original contributions can still be made by people with no education whatever. You’ll call me Cooksey, by the way, except if we’re ever on a campus where I’m actually professing.”
He led her over to his desk, now uncluttered, and sat her down in the leather chair he used for reading. He sat behind his desk.
“Now, what do you know about evolution?” he asked.
She thought; a scene from a movie crossed her mind. She said, “Monkeys turned into people?”
“Just so, very good. But a great deal happened before that. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. We have that part down, or at least the scientific version of it, and now after billions of years we observe millions of different sorts of creatures, plant and animal and neither, and how did they all come about is the question, and we think that the answer is that they changed over time. They started out simple and evolved, they changed form. Now look at the two of us. We eat steak, potatoes, and beans, let us say, or tofu, potatoes, and beans as long as we live here, but we remain Nigel and Jennifer: we don’t become cows or vegetables or tofu. We take things in, air and water and food, and things come out of us, but we remain identifiable bodies. Why is that?”
Jennifer didn’t know and said so. In fact, the question had never vexed her mind.
“I’ll tell you, then,” he said. “The cells of our body contain a chemical code that causes our bodies to make us and nothing else, out of food and water and air. And we reproduce, don’t we? But, of course, not exactly. Nigel and Jennifer, let us say, have a baby, but the baby is neither Nigel nor Jennifer. Reproduction is a shake of the dice, not even considering the little changes that creep in from errors of various sorts during reproduction. Most errors are bad for baby, but some few are good. The baby might be even more beautiful than Nigel, even more brilliant than Jennifer.”
A small blush covered Jennifer’s cheeks at this. He didn’t seem to notice but went on. “Now, it’s a fact of nature that there is never enough to go around. Every creature needs a place to live and the means of life, food, and so on, and these are always in short supply; so what may we expect, given any population of creatures?”
It was not a rhetorical question. Jennifer realized he was waiting for her answer, and that a shrug and an “I don’t know” were not adequate. It was a kind of game he was playing, in which he really believed that answers would somehow spring into her mind if she thought about them. It was a little frightening, but exciting, too. She reached into what she had always thought was an empty bag and to her surprise came up with “Some of them die? Because I was in this home once, and they were real poor, and the mom, Mrs. McGrath, liked one of the kids the best and fed her the most food, and the others didn’t get hardly anything. The state closed her down, though.”
“Very good. Mrs. McGrath was practicing artificial selection. Charles Darwin made a similar observation, and that’s how he came to invent the whole idea. But in nature there’s no state to close her down. So we have both a struggle for existence and small variations among creatures from the same parent, and what follows?”
A shorter pause this time. Jennifer thought about foster-care families, and horrible low-end day care centers, and nasty fights over bits of food. “Some will do okay and some won’t, so that after a while there’ll be more of the better ones.”
“Because…?”
“They’ll have more babies, and the babies will be like them. How they changed.”
“Very good. A near perfect statement of the theory of evolution by natural selection. But as they say, God is in the details. Or the devil. It’s all very well to think great thoughts about the origin of all things, but let’s see if we can figure out how tiny pieces of it actually evolve, a test, as it were, of the theory. Here we are fortunate in the fig wasp and the fig. You recall what I told you about the life of the Agaoniids? It was the day you found Moie in the Gardens.”
“No,” she said.
“Really? I thought I was being perfectly lucid.”
She had to look away. “I kind of tuned all that out. I’m sorry.”
After a moment, he said brightly, “Well, never mind. I’m sure you’ll absorb it, by and by. For the moment we have to get you keying out specimens. That means telling one tiny bug from another one that looks almost the same. She might even be the same to the eye but have important differences in her genes. You see, in these little wasps we have the opportunity-the privilege, I should say-of observing the generation of new species. Their mode of life is so tightly constrained, the evolutionary niche, as we call it, is so small, that evolution itself is, one might say, squirted out so that we can observe it in a short human life span. Are you game?”
Jennifer nodded. “Uh-huh.” He smiled, showing his yellow teeth. “Splendid! If you’ll step over here…” He left his desk and went to a long wooden table on the other side of the room, where stood a binocular teaching microscope with two sets of eyepieces, along with racks and racks of shallow specimen drawers. From a shelf he reached down a plastic-covered chart, dull with age and use, and set it up before her. They sat on lab stools. “Today we have naming of parts. ‘Japonica glistens like coral in all the neighboring gardens, and today we have naming of parts.’”
“Say what?”
“A poem, but never mind that. I meant that you have to learn the parts of the bug before you can use the keys. Now, this long thing is the antenna. The tip is called the radicle. Say it!”
She did.
“Next the pedicle. Say ‘pedicle’! Good. Next the annelli.”
And so on, she repeating the meaningless words as he proceeded from the antenna to the head itself, the wings, with their diagnostic patterns of veins, to the thorax, the legs and the gaster, ending with the long ovipositor, all the little shields, knobs, and spikes with which taxonomists classify the insect world. This took half an hour. Then Cooksey pointed with the tip of his pencil to the tip of the model’s antenna. “What is this, please?” he asked.
She didn’t know. The pencil twitched down the hair-thin appendage. Blank. Blank again.
“I can’t do it!” she wailed.
“Nonsense! Of course you can. You’re resisting because you associate learning with pain. You must relax and let the names flow into you. We are made for memory, my dear, and there is a fruitful plain in your head that just needs some water and some seed.”
“I’m too stupid.” She was about to break down sobbing, and she bit her lip hard to stop it.
“No, you’re not. If you were stupid you’d be dead, or a drug addict, or a prostitute, or have three children. Think about it!”
Jennifer did, and it was true. She had thought it was just dumb luck. Something popped in her head, like snorting a long, long line of cocaine. The world looked different, and she knew that, unlike a drug rush, it was a difference from which she would not come down.
“In any case,” Cooksey continued, “some of the stupidest people I know are invertebrate systematists with international reputations. Now, from the beginning. This is the radicle. Say…”
“Radicle,” she said. “Radicle.”
On the evening after Paz brought Amelia to theile, he and Lola had fought a major fight, and Paz hoped that it had been the main battle and not a mere carpet-bombing prelude to further assaults. Although it was a family principle to settle such things before retiring for the night, Lola had fled the field and locked herself in the bedroom she used as an office, whence he could hear the sound of weeping, of cursing, of small missiles being flung. An overreaction, he thought, and said so through the door, but received no intelligible response. This in itself was unusual and worrying. Lola was not one to avoid discussion about emotional states; to the contrary, she doted upon them, long explorations into their separate and conjoined-in-marriage psyches until sometimes Paz felt like a specimen on a slide. He bore up, however, this being a part of his beloved, and thought himself a better husband for it.
Maybe that was part of the problem, he mused as he sat in the early-morning garden with a cup of Cuban coffee in his hand: maybe he had been a little too accommodating. He considered the house itself, their home. Her house originally, a typical Florida ranch house in South Miami, made of white-painted stuccoed concrete block with a gray tile roof and aqua-blue-painted steel hurricane awnings. Charmless as architecture, it was, however, old
