When The Moon Sings - August 2, 2025

For several months now, the morning star has appeared inSavannah directly over the rising sun. It will not always be at that preciselocation. The morning star is actually the planet Venus, which has its ownorbit. But lately, you can draw a straight vertical line between Venus and therising sun.  It will change, butgradually.

Most changes in nature are gradual. Some say sneaky. Thiswas the hottest week of the year, and we hope it will remain the record. I willleave it to others to dramatize the air temperature, but the water temperatureat Tybee Pier is 89 degrees, some seven degrees warmer than normal. Tomorrowwill be little different, but by the time we start looking at turkeys with leanand hungry eyes, air and water will have an entirely different look and feel,having changed day by day in a cooler direction.  I don’t know what the “feels like”temperature of water at 89 degrees is, but nobody will catch a chill fromit.  November and December dips in theocean will have more bite.

But some natural changes are dramatic. We will be at riskfor circular weather through turkey season, according to the worthies thatproclaim such things.  If one of thewhirling dervishes visits, we will have chaos aplenty.  This year, the country has had a bumper cropof rude weather events – fires, tornadoes, heat dramatically above average, andfloods.  We have eluded many of them, andso have been spared the difficulties that they bring.

So this week, I thought of Stephen Jay Gould and his theoryof such things.  Gould was apaleontologist and evolutionary biologist, but he also wrote essays that exploredscience for non-scientists, mostly in Natural History magazine.  I have half a bookshelf of the collectedcolumns, and they still cause reflection and wonder.

His basic research, though he did much that was not basic,was in shelled gastropods – Gould was a snail guy.  At some point, he teamed with another snailguy named Niles Eldridge.  Eldridgesimilarly had ideas that snails contributed to but were not the focus of.  They published snail studies together, butalso a set of more general thoughts on evolution, which they called punctuatedequilibrium.

Some people think that evolution is a steady march towardsome definable goal, especially when it comes to human progress.  Gould and Eldridge saw evolution as beingsadapting to their environment and then refining the adaption as long as theenvironment stays stable.

But environments don’t stay stable.  Periodically, they become subjected to suddenevents – hurricanes, fires, tornadoes, floods, and overheating are dandyexamples.  Evolutionary adaption nolonger works, because the environment is no longer the same.  The equilibrium has been punctuated, the potstirred, the beings present with a new set of imperatives.  They either re-adapt, or they don’t. Thepopular theory that the dinosaurs disappeared when a meteorite plunged into theearth serves as an example of not adapting.

No scientific theory goes without challenge, but the duelingon this one remained curiously muted.  Itseemed to make sense to those who deal with evolution professionally.  In contrast, many of Gould’s other ideascreated howls of rage, some from other scientists and some from others whoobjected to his basic principles.  Gouldparticipated with fang and claw in the Darwin Wars of the 80s, and was quick tocorrect those who used his theories for their own political or religiousnarratives.  Sociobiology, the idea thatevolution explains human behavior, particularly irritated him, but he came togrant that some of those ideas had merit.

I watched those conflicts from the cheap seats, box ofpopcorn in my hand.  I have neither theintellectual firepower not the training to participate.  There may be a unified field theory forgravity and electromagnetism, as Einstein believed; I seriously doubt therewill ever be a unified theory of human behavior.

But human behavior does parallel natural behavior in someways.  Like tree frogs and land snails,we adapt to our environment, both natural and human-imposed.  Human-imposed changes to the environment,though largely invisible, exert a powerful force on us.  Compare the United States of the 1920’s withthat of the 1930’s – the invisible force called economics created vast amountsof misery and worse.

They seem similar in this – every punctuation – naturaldisasters, but also wars, pestilence, depressions, and other human affairs,comes with a casualty list.  Non-adaptersdisappear, sometimes in droves, and the maimed remain to remind us of what oncewas.  Armed conflict, internal orexternal, provides the most vivid example, but any sudden shift in the humanenvironment causes unusual degradation of life, just as shifts in the naturalone.

The natural environment seems to remain stable once thepunctuation has ended.  The humanenvironment appears to be much less so. For one thing, one bout of instability seems to lead to another, withoutthe effects of the first being fully absorbed. We never finish with a comma before somebody attempts to slam asemicolon somewhere in the sentence, mainly for beneficial reasons (but notalways).    Our ability to sniff out trends or upcomingproblems helps us survive, but we don’t always perceive correctly.  We create unnecessary punctuation.

Each punctuation, even with the best intention, creates acasualty list that far exceeds the estimate of the perpetrator, and mostperpetrators don’t bother to estimate damages. Nature has no intentions, so flood and fire have no unintendedconsequences.  Human activity hasintentions, but the unintended ones frequently outgrow the intended.

That’s not to say we should create static, immovablesocieties.  They are as toxic in theirways as unstable ones, and they usually pre-suppose a significant amount ofmisery.  The way is clearly somethingbetween constant uproar and lack of motion. But perhaps we should become better at calculating the cost of a change,and worse at being enchanted by ideas.