The Origin of the Universe, Earth, and Life
The term "evolution" usually refers to the biological evolution of living things. But the processes by which planets, stars, galaxies, and the universe form and change over time are also types of "evolution." In all of these cases there is change over time, although the processes involved are quite different.
In the late 1920s the American astronomer Edwin Hubble made a very interesting and important discovery. Hubble made observations that he interpreted as showing that distant stars and galaxies are receding from Earth in every direction. Moreover, the velocities of recession increase in proportion with distance, a discovery that has been confirmed by numerous and repeated measurements since Hubble's time. The implication of these findings is that the universe is expanding.
Hubble's hypothesis of an expanding universe leads to certain deductions. One is that the universe was more condensed at a previous time. From this deduction came the suggestion that all the currently observed matter and energy in the universe were initially condensed in a very small and infinitely hot mass. A huge explosion, known as the Big Bang, then sent matter and energy expanding in all directions.
This Big Bang hypothesis led to more testable deductions. One such deduction was that the temperature in deep space today should be several degrees above absolute zero. Observations showed this deduction to be correct. In fact, the Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer (COBE) satellite launched in 1991 confirmed that the background radiation field has exactly the spectrum predicted by a Big Bang origin for the universe.
As the universe expanded, according to current scientific understanding, matter collected into clouds that began to condense and rotate, forming the forerunners of galaxies. Within galaxies, including our own Milky Way galaxy, changes in pressure caused gas and dust to form distinct clouds. In some of these clouds, where there was sufficient mass and the right forces, gravitational attraction caused the cloud to collapse. If the mass of material in the cloud was sufficiently compressed, nuclear reactions began and a star was born.
Some proportion of stars, including our sun, formed in the middle of a flattened spinning disk of material. In the case of our sun, the gas and dust within this disk collided and aggregated into small grains, and the grains formed into larger bodies called planetesimals ("very small planets"), some of which reached diameters of several hundred kilometers. In successive stages these planetesimals coalesced into the nine planets and their numerous satellites. The rocky planets, including Earth, were near the sun, and the gaseous planets were in more distant orbits.
The ages of the universe, our galaxy, the solar system, and Earth can be estimated using modern scientific methods. The age of the universe can be derived from the observed relationship between the velocities of and the distances separating the galaxies. The velocities of distant galaxies can be measured very accurately, but the measurement of distances is more uncertain. Over the past few decades, measurements of the Hubble expansion have led to estimated ages for the universe of between 7 billion and 20 billion years, with the most recent and best measurements within the range of 10 billion to 15 billion years.
The age of the Milky Way galaxy has been calculated in two ways. One involves studying the observed stages of evolution of different-sized stars in globular clusters. Globular clusters occur in a faint halo surrounding the center of the Galaxy, with each cluster containing from a hundred thousand to a million stars. The very low amounts of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in these stars indicate that they must have formed early in the history of the Galaxy, before large amounts of heavy elements were created inside the initial generations of stars and later distributed into the interstellar medium through supernova explosions (the Big Bang itself created primarily hydrogen and helium atoms). Estimates of the ages of the stars in globular clusters fall within the range of 11 billion to 16 billion years.
A second method for estimating the age of our galaxy is based on the present abundances of several long-lived radioactive elements in the solar system. Their abundances are set by their rates of production and distribution through exploding supernovas. According to these calculations, the age of our galaxy is between 9 billion and 16 billion years. Thus, both ways of estimating the age of the Milky Way galaxy agree with each other, and they also are consistent with the independently derived estimate for the age of the universe.
Radioactive elements occurring naturally in rocks and minerals also provide a means of estimating the age of the solar system and Earth. Several of these elements decay with half lives between 700 million and more than 100 billion years (the half life of an element is the time it takes for half of the element to decay radioactively into another element). Using these time-keepers, it is calculated that meteorites, which are fragments of asteroids, formed between 4.53 billion and 4.58 billion years ago (asteroids are small "planetoids" that revolve around the sun and are remnants of the solar nebula that gave rise to the sun and planets). The same radioactive time-keepers applied to the three oldest lunar samples returned to Earth by the Apollo astronauts yield ages between 4.4 billion and 4.5 billion years, providing minimum estimates for the time since the formation of the moon.
The oldest known rocks on Earth occur in northwestern Canada (3.96 billion years), but well-studied rocks nearly as old are also found in other parts of the world. In Western Australia, zircon crystals encased within younger rocks have ages as old as 4.3 billion years, making these tiny crystals the oldest materials so far found on Earth.
The best estimates of Earth's age are obtained by calculating the time required for development of the observed lead isotopes in Earth's oldest lead ores. These estimates yield 4.54 billion years as the age of Earth and of meteorites, and hence of the solar system.
The origins of life cannot be dated as precisely, but there is evidence that bacteria-like organisms lived on Earth 3.5 billion years ago, and they may have existed even earlier, when the first solid crust formed, almost 4 billion years ago. These early organisms must have been simpler than the organisms living today. Furthermore, before the earliest organisms there must have been structures that one would not call "alive" but that are now components of living things. Today, all living organisms store and transmit hereditary information using two kinds of molecules: DNA and RNA. Each of these molecules is in turn composed of four kinds of subunits known as nucleotides. The sequences of nucleotides in particular lengths of DNA or RNA, known as genes, direct the construction of molecules known as proteins, which in turn catalyze biochemical reactions, provide structural components for organisms, and perform many of the other functions on which life depends. Proteins consist of chains of subunits known as amino acids. The sequence of nucleotides in DNA and RNA therefore determines the sequence of amino acids in proteins; this is a central mechanism in all of biology.
Experiments conducted under conditions intended to resemble those present on primitive Earth have resulted in the production of some of the chemical components of proteins, DNA, and RNA. Some of these molecules also have been detected in meteorites from outer space and in interstellar space by astronomers using radiotelescopes. Scientists have concluded that the "building blocks of life" could have been available early in Earth's history.
An important new research avenue has opened with the discovery that certain molecules made of RNA, called ribozymes, can act as catalysts in modern cells. It previously had been thought that only proteins could serve as the catalysts required to carry out specific biochemical functions. Thus, in the early prebiotic world, RNA molecules could have been "autocatalytic"--that is, they could have replicated themselves well before there were any protein catalysts (called enzymes). Laboratory experiments demonstrate that replicating autocatalytic RNA molecules undergo spontaneous changes and that the variants of RNA molecules with the greatest autocatalytic activity come to prevail in their environments. Some scientists favor the hypothesis that there was an early "RNA world," and they are testing models that lead from RNA to the synthesis of simple DNA and protein molecules. These assemblages of molecules eventually could have become packaged within membranes, thus making up "protocells"--early versions of very simple cells.
For those who are studying the origin of life, the question is no longer whether life could have originated by chemical processes involving nonbiological components. The question instead has become which of many pathways might have been followed to produce the first cells.
Will we ever be able to identify the path of chemical evolution that succeeded in initiating life on Earth? Scientists are designing experiments and speculating about how early Earth could have provided a hospitable site for the segregation of molecules in units that might have been the first living systems. The recent speculation includes the possibility that the first living cells might have arisen on Mars, seeding Earth via the many meteorites that are known to travel from Mars to our planet.
Of course, even if a living cell were to be made in the laboratory, it would not prove that nature followed the same pathway billions of years ago. But it is the job of science to provide plausible natural explanations for natural phenomena. The study of the origin of life is a very active research area in which important progress is being made, although the consensus among scientists is that none of the current hypotheses has thus far been confirmed. The history of science shows that seemingly intractable problems like this one may become amenable to solution later, as a result of advances in theory, instrumentation, or the discovery of new facts.
Creationist Views of the Origin of the Universe, Earth, and Life
Many religious persons, including many scientists, hold that God created the universe and the various processes driving physical and biological evolution and that these processes then resulted in the creation of galaxies, our solar system, and life on Earth. This belief, which sometimes is termed "theistic evolution," is not in disagreement with scientific explanations of evolution. Indeed, it reflects the remarkable and inspiring character of the physical universe revealed by cosmology, paleontology, molecular biology, and many other scientific disciplines.
