Words&Dirt

“The language of evolution is neither mathematics nor computer-generated morphology.  Certainly it is not statistics.  Rather, natural history, ecology, genetics, and metabolism must be supplemented with accurate knowledge of microbes.  Microbial physiology, ecology, and protistology are essential to understand the evolutionary process.  The living subvisible world ultimately underlies the behavior, development, ecology, and evolution of the much larger world of which we are a part and with which we co-evolved.  While some may feel belittled by this perspective of evolution punctuated and driven forward by microbial mergers, we believe, echoing Darwin, that there is grandeur, too, in this view of life.  Numberless forms and variation come not just gradually and at random, but suddenly and forcefully, by the co-opting of strangers, the involvement and infolding of others––viral, bacterial, and eukaryotic––into ever more complex and miscegenous genomes.  The acquisition of the reproducing other, of the microbe and its genome, is no mere sideshow.  Attraction, merger, fusion, incorporation, cohabitation, recombination––both permanent and cyclical––and other forbidden couplings, are the main sources of Darwin’s missing variation.  Sensitivity, co-optation, merger, acquisition, fusion, accommodation, perseverance and other capabilities of the microbes are not at all irrelevant to the evolutionary process.  Far from it.  The incorporation and integration of ‘foreign’ genomes, bacterial and other, led to significant, useful heritable variation.  The acquiring of genomes has been central to the evolutionary processes throughout the long and circuitous history of life.”

––Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species, by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, pg. 204-5

“On his way back to Portland, Wilbur Larch reflected on the last century of medical history––when abortion was legal, when many more complex procedures than a simple abortion were routinely taught medical students: such things as utero decapitation and fetal pulverization (these in lieu of the more dangerous Caesarean section).  He mumbled those words to himself: utero decapitation, fetal pulverization.  By the time he got back to Portland, he had worked the matter out.  He was an obstetrician; he delivered babies into the world.  His colleagues called this ‘the Lord’s work.’  And he was an abortionist; he delivered mothers, too.  His colleagues called this ‘the Devil’s work,’ but it was all the Lord’s work to Wilbur Larch.  As Mrs. Maxwell had observed: ‘The true physician’s soul cannot be too broad and gentle.’

Later, when he would have occasion to doubt himself, he would force himself to remember: he had slept with someone’s mother and dressed himself in the light of her daughter’s cigar.  He could quite comfortably abstain from having sex for the rest of his life, but how could he ever condemn another person for having sex?  He would remember too, what he hadn’t done for Mrs. Eames’s daughter, and what that had cost.

He would deliver babies.  He would deliver mothers, too.”

––The Cider House Rules, by John Irving, pg. 75