Like consciousness, like music, like love, life itself didn't have to exist – nothing in the basic laws does. The universe would continue to roll in on itself like a pure void sea of space-time, as dark and lifeless as the inside of a skull. But, with a whisper that quickly became a symphony, life emerged to give us endless surprises like the ghost pipe and ginkgo, the underbird and the scallop eye.
Neuroscientist Brian Isett and artist Claudia Biçen celebrate the wonder of how we got from mitochondria to brains Silent Teachers: How Nature Wrote Life's Story (public library) – a love letter to that place between knowledge and mystery, where science illuminates the spirituality of nature.
Beginning the story where nature began, Isett writes in the first chapter, “The Sea”:
Long ago, Ocean taught life how to begin. The lesson began somewhere warm, like the shallow waters of a cool bay, or a flowing broth of hot air. In these places, the warm water provided enough energy to combine chemicals that would normally stay separate. Rings of carbon, called “nucleotides,” are joined together in the same way that letters form words. And while most of these islands form random collisions, some form the babbling strands of the original genetic code called “RNA.” Encouraged by the ocean, a chain reaction began: instead of dissolving back into the ocean, the chemicals began to fold into fragile structures that allowed for more chemical reactions. These early molecules, many of which are now called “ribozymes,” are thought to have supported the first whispers of life. Our story had begun.
The story continues like an Eames powers-of-ten shot, moving orders of difficulty until the pixels of the first letters begin to form a visual image of the living world – the first cells, inside which “our first ancestors wrote and composed”; a skeleton, a lung, an edge that became a foot; and, along the way, the evolution of photosynthesis and fungi, symbionts and dormancy.
What holds the wonder of all of Biçen's vibrant illustrations is part myth and part fantasy.
Underneath all the insistence that it is never too late to change the disastrous course of ecology, that it can only be done by carefully and artfully listening to nature's own silent lessons, it emphasizes that our most powerful tool for resilience is a wondrous miracle.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; page photos by Maria Popova