The advocates of "creation science" hold a variety of viewpoints. Some claim that Earth and the universe are relatively young, perhaps only 6,000 to 10,000 years old. These individuals often believe that the present physical form of Earth can be explained by "catastrophism," including a worldwide flood, and that all living things (including humans) were created miraculously, essentially in the forms we now find them.
Other advocates of creation science are willing to accept that Earth, the planets, and the stars may have existed for millions of years. But they argue that the various types of organisms, and especially humans, could only have come about with supernatural intervention, because they show "intelligent design."
In this piece, both these "Young Earth" and "Old Earth" views are referred to as "creationism" or "special creation."
There are no valid scientific data or calculations to substantiate the belief that Earth was created just a few thousand years ago. This piece of mine has summarized the vast amount of evidence for the great age of the universe, our galaxy, the solar system, and Earth from astronomy, astrophysics, nuclear physics, geology, geochemistry, and geophysics. Independent scientific methods consistently give an age for Earth and the solar system of about 5 billion years, and an age for our galaxy and the universe that is two to three times greater. These conclusions make the origin of the universe as a whole intelligible, lend coherence to many different branches of science, and form the core conclusions of a remarkable body of knowledge about the origins and behavior of the physical world.
Nor is there any evidence that the entire geological record, with its orderly succession of fossils, is the product of a single universal flood that occurred a few thousand years ago, lasted a little longer than a year, and covered the highest mountains to a depth of several meters. On the contrary, intertidal and terrestrial deposits demonstrate that at no recorded time in the past has the entire planet been under water. Moreover, a universal flood of sufficient magnitude to form the sedimentary rocks seen today, which together are many kilometers thick, would require a volume of water far greater than has ever existed on and in Earth, at least since the formation of the first known solid crust about 4 billion years ago. The belief that Earth's sediments, with their fossils, were deposited in an orderly sequence in a year's time defies all geological observations and physical principles concerning sedimentation rates and possible quantities of suspended solid matter.
Geologists have constructed a detailed history of sediment deposition that links particular bodies of rock in the crust of Earth to particular environments and processes. If petroleum geologists could find more oil and gas by interpreting the record of sedimentary rocks as having resulted from a single flood, they would certainly favor the idea of such a flood, but they do not. Instead, these practical workers agree with academic geologists about the nature of depositional environments and geological time. Petroleum geologists have been pioneers in the recognition of fossil deposits that were formed over millions of years in such environments as meandering rivers, deltas, sandy barrier beaches, and coral reefs.
The example of petroleum geology demonstrates one of the great strengths of science. By using knowledge of the natural world to predict the consequences of our actions, science makes it possible to solve problems and create opportunities using technology. The detailed knowledge required to sustain our civilization could only have been derived through scientific investigation.
The arguments of creationists are not driven by evidence that can be observed in the natural world. Special creation or supernatural intervention is not subjectable to meaningful tests, which require predicting plausible results and then checking these results through observation and experimentation. Indeed, claims of "special creation" reverse the scientific process. The explanation is seen as unalterable, and evidence is sought only to support a particular conclusion by whatever means possible.
Evidence Supporting Biological Evolution
A long path leads from the origins of primitive "life," which existed at least 3.5 billion years ago, to the profusion and diversity of life that exists today. This path is best understood as a product of evolution.
Contrary to popular opinion, neither the term nor the idea of biological evolution began with Charles Darwin and his foremost work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Many scholars from the ancient Greek philosophers on had inferred that similar species were descended from a common ancestor. The word "evolution" first appeared in the English language in 1647 in a nonbiological connection, and it became widely used in English for all sorts of progressions from simpler beginnings. The term Darwin most often used to refer to biological evolution was "descent with modification," which remains a good brief definition of the process today.
Darwin proposed that evolution could be explained by the differential survival of organisms following their naturally occurring variation--a process he termed "natural selection." According to this view, the offspring of organisms differ from one another and from their parents in ways that are heritable--that is, they can pass on the differences genetically to their own offspring. Furthermore, organisms in nature typically produce more offspring than can survive and reproduce given the constraints of food, space, and other environmental resources. If a particular off spring has traits that give it an advantage in a particular environment, that organism will be more likely to survive and pass on those traits. As differences accumulate over generations, populations of organisms diverge from their ancestors.
Darwin's original hypothesis has undergone extensive modification and expansion, but the central concepts stand firm. Studies in genetics and molecular biology--fields unknown in Darwin's time--have explained the occurrence of the hereditary variations that are essential to natural selection. Genetic variations result from changes, or mutations, in the nucleotide sequence of DNA, the molecule that genes are made from. Such changes in DNA now can be detected and described with great precision.
Genetic mutations arise by chance. They may or may not equip the organism with better means for surviving in its environment. But if a gene variant improves adaptation to the environment (for example, by allowing an organism to make better use of an available nutrient, or to escape predators more effectively--such as through stronger legs or disguising coloration), the organisms carrying that gene are more likely to survive and reproduce than those without it. Over time, their descendants will tend to increase, changing the average characteristics of the population. Although the genetic variation on which natural selection works is based on random or chance elements, natural selection itself produces "adaptive" change--the very opposite of chance.
The Fossil Record
Although it was Darwin, above all others, who first marshalled convincing evidence for biological evolution, earlier scholars had recognized that organisms on Earth had changed systematically over long periods of time. For example, in 1799 an engineer named William Smith reported that, in undisrupted layers of rock, fossils occurred in a definite sequential order, with more modern-appearing ones closer to the top. Because bottom layers of rock logically were laid down earlier and thus are older than top layers, the sequence of fossils also could be given a chronology from oldest to youngest. His findings were confirmed and extended in the 1830s by the paleontologist William Lonsdale, who recognized that fossil remains of organisms from lower strata were more primitive than the ones above. Today, many thousands of ancient rock deposits have been identified that show corresponding successions of fossil organisms.
Thus, the general sequence of fossils had already been recognized before Darwin conceived of descent with modification. But the paleontologists and geologists before Darwin used the sequence of fossils in rocks not as proof of biological evolution, but as a basis for working out the original sequence of rock strata that had been structurally disturbed by earthquakes and other forces.
In Darwin's time, paleontology was still a rudimentary science. Large parts of the geological succession of stratified rocks were unknown or inadequately studied.
Darwin, therefore, worried about the rarity of intermediate forms between some major groups of organisms.
Today, many of the gaps in the paleontological record have been filled by the research of paleontologists. Hundreds of thousands of fossil organisms, found in well-dated rock sequences, represent successions of forms through time and manifest many evolutionary transitions. As mentioned earlier, microbial life of the simplest type was already in existence 3.5 billion years ago. The oldest evidence of more complex organisms (that is, eucaryotic cells, which are more complex than bacteria) has been discovered in fossils sealed in rocks approximately 2 billion years old. Multicellular organisms, which are the familiar fungi, plants, and animals, have been found only in younger geological strata. The following list presents the order in which increasingly complex forms of life appeared:
So many intermediate forms have been discovered between fish and amphibians, between amphibians and reptiles, between reptiles and mammals, and along the primate lines of descent that it often is difficult to identify categorically when the transition occurs from one to another particular species. Actually, nearly all fossils can be regarded as intermediates in some sense; they are life forms that come between the forms that preceded them and those that followed.
The fossil record thus provides consistent evidence of systematic change through time--of descent with modification. From this huge body of evidence, it can be predicted that no reversals will be found in future paleontological studies. That is, amphibians will not appear before fishes, nor mammals before reptiles, and no complex life will occur in the geological record before the oldest eucaryotic cells. This prediction has been upheld by the evidence that has accumulated until now: no reversals have been found.
Common Structures
Inferences about common descent derived from paleontology are reinforced by comparative anatomy. For example, the skeletons of humans, mice, and bats are strikingly similar, despite the different ways of life of these animals and the diversity of environments in which they flourish. The correspondence of these animals, bone by bone, can be observed in every part of the body, including the limbs; yet a person writes, a mouse runs, and a bat flies with structures built of bones that are different in detail but similar in general structure and relation to each other.
