6:43 a.m. 46 degrees, wind SSW 4 mph. Sky: a steady, cold rain, the haunting of a tropical storm, steadier and stronger as I walk; rain on leaves loud enough to drown out kinglets; chickadees barely audible. Thoughts turn to squash and potato-leek soup. Permanent streams: Singin' In The Rain. Wetlands: a soaked crow over the marsh, Cawin' In The Rain. Pond: an empty and disturbed surface.
At the feeder: a flock of bedraggled purple finches; three females perch on a tube-feeder, dripping; a male on a tiki torch patiently waits a turn, soaked and silent. Two other males on the ground, join five doves and two juncos, scavenge fallen sunflower seeds, which arrive steadily as the rain. Chickadees, titmice, and a white-breasted nuthatch grab seeds and leave, back and forth from the cherry tree, no time to perch on the feeder. Blue jays and a hairy woodpecker disperse purple finches, linger on the feeder, unperturbed, immobile, unbound assurance . . . one seed after another. Throats bulge, feathers matted like leaves.
In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus drove a stake through the heart of conventional thinking when he published On Revolutions of Celestial Spheres, a radical view of the universe. For fear of upending the church, which believed Earth was the center of the universe, Copernicus delayed publication for two decades. There is no center to the universe, he wrote. Nearly five hundred years later, we hold this truth to be self-evident. For his part, Copernicus was excommunicated.
Charles Darwin, another critical thinker, showed us that humans do not reside in the center of the universe, either. In fact, he included us with everything else in the struggle of life. Like Copernicus, Darwin changed how we see our world and ourselves; he delayed publication of The Origin of Species for more than twenty years.
Yet even today, one hundred sixty-one years after Origins appeared in print, a recent Gallup poll concluded that seventy-three percent of Americans continue to reject Darwin's view of life. Forty percent believe God created human beings in our present form within the last ten thousand years; the other thirty-three percent believe we evolved over the past million years with God's guidance. Twenty-two percent of Americans agreed with Darwin (a slow, upward trend), the lowest total of any technologically advanced nation.
What exactly did Darwin say? Like Copernicus, he denied us special status.
Darwin perceived how species evolved from one to another using natural selection, a process in which traits best suited for survival and reproductive success are passed on to the next generation. A biological arms race foraged in the furnace of natural selection. Humans are subject to the same trials and tribulations as kinglets. Or put another way, all life—past, present, future—conjoin into one big family, a parade of species that reaches back more than three billion years, extends into an unknown future.
There is grandeur in this view of life, wrote Darwin, and that whilst the planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Like gravity, evolution is a law, not a theory.
A kinglet hovers at the tip of a spruce twig, scatters raindrops.
Yes! A law- bravo!