Have we shrugged off nature?
The room looks like a mad scientist’s lair: Rows and rows of looming metal shelves crammed with clear jars of varying sizes, each filled with a formaldehyde-like liquid to preserve the long-dead creatures inside. Taped to the end of each long shelf is a typewritten sign indicating the range of reptiles and amphibians to be found in the row.
“You see where we fit into the whole evolution of life on the planet,” notes Michelle Koo, explaining why she spends her days among dead frogs and iguanas. “You get to see what’s possible. I’m always amazed at the kind of novel characteristics that can occur to adapt a species to its environment.”
Koo is one of the herpetologists at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. She studies specimens that have been collected from around the world since the late-19th century and stored here.
She climbs a ladder and gingerly hauls down a jar the size of a small keg of beer. Inside, she says, is a tuatora, a creature she calls a living fossil. It is a large lizard found in New Zealand that belongs to a group that walked among the dinosaurs.
The visit to the herpetology department was inspired by my 13-year-old son, who wants to be a herpetologist. He owns a boa constrictor, a bearded dragon, a leopard gecko and a crotchety lizard any of us has yet to identify. My son, however, took one look at the rows of dead animals and spent the rest of the visit in the hall, having concluded he didn’t want to be that kind of herpetologist.
I, however, got to thinking about adaptation. Ken Howell, the assistant curator at the Steinhart Aquarium at the Academy, had earlier in the day shown my son and me a bug that emits a vinegar smell to ward off predators. He told us that the brilliant colors of the coral reefs are pigments that protect the coral from ultraviolet rays. The giant clams, stuck in one place, grow algae on their frilly flesh, producing 80 to 85 percent of all the food they need.
“Different habitats drive evolution,” Howell said in explaining why half of all the species of fish can be found in freshwater, even though freshwater makes up only 1/100th of 1 percent of the Earth’s water. Lakes, ponds and rivers have much more varied environments than oceans.
All this had me wondering about humans.
We make the environment adapt to us rather than the other way around. If the climate is too hot, we flip on the air-conditioner. Too cold, and we fire up the heater. We turn deserts into lush landscapes. We fix what Mother Nature is too slow to fix. We have growth hormones if we’re too short; steroids if we’re too weak; glasses to correct our vision; artificial hips and knees and hearts to replace worn-out joints. We have in-vitro fertilization to enhance procreation, and contraception to thwart it.
I wondered if we have become like the creatures in the jars, forever unchanged. As evolution imperceptibly smoothes the skull of a South American salamander or thickens the hide of an African rhino, we seem to have shrugged off nature’s delicate touch and taken matters into our own hands. Won’t our artificial tinkering eventually interfere with the natural course of human evolution?
“Being able to alter the environment and adapt through behavior don’t really run ‘counter’ to evolution,” says David DeGusta at the Laboratory for Human Evolutionary Studies at UC Berkeley. “Those abilities are just, themselves, evolutionary adaptations.”
Greg Niemeyer, a professor of art, technology and culture at UC Berkeley, concurs. “Evolution is no longer limited to nature,” he says. “It has to include technological adaptation.”
In other words, our technological adaptation is nature, driven by the primal instincts shared by tuatoras and coral and every living thing: To endure and to push the boundaries of possibility.
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Send comments to her in care of this newspaper or send her e-mail at [email protected].)