Scientists call such structures homologies and have concluded that they are best explained by common descent. Comparative anatomists investigate such homologies, not only in bone structure but also in other parts of the body, working out relationships from degrees of similarity. Their conclusions provide important inferences about the details of evolutionary history, inferences that can be tested by comparisons with the sequence of ancestral forms in the paleontological record.
The mammalian ear and jaw are instances in which paleontology and comparative anatomy combine to show common ancestry through transitional stages. The lower jaws of mammals contain only one bone, whereas those of reptiles have several. The other bones in the reptile jaw are homologous with bones now found in the mammalian ear. Paleontologists have discovered intermediate forms of mammal-like reptiles (Therapsida) with a double jaw joint--one composed of the bones that persist in mammalian jaws, the other consisting of bones that eventually became the hammer and anvil of the mammalian ear.
The Distribution of Species
Biogeography also has contributed evidence for descent from common ancestors. The diversity of life is stupendous. Approximately 250,000 species of living plants, 100,000 species of fungi, and one million species of animals have been described and named, each occupying its own peculiar ecological setting or niche; and the census is far from complete. Some species, such as human beings and our companion the dog, can live under a wide range of environments. Others are amazingly specialized. One species of a fungus (Laboulbenia) grows exclusively on the rear portion of the covering wings of a single species of beetle (Aphaenops cronei) found only in some caves of southern France. The larvae of the fly Drosophila carcinophila can develop only in specialized grooves beneath the flaps of the third pair of oral appendages of a land crab that is found only on certain Caribbean islands.
How can we make intelligible the colossal diversity of living beings and the existence of such extraordinary, seemingly whimsical creatures as the fungus, beetle, and fly described above? And why are island groups like the Galápagos so often inhabited by forms similar to those on the nearest mainland but belonging to different species? Evolutionary theory explains that biological diversity results from the descendants of local or migrant predecessors becoming adapted to their diverse environments. This explanation can be tested by examining present species and local fossils to see whether they have similar structures, which would indicate how one is derived from the other. Also, there should be evidence that species without an established local ancestry had migrated into the locality.
Wherever such tests have been carried out, these conditions have been confirmed. A good example is provided by the mammalian populations of North and South America, where strikingly different native organisms evolved in isolation until the emergence of the isthmus of Panama approximately 3 million years ago. Thereafter, the armadillo, porcupine, and opossum -- mammals of South American origin -- migrated north, along with many other species of plants and animals, while the mountain lion and other North American species made their way across the isthmus to the south.
The evidence that Darwin found for the influence of geographical distribution on the evolution of organisms has become stronger with advancing knowledge. For example, approximately 2,000 species of flies belonging to the genus Drosophila are now found throughout the world. About one-quarter of them live only in Hawaii. More than a thousand species of snails and other land mollusks also are found only in Hawaii. The biological explanation for the multiplicity of related species in remote localities is that such great diversity is a consequence of their evolution from a few common ancestors that colonized an isolated environment. The Hawaiian Islands are far from any mainland or other islands, and on the basis of geological evidence they never have been attached to other lands. Thus, the few colonizers that reached the Hawaiian Islands found many available ecological niches, where they could, over numerous generations, undergo evolutionary change and diversification. No mammals other than one bat species lived in the Hawaiian Islands when the first human settlers arrived; similarly, many other kinds of plants and animals were absent.
The Hawaiian Islands are not less hospitable than other parts of the world for the absent species. For example, pigs and goats have multiplied in the wild in Hawaii, and other domestic animals also thrive there. The scientific explanation for the absence of many kinds of organisms, and the great multiplication of a few kinds, is that many sorts of organisms never reached the islands, because of their geographic isolation. Those that did reach the islands diversified over time because of the absence of related organisms that would compete for resources.
Similarities During Development
Embryology, the study of biological development from the time of conception, is another source of independent evidence for common descent. Barnacles, for instance, are sedentary crustaceans with little apparent similarity to such other
crustaceans as lobsters, shrimps, or copepods. Yet barnacles pass through a free-swimming larval stage in which they look like other crustacean larvae. The similarity of larval stages supports the conclusion that all crustaceans have homologous parts and a common ancestry.
Similarly, a wide variety of organisms from fruit flies to worms to mice to humans have very similar sequences of genes that are active early in development. These genes influence body segmentation or orientation in all these diverse groups. The presence of such similar genes doing similar things across such a wide range of organisms is best explained by their having been present in a very early common ancestor of all of these groups.
New Evidence from Molecular Biology
The unifying principle of common descent that emerges from all the foregoing lines of evidence is being reinforced by the discoveries of modern biochemistry and molecular biology.
The code used to translate nucleotide sequences into amino acid sequences is essentially the same in all organisms. Moreover, proteins in all organisms are invariably composed of the same set of 20 amino acids. This unity of composition and function is a powerful argument in favor of the common descent of the most diverse organisms.
In 1959, scientists at Cambridge University in the UK determined the three-dimensional structures of two proteins that are found in almost every multicelled animal: hemoglobin and myoglobin. Hemoglobin is the protein that carries oxygen in the blood. Myoglobin receives oxygen from hemoglobin and stores it in the tissues until needed. These were the first three-dimensional protein structures to be solved, and they yielded some key insights. Myoglobin has a single chain of 153 amino acids wrapped around a group of iron and other atoms (called "heme") to which oxygen binds. Hemoglobin, in contrast, is made of up four chains: two identical chains consisting of 141 amino acids, and two other identical chains consisting of 146 amino acids. However, each chain has a heme exactly like that of myoglobin, and each of the four chains in the hemoglobin molecule is folded exactly like myoglobin. It was immediately obvious in 1959 that the two molecules are very closely related.
During the next two decades, myoglobin and hemoglobin sequences were determined for dozens of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, worms, and molluscs. All of these sequences were so obviously related that they could be compared with confidence with the three-dimensional structures of two selected standards--whale myoglobin and horse hemoglobin. Even more significantly, the differences between sequences from different organisms could be used to construct a family tree of hemoglobin and myoglobin variation among organisms. This tree agreed completely with observations derived from paleontology and anatomy about the common descent of the corresponding organisms.
Similar family histories have been obtained from the three-dimensional structures and amino acid sequences of other proteins, such as cytochrome c (a protein engaged in energy transfer) and the digestive proteins trypsin and chymotrypsin. The examination of molecular structure offers a new and extremely powerful tool for studying evolutionary relationships. The quantity of information is potentially huge -- as large as the thousands of different proteins contained in living organisms, and limited only by the time and resources of molecular biologists.
As the ability to sequence the nucleotides making up DNA has improved, it also has become possible to use genes to reconstruct the evolutionary history of organisms. Because of mutations, the sequence of nucleotides in a gene gradually changes over time. The more closely related two organisms are, the less different their DNA will be. Because there are tens of thousands of genes in humans and other organisms, DNA contains a tremendous amount of information about the evolutionary history of each organism.
Genes evolve at different rates because, although mutation is a random event, some proteins are much more tolerant of changes in their amino acid sequence than are other proteins. For this reason, the genes that encode these more tolerant, less constrained proteins evolve faster. The average rate at which a particular kind of gene or protein evolves gives rise to the concept of a "molecular clock." Molecular clocks run rapidly for less constrained proteins and slowly for more constrained proteins, though they all time the same evolutionary events.
The figure on this page compares three molecular clocks: for cytochrome c proteins, which interact intimately with other macromolecules and are quite constrained in their amino acid sequences; for the less rigidly constrained hemoglobins, which interact mainly with oxygen and other small molecules; and for fibrinopeptides, which are protein fragments that are cut from larger proteins (fibrinogens) when blood clots. The clock for fibrinopeptides runs rapidly; 1 percent of the amino acids change in a little longer than 1 million years. At the other extreme, the molecular clock runs slowly for cytochrome c; a 1 percent change in amino acid sequence requires 20 million years. The hemoglobin clock is intermediate.
The concept of a molecular clock is useful for two purposes. It determines evolutionary relationships among organisms, and it indicates the time in the past when species started to diverge from one another. Once the clock for a particular gene or protein has been calibrated by reference to some event whose time is known, the actual chronological time when all other events occurred can be determined by examining the protein or gene tree.
