Mr. Starling put Charlotte’s paper down on his desk, took off the half-glasses, put them in the breast pocket of the lab coat, and leaned so far forward in his chair that his forearms rested on top of his thighs. Why such an extreme posture? He smiled. Whether that smile expressed warmth, pity, or cynical mistrust of the wiles of the human beast, Charlotte didn’t know. She couldn’t decode it.
“Ms.”—Miz—“Simmons,” said Mr. Starling, “I want to ask you something. Did you by any chance think the assignment was to disprove the theory of evolution in fifteen to twenty pages?”
The irony cut her to the quick. “No, sir.” She could barely make her voice rise above a gasp.
“The assignment,” he continued, “was to assess the theory with regard to the conventional requirements of the scientific method. Perhaps you remember our discussing the fact that in science, no theory merits consideration unless you can provide a set of contraindications, which, if true, would prove it wrong.”
“Yes, sir,” mumbled Charlotte.
“From this standpoint,” said Mr. Starling, “evolution has to be considered as a special case. You may remember our talking about that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Because of the immensely long intervals between cause and effect—hundreds of thousands of years being ‘the short run’ and millions of years being the norm—and because of the relative lack of paleontological evidence spanning such vast intervals—there is no way of stating what would prove it wrong.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But you chose to leave that minor-league ballpark and go to work dismantling the entire theory…in fifteen to twenty pages.”
“No, sir,” said Charlotte in a strangled voice.
Mr. Starling picked her paper up from the desk, put his half-glasses back on, and riffled through to the last page. “Twenty-three pages,” he said. “You overshot the mark slightly…in more ways than one.”
This time, a completely incoherent gasp.
Mr. Starling was smiling at her in a kindly but devastating way. It was the kindly smile you bestow upon a child to show that even though you are compelled to give her a dressing-down for something very wrong that she’s done, that doesn’t mean you dislike her or blame her for still being a child.
Shot through the heart, she was! An abject failure for the first time in her life as a student! Unable to comprehend the most clear-cut of guidelines for a major assignment! A student’s performance on the class’s two term papers would account for two thirds of her grade! Even if she got an A-plus on the second term paper and in everything else in the course, she couldn’t possibly receive more than a D for the entire semester! D!—and I am Charlotte Simmons!
“No, sir!” she said in a voice made hoarse by fear and occluded by shock, but audible. “I would never do that! I would never be that presumptuous, Mr. Starling! I wouldn’t even know where to begin!”
“No?” said Mr. Starling. “Let me summarize your argument very briefly.” He peered at her over the half-glasses. “If I wreak undue damage to it at any point, you won’t hesitate to speak up, I hope.”
“Yes, sir—I mean, no, sir.” The triple negative had her dazed. The additional irony—sarcasm?—was like a punch in the stomach.
“All right.” Mr. Starling began going over the notes he had made in the margins of the paper. “Right off the bat you argue that the human beast—” He peered again. “That’s the term you use, ‘the human beast.’” Drily: “I can’t speak for Darwin, but Zola would have liked that, I suppose.”
Hoarsely: “Yes, sir. La Bête Humaine.”
“Ah. You’ve read it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“In translation or in French?”
“Both.”
“Ah.” That seemed to stymie him for a moment. “In any case”—his eyes returned to the paper—“you say that Darwin shared a common frailty, almost a superstition, of the human beast. He couldn’t conceive of anything in the world, or the world itself, for that matter, not having had a beginning. And why? Because the human beast’s own life had a beginning—and would have an end. Every living thing, the plants and animals he lived on, even the trees in the forest, had a beginning—and an end.”
Ever so meekly, Charlotte interrupted. “Sir, I didn’t say ‘frailty’ or ‘superstition.’”
“All right, we’ll strike ‘frailty’ and ‘superstition.’ Now…you say that since human beasts, including Mr. Darwin, I presume, believe that everything must have a point of origin, then everything must start out very small…like a baby at birth or, if you’d rather, at the moment of conception—that’s a political question, I suppose—or the cosmos at the moment of the Big Bang—or Darwin’s single cells ‘in a warm pool somewhere.’”
He looked up. “I’m glad you remembered the warm pool. Oh, and incidentally, Darwin died in 1882 and never learned about the Big Bang, but I get your point.”
Blow after blow to the pit of the stomach!
“This you call ‘original fallacy.’ After the point of origin, the newborn—the human beast, the cosmos and everything in it—grows larger and larger and more complex. It progresses. So the human beast believes that progress is normal and inevitable. This you call ‘the progression fallacy.’”
Barely audible: “Yes, sir.”
“All right. Now you introduce a bit of intellectual history. Darwin was alive at a time when progress was on everybody’s mind. It was a time in which modern industry was developing and changing the face of England. Also technology, mechanical invention, modern medicine, and the first widespread distribution of printed materials—books, magazines, newspapers. On top of everything else, and on every Englishman’s mind, was the spread all over the world of the British Empire. Darwin, you tell us, was swept up in this general belief in progress, and long before he went to the Galápagos he intended to show that all animals, all species, had progressed from a single cell”—Mr. Starling looked up, smiling—“or those four or five cells in our famous warm pool.”
He returned to her paper. “In fact, you inform us”—he lifted a declamatory forefinger into the air in a gesture of ironic bombast—“that nothing begins, and nothing ends. No physical or chemical elements, no particles, ever leave the biosphere. They merely change in their combinations. Your ‘life,’ which you say is merely another way of saying your ‘soul,’ is over, finished, but all of the materials that comprised your body and your brain remain, destined to be recombined. In other words, ‘dust to dust.’ Correct?”
Defeated: “Yes, sir.”
“Oh—and I mustn’t forget this.” He had his forefinger on one of the pages of her paper. “You also inform us that time is nothing but one of the human beast’s inventions. Your term is ‘mental constructs.’ Other animals react to light, darkness, and climate, but they have no sense or awareness of time.”
Mr. Starling put the paper on the surface of the desk. He leaned back in his chair and stared at Charlotte, smiling, inexplicably, for what seemed like a minute at least but was probably only a few seconds. She waited for the coup de grâce.
“Ms. Simmons,” he said, still smiling in that certain way, “people, scholars and laymen, have been trying to undermine the theory of evolution for almost a century and a half. That aspect of your paper doesn’t interest me at all, frankly. What impresses me about what you’ve done is your extraordinary use of the literature, some of it highly technical, even esoteric—”
Impresses?
“—and the nuanced way in which you are able to project the ramifications of a theory, whether Mr. Darwin’s or your own. Just to cite one example, I’m a bit bowled over by the fact that you found and were capable of digesting and using Steadman and Levin’s study of the lack of time sense in animals. That’s a very elegant, very sophisticated—methodologically, very exhaustive, highly technical—in terms of brain physiology—it couldn’t have been done before the development of three-dimensional electroencephalography in the nineties—and obscurely published paper. It appeared in the Annals of Cognitive Biology. How on earth did you find it?”