Introduction

The modern scientific enterprise is merely the latest incarnation of a two billion year legacy. Our ancestors inherited a confusing and complex world, and we tried to make sense of it using the tools at hand. Although a few will now reach for fantasies when interpreting the world around them, there is a long history of others whose search for meaning was located in what the world was rather than what they wanted it to be. Despite recent missteps, despite straying from the path that the earliest beings had established, we are their descendants, the inheritors of a long and colourful history.

This study examines the mistakes we have more recently made when we forgot the ancient lessons offered by the phenomenological world and celebrates the resiliency of our ancestors' achievement. Although some have recently forgotten the eons-long record of experimentation and the recording of results, we can congratulate the rest that they have chosen to return to the fold of scientific accomplishment.

The earliest workings of experiment and scientific thought can be credited to the protozoa. They timidly reached into their Proterozoic environment, gradually realizing in their simple way that their world was divided between cold and light, hot and dark. This was the earliest example of experimentation, and in many ways the most pure. With their sensation limited to the weakest grasp of nutrient and temperature, the protozoa were able to tie information processing to detection and make decisions on the basis of their findings. Perhaps they were arrogant about that accomplishment, for the scientific process stalled at that stage for half a billion years, protozoa using the tools at hand to decide between flagellating to the top of the water to seek the sun and nutrient or drift to the bottom to avoid the heat and starve.

Life in the Cambrian became abruptly more competitive. The tentative gestures toward the surface made by the burrowing worms was interrupted by predatory, legged proto-crabs who were more efficient in their movements and more determined in their search for food. The worms could only dive, and leave the sunlight to those more equipped to take advantage of it. Their burrowing was an experiment of desperation, but others followed and before long the oxygen rich sediments were an ecosystem in their own right. Multiple experiments were tried and data gathered, and even as the climate shifted and the Earth grew hotter with increased carbon dioxide, more active lifeforms, the ancestor to the molluscs and arthropods, Kimberella, Spriggina, Parvancorina, and Yilingia crawled and strove on the quiet beds of ancient seas.

They were better equipped to test their environment than the protozoa. The slugs could track the nutrient rich sediments which tasted the best, thus indicating its mineral signature, and the worm-like proto-crustacean needed to discern which prey could be caught with the least effort. They were constantly checking the results of their experiments, and even blind and deaf as they were, they knew the environment was testing them. A wrong step, a chance mistake of prey for a toxic stromatolitic mat, and they could die, and their species with them. They took chances, but they were careful to avoid fatality. They reached out, but not before they examined their environment and made tentative assays. They had no time for fantasy, if even their mental processes were complex enough to house the thoughts.

With the arrival of the true arthropods, half a billion years ago during the Ordovician, the slow moving prey animals either lost their birthright above the sediment, or developed shells and learned to hide in the sand and mud. A tremor in the ground meant approaching danger, and they learned quickly not to test nature's patience. The Earth had become intemperate, and sea level changes and glaciation led most of the splendid and extensive family of trilobites to extinction. Some, like the bryozoans, gave up on movement and lived in vast colonies, subject to the passing whims of predators and climatic shifts. And the echinoderms and crinoids, the star fish of the period, slowed down their experimentation into a kind of evolutionary dark ages and the corals joined them in turning away from the light.

In the long eons that preceded the Devonian, cephalopods and articulate brachiopods began to move around on the sea floor. Suffering through the extinction event at the turn of the epoch, early jawed fish began to explore the thermoclines, and out of desperation began to turn on each other. This meant some had to experiment more radically, in their search for an environment free of predators. They could have remained to fight with their fellows, but some were driven into the intertidal zone, where, following the plants who had already made the move, they experimented with breathing air. Armoured fish drove early lung fish prototypes into the mud flats, where they overstayed their welcome until they were able to crawl and walk farther inland. Myriapods, arachnids and hexapods established themselves on land, crawling into a hundred different niches, taking advantage of the nutrient bloom from the earlier immense colonization of plants from the carboniferous period.

Life on the land was initially one of opportunity. Each new explorer had a different report on what they'd seen, and with none before them, their report was believed. They endured the frigidity of the night, unprotected by the temperate water, and upon the basis of that discovery, they moved farther inland until the sea was merely a memory and a story. If any lied, claimed the arthropods who'd gone before them were friendly or who overstated the beneficence of the sun, they doomed their fellows to extinction. Lying changed nothing about the natural world, and nature has never been kind to those who mislead.

