I am on a vacation at Rockport-Fulton, on the Gulf Coast in Texas. It is a charming fishing village where I seek sanctuary. I have been coming here for years. Here I find peace. I book a cottage at the Pelican Bay Resort and hang out and spend hours every day in Vipassana meditation, and leave the cares of life behind. In the evenings I hang out on the fishing pier and look at the calm and serene bulk of the Gulf of Mexico. It has a wide sweep, and it is serene in its bulk, and it is quiet even in tide. In its quietness I find quiet. I watch the jelly fish floating in the water, and I look at Scorpio hanging in the sky, with the Red Giant Antares glowing brilliantly. The constellations and the calm space of ocean are comforting. They take us back to our ancestors. For our forefathers were here too, seeing all that I now see.
The best thing about being with fishermen and fisherwomen is that they are quiet, they hate noise, and they do not want to make conversation. They look indifferently at this crazy Indian who meditates for hours on end. I alternate sitting meditation with walking meditation. And when I walk, I walk very slowly, taking one step every two minutes. It takes me over an hour to walk the hundred foot fishing pier, and I repeat it for eight hours. I must look like a madman. But they do not care. I could be a crazy alien with tentacles, but as long as I do not make noise, they are content to let me be. Texas has more depth to it, and Texans accept more readily, than is recognized. Here, in Texas, you can be a madman. We have plenty of them.
From our loins sprang George W. Bush, brazen and brash. He leaped into the world, a veritable Pantagruel, blowing off his placenta. Born after a protracted pregnancy that lasted several years, his ontogeny was complete at birth. He was half the man that he should be, with less than half of its normal intelligence. And we suffered him, and we accepted, indulged, and nourished him. We fed him from our breast. To the nipples of Texas he hung, clamped to her ample breast, feeding steadily until he attained gargantuan proportions. He suckled into early adulthood, until he attained his right to vote. And when his weary mother weaned him, exhausted, with her tits sagging to her knees, he bounded forth to conquer the world, a restless beast in search of his destiny. Yes, Texas is a forgiving mother. She is all accepting, and ever giving. It is in Texas that I have truly learned to understand biological processes. In her arms I am humble. In the ample space that she affords, my mind wanders, to wonder on all that is beautiful about nature. And in her mysterious workings I see vast time scales, immeasurably greater than my life span. These are time scales that stagger the mind.
I sit out on the porch of my cottage late at night, surrounded by Live Oaks (Quercus virginiana). On Live Oaks alone can I write paeans. These beautiful trees, gnarled and twisting, are a delight to see. They are the characteristic signature of Texas. Day or night, in sunlight or in silhouette, they are a wonder of nature. All things are a wonder, but Live Oaks signify the flora of Texas, and Texas is a land that I love. But tonight I am paying attention to sounds. I hear the call of the Cliff Chirping Frog (Eleutherodactylus (Syrrhophus) marnockii) which is an old friend. He is rather erratic in his calls, but what is fascinating is that he can also run and not just hop! Odd indeed! Frogs call in an oscillatory fashion, and I think to myself that this frog is worth studying for its erratic motor behavior and its erratic calling behavior. When does it switch from hop to run, and under what sensory stimulation? Why does it chirp like an insect? Maybe, one day I will study it, if I have time.
I see a movement near me, and I see a male Gulf Coast Toad (Bufo valliceps) next to my chair. “Hop it!” I tell him, but he won’t move. And so I pick him up and he sits in my palm, not afraid at all. He shuffles his feet a little, carefully tucking them under his body, and he sits still hoping that I will not find him interesting enough to eat. A toad is the canonical definition of the word ugly. Our literature and lore speaks of it. I looked at his warty body, his stillness, his instinct for self-preservation, and I thought that I was looking at the most beautiful of all life forms. I love B. valliceps. I think he is a most elegant and beautiful creature, warts and all. And I have studied him. So I look at him and tell him “I wrote a paper on you, aren’t you going to thank me?” I love nature and the endless questions that it raises. How often can we pick up a toad in our yard, look at it with satisfaction, and inform it rather grandly that we have written a paper on it? I have (Jones & Ratnam, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 126, 2009). There is a certain pleasure in it. I dropped him off in the flower bed, and he just sat. Toads sit, and sometimes toads hop. Mostly they sit.
Today I am fascinated by the Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus). You can usually hear them calling in isolation. They are loud and rather mournful, but charming. Tonight I hear three of them calling back and forth. I am astonished. I did not know that they called antiphonally (in alternation). It seemed as if they were signaling to one another. What are these signals? Why for? And to what purpose? I do not know.
From these observations came a mournful regret. I wrote a paper on one solitary species of toads, and I will perhaps write papers on a few other species. How many billions of species are there about which I will never say a word? And other than the living, how many things are there about which I can never know anything, and say nothing? It is infinite, and regrettably my life is finite. I am close to fifty, and I have perhaps a few more decades before dementia and oxidative stress overcome me. And then I will die. But there is so much to investigate and know. Everything in life is interesting. Everything in life is low-hanging fruit. Time will not let me pluck each and every one. The pleasure to examine the texture of each, their smell or their taste is not mine. Mortality is cruel because it takes away my desire to know. It cuts me down at a time when I am just beginning to appreciate and understand nature. And there is so much to know about nature and matter. For, nature is infinite in its extent, but it requires an infinity of lifetimes to know and understand. This is our eternal regret as humans. As awake and enquiring creatures, we have so much to know, and so little time.