An interesting additional line of evidence supporting evolution involves sequences of DNA known as "pseudogenes." Pseudogenes are remnants of genes that no longer function but continue to be carried along in DNA as excess baggage. Pseudogenes also change through time, as they are passed on from ancestors to descendants, and they offer an especially useful way of reconstructing evolutionary relationships.
With functioning genes, one possible explanation for the relative similarity between genes from different organisms is that their ways of life are similar -- for example, the genes from a horse and a zebra could be more similar because of their similar habitats and behaviours than the genes from a horse and a tiger. But this possible explanation does not work for pseudogenes, since they perform no function. Rather, the degree of similarity between pseudogenes must simply reflect their evolutionary relatedness. The more remote the last common ancestor of two organisms, the more dissimilar their pseudogenes will be.
The evidence for evolution from molecular biology is overwhelming and is growing quickly. In some cases, this molecular evidence makes it possible to go beyond the paleontological evidence. For example, it has long been postulated that whales descended from land mammals that had returned to the sea. From anatomical and paleontological evidence, the whales' closest living land relatives seemed to be the even-toed hoofed mammals (modern cattle, sheep, camels, goats, etc.). Recent comparisons of some milk protein genes (beta-casein and kappa-casein) have confirmed this relationship and have suggested that the closest land-bound living relative of whales may be the hippopotamus. In this case, molecular biology has augmented the fossil record.
Creationism and the Evidence for Evolution
Some creationists cite what they say is an incomplete fossil record as evidence for the failure of evolutionary theory. The fossil record was incomplete in Darwin's time, but many of the important gaps that existed then have been filled by subsequent paleontological research. Perhaps the most persuasive fossil evidence for evolution is the consistency of the sequence of fossils from early to recent. Nowhere on
Earth do we find, for example, mammals in Devonian (the age of fishes) strata, or human fossils coexisting with dinosaur remains. Undisturbed strata with simple unicellular organisms predate those with multicellular organisms, and invertebrates precede vertebrates; nowhere has this sequence been found inverted. Fossils from adjacent strata are more similar than fossils from temporally distant strata. The most reasonable scientific conclusion that can be drawn from the fossil record is that descent with modification has taken place as stated in evolutionary theory.
Special creationists argue that "no one has seen evolution occur." This misses the point about how science tests hypotheses. We don't see Earth going around the sun or the atoms that make up matter. We "see" their consequences. Scientists infer that atoms exist and Earth revolves because they have tested predictions derived from these concepts by extensive observation and experimentation.
Furthermore, on a minor scale, we "experience" evolution occurring every day. The annual changes in influenza viruses and the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are both products of evolutionary forces. Indeed, the rapidity with which organisms with short generation times, such as bacteria and viruses, can evolve under the influence of their environments is of great medical significance. Many laboratory experiments have shown that, because of mutation and natural selection, such microorganisms can change in specific ways from those of immediately preceding generations.
On a larger scale, the evolution of mosquitoes resistant to insecticides is another example of the tenacity and adaptability of organisms under environmental stress. Similarly, malaria parasites have become resistant to the drugs that were used extensively to combat them for many years. As a consequence, malaria is on the increase, with more than 300 million clinical cases of malaria occurring every year.
Molecular evolutionary data counter a recent proposition called "intelligent design theory." Proponents of this idea argue that structural complexity is proof of the direct hand of God in specially creating organisms as they are today. These arguments echo those of the 18th century cleric William Paley who held that the vertebrate eye, because of its intricate organization, had been specially designed in its present form by an omnipotent Creator. Modern-day intelligent design proponents argue that molecular structures such as DNA, or molecular processes such as the many steps that blood goes through when it clots, are so irreducibly complex that they can function only if all the components are operative at once. Thus, proponents of intelligent design say that these structures and processes could not have evolved in the stepwise mode characteristic of natural selection.
However, structures and processes that are claimed to be "irreducibly" complex typically are not on closer inspection. For example, it is incorrect to assume that a complex structure or biochemical process can function only if all its components are present and functioning as we see them today. Complex biochemical systems can be built up from simpler systems through natural selection. Thus, the "history" of a protein can be traced through simpler organisms. Jawless fish have a simpler hemoglobin than do jawed fish, which in turn have a simpler hemoglobin than mammals.
The evolution of complex molecular systems can occur in several ways. Natural selection can bring together parts of a system for one function at one time and then, at a later time, recombine those parts with other systems of components to produce a system that has a different function. Genes can be duplicated, altered, and then amplified through natural selection. The complex biochemical cascade resulting in blood clotting has been explained in this fashion.
Similarly, evolutionary mechanisms are capable of explaining the origin of highly complex anatomical structures. For example, eyes may have evolved independently many times during the history of life on Earth. The steps proceed from a simple eye spot made up of light-sensitive retinula cells (as is now found in the flatworm), to formation of individual photosensitive units (ommatidia) in insects with light focusing lenses, to the eventual formation of an eye with a single lens focusing images onto a retina. In humans and other vertebrates, the retina consists not only of photoreceptor cells but also of several types of neurons that begin to analyze the visual image. Through such gradual steps, very different kinds of eyes have evolved, from simple light-sensing organs to highly complex systems for vision.
Human Evolution
Studies in evolutionary biology have led to the conclusion that human beings arose from ancestral primates. This association was hotly debated among scientists in Darwin's day. But today there is no significant scientific doubt about the close evolutionary relationships among all primates, including humans.
Many of the most important advances in paleontology over the past century relate to the evolutionary history of humans. Not one but many connecting links -- intermediate between and along various branches of the human family tree -- have been found as fossils. These linking fossils occur in geological deposits of intermediate age. They document the time and rate at which primate and human evolution occurred.
Scientists have unearthed thousands of fossil specimens representing members of the human family. A great number of these cannot be assigned to the modern human species, Homo sapiens. Most of these specimens have been well dated, often by means of radiometric techniques. They reveal a well-branched tree, parts of which trace a general evolutionary sequence leading from ape-like forms to modern humans. 
Paleontologists have discovered numerous species of extinct apes in rock strata that are older than four million years, but never a member of the human family at that great age. Australopithecus, whose earliest known fossils are about four million years old, is a genus with some features closer to apes and some closer to modern humans. In brain size, Australopithecus was barely more advanced than apes. A number of features, including long arms, short legs, intermediate toe structure, and features of the upper limb, indicate that the members of this species spent part of the time in trees. But they also walked upright on the ground, like humans. Bipedal tracks of Australopithecus have been discovered, beautifully preserved with those of other extinct animals, in hardened volcanic ash. Most of our Australopithecus ancestors died out close to two-and-a-half million years ago, while other Australopithecus species, which were on side branches of the human tree, survived alongside more advanced hominids for another million years. 
Distinctive bones of the oldest species of the human genus, Homo, date back to rock strata about 2.4 million years old. Physical anthropologists agree that Homo evolved from one of the species of Australopithecus. By two million years ago, early members of Homo had an average brain size one-and-a-half times larger than that of Australopithecus, though still substantially smaller than that of modern humans. The shapes of the pelvic and leg bones suggest that these early Homo were not part-time climbers like Australopithecus but walked and ran on long legs, as modern humans do. Just as Australopithecus showed a complex of ape-like, human-like, and intermediate features, so was early Homo intermediate between Australopithecus and modern humans in some features, and close to modern humans in other respects. The earliest stone tools are of virtually the same age as the earliest fossils of Homo. Early Homo, with its larger brain than Australopithecus, was a maker of stone tools.
The fossil record for the interval between 2.4 million years ago and the present includes the skeletal remains of several species assigned to the genus Homo. The more recent species had larger brains than the older ones. This fossil record is complete enough to show that the human genus first spread from its place of origin in Africa to Europe and Asia a little less than two million years ago. Distinctive types of stone tools are associated with various populations. More recent species with larger brains generally used more sophisticated tools than more ancient species.
Molecular biology also has provided strong evidence of the close relationship between humans and apes. Analysis of many proteins and genes has shown that humans are genetically similar to chimpanzees and gorillas and less similar to orangutans and other primates. 
DNA has even been extracted from a well-preserved skeleton of the extinct human creature known as Neanderthal, a member of the genus Homo and often considered either as a subspecies of Homo sapiens or as a separate species. Application of the molecular clock, which makes use of known rates of genetic mutation, suggests that Neanderthal's lineage diverged from that of modern Homo sapiens less than half a million years ago, which is entirely compatible with evidence from the fossil record.
