A face in the public domain
Unless you're a fish, the nerve that controls the muscles in your larynx and allows you to go on breathing without choking when you eat travels a roundabout route from your brain to down under your heart before heading up again into your throat. Why doesn't the nerve go straight from brain to throat as it does in a flounder or a guppy? Because fish have no necks. When necks evolved, evolution didn't bother to redesign the connection, so it just kept getting longer and longer. In a giraffe the impulse from brain to larynx can travel a dozen feet. In humans it extends several extra inches more than necessary (at least it does so after a fetus develops a neck).
What kind of way is that to run an evolution? In a world where so much seems so elegantly put together, how could clumsy good-enoughs like the route of the vagus nerve occur? Evolution had hundreds of millions of years to get it right. Why did it settle for work-arounds like the laryngeal nerve and other jerry-rigged operations?
More importantly, why did evolution or creation or God or whatever you want to call the forces driving not just biology but everything in the cosmos from star nurseries to starlings have to include pain and suffering? Unless you believe in Original Sin or subscribe to some other way of blaming the victim for their misery, there seems to be no reason why something as well-organized as life has to be beset by the miseries to which the flesh is heir. Life is precarious and fraught from start to finish, thanks to miscarriage, disease, predation and a host of other calamities.
And then there's death. We try to stoically accept death as something "natural," an inevitable part of life itself. Where would we find enough space for new generations if everything didn't die? If even a single bacterium were to propagate without check, in just a few days it would elbow out every other organism on the planet. Maybe that's what actually happened before the current evolutionary arrangement was "discovered"—runaway organisms that proliferated unchecked by mortality until they failed as a result of their own success. Maybe death, ironically, made life as we know it possible. In any case, the grim reaper is now inevitable, a permanent part of the script of life whether or not we believe in a deity, Mother Nature, or Blind Chance as the prime mover of our universe.
Whatever its earliest history, though, life seems to be as much the inevitable consequence of the forces or "laws" of the cosmos as are stones and sunshine. Our fancy human brains, like all other life forms, evolved primarily to function more efficiently in the practical world we have to live in. The knowledge we need for that purpose—that objects fall given the chance or move when pushed, a wisdom we share with countless other species—kept us going nicely for millions of years in a more primitive state. But the extra knowledge we gained through the enlargement of our brain has allowed us to realize there is more, much more, than the simple playbook of things-fall and things-move-when-pushed. That knowledge may or may not give us a leg up in terms of longevity as a species. But the physical forces that still act without thought or planning always prioritize what works, meaning what survives and reproduces. On that grid it's the 300 million-year-old coelacanth or sharks who are the winners, not us human-come-latelys. In fact, there's a correlation between what we bipeds call intelligence and a modest lifespan as a species.
The criterion evolution values above all else is survival. (It's almost impossible not to use words that imply conscious intention and other anthropomorphic qualities to evolution). Toward that end the rule is whatever works, even if it only does so thanks to a bit of evolutionary duct tape here and there. The eye took hundreds of millions of years to reach its current state of complexity. It still is not perfect. But, like the rest of creation, it's good enough to serve the purpose, just as the ridiculous route the vagus nerve takes in humans, giraffes, and all other necked creatures, is good enough to keep us from gagging on our lunches.
The entire human body is itself a hit-and-miss thing put together out of spare parts lying around over the eons, on its fundamental level a "clubbing together" of bacteria, as one biologist puts it. We are an incredibly complex cooperative of various life forms finding mutual support by joining together as a single organism. The mitochondria in our cells process oxygen, without which nothing but anaerobic life forms like the deadly botulinum bacterium can survive. Mitochondria are still so distinct from the cells they inhabit, we can use them to trace our ancestry on the maternal side all the way back to the beginnings of our life as a species.
In each of our guts, mostly in our large intestine, the endmost and most embarrassing organ of our digestive tract, live 50-100 trillion bacteria comprised of myriads of different species, together providing critical functions, including the manufacture of vitamins, sedatives, and immunities, while also functioning as a command center for functions we have mistakenly assumed are perform exclusively in the gray cells between our ears. The gut is literally a "second brain."
Those gut bacteria, about two and a half pounds worth, reside there as their permanent home, as necessary to our existence as our hearts or skeletons, though, like mitochondria, they retain their own identities as separate species, fiercely independent and competitive, jealous of rivals and belligerently protective of their own kind. It's now believed people with intolerances to certain foods, uncontrollable weight gain, a wonky immune system, and a host of other dysfunctions including what we usually think of as "mental" disorders, suffer them because of a poorly balanced or insufficient intestinal ecology.
No matter how you look at it, evolution is a hit-and-miss, however ingenious, affair—mostly miss over the long run since it first began producing one-celled vegans living off the mineral output of deep-ocean hot springs. All that's left of the countless life forms it's tried its hand at which failed, fish with arms and such like, are now just fossils in ancient rocks exposed by road cuts. The rest of creation, ourselves and the other species currently alive (though disappearing by the dozens every day) are try-outs, only some of which will make the cut for the long haul... like the coelacanth, who lives its entire life span in a small patch of ocean here and there on the planet. We humans meanwhile, like the dinosaurs who certainly beat out us and all our pre-human ancestors combined for longevity, swarm over the planet like locusts for a while but then vanish in the bat of an evolutionary eye.
Pain and other suffering seem to be just as accidental or at least incidental, much like the vagus nerve's torturous route to the larynx. Misery, whether the discomfort of a mild toothache, a passing bout of depression, or a long painful death, seem to be just part of the good-enough, whatever-works playbook evolution goes by. If the misery were such that it always caused death or disablement at an early, pre-reproductive age, evolution would have had to find some better work-around. But life proliferates despite the diseases and other calamities all species endure, perhaps the most shocking being the necessity for life to ingest other life in order to survive.
