Ultrablamtacular!

So, it’s Charles Darwin’s birthday. Happy b-day, Chuck, and thanks for everything. Last July, my wife and son and I were in London, and we had tea in the snack bar of the Natural History Museum, where a statue of him stands. This Fall, we discovered (in Bill Bryson’s excellent book, A Short History of Nearly Everything) that the statue was there as an insult from a rival naturalist involved in the museum’s inception.

I remember when my parents explained evolution to me when I was a kid. I remember boggling at the idea, going up the forested hill from my house (we lived in the Manzano Mountains, east of Albuquerque) to sit on a rock that I had found fossils in before to think about how long it took for animals to become fossils and for single-celled organisms to become human beings. To think about how those fossils meant that the mountain I was sitting one was once seafloor. I got a sense of how vast the history of the world must be and how inexpressibly small my part in it was.

I work with people who don’t believe in evolution. And I wonder if it’s egoism – if they just never could get over the idea of their own minuteness, of the minuteness of humankind.