Raptures of the deep

Originally published 6 May 2007

Ear­ly in Jules Verne’s’ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Cap­tain Nemo wel­comes Pierre Aron­nax, pro­fes­sor of nat­ur­al his­to­ry at the Paris Muse­um, aboard his submarine.

“You have pur­sued your stud­ies as far as ter­res­tri­al sci­ence can go,” Nemo tells the pro­fes­sor. “But you don’t know all because you haven’t seen all.”

He promis­es Aron­nax excite­ment aboard the Nau­tilus: “You are going to tour a land of mar­vels. Aston­ish­ment, amaze­ment will become your every­day state of mind…Starting today, you’ll enter a new ele­ment, and you will see what nobody has seen before.”

And so begins an epic voy­age into the depths of the sea, an alien realm where every­thing sways and slith­ers with the gen­tle tug of tide and cur­rent. A world of inky dark­ness, where crea­tures depend for food on the decay­ing organ­ic mat­ter that rains down from the sun­lit world above.

I shared some­thing of Aron­nax’s under­sea adven­ture as I vis­it­ed the web­site for Claire Nou­vian’s book The Deep. I had pre­vi­ous­ly blogged one of these won­der­ful pho­tographs, but see­ing so many togeth­er was breath­tak­ing. I look for­ward to the hun­dreds more that the book promises.

What won­der­ful denizens of the deep, many of them ghost­ly and gelati­nous, some of them glow­ing with mys­te­ri­ous lights. So many col­ors in total darkness.

I remem­bered the words of Pro­fes­sor Aron­nax, who watched jel­ly­fish as he walked with Nemo in his abyssal gar­dens: “Some of them were shaped like a smooth semi­spher­ic umbrel­la, with red and brown stripes and a fringe of 12 sym­met­ri­cal ten­ta­cles. Oth­ers looked like over­turned bas­kets from which there trailed wide leaves and long red twigs. They swam with quiv­er­ings of their four leaflike arms, let­ting the rich tress­es of their ten­ta­cles float in the water.”

The abyssal crea­tures seem as much a part of their medi­um as clouds are part of the sky, as if the water itself has a ten­den­cy to thick­en and to flower. They intrigue us as if they were vis­i­tors from a world of pure spirit.

“I would have liked to pre­serve a few spec­i­mens of these del­i­cate zoophytes,” says Aron­nax, “but they are clouds, shad­ows, illu­sions that dis­solve, melt, or evap­o­rate after they are removed from their native element.”

This was the moment in Earth­’s his­to­ry when micro­scop­ic blobs of ame­bic pro­to­plasm, which had lived on their own for 3 bil­lion years, began to com­bine into mul­ti­celled organ­isms, meld­ing their respec­tive tal­ents for the com­mon good. Some cells spe­cial­ized to build body walls, oth­ers to make the “jel­ly” between the walls, oth­ers to make ten­ta­cles, bulbs and fins, oth­ers to sting and bite, oth­ers to digest. This divi­sion of labor is the cen­tral sto­ry of all macro­scop­ic life dur­ing the past 650 mil­lion years, and it was in the sea that life first exper­i­ment­ed with collectivities.

What beau­ty of form fol­lowed from func­tion! With spe­cial­iza­tion and col­lec­tiviza­tion, life emerged from pro­to­plas­mic amor­phous­ness into shape, col­or, sym­me­try, and extrav­a­gant design. The pho­tographs of the jel­ly­fish, espe­cial­ly, give us a glimpse of that moment in geo­log­ic his­to­ry when life ceased to be microscopic.

How did it hap­pen? What caused our micro­bial ances­tors to forego their indi­vid­ual exis­tences and embark upon a life of col­lec­tive adven­ture? We do not know.

We don’t know all because we haven’t seen all, as Nemo says.

But we do know that in spite of the aston­ish­ing vari­ety of forms rep­re­sent­ed by the crea­tures of the deep, they all share with us the basic mol­e­c­u­lar machin­ery of life. Their DNA, like ours, con­tains a kind of tran­script of where they came from and how they are relat­ed. Chris­t­ian de Duve, the 1974 Nobel prizewin­ner in med­i­cine, has pro­posed a life force embed­ded in the cre­ation, a “cos­mic imper­a­tive,” he calls it. He writes: “The his­to­ry of life on Earth allows less lee­way to con­tin­gency and unpre­dictabil­i­ty than cur­rent fash­ion [in sci­ence] claims.” There is acci­dent in the details, he believes, but inevitabil­i­ty in the grand thrust towards chem­i­cal complexity.

This may sound a bit too tele­o­log­i­cal for some of us. But sure­ly in one sense he is right: Life is too diverse, too resilient, and too per­va­sive not to have been poten­tial­ly there from the begin­ning, at least in broad out­line. If we find such won­ders just a few miles down in the oceans of our own plan­et, imag­ine what must exist out there among the hun­dreds of bil­lions of galaxies.

Those of us who count our­selves agnos­tics are dis­missed by many of our fel­lows as god­less infi­dels. I would rather say that agnos­ti­cism is the most gen­uine­ly reli­gious atti­tude a per­son can have. Every­one else, it seems to me, wor­ships idols of one sort or anoth­er, most­ly gods con­trived in a human like­ness. The agnos­tic is not will­ing to reduce the cre­ative agency of the uni­verse to a human scale. We open our hearts and minds to the over­flow­ing won­ders of cre­ation in the hope that our spir­its will be stretched to accom­mo­date the tiny glimpse of real­i­ty we have so far been allowed.

We don’t know all, because we haven’t seen all. In the mean­time: Hosan­nah! Not in the high­est, but right here, right now, this.