Wowable Non-Fiction

Since then, in the 1930’s, the electron microscope has been developed, allowing scientists to see deep within the molecular structure of cells.  Living beings too tiny to see had their cell walls, nuclei, various individualized parts laid bare for analysis.  Genes, DNA, eventually whole genomes themselves were part of an intense transformation in the thinking of molecular biologists.

In The Tangled Tree, David Quammen painstakingly explores the changes of the last fifty years.  His hero is Carl Woese, a name that has not yet broken into the national consciousness but whose work is as astounding as Darwin’s.  Classification of living beings has always been the stuff of biology as scientists try to understand how life started four billion years ago and how forms are related.  In the 1970s Woese proved that there are three major classifications of life, not two: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes (our own category, all life that can be seen).  Quammen, in a friendly breezy style, makes us understand and care about why this was such an outstanding achievement.

But Woese  generated still additional excitement when he helped prove that heredity was not just vertical (like a tree) with traits passed down from parents to offspring, but moved sideways as well.  Cells were able to choose helpful parts from other cells, even of different species, and appropriate and replicate them.  Branches of the tree merged with other branches and mosaic was the image that finally emerged.

Quammen’s forte is explaining arcane scientific concepts to the general public and generating excitement about them.  As a non-scientist, I was on overload, but Quammen shifted my view on how life worked, and still does.  I won’t remember the names or details, but here are some general concepts that will stay with me from this extraordinary provocative book:

The ratio of tiny unseeable life forms to complex, seeable life forms is astronomical.  I am supported and constructed by an incomprehensible number of living invisible beings.  Some of their traits have been incorporated into my genome and are heritable.  Some of these other life forms are a part of “me.” 

In the 1960’s, scientists thought that all life derived from two kinds of bacteria, those with a nucleus and those without.  But no, they have since discovered that there is a third form, the archaea, which is different, and can live in inhospitable conditions such has boiling sulfur springs.  This realization has implications for finding life on other planets and understanding early life here when our atmosphere was hot and composed of hydrogen and helium instead of oxygen.

Evolution is not driven solely by mutations and inheritance (vertically) but by gene transfer, cells changing one another now (horizontally – think viruses or antibiotic resistance).

As always, I am impressed with the behind-the-scenes unpleasant arduous work that scientists do to tease out just one more small piece of information.  It is the accumulation of this patient research that leads to the scientific headlines that challenge our thinking about who and what we are.

There are lyrical descriptions of the English countryside, of sun and storms, of the talented falconers, but it is the bird, Mabel, that she returns to again and again.

“She filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent…café-au-lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-coloured teardrops…two wild, wide eyes stare at me…scaled yellow toes and curved black talons…reptilian…snakes her small head from side to side…”

Raising and training Mabel becomes Helen’s life.  There is meticulous attention to the description of the hawk– how it moves, how its appearance (fluffed feathers, upside down head), expresses its emotions, what its eyes rivet on when outside, almost how it thinks.

These physical details are a large part of the book, but a story about raising a wild non-social animal in captivity and using it as a balm for human pain raises ethical issues.  Macdonald’s treatment of death in nature (the hawk is a predator and she a hunter) is straightforward.  Killing and death are integrated into life and not separable.  The emotion of human grief however is not easily pigeonholed and the pain of it suffuses and changes everything.

A third section, in addition to the descriptions of raising the goshawk, and dealing with her grief, is a synopsis of The Goshawk by T. H. White, author of The Once and Future King.  Although White did a terrible job of raising his hawk, Macdonald offers a sort-of homage to him, the author of a book that introduced her to hawking when she was a child, and who used his hawk, as she did, to try to overcome personal difficulties.

The attraction of the wild and need for the natural world are concepts that emerge from the story.  All are part of a whole and other living things need our empathy and respect, not attempts at mastery.

Our most recent visit was to the Honolulu Museum of Art where we viewed original paintings by Constance Gordon Cummings, a 19^th century adventurer and cohort of Isabella Bird.  We have also been to The Bishop Museum where we were allowed to see carefully preserved copies of drawings by the artists on Captain Cook’s voyage to Hawaii.

Cummings, a single woman, a wealthy privileged Scot, was both a talented painter and writer who travelled around the South Pacific, Asia and even Yosemite.  Of the several books she published about the South Seas, the one I read is A Lady’s Cruise in a French Man-of-War.  This charming travelog is written in the form of letters and describes details of everyday life in Tonga, Samoa, and Tahiti as they were in the mid-1800s. 

She tells how they made cava (by chewing a dry root then soaking the remains).  She describes jewelry (two or three large pearls fastened together with finely braided human hair).  She compares the huge stone memorials to those seen all over the world and asks the same question about how they could possibly have been transported. She disliked the “vulgarizing influence” of the white merchants and sailors “Proud was the man who became possessed of a pair of trousers, to be displayed alternately on the legs or arms”.  She approved of the missionaries who had Christianized the natives and driven out cannibalistic practices and night time orgies.

Cummings has also written a book about Hawaii, Fire Fountains: The Kingdom of Hawaii, which can be read at the Honolulu library but is not available for circulation.  A good rainy-day project that I look forward to.