The missing link
and Professor Gould
By Dean Jorge Bocobo
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PALEONTOLOGY, the science of ancient life, gets upper case treatment this week, because Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard University professor of Zoology and Geology, and the author of 20 popular science bestsellers, died recently. There is also the sensational discovery, reported last week, of a possible Missing Link, a six-million-year-old skull from the deserts of Chad in Central Africa, nicknamed "Toumai," or a child born in drought. (By the way, the list of collaborators in this work, announced in the prestigious scientific publication Nature, destined for wide acclaim, has two Filipino-sounding names. May it be!)
Toumai is physical evidence of a now extinct animal species, not-yet man but almost monkey, some of which became human beings, while most stayed up in the trees and evolved into chimpanzees. This makes humans and chimps blood cousins in the 200,000th degree of consanguinity (30 years per human generation, into the six million year age). So now, you have heard it first in this newspaper, the name of our far ancestor, Sahelanthropus tchadensis. She stands on a rock in the raging river of Time, where the stream of human history splits off from the rest of the animal kingdom.
I am moved by Gould's passing and the discovery of superlola Toumai, to abandon for today, the usual contemplation upon presidents, senators, terrorists, jueteng lords and other forms of strange life and negative evolution.
By looking at how many of his books are on my bookshelf, with the broken spines of frequent indulgence, I realize what a debt of gratitude I owe him. They have piquant titles, like "Bully for Brontosaurus"; "Ever Since Darwin"; "The Panda's Thumb"; "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes"; and "The Lying Stones of Marrakech." But my favorite is the great classic, "Wonderful Life," about some Ferrari-fantastic and futuristic-looking creatures, preserved in Canada's Burgess Shale formation, now mysteriously extinct.
Writers like Gould never assume that the audience is too stupid to understand the deepest scientific ideas, which they never "dumb down" or oversimplify, for the sake of a facile explanation of science's hardest work. The apparatchiks in the Department of Education would have detested him.
But we owe the tribe of paleontologists big time, for the gift of the true story of life on earth, in deepest time. That story is worth telling now, as a tribute to the passing of a great exponent in the art of explanation. Here is the gist of how paleontologists see the history of the world, their creation myth, based on a study of the stones and bones of the geologic and fossil records.
The earth formed from solar debris about 4,500 million years ago. When God created life, He seems to have done so here on earth, about 3,000 million years ago. Adam and Eve were archaeo-bacteria living in hot volcanic vents deep below the earth and oceans. Up to 95 percent of the biomass on earth may be still composed of such simple creatures.
Over the next two billion years, these single-celled creatures discovered the possibilities of cooperation and federalism. Thus was born sex, multi-cell organisms, virus barangay, republics of germs, animal bodies, and an explosion of global life forms about 1,000 million years ago. Now the textbook sequence of what happened during these last billion years, (algae, trilobites, dinosaurs, mastodons, monkeys, man), paints a direct line to our own species, and then stops. But notice that the half-man, half-chimp Toumai is only six million years old. What happened during those 994 million years before Toumai and after the Age of Bacteria?
What happened is mystifying and fascinating. Up to 99 percent of all species ever to register their presence in the fossil record, are now extinct. But they do not just die off in a gradual way in a struggle for survival of the fittest. No! There are these unexplained spikes of mass extinction every 25 million years or so, in which almost all the species of life on earth, seem to be extinguished in sudden, but periodic flashes of annihilation.
The famous end of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, was only one in a series of at least 20 mass extinction events, spaced out in 25 million-year intervals in the fossil record of the last 500 million years. In each, something insignificant survives to inherit the earth. This fits well with Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium" in evolution, a controversial theory that new species rapidly develop when some cataclysmic event occurs and clears out the ecosystem, apart from natural selection by fitness. Man may be just such an accidental beneficiary of cosmic tragedy.
There have already been two other events of mass extinction since a 6-mile wide asteroid landed 200 miles off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and wiped out all of dinosauria plus thousands of other species, at the end of the Jurassic. The last was about 12 million years ago, the next in about 13 million years. Six million years ago, Toumai and the hominids arose. Two million years ago, the first glimmer of Homo sapiens in the Olduvai Gorge. Two thousand years ago, Christ, and Mohammed soon after. Four years ago, Erap, then Osama bin Laden. Oh well. Shiva the Destroyer, may be arriving 13 million years early, aboard soccer-field sized meteors, or the buses on Edsa.
Before God thought to invent man, He spent nearly one billion years creating and destroying several million species of life forms, designing, making and slaughtering untold zillions of individual creatures, soulless flesh-and-blood beings, bringing them to life for eons, then utterly erasing them. Fossils are the white chalk marks on the blackboard of the Great Artificer. So, was He just practicing to make us?
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