Pain may have started out as a way to protect an organism from something harmful, but it seems to have developed without reasonable limitation, no shut-down fail-safe when the pain serves no good function like getting our hand out of the fire or an abusive spouse out of our life. We hurt for any number of good reasons and for no reason at all. It's another example of evolutionary shoddy planning, or no planning at all, beyond what works. Our human explanations for non-productive suffering—punishment for an imagined sin is just one—is just as sloppy as nature's own—intellectual whiteout to rationalize the worst of creation's confusing and uncaring handiwork.
The same complexification that turns hydrogen into helium and all other elements just as inevitably produces what we call life. But it does so taking the path of least resistance or, rather, the only path open to it given the set of physical laws it must abide by. What may seem to us, or to any feeling creature—and there don't seem to be anything but feeling creatures no matter what biological family they belong to—serious flaws in the process like pain and suffering as unnecessary and therefore incomprehensible, is not nature's way of seeing things. Evolution is not sentimental. Strictly speaking, evolution, like "Nature," is just a concept, a story we have come up with to explain who we are and how we got here, much like our religious myths, only in the case of evolution affording good plausibility thanks to the verification process of something we call science.
In another universe, with a different set of imperatives or "laws," things would presumably look different than they do in our own—assuming there could be other laws than the ones governing our universe. In one of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries, a bad guy posing as a Catholic priest is exposed by the master detective, a real Catholic priest, when the perp wonders aloud as he gazes up at the night sky if there might not be a whole different way of reasoning on another planet, an alternative set of facts, as we might say today. It's that moment when the priest-detective knows he's got his man, because no real priest would doubt there can be only one, God-given way to reason to the truth.
But, to invoke Ira Gershwin's famous lyric, "It ain't necessarily so." We shouldn't be surprised, though, if the "alternate universes" the physicists play around with also involve clumsy workarounds like the meandering route of the vagus nerve and a general disregard for everything except what gets the job done, including plagues, chronic pain, and earthquakes.
We might as well be the grand experiment of those cerebral extraterrestrials some of us like to believe we are: lab rats put into a maze called planet earth, if only in the most primitive form billions of years ago to see what happens when critters like us have to get on without our keepers' superior intelligence. Our religious books provide much the same scenario if you substitute Yahweh, God, or Allah for "extraterrestrials": Set the ball rolling with some anaerobic bacteria or a first man and woman and come back from time to time to see how things are going, as if we were bugs in an interstellar petri dish or a child's ant colony.
It's much more likely we are on our own and always were—no goggle-eyed spacemen or other superhumans looking down with the cold eye of a mad scientist. We are stuck with the oops moments of our slapdash constructions, just as we have no choice but to endure (though still try to mitigate) our sufferings and mortality.
But we humans have just as randomly ended up with a capacity to deplore our fate, even to cry out against it, as if the same cosmic forces that created us inadvertently ended up giving us a capacity to recognize what a lousy hand we have been dealt. The poet's evergreen protest against suffering and death, for me expressed best by the Roman Catholic priest Gerard Manley Hopkins in "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" (see below), springs from much the same place as the corny rant against heartless fortune expressed by an atheist scriptwriter in the latest Hollywood tearjerker. There is no reconciling the human or any other species' lot to a "higher purpose," at least not in any way that fully satisfies even a Christian like Hopkins.
There are compensating pleasures and joys, of course, and they go some way to make up for even the worst of what we have to put up with. Love in all its forms, from full-blown erotic bliss to spontaneous pity, not only compensates for much of our misery, it can even make up for death itself. In all its forms—sexual, parental, human-to-human, human-to-animal, animal-to-human, plant-to-plant—love is after all a consequence and embodiment of the same cosmic forces at the root of all things that exist, but like pain and other not-well-thought-out aspects of evolution, ended up having a remit wider than the blind forces' original "intent."
Love, it turns out, is as endemic to evolution as is coldhearted natural selection. It may have started out as just a way for evolution to reproduce and maintain a species, but it's developed a more than functional role. It's become something we use, along with our heightened consciousness, to cry out against the uncaring forces that created us. Our persistent urge to care for and about each other may have begun as just a device to keep the evolutionary ball rolling. But in humans and in other species, too, it has taken on a life of its own, holding creation to account for its lack of compassion. From being just an impulse for reproducing, suckling, and nurturing, it has morphed into a protest, a revolutionary thing at odds with the meaninglessness of the cosmos even a clergyman like Hopkins feels compelled to express.
We don't need a formal creed to make us see we are all in this jerry-rigged existence together. We don't need something extraneous to ourselves and our fellow creatures to inspire pity and caring. It's built in, available to all despite the cruelty and selfishness we are also capable of. When we embrace our innate feelings of compassion, we do so not as something inspired from without, but as our own. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote when we come upon a congenial concept, we don't wait for it to come to us but rush out to embrace it with open arms.
So when we cry out against the tragic fate we share with oak trees and field mice, petunias and catfish, we should hold our heads high like prisoners of war in front of a firing squad. We may not any of us get out of this life alive, we may be stuck with millions of other life forms on an imperfect planet in the galactic boondocks of a universe that seems to have forgotten all about us, but we have each other—not just other humans, but all that is born and dies and can embrace in the few or many years we have of this once-in-a-lifetime existence.
Spring and Fall
By Gerard Manley Hopkinsto a young child
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