Once the fish moved onto land, their task became harder, but the plants that had gone before them grew wild and profuse. There were no competitors or toothy predators, and before long, amphibians turned to reptile and soft watery eggs to sacs and shells. Carrying the sea still in their blood, the animals colonized the land thoroughly, learning how to survive the vagaries of temperature and reaching into every niche and crevice. They crawled on a rock and tested their success, they plumbed river bottoms and assayed the nutrient load of the silty streams. By this time they had become planning animals, debating each of their moves and ensuring their future success by carefully evaluating their environment for its dangers and reproductive potential.

Although the trees and other plants were their scaffold, they were also the downfall of many, for the greening of the continents became a carbon sink, and carbon dioxide levels dropped until many of those who remained in the sea had reason to regret their timidity. As they died in the millions from an increasingly acidic ocean, those on land thrived, until the late carboniferous rainforest collapse. The arthropods, most notably the huge dragonflies and millipedes who grew large in the abundant oxygen and who had ruled the land without predators, now had to face evolutionary experiments. Amphibians and reptiles lost their interest in eating insects and fish and began to hunt the dense jungles even as the world grew dryer. The amphibians who left the water either developed a scaly skin or did not survive the new conditions, and the reptiles moved farther inland and sought their cousins for prey.

This was a time of carnage and fear, as the huge sauropods dominated the swamps, smaller dinosaur cousins crept in and ate their eggs and young, and still other titans clashed in mighty battles which would determine who would die and who would dine. In this war-torn era, decisions were made in moments, as predators debated internally whether they could win against their prey in a way that did not leave them crippled with injuries. Bluff charges likely began during this time, as animals tested one another for weaknesses and signs of fragility or cowardice and in that way ensured the survival of all.

They thrived in these deadly surroundings for millions of years, until a chance meteor wiped the sauropods and most of the theropods from the world. The Chicxulub impact caused earthquakes, tsunamis, and a global firestorm that likely killed every one of our ancestors who stood to watch. The resultant wildfires, combined with the acid rain and ocean acidification cooled the Earth for centuries, and for many years blocked the sun, thus disrupting photosynthesis and creating an impact winter. With the collapse of the food webs, and the destruction of the leafy plants by fire or lack of light, only those dinosaurs who would become the birds were able to continue. The seismic wave split the rock at the Deccan traps and volcanic plumes filled the sky and only the most alert survived the general collapse.

This was not a time for fantasy. Not a time that anyone who could not manage their world around them would survive. The era demanded attention to detail, memory of past events, and cautious experimentation. The world had changed radically and suddenly, and none could afford centuries-long evolutionary deliberation or mistakes. Only those who were the most careful, those who cautiously crept through the new reality, could survive. Animals taught their progeny where best to find food, how to watch the skies and the land for predators, and those lessons were passed through a million generations as the skies slowly cleared and the level of light and warmth returned to something like the previous normal. Any animal which did not re-evaluate what they'd learned from their environment and extrapolated that to the changed world died.

Once again burrowing saved those who were threatened with the K.T boundary extinction. The early mammals, tiny shrew-sized animals, had passed on the advantages of burrowing, and before long they were expanding into the new ecological niches opened up by the extinction event. The early Cenozoic saw a land covered with flowering plants, pollinators who had evolved to assist the plants, mammals filling hundreds of niches formerly populated by the reptiles who'd been resentfully driven into the swamps and backwaters as well as deserts of the world. The climate cooled and dried, and mammals had diversified enough to accumulate and transmit culture.

Birds, especially the corvids, teach their young, and even interact with other species. Birds dropped shells onto rocks to break them open where their beak did not suffice and used sticks to pull termites out of their hills, but in the primates the urge to explore the environment reached new heights. The orangutan was soon building nests less elaborate than those of the imitative birds, but they were making decisions on location and climate. The apes carried hammer stones and sticks for kilometres before using them to open nuts or pull insects from their homes. They passed on their skills to their young, but it was long centuries before they were able to improve on what they'd been taught, and once having improved, were able to tell others of their discoveries.

Those days of weak experimentation and fragmentary theory were soon superseded by the actions of humanity. We mastered the use of fire first, then communication, likely, and then began to tell elaborate stories about ourselves that we eventually named culture. Upright apes of the fossil record, we slouched past the bones and shells of our early ancestors who laid the groundwork we followed. We smashed stones in our clumsy hands, and lengthened our reach with a club and then a handle for an axe. The world around us was suddenly instructive, as we looked for new wonders in the passage of light and dark, the chance sharp stone in a creek which might be duplicated, and how sticks might be bent into a weapon or a shelter.

