Watchmaker, watchmaker, make me a watch.
Whenever I hear about something like, oh, how close we’re maybe getting to reconciling general relativity with quantum theory, I think of the termites.
The termites: there’s this guy on the TV, one of those professionally unflappable British narrator guys, crouching three feet underground in a cramped little dig somewhere in the middle of the East African desert, playing his headlamp over a nightmarishly inscrutable labyrinth of twisty little passages, all alike, maybe wide enough to cram a finger into. The labyrinth is mirrored in the ceiling inches over his stooped shoulders. He’s inside the base of a termite mound, this narrator guy, in an heroically excavated cross-section. Outside, above, it’s a weird flat sail, razor-thin at the top, seven to ten feet tall and it’s easily that long. Aligned north to south so it catches the full weight of the morning and evening sun, but hides in its own sort-of shadow from the brutal noonlight. Inside, those labyrinthine fissures snake through the sail, hollowing it out like worm-eaten driftwood, sinking down another yard or so below the narrator guy’s feet, down to where the mud starts, kept cool and damp by seepage from the water table.
And all of it done by termites: hordes and hordes of plump pale bugs as big as the first two joints of your index finger, that hoisted the sail, dug the labyrinth, and now swarm blindly about, sealing one passage here, opening another there. Why? says the narrator guy, three feet underground. Why this incredible effort, this marvel of insect engineering? His unflappable mien not at all compromised by the dirt streaking his cheeks. Air conditioning, says the narrator guy. The difference in temperatures between the cool air underground and the air in the sail, heated by the sun, sets up a constant flow throughout the nest. Regulated by those swarms of tiny HVAC techs, opening this shaft, closing the other, the ambient temperature throughout most of the nest never fluctuates outside of a narrow 2º Fahrenheit window. And a good thing, that, says the narrator guy. There’s a fungus the termites depend on for their digestion which can only flourish in that temperature range. Without the termites and their marvel of insect engineering, the fungus would wither up and blow away in the 120º afternoons. And without the fungus: no termites.
Hearing this made me all shivery inside. Here I am, a rakishly secular humanist with just enough science to get me into trouble, and this unflappable narrator guy is breezing past an incredible marvel of inhuman ingenuity with a dry, unflapped chuckle, heading off after the next incredible marvel—weaver birds, maybe, or octopi that open Mason jars with their tentacles. I can’t remember. I was left behind with a startling sign of intelligent design, one far more impressive than that dam’ bombardier beetle, and nothing but a dull piece of logic to pick it apart with. How on earth could trial and error, self-organization, and evolutionary pressures have produced such an intricate system of vents and a thermostat far more effective than the one in my office? How could it all have had enough time to work itself out to support this fungus, when without it, the fungus would die? When without the fungus, the termites would starve?
Could it all have been made, and not just happened?
Luckily, I have a friend who’s able to help me sharpen my logic and show me which end to hold it by. (Thanks, Charles.) —My mistake, there on the couch, gobsmacked by the unflappable narrator guy, was (rather foolishly) to assume the fungus’s dependence on that precisely narrow temperature window, and the termites utter dependence on the fungus, were constants throughout the history of their symbiosis; not so. The fungus was hardier in the past; the termites less finicky. The incredible success of their relationship was finely tuned over an incredibly long stretch of time—evolved, one might say, along with the termites’ instincts for building with spittle and homeostasis, and the fungus’s for, well, whatever it is fungi do all day—until it reached its current interdependent apex, littering the East African desert with monuments seven to ten feet high.
So it’s a little thing, and a bone-headed error, and I’m not at all suggesting it’s the same thing, no—well, maybe similar, perhaps, in kind if not degree, but still: I think about that shiver I felt, looking at the inscrutable labyrinth; I remember the ghostly whisper in the back of my brain, insisting despite all I know that it must have been made and couldn’t just have happened, and I think, I think I know what it is that makes people take up ideas like the anthropic principle. And maybe it’s because I share that feeling that I take such an immediate and visceral dislike to them. (Well. The ideas. I mean, it’s nothing personal.)
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