were certainly more complex than is presented here, the
If evolution’s huge investment in the Thecodontia, Saurischia, Ornithischia, and in the Rhamphorhynchoidea and Pterodactyloidea had not ended in a great crash sixty-five million years ago, the mammals would not have taken over the planet. We owe our existence to that catastrophe. We emerged and multiplied into the billions only because billions of other creatures suffered annihilation. Hence the title,
VI
Where there is No One — therefore no feelings, friendly or hostile, no love or hate — there are also no intentions. The Universe, being neither a Person nor the work of any Person, cannot be accused of bias in its action: it simply is what it is and does what it does. What it does is create, again and again, by destroying. Some stars “must” explode and disintegrate so that the heavy elements formed in their nuclear cauldrons can disperse and give a start — billions of years later — to planets and, once in a while, organic life. Others, supernovas, “must” undergo catastrophic destruction in order that galactic clouds of hydrogen, compressed by the explosions, can condense into sunlike, long-lived stars that calmly and steadily warm their family of planets, who also owe their existence to these catastrophes.
But must intelligence, too, begin in lethal cataclysm?
The twenty-first century will not have a definitive answer to that question. It will continue to gather evidence and will fashion a new picture of the world: a collection of random catastrophes governed by precise laws. But it will not provide the final explanation for intelligence.
It will dispel, to be sure, many illusions that persist in science. For example, it will establish beyond any doubt that a brain of high volume is not equivalent to a brain of high intelligence, for which largeness is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. The extraordinary intelligence with which dolphins are supposedly endowed because their brains are larger and more complex than man’s, this dolphin intellect about which so much has been written in our time, will be shown to be a myth. A large brain was indeed needed if the dolphins were to compete successfully in the same ocean with the “stupid” sharks. It allowed them to enter and survive in a niche occupied for millions of years by predator fish — but nothing more.
From this it follows that no statement can be made regarding the chances of intelligence arising among the reptiles had there been no meteor.
A slow but practically constant growth in neural mass characterizes the evolution of
The crater-pocked surfaces of all the moons in our planetary system are like photographs of the past, a frozen picture of the beginning of this system, which was also created out of destruction. All the bodies orbited the young Sun in frequently intersecting paths, and collisions resulted. Thanks to these catastrophes, the large bodies — the planets — increased in mass, while the bodies of small mass, in colliding with the planets, “vanished” from the system. I said earlier that about 4.6 billion years ago the Sun and its planetary family left the stormy region of the galactic spiral and moved off into calm space. But this does not mean that the interior of the solar system was then calm. Collisions of planets with meteorites and comets were still going on when life began on Earth. Moreover, leaving the spiral arm was not like walking out of a house; radiation and stars do not suddenly cease to exist at any one point. During the first billion years of its existence, the Earth was still continually exposed to shocks, though the supernovas were distant enough not to devastate it and turn it into a dead globe. The hard radiation (X rays and gamma rays) coming from space was a factor both creative and destructive, since it accelerated the rate of mutation in the proto-organisms.
Some insects are a hundred times less vulnerable to the lethal effect of radioactivity than vertebrates. This is really very strange when you consider that the hereditary substance of all living systems is basically the same. They differ from one another in the way buildings of various cultures, epochs, and architectural styles differ; the building material — brick and stone — is the same everywhere, as is the mortar that keeps the whole together.
The difference in vulnerability to lethal radiation must have been caused by events extremely distant in time, by catastrophes in the era when the first insects (or, rather, their ancestors) came into being, about 430 million years ago. It is not impossible, however, that the “insensitivity” of certain organic forms to radiation fatal to most others developed one billion years ago.
Will the coming century witness a revival of the theory put forth by the early nineteenth-century French paleontologist and anatomist Cuvier, called catastrophism? It saw geological processes, like mountain-formation, climate changes, the rise and disappearance of seas, as violent and sudden transformations — planetary catastrophes. The theory was developed further by Cuvier’s student, d’Orbigny, in the middle of the nineteenth century; according to him, the organic world of the Earth perished and arose anew many times in successive acts of creation.
This union of catastrophism with creationism was laid to rest by Darwin’s theory, but the funeral was premature. Catastrophes on the largest scale, cosmic, are an indispensable condition not only for the evolution of stars but also for the evolution of life. It was the human mind that created the alternative of either “destruction or creation” and that has continued to impose it on the world since the dawn of our history. Man considered the mutual exclusiveness of destruction and creation as self-evident when he faced his own mortality and set it against his will to live. That opposition is the common foundation for all the hundreds of our cultures; one finds it in the most ancient myths, creation legends, and religious beliefs, and in the science that arose a few thousand years later. Faith as well as science endowed the visible world with properties that eliminated blind, incalculable chance as the author of all events. The war of good and evil present in all religions does not always end, in every faith, with