Technological feat followed invention until knowledge began to accumulate, and when even the prodigious memories of our ancestors could not collect all we knew, we took to transcribing our thoughts and ideas painfully onto the cave wall, onto bone and wood and ivory. We left a record for others to follow, and that shortly led to the great libraries of the world and still more accumulation of knowledge. As a species we could finally see beyond the amoeba dream and look at the stars, take measurements and develop mathematics, in order to describe both what lay around us and what was in our minds.

This is when we began to go astray. For the first time in two billion years, we began to turn away from the world around us. Finding it insufficient, we dreamed of realities unlinked from survival as well as the evidence offered by the world. Not content to rely on the mischance of the world around us, on the faithful ritual of seasons and life cycles, in the dearth of our understanding we began to develop elaborate narratives. We used stories to describe our place in the world and how we came to be. Without the knowledge of our dim ancestors and all the work they'd done so that we could make those proclamations, we invented gods and demons, ghosts and luck, and in other ways diverted the channel of animal experimentation for the first time. Our stories spoke to our deepest fears, and the best minds distracted their genius on distinguishing aspects of fiction, feeling, and subjective reality. Religious theorists battered their heads against the same rock that the protozoa had tested and found wanting, and only the theologian found it rich in sentiment and facile explanation.

The other animals did not, or perhaps could not, follow us down that long and fruitless path away from the light. They kept experimenting, sniffing the meat first, and then licking it, and then finally tasting a bit and seeing if it agreed with their stomachs. They still lived in the world that we had abandoned for our fantasies, and could not afford to distract their senses with fakery when they might be eaten or needed to eat.

We chose that other path for a long time, and in many ways we are still in that stage of society. Carrying the reptile within us in the hypothalamus, we are restless about dangers which no longer trouble our sleep, such as the heavy-jawed dire wolf and cave bear, and in their absence we have invented new horrors to take the place of the old. We are both the plains ape lately come to language and transcription, cowering in our fear under stories we invented recently enough to know their provenance, and the reactive reptile lurching forward at food and leaping away at danger.

In our naiveté, we thought the scientific revolution which in the west brought about the Enlightenment was a period of innovation, but it was instead intensely reactionary. We went back to an earlier way of thinking, not forward away from our animal past. We made a recent misstep into dangerous and pointless fantasies, and now we were trying to get back on the path the protozoa had laid down for us and our many millions of ancestors had trod. The new theorists were vilified and attacked, but the animal instinct to believe in reality was strong and the fantasies increasingly weak.

Struggling against the confinement of religious thought and superstition, the early empiricists of the Enlightenment discovered the component parts of the air we breathed, began to probe the geological past, and saw in the steam whirring from a closed chamber energy capable of being harnessed to work. The hot air balloon took to the air, math began to describe the movement of the planets, and we were told that we would shortly become a rational society. Advancements in medicine, physics, biology, an understanding of electricity and magnetism, chemistry and new mathematics were demanded as a way to understand a world which had suddenly become more complicated and wondrous.

There were those who wished for a return to a simpler life, when the actions of the stomach could be ascribed to demons, and when the stars kept to their place in the fixed ether, but they found themselves in conflict with others who'd armed themselves with the gifts of their animal past. The world could answer any question, if it were asked properly, and we were increasingly aware that the vague, untestable dreams of the mystics were an anomaly in the fossil record. No animal would catch itself guessing when its life was at stake, and in Enlightenment terms, no human should as well.

Our geological and biological history is a record of our growing pains, a kind of diary from this side of the millennia about those who struggled before us so that we may sleep safely, so that disease may be kept at bay, warmth cover us at night, and the mysteries of the universe that lay just beyond our feeble grasp possibly unraveled. This book is about those who are carrying on the fine tradition of experimentation and theory, and about those who struggle to get accustomed to the rapidly changing face of the plains now that the mammoths and sabre toothed tigers are gone, and we have decided to invent our own fears and succors.

Ninety-nine percent of all the biota that has ever lived has gone extinct, but their bones are not a tale of defeat. Rather they represent a story of survival, of the successes which allowed us to continue living on the planet today. Each one of our ancestors did more than eat and propagate, they also made choices-however trivial they might appear to us now-that helped us survive into the present.

Others made missteps, and although many of our inventive ancestors are no longer here to debate with us the wisdom of their gods and demons, their mistakes persist in the culture. This study is an attempt to celebrate the successes of our animal past and to bring our more recent superstitious silliness into the open where such nonsense cannot long endure the sun and the rain.

 

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