We humans are like a newborn baby left on a doorstep, with no note explaining who it is, where it came from, what hereditary cargo of attributes and disabilities it might be carrying, or who its antecedents might be. We long to see the orphan’s file.
Repeatedly, in many cultures, we invented reassuring fantasies about our parents—about how much they loved us, about how heroic and larger than life they were.3 As orphans do, we sometimes blamed ourselves for having been abandoned. It must have been our fault. We were too sinful, perhaps, or morally incorrigible. Insecure, we clung to these stories, imposing the strictest penalties on any who dared to doubt them. It was better than nothing, better than admitting our ignorance of our own origins, better than acknowledging that we had been left naked and helpless, a foundling on a doorstep.
As the infant is said to feel it is the center of its Universe, so we were once sure, not just of our central position, but that the Universe was made for us. This old, comfortable conceit, this safe view of the world has been crumbling for five centuries. The more we understood of how the world is put together, the less we needed to invoke a God or gods, and the more remote in time and causality any divine intervention had to be. The cost of coming of age is giving up the security blanket. Adolescence is a roller coaster ride.
When, beginning in 1859, our very origins, it was suggested, could be understood by a natural, unmystical process—requiring no God or gods—our aching sense of isolation became nearly complete. In the words of the anthropologist Robert Redfield, the Universe began to “lose its moral character” and became “indifferent, a system uncaring of man.”4
Moreover, without a God or gods and the attendant threat of divine punishment, will not humans be as beasts? Dostoyevsky warned that those who reject religion, however well-intentioned they may be, “will end by drenching the earth with blood.”5 Others have noted that drenching has been in progress since the dawn of civilization—and often in the name of religion.
The distasteful prospect of an indifferent Universe—or worse, a meaningless Universe—has generated fear, denial, ennui, and the sense that science is an instrument of alienation. The cold truths of our scientific age are uncongenial to many. We feel stranded and alone. We crave a purpose to give meaning to our existence. We do not want to hear that the world was not made for us. We are unimpressed with moral codes contrived by mere mortals; we want one handed down from on high. We are reluctant to acknowledge our relatives. They are strangers to us still. We feel ashamed: After imagining our Antecedent as King of the Universe, we are now asked to accept that we come from the lowest of the low—mud, and slime, and mindless beings too small to be seen with the naked eye.
Why concentrate on the past? Why upset ourselves with painful analogies between humans and beasts? Why not simply look to the future? These questions have an answer. If we do not know what we’re capable of—and not just a few celebrity saints and notorious war criminals—then we do not know what to watch out for, which human propensities to encourage, and which to guard against. Then we haven’t a clue about which proposed courses of human action are realistic, and which are impractical and dangerous sentimentality. The philosopher Mary Midgley writes,Knowing that I have a naturally bad temper does not make me lose it On the contrary, it should help me to keep it, by forcing me to distinguish my normal peevishness from moral indignation My freedom, therefore, does not seem to be particularly threatened by the admission, nor by any light cast on the meaning of my bad temper by comparison with animals
The study of the history of life, the evolutionary process, and the nature of the other beings who ride this planet with us has begun to cast a little light on those past links in the chain. We have not met our forgotten ancestors, but we begin to sense their presence in the dark. We recognize their shadows here and there. They were once as real as we are. We would not be here if not for them. Our natures and theirs are indissolubly linked despite the aeons that may separate us. The key to who we are is waiting in those shadows.
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When we began this search into our origins, using the methods and findings of science, it was almost with a sense of dread. We were afraid of what we might find. We found instead not just room but reason for hope, as we begin to explain in this book.
The real orphan’s file is long. We humans have uncovered bits and pieces, occasionally a few consecutive pages, nothing as elaborate as a complete chapter. Many of the words are blurred Most have been lost.7
Here then is one version of some of the early pages of the orphan’s file, the missing note that should have accompanied the foundling on the doorstep, something of our beginnings and the forgotten ancestors that are central to the outcome of our story. Like most family stories, it begins in the dark—so long ago and far away, in circumstances so unpromising, that no one could have guessed where it all would lead.
We are about to trace the history of life, and the path that led to us—how we got to be the way we are. It is fitting that we begin at the beginning. Or a little earlier.
Chapter 1
ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN
How long the stars
Have been fading,
Lamplight dimming …
NANSEN
(748–834, China)1
For the forming of the earth they said “Earth.” It arose suddenly, just like a cloud, like a mist, now forming, unfolding …
Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life2
Nothing lives forever, in Heaven as it is on Earth. Even the stars grow old, decay, and die. They die, and they are born. There was once a time before the Sun and Earth existed, a time before there was day or night, long, long before there was anyone to record the Beginning for those who might come after.
Nevertheless, imagine you were a witness to that time:
An immense mass of gas and dust is swiftly collapsing under its own weight, spinning ever faster, transforming itself from a turbulent, chaotic cloud into what seems to be a distinct, orderly, thin disk. Its exact center smolders a dull, cherry red. Watch from on high, above the disk, for a hundred million years and you will see the central mass grow whiter and more brilliant, until, after a couple of abortive and incomplete attempts, it bursts into radiance, a sustained thermonuclear fire. The Sun is born. Faithfully, it will shine over the next five billion years—when the matter in the disk will have evolved into beings able to reconstruct the circumstances of its origin, and theirs.
Only the innermost provinces of the disk are illuminated. Farther out, the sunlight fails to penetrate. You plunge into the recesses of the cloud to see what wonders are unfolding. You discover a million small worlds milling about the great central fire. A few thousand sizable ones here and there, most circling near the Sun but some at great distances away, are destined to find each other, merge, and become the Earth.