Based on molecular and genetic data, evolutionists favor the hypothesis that modern Homo sapiens, individuals very much like us, evolved from more archaic humans about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. They also believe that this transition occurred in Africa, with modern humans then dispersing to Asia, Europe, and eventually Australasia and the Americas.
Discoveries of hominid remains during the past three decades in East and South Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere have combined with advances in molecular biology to initiate a new discipline--molecular paleoanthropology. This field of inquiry is providing an ever-growing inventory of evidence for a genetic affinity between human beings and the African apes.
Opinion polls show that many people believe that divine intervention actively guided the evolution of human beings. Science cannot comment on the role that supernatural forces might play in human affairs. But scientific investigations have concluded that the same forces responsible for the evolution of all other life forms on Earth can account for the evolution of human beings.
The Problem
The question to be considered here is not how living bodies originate now. With respect to the present everyone admits biogenesis as a law, i.e., not a single instance is known of a living body which did not come into existence through a process of generation from another living body. The experiments of Pasteur and others have conclusively shown that in all instances where life seemed to originate from inanimate matter, microscopically small organisms gave rise to the new living bodies.
Our problem is concerned with the possibility of living bodies originating from inanimate matter. To a certain extent this problem refers to the future, but its main interest lies still in the past. It refers to the future insofar as the question can be raised whether or not laboratory experiments will ever succeed in producing a living organism, no matter how primitive, from inanimate matter. It refers to the past insofar as all available evidence points to the fact that once life on earth was physically impossible, so that at some time in the distant past living bodies must have made their first appearance on earth. Because observation of this first appearance is evidently impossible, the question how this life originated may be studied philosophically by an investigation of the various possibilities and the elimination of any position that is not in accordance with reason. In this way it will perhaps be possible to arrive at the conclusion that only one position is in agreement with the demands of reason, or that one position offers a great degree of probability than others.
Possible Positions Concerning the Origin of Life
Omitting pantheistic and occasionalistic hypotheses with respect to the origin of life, the following may be formulated:
The first two of these positions need not be considered to any great extent. Even if living bodies had always existed they would need a cause to explain their existence, for their essence is not their "to be," and therefore, they do not have in themselves a sufficient reason for their existence. Moreover, the earth has not always been suitable for life, because at one time in the past it was so hot that no living bodies could have existed upon it. To explain the origin of living bodies by claiming that they came form other planets, as is done by the second position, merely shifts the problem to another planet. Moreover, in passing from another planet to the earth, any form of physical life would have been exposed to certain death because of ultraviolet rays and the heat resulting from its passage through the atmosphere.
Direct Creation. There cannot be any doubt concerning the possibility that living bodies were directly created by God, for anything which is not a contradiction in terms can be done by God. The point, however, is that it would be unreasonable to suppose that God created new bodies when plenty of matter was available for the formation of these bodies. It does not seem in accordance with wisdom to make new material where an abundance of suitable material is available. But inanimate matter contains all the necessary material for the physical organization required by a living body.
Divine Intervention as the Sole Organizing Cause of Matter. Again, there cannot be any doubt that God has the power directly to organize matter in such a way that it is immediately disposed for actuation by a soul. However, it would seem unreasonable to attribute directly to God what can be brought about through the activity of the natural forces of inanimate matter acting in accordance with the laws of nature. If the Author of nature has endowed matter with forces that can naturally lead to the emergence of living bodies, it would seem unreasonable to suppose that He positively intervened in the process of natural development by suspending the activity of these forces and directly organizing inanimate matter. We say if, for it remains to be seen whether or not living bodies can have originated from inanimate matter acting in accordance with the laws of nature. Should the answer to this question be negative, then it would seem to be more consonant with divine wisdom to give rise to living bodies by organizing existing matter than by the creation of new matter.
Emergence of Life from Matter Alone. Can the physical forces of inanimate matter alone serve as an adequate explanation for the emergence of life? At first sight it would seem that the forces of inanimate matter can never give rise to a living body, because any material cause acts in accordance with its nature and therefore its effect cannot be greater than itself. But a living body is essentially more perfect than a nonliving body; hence it would seem that no forces of inanimate matter can give rise to a living body.
However, this answer fails to take into consideration the possibility of many material causes combining to produce an effect. Admittedly, if it is possible to introduce into a body the material dispositions making it proximately disposed for actuation by a soul, the cause or causes introducing these dispositions are the cause of a living body. The question, therefore, is whether or not it would be impossible for a combination of material forces to cause these dispositions in nonliving matter. The enormous complexity of the necessary dispositions excludes the possibility that a single line of material causality would ever produce these dispositions. But it is a well-known fact that physical causality, as it occurs in nature, is a very complex process in which many different lines of causality constantly interfere with one another.
Now the interference of different lines of causality may result in an effect which is proportioned to none of the interfering causes taken separately. Conceivably such an effect could be even more perfect than any of the producing causes, precisely because the combination of these causes could happen to be equal to the material causality normally exercised by one cause of a higher nature. If the material forces operating in a living body, which the soul combines into a single unit, are able to cause the necessary dispositions for life and thus produce a new living body, why would it be impossible for these forces to be united "by chance" into an operational unit and thus give rise to a living body? If such a thing did happen a living body would have been produced from inanimate matter. Thus it would not be impossible for a combination of inanimate forces to give rise to a living body.
Granted that such a combination is a possibility, does it provide an adequate explanation for the origin of life? An adequate explanation is one which takes into consideration all the causes that are at work in the production of an effect. No one admits that in the present state of science it is possible to indicate even all the physical forces that are necessary for the production of the dispositions of matter required for actuation by a soul. But supposing that a time will come when man will know all the material causes whose combination results in the production of a living body, will he have an adequate explanation for the origin of living bodies? The answer is in the negative, because he has failed to indicate the cause which led to the combination of these causes by unifying their activity.
But could not this unification be brought about by chance, as was suggested above? We must answer that an appeal to chance is not an explanation. Chance refers to the unpredictability of an effect produced by causes whose combined action cannot be foreseen, because the cause of their combination is not known. To deny that their combination has a cause is tantamount to a denial of the principle of causality. Therefore, an appeal to chance is an admission that the known physical forces of inanimate matter cannot explain the origin of life.
But, perhaps, at a future date science will discover the cause or causes which combine the forces of inanimate matter and make them produce in a nonliving body the necessary dispositions for actuation by a soul. Then, at least, science will have given an adequate explanation for the emergence of life by the sole forces of inanimate matter. Again, however, our answer has to be in the negative. Granted that perhaps a material agent causing the unification of these forces will be discovered, there still remains the principle of finality, i.e., the metaphysical law that every agent acts for a definite purpose. An agent can act for a purpose either because it is made to act for this purpose by an intelligent being, or because the agent himself is an intelligent being and directs his activity to a definite end.
If the cause of the unification is purely material, it cannot be an intelligent agent; therefore it acts towards a purpose merely because it is made to act in this way by an intelligent being. This intelligent being, qua intelligent, is extraneous to matter, for any intellect is immaterial. If, on the other hand, the agent is immaterial, it is of course extraneous to matter. Our final conclusion, therefore, is that the physical forces of inanimate matter alone cannot give an adequate explanation for the origin of living bodies.
Emergence of Life from Matter Under the Directing Influence of God. This position combines certain aspects of the two preceding hypotheses and discards others. It agrees with the theory of divine intervention insofar as it demands God's influence upon matter in the production of living bodies; it differs from it in that it does not require a suspension of the deterministic laws of nature (a miraculous intervention), but merely that God act through causes which are intrinsic to matter.
It agrees with the theory that life originates from matter alone insofar as it admits that the physical forces of inanimate matter can produce life, but differs from it because it requires that these causes be directed by the Primary Cause. Does this new position offer a satisfactory explanation for the origin of living bodies?
