The Carolinian Trail

July 26, 2000

First published on the now-defunct website, Themestream, as an essay, "Song of evolution."

Nature can be appalling in its overproduction. But the countless births and deaths of organisms great and small are more than the reckless waste of evolutionary process. Fecundity plays an integral role in the stability of the environment.

In springtime along the Eramosa River in Guelph, Ontario, thousands upon thousands of tiny black tadpoles swarm through the shallows. Many of them will become food for fish, wading birds or adult frogs. Within a week or two the teeming cloud has reduced to a few scattered remnants schooling under weedy edges. It's bewildering to contemplate how many must die so that a few will mature to become adult frogs.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard worries about this apparent waste of life: "The barnacles encrusting a single half mile of shore can leak into the water a million million larvae....What if God has the same affectionate disregard for us that we have for barnacles?"

She also observes that this death is the driving force of evolution: "If an aphid lays a million eggs, several might survive....Wonderful things, wasted. It's a wretched system." And she concludes that, "Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me."

Dillard paints an appalling picture and gets lost in its morbidity. But an essential outcome of productivity is the stability it brings to natural systems.

In the course of Earth's history, living things have gone through at least five periods of catastrophic extinction. We are experiencing another one right now, brought about by humanity careless exploitation of the environment.

When an asteroid struck 65 million years ago it probably ignited fires around the globe. Dust shrouded the entire atmosphere, cooling the climate drastically for years or decades afterwards. Within the space of a few years dinosaurs and many other life forms became extinct.

But what is even more remarkable is the diversity that survived intense devastation and quickly evolved to fill so many empty niches. The most large scale disasters seem incapable of coming anywhere near eradicating life.

Even the worst scenario of nuclear holocaust or environmental devastation could not reproduce the harsh environment in which life evolved to begin with. Our waterways, soils and air teem with microbes capable of surviving without oxygen, not to mention temperatures above the boiling point of water. Long after our species ceases to exist, unthinkable new organisms will thrive.

This potential is the legacy of fecundity. There's more too it than a selfish gene pool racing to reproduce itself. Altogether, the intense reproduction of so many species ensures a complex ecological stability.

The persistence of life is inevitable.

Viewed from this perspective, the overproduction of life seems less blind, cruel and sinister. It bears the semblance of a great design, as if creative force had sought to secure its place in the unfolding of the cosmos.