The Great Horned Owl calls for a mate. It is territorial in nature because it is a fierce predator. But having established its territory why does it respond to the call of another owl? Is it signaling its territorial domain? Or is it signaling to attract a female? Antiphonal calling is found in frogs as well. They will call in alternation, to attract females, and avoid jamming with neighbors. Mate attraction and maintenance of territory, to raise our young, is the blueprint of life. It is so intimately tied to evolution and sexual selection that it runs as a steady thread across the taxa, and this is due to selection pressure. We humans have not forgotten our ancestral voice, our genetic origins, nor have we forgotten our ascent from slime. We do it too. And associated with it are complex behaviors.
We think frogs are stupid compared to higher vertebrates, likes mammals. Perhaps, but it is a fallacy. We should not be looking at physiological function as an absolute. Rather, we should be looking at the ecological niche that each species fits into. From this viewpoint, evolution has placed all species on equal footing. Each species is superbly designed and adapted to perform its function in its ecological niche. From this viewpoint, no species is any more smart or stupid than any other. Male frogs have one purpose alone. They aggregate to form a chorus, competing with one another by adjusting their calling behavior to successfully attract a female. Their sperm is of great value, and they have to work hard to attract a female so that their sperm counts, and results in fertilization.
When I try to tease apart the alternating calling patterns of frogs in a chorus, I see selection pressure at work. The proximate cause of evolution can be found in the calling behaviors of males, in their intricate timing to attract a mate. This is highly evolved. It is an audio-motor problem, A male hears other males calling (the auditory component) and then it adjusts the timing of its call oscillator in the brain to put out its own call (the motor component), all the while maximizing its chance of attracting a female. What is this link in the brain? How is this dynamic adjustment between listening and calling achieved? We do not know.
From these proximate causes do the ultimate causes of evolution spring. Generations after generations have refined the audio-motor dynamics so that a fit male frog gets it right, and a female selects him. Her selection of a mate bridges the link between the proximate and ultimate causes. Determining this link is one of the hard problems in biology. We simply do not have the time, on an evolutionary scale to understand it. We never see the process of evolution working in a single human lifetime, at least not in vertebrates.
So, this brings me back to the finite number of things that we can do in a lifetime. The number is small, and indeed the time is limited. I envy cosmologists. Like evolutionary biologists cosmologists look into the evolution of the universe. Neither the evolutionary nor the cosmological problems are easy. But there is one factor that makes the life of the cosmologist easier. It is the fundamental limit placed by the speed of light. This limit allows us to calibrate the velocity of the arrow of time. If you take a look at the remarkable Deep Space images from the Hubble Telescope, you will know what I mean. These images provide us information that stretch back billions of years to a time that is close to the Big Bang. Slowly and steadily cosmologists are munching their way towards understanding the evolution of the universe. Biologists are not so lucky. All they have are fossils. But fossils do not provide information about soft tissue (parenchyma), and it is soft tissue that will allow us to get a handle on the proximate causes of evolution.
A working biologist stops and stares, and observes phenomena. In each and every problem encountered in ecology, ethology, evolution, or neurobiology, the biologist has plenty of material to go on, but very little history. There is a cliché to the effect that if we do not understand history, then we are condemned to repeat it (Santayana). I would like to add that if we do not understand history, then we are condemned to never understanding life. So, in our lifetimes we construct theories. Darwin’s is perhaps the best, but to live in the shadow of Darwin would be unwise. He pointed the way forward and it is up to us to take it further. How much further we can take biological theories in an individual lifetime, is a question that I always confront. On B. valliceps alone, a fairly common toad, I can spend a decade or more in teasing apart his calling behavior. But at the end of it I will understand nothing more than his calling behavior. I will not understand his physiology as an integrated, functioning, and whole organism. I will not understand him as a toad.
Is a complete understanding of life possible? Let us take a million biologists, toiling for a million years, can they produce the blueprint of life? In mathematics there are two forms of infinity. One is “countable infinity” such as when counting off the integers. The other is the “uncountable infinity” as defined by the continuum of the real number system. The number of biological problems form a countable infinity, but the understanding of integrative and organismal biological functioning is too packed, too close to be discrete and countable. It is uncountably infinite. Organismal physiology will not be understood no matter how big an army of scientists we assemble, nor the time and resources we expend on the effort. Biological organisms are much too complex. They are organized at multiple levels. To take a simpler example, much has been studied about water, a simple molecule. But there is no theory as yet that can take the molecular structure of water and predict that it will look like the water that we know and see. One that can turn to steam and one that can turn to ice. If we cannot understand water, how much further do we have to go to understand life? A good bit I would think.
This is not an excuse for a horse to sit down in the middle of the race and simply give up. Biologists toil onwards and we are slowly putting together the pieces. They are still tiny patches of a vast tapestry, and there is work to do. I do it happily. My only regret is that my time is finite. Like a child hopping up and down in excitement when visiting a zoo, I too hop up and down every time I step outside my door. From the Live Oak to the Cliff Chirping frog to the Gulf Coast toad to the Great Horned Owl, I have only questions. And then on to the wildflower and the songbird, I find more questions. I am filled with wonder and excitement. I wish to know it all. And I regret that I am a mortal man, for I thirst for completeness of knowledge and seek complete understanding. I want to know everything, nothing spared. The lack of time is my curse. This inability to investigate forever, my everlasting regret.
This time that I have is adequate to live happily in most ways. But it is insignificant compared to the infinite extent of life. Like Faust, I would happily sell my soul to the devil, just to know the infinite. This sin would be less than original.