There is no reason to suppose that God cannot exercise influence upon the forces of inanimate matter without suspending the deterministic laws of nature. All that is necessary is that God make use of the intrinsic forces of matter, which act in accordance with these laws, by directing their activity to the purpose He intends, viz., the production of the necessary conditions for the actuation of matter by a soul. The question, however, is whether God can give such a direction to the forces of matter without producing in existing matter a tendency previously nonexistent in it, for such a production would be a positive intervention in the existing order of nature.
To this question, we answer that the existence of such a tendency in matter allows a double explanation -- either God created it in matter which previously did not have it, or He concreated it in matter when matter itself was created. In the first case there would have been a positive intervention, and the whole explanation would be identical with the position that the divine Cause organizes matter by suspending the existing laws of nature. In the second alternative, however, this tendency would belong to the very essence of the material world, as planned and created by God.
Therefore, the directing influence of this tendency would not be an intervention in the established order of nature, but merely the execution of the order of nature established by divine providence. In this theory inanimate matter from its very beginning would have possessed all the forces necessary for the emergence of life, because God Himself planned the whole course of nature in such a way that life followed of necessity when the planned combination of inanimate forces occurred.
If this position were true the human observer of nature would be faced with effects emerging "by chance" from a concurrence of causes, because he does not see this concurrence takes place according to plan. Consequently, upon his level of explanation, he would be justified in speaking about life as emerging from a chance meeting of inanimate causes. He would be mistaken, however, if from his observations he would conclude that his explanation gives an adequate account for the origin of life.
It would seem that this theory does not violate any physical or metaphysical principles. Although it does not postulate a special intervention of God in the origin of life, it does not deny that life could originate only as a result of God's planning and providence. It certainly would be a more splendid manifestation of God's power if life were produced in this way rather than by a miraculous intervention in the established order of nature.
Emergence of Life from Matter Under the Directing Influence of a Secondary Cause. If the preceding theory offers an explanation for the emergence of life, there seems to be no reason why it should be impossible for an intelligent secondary cause to direct the forces of matter in the production of the material conditions required for actuation by a soul. Of course, such a cause would need to have a far greater knowledge of matter than is possessed by man at this time. It would not seem impossible, however, that ultimately man will succeed in acquiring this knowledge and be able to utilize it to obtain the desired effect. In that case man would be able to produce living bodies artificially. Nevertheless, it would not be a case of life being produced by the sole forces of matter, because these forces would be under the direction of man, who is an intelligent being. Moreover, even in this case God's action would not be excluded, because man's activity does not escape the directing influence of God.
A similar theory for the emergence of life from inanimate matter was offered by ancient and medieval philosophers, including St Thomas, as an explanation of the supposedly spontaneous generation of maggots in decaying flesh. They though that in this case the forces of inanimate matter, as acted upon by the sun or other celestial bodies under the direction of spiritual substances, made matter proximately disposed for actuation of a soul.
Conclusion
Of the seven positions formulated above with respect to the first origin of life only the third, fourth, sixth, and seventh offer reasonable possibilities. However, the third (direct creation of the whole living body) is less probable, although it cannot be called impossible. The seventh (directing influence of a secondary cause) does not apply to the first origin of living bodies, if man is supposed to be this cause. Hence, the choice seems to be mainly between the fourth position (God as the sole organizing cause of matter) and the sixth (emergence of life under the influence of God acting through causes that are intrinsic to matter). Of course, it is impossible to say what actually did happen, unless there is a reliable report of a witness. But if there is such a report, its contents escape from the domain of philosophy and physical science.
Do YOU have the report?
There would seem to be at least three possible viewpoints of the value of history. Clearly such a statement calls for the qualification that the positions represented by these viewpoints are unlikely to be sharply demarcated, but will generally merge into one another.
The first is the view that history is bunk, often positively harmful, and that we should have as little to do with it as we can manage. Such an opinion would fit a strong belief that all that matters is the future, that preoccupation with the past can only hold us back, and indeed that lessons learned from the past are highly likely to be wrong and to lead us on to worse mistakes in the future. Support, of a sort, for these opinions may be sought from Hegel's comment that people and governments have never learned from history, although any further investigation of Hegel will result in that support drying up rapidly, since his whole philosophical position puts history into a pre-eminent position. Holders of this negative view of the value of history may among other things point to the disasters arising from the tendency among army generals to attempt to re-fight the battles of earlier wars, while ignoring the opportunities and dangers presented by subsequent advances in technology.
Others who might find themselves in this camp are those with a particularly strong conviction of the impossibility of disentangling historical truth from propaganda, or at least from the views and prejudices of those who write history, a subject discussed in detail in the first essay, on objectivity.
There are many incontestable truths in these views, and they should certainly inform any position that might be held on the value of history, but to hold them exclusively seems indicative of a certain poverty of overall outlook. Perhaps the real value of this position is that it obliges those who do not hold it constantly to examine their own views, to ensure that they are not vulnerable to such negativism.
A different position on the subject, and one that in practice is likely to be held at least to a limited extent by all but the most diehard negativists, is the belief that there are certain utilitarian uses to which history can be put. There is much support to be found for this view, and a great deal of evidence. Take for example the role of history as a social lubricant. "An acquaintance with history is agreeable to us as sociable and conversable creatures" wrote Joseph Priestley, and John Locke believed not only that history was a great moral and political teacher, but was a proper study for a man of business in the world" and "a gentleman".
E H Carr wrote, "the function of the historian is to master and understand, and the past as the key to the understanding of the present`. And Hegel, in the remark quoted above, does not say that we cannot learn from the past, only that we do not, and it is not difficult to find instances where he is right. Very recently there were those who, perhaps with Vietnam or Afghanistan in mind, warned that going into the Balkans militarily would be a great deal easier than coming out. No, no said our leaders, six months should do it. Less obvious are the cases where we just may have learned something. There were for example many who felt that Saddam should have been toppled after the Gulf War. Failure to do so may not have left an ideal situation, but neither is the West tied to the appalling task of trying to govern Iraq, as it is Kosovo.
The fact is that a large number of influential people has always believed that there is a very great deal to be learned from history. We have noted Locke's view, and Collingwood points out that Polybius, writing in the Rome of the late republic, thought history worth learning because it provided a training ground for political life, not, it is true, because it would enable us to prevent things happening, but because it would teach us how to respond to them when they did happen. All those who for centuries have studied Machiavelli, must have believed that they could get some things right, or less wrong, by observing the apparent consequences of certain courses of actions. The art of statecraft and diplomacy all over the world is heavily influenced by the study of history. Is it credible that the relative peace of the world between 1815 and 1914, and again since 1945, owes nothing to an awareness of history by statesmen and diplomats? Doubtless the wisdom sought by our political leaders could be taught purely theoretically, but as Seneca said, "the journey is long by way of precepts, but short and effective through examples."
There is in addition a large number of what we might call "special pleaders" who make use of historical events to pursue their own aims. A small sample of these could include UK Labour Party stalwarts keeping their flame alive by reference to Tolpuddle Martyrs and Jarrow Marchers; the Victorian Samuel Smiles using the lives of such great past figures as Newton and Watt to convince his own age of the virtues in which he believed; feminism, constructed at least in part out of a particular interpretation of the history of women down the centuries; and Ulster Unionism maintaining its strength by annual appeals to history represented by the Orange Marches.
On an even more mundane level, we may care to note in passing the highly practical values placed on history by those whose livelihoods depend on having some understanding of past trends in share prices or the past performance of race horses and their blood lines. Indeed the very existence of the phrase "track record" is an indication of the extent to which awareness of the value of history permeates mankind's consciousness.
That is no bad cue to start to move away from the second, or utilitarian position towards the final view, which takes a far deeper view of what history means to us as human beings. Arguably this is the area in which philosophy should primarily interest itself.
A simple, if uncompromising expression of this viewpoint is that history is simply representative of our whole culture. That need not be seen as an extreme position, but even among those who do find it so, many will agree that history is an inescapable part of what it is to be human. Awareness of our place in time is part of what we call consciousness. We are creatures who plan the future and who remember and assess the past. We do it as individuals and we do it collectively, and we have done so since folk tales were told and sung around the campfires of our distant past. Those who are cut off from the past, by loss of memory or other conditions of the brain, are regarded as ill, unable to function as normal people, lacking human identity; without knowledge of our past we are incomplete. The purpose of history, says Tolstoy, is to teach nations and humanity to know themselves. One of the first things many people do when they retire is to lay siege to the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, in order to discover, and perhaps to write their own history.
Those who have little difficulty accepting these sentiments may also find it easy to share the rather unfashionable view that says simply that history is of the greatest possible value for its own sake. The notion is not quite dead even in our own utilitarian age, and is grounded in a powerful Victorian attitude concerning knowledge generally. This attitude is well expressed by Cardinal Newman's mid-century belief in "liberal knowledge" as an end in itself, although Newman saw himself as following Cicero, who considered the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake to be the first of what he called "heads of moral excellence".
What could it be about history that makes such a basic appeal to us? As descendants of those early humans around their campfires, we still have a weakness for a good story, and history, narrative history at least, meets that basic need. History, Cicero said, gives pleasure. Our liking for a good story may be one reason why the "kings and battles" school of history proves so resistant to the efforts of would-be reformers, who would rather we studied the lives of people — "ordinary" people for choice. The Battle of Waterloo is simply a much better story than the calorific intake of a mediaeval peasant. Kings and battles history is not always helpful to the more didactic schools, but it is of inestimable value not only to those who love a good yarn, but also as a golden treasure trove of inspiration for the world's greatest artists and writers. History as source material for great art can only with difficulty be described as valueless.
Of course this deeper view of the value of history is not without its own utilitarian aspects, its role as provider of the raw material for so much of the world's great art being only one example. To name another, a fairly logical extension of the thoughts expressed brings us to a consideration of nationalism. Some two hundred years ago Gottfried Herder made it crystal clear how important was the presentation of history in creating awareness of the new German nationhood. Many countries (the United Kingdom an interesting exception), reinforce their national identity with holidays that recall important events in their history; the Fourth of July and Bastille Day come to mind.
A further example of value being taken from history by those who certainly subscribe to the fundamental importance of the subject is to be found in the work of both Hegel, already mentioned, and Karl Marx. Their philosophies of history have already been discussed in the previous essay, which covered causation in history, but it is worth referring here to the very special role played by history in the formulation of Marxism, an ideology which played such a momentous part in the history of the twentieth century, although there is obviously room to question its value. Marx's entire economic system rests on his interpretation of the historical struggle of the labouring classes.
Religion, another great human preoccupation, is steeped in history. Religious instruction is in effect the teaching of history, history with some very precise aims it is true, light years from Lord Acton's view that history should be all but purposeless, and history which may at times be thought to blur the distinction between itself and mythology, but grounded nevertheless in the description of past events. Bede made liberal use of miracles in his writings, but they were historical miracles, and the Gospels themselves, when they were written, set out to provide the new religion of Christianity with some historical credibility. The value of history to the world's great religions seems incontestable. Without it, would they even exist?
Perhaps the most extreme version of a belief in the value of history may be found in what is an interesting footnote to the role of history in religion. This is the view held by some, that with the decline in religious faith, history should be seen as the real route to truth, perhaps even the sort of truth which was previously found in religion. As noted above, some of the difficulties associated with the congruence of history and truth were looked at in the first of these essays, that on objectivity in history. We can be confident that Kierkegaard, for one, would strongly object to any idea that history could be some sort of replacement for religion, and his objections would in part rest on the matter of objectivity. For in developing his views on what he called subjective truth, he claimed for example that Christian belief in the Crucifixion could not be justified if it depended on belief in the Crucifixion as an historical event. This is because we can never be entirely sure of the accuracy of any historical report; because, he maintained, mere probability about events, (which is in any case continually being updated as new scholarship uncovers new facts about the past), is not enough to justify religious belief; and because the detachment necessary required for a historical approach is totally at odds with the Passion which is inseparable from religious faith.
If, however, we believe with Henri Bergson that what we are is to a great extent made up from our memories of the past, and with Alexander Pope that "the proper study of mankind is man", then denying history the mantle of religion need not prevent us from according it a very high value.
Then, having brought Mithridates to terms, Sulla returned to finish the civil war against the Marian party. After a campaign throughout Italy he finally crushed the Marians at the Battle of the Colline Gate in November 82 BC. With both consuls dead, he had himself appointed to the revived office of dictator: but whereas a dictator was traditionally appointed for six months at a time, Sulla's appointment had no fixed term limit. There followed a series of bloody proscriptions against his political enemies, which dwarfed even Marius's purges. Statues of Marius were destroyed and Marius' body was exhumed and thrown in the Tiber. Cinna was already dead, killed by his own soldiers in a mutiny.[13] Caesar, as the nephew of Marius and son-in-law of Cinna, was targeted. He was stripped of his inheritance, his wife's dowry and his priesthood, but refused to divorce Cornelia and was forced to go into hiding. The threat against him was lifted by the intervention of his mother's family, who were supporters of Sulla, and the Vestal Virgins. Sulla gave in reluctantly, and is said to have declared that he saw many Mariuses in Caesar.[14]
After two years of unchallenged power, having reformed the Roman constitution to his satisfaction, Sulla resigned his dictatorship and re-established consular government. He dismissed his lictors and walked unguarded in the forum, offering to give account of his actions to any citizen.[17] This lesson in supreme confidence, Caesar later ridiculed — "Sulla did not know his political ABC's".[18] Ironically and dramatically, Caesar followed suit on the Ides of March and was not as lucky as Sulla. 
In 63 BC, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius, who had been appointed to the post of Pontifex Maximus by Sulla, died. In a bold move, Caesar put his name up for election to the post. He ran against two of the most powerful members of the boni, the consulares Quintus Lutatius Catulus and Publius Servilius Vatia Isauricus. There were accusations of bribery by all sides in the contest but Caesar emerged as the victor. The election to the post of Pontifex Maximus was very important to Caesar's career. The post held vast political and religious authority and firmly placed Caesar in the public eye for the remainder of his career.
In 60 BC (or 59 BC), the Centuriate Assembly elected Caesar senior Consul of the Roman Republic. His junior partner was his political enemy Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, an optimas and son-in-law of Cato the Younger. Bibulus' first act as Consul was to retire from all political activity in order to search the skies for omens. This apparently pious decision was designed to make Caesar's life difficult during his Consulship. Roman satirists ever after referred to the year as "the consulship of Julius and Caesar", as Romans expressed the time period by the names of the two consuls that were elected.
Caesar was then appointed to a five year term as Proconsular Governor of Transalpine Gaul (current southern France) and Illyria (the coast of Dalmatia). Not content with an idle governorship, Caesar started the Gallic Wars (58 BC–49 BC) in which he conquered all of Gaul (the rest of current France, with most of Switzerland and Belgium and parts of Germany, effectively western mainland Europe from the Atlantic to the Rhine) and annexed them to Rome. Among his legates were his cousins Lucius Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, Titus Labienus and Quintus Tullius Cicero, the younger brother of Caesar's future political opponent, Marcus Tullius Cicero.
In 50 BC, the Senate, led by Pompey, ordered Caesar to return to Rome and disband his army because his term as Proconsul had finished. Moreover, the Senate forbade Caesar to stand for a second consulship in absentia. Caesar thought he would be prosecuted and politically marginalized if he entered Rome without the immunity enjoyed by a Consul or without the power of his army. Pompey accused Caesar of insubordination and treason. On January 10, 49 BC Caesar crossed the Rubicon (the frontier boundary of Italy) with only one legion and ignited civil war. Upon crossing the Rubicon, Caesar is reported to have said Iacta alea est. This is normally rendered as "The die is cast". Plutarch maintains that he spoke this in Greek, quoting a line from the poet Menander, Aneristho kubos
Caesar returned to Italy in September 45 BC. As one of his first tasks, he filed his will, naming his grand-nephew Gaius Octavius (Octavian) as the heir to everything, including his title. Caesar also wrote that if Octavian died before Caesar did, Marcus Junius Brutus would be the next heir in succession. The Senate had already begun bestowing honours on Caesar in absentia. Even though Caesar had not proscribed his enemies, instead pardoning nearly every one of them, there seemed to be little open resistance to him.
He was honored by the Roman Senate as Imperus Maximus Dalte Sum Romana, or Highest of the Roman Imperators. This title stated that he was Praetori et Romanus, meaning High Protector of Rome (this title was later passed under the reign of Augustus).The conspirators never met openly, but they assembled a few at a time in each others' homes. There were many discussions and proposals, as might be expected, while they investigated how and where to execute their design. Some suggested that they should make the attempt as he was going along the Sacred Way, which was one of his favourite walks. Another idea was for it to be done at the elections during which he had to cross a bridge to appoint the magistrates in the Campus Martius; they should draw lots for some to push him from the bridge and for others to run up and kill him. A third plan was to wait for a coming gladiatorial show. The advantage of that would be that, because of the show, no suspicion would be aroused if arms were seen prepared for the attempt. But the majority opinion favoured killing him while he sat in the Senate, where he would be by himself since only Senators would be admitted, and where the many conspirators could hide their daggers beneath their togas. This plan won the day.
Caesar's death also marked, ironically, the end of the Roman Republic, for which the assassins had struck him down. The Roman middle and lower classes, with whom Caesar was immensely popular, and had been since Gaul and before, were enraged that a small group of high-browed aristocrats had killed their champion. Antony did not give the speech that Shakespeare penned for him more than 1600 years later ("Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears..."), but he did give a dramatic eulogy that appealed to the common people, a reflection of public opinion following Caesar's murder. Antony, who had been drifting apart from Caesar, capitalized on the grief of the Roman mob and threatened to unleash them on the Optimates, perhaps with the intent of taking control of Rome himself. But Caesar had named his grand nephew Gaius Octavian his sole heir, giving him the immensely powerful Caesar name as well as making him one of the wealthiest citizens in the Republic. Gaius Octavius was also, to all intents and purposes, the son of the great Caesar, and consequently also inherited the loyalty of much of the Roman populace. Octavius, only aged 19 at the time of Caesar's death, proved to be dangerous, and while Antony dealt with Decimus Brutus in the first round of the new civil wars, Octavius consolidated his position.
The first prize which fell to Caesar was the consulship, to secure which he forewent the triumph which he had earned in Spain. His colleague was M. Bibulus, who belonged to the straightest sect of the senatorial oligarchy and, together with his party, placed every form of constitutional obstruction in the path of Caesar's legislation. Caesar, however, overrode all opposition, mustering Pompey's veterans to drive his colleague from the forum. Bibulus became a virtual prisoner in his own house, and Caesar placed himself outside the pale of the free republic. Thus the program of the coalition was carried through. Pompey was satisfied by the ratification of his acts in Asia, and by the assignment of the Campanian state domains to his veterans, the capitalists (with whose interests Crassus was identified) had their bargain for the farming of the Asiatic revenues cancelled, Ptolemy Auletes received the confirmation of his title to the throne of Egypt (for a great consideration), and a fresh act was passed for preventing extortion by provincial governors.
In 55 BC certain German tribes, the Usipetes and Tencteri, crossed the lower Rhine, and invaded the modern Flanders. Caesar at once marched to meet them, and, on the pretext that they had violated a truce, seized their leaders who had come to parley with him, and then surprised and practically destroyed their host. His enemies in Rome accused him of treachery, and Cato even proposed that he should be handed over to the Germans. Caesar meanwhile constructed his famous bridge over the Rhine in ten days, and made a demonstration of force on the right bank. In the remaining weeks of the summer he made his first expedition to Britain, and this was followed by a second crossing in 54 BC. On the first occasion Caesar took with him only two legions, and effected little beyond a landing on the coast of Kent. The second expedition consisted of five legions and 2000 cavalry, and set out from the Portus Itius (Boulogne or Wissant). Caesar now penetrated into Middlesex and crossed the Thames, but the British prince Cassivellaunus with his war chariots harassed the Roman columns, and Caesar was compelled to return to Gaul after imposing a tribute which was never paid.
Thus Caesar's work remained unfinished, and this must be borne in mind in considering his record of legislative and administrative reform. It may be well to single out from the list of his measures (some of which, such as the restoration of exiles and the children of proscribed persons, were dictated by political expediency, while others, such as his financial proposals for the relief of debtors, and the steps which he took to restore Italian agriculture, were of the nature of palliatives) those which have a permanent significance as indicating his grasp of imperial problems. The Social War had brought to the inhabitants of Italy as far as the Po the privileges of Roman citizenship; it remained to extend this gift to the Transpadane Italians, to establish a uniform system of local administration and to devise representative institutions by which at least some voice in the government of Rome might be permitted to her new citizens. This last conception lay beyond the horizon of Caesar, as of all ancient statesmen, but his first act on gaining control of Italy was to enfranchise the Transpadanes, whose claims he had consistently advocated, and in 45 BC he passed the Lex Julia Municipalis, an act of which considerable fragments are inscribed on two bronze tables found at Heraclea near Tarentum. This law deals inter alia with the police and the sanitary arrangements of the city of Rome, and hence it has been argued by Theodor Mommsen that it was Caesar's intention to reduce Rome to the level of a municipal town. But it is not likely that such is the case. Caesar made no far-reaching modifications in the government of the city, such as were afterwards carried out by Augustus, and the presence in the Lex Julia Municipalis of the clauses referred to is an example of the common process of "tacking" (legislation per saturam, as it was called by the Romans). The law deals with the constitution of the local senates, for whose members qualifications of age (30 years) and military service are laid down, while persons who have suffered conviction for various specified offences, or who are insolvent, or who carry on discreditable or immoral trades are excluded. It a]so provides that the local magistrates shall take a census of the citizens at the same time as the census takes place in Rome, and send the registers to Rome within sixty days. The existing fragments tell us little as to the decentralization of the functions of government, but from the Lex Rubria, which applies to the Transpadane districts enfranchised by Caesar (it must be remembered that Cisalpine Gaul remained nominally a province until 42 BC) we gather that considerable powers of independent jurisdiction were reserved to the municipal magistrates. But Caesar was not content with framing a uniform system of local government for Italy. He was the first to carry out on a large scale those plans of transmarine colonization whose inception was due to the Gracchi. As consul in 59 BC Caesar had established colonies of veterans in Campania under the Lex Julia Agraria, and had even then laid down rules for the foundation of such communities. As dictator he planted numerous colonies both in the eastern and western provinces, notably at Corinth and Carthage. Mommsen interprets this policy as signifying that "the rule of the urban community of Rome over the shores of the Mediterranean was at an end", and says that the first act of the "new Mediterranean state" was "to atone for the two greatest outrages which that urban community had perpetrated on civilization." This, however, cannot be admitted. The sites of Caesar's colonies were selected for their commercial value, and that the citizens of Rome should cease to be rulers of the Mediterranean basin could never have entered into Caesar's mind. The colonists were in many cases veterans who had served under Caesar, in others members of the city proletariat. We possess the charter of the colony planted at Urso in southern Spain under the name of Colonia Julia Genetiva Urbanorum. Of the two latter titles, the first is derived from the name of Venus Genetrix, the ancestress of the Julian house, the second indicates that the colonists were drawn from the plebs urbana. Accordingly, we find that free birth is not, as in Italy, a necessary qualification for municipal office. By such foundations Caesar began the extension to the provinces of that Roman civilization which the republic had carried to the bounds of the Italian peninsula. Lack of time alone prevented him from carrying into effect such projects as the piercing of the Isthmus of Corinth, whose object was to promote trade and intercourse throughout the Roman dominions, and we are told that at the time of his death he was contemplating the extension of the empire to its natural frontiers, and was about to engage in a war with Parthia with the object of carrying Roman arms to the Euphrates. Above all, he was determined that the empire should be governed in the true sense of the word and no longer exploited by its rulers, and he kept a strict control over the legati, who, under the form of military subordination, were responsible to him for the administration of their provinces.Caesar left behind him in the minds of certain friends a suspicion that he neither desired nor cared to live any longer, on account of his fading health, and for that reason alone slighted all the omens of religion, and the warnings of his friends...Others again suppose that he chose rather to face at once the dangers which threatened him on all sides than to be forever on his watch against them, protesting the while that the safety of his person concerned the commonwealth more than himself, for he had been satiated with power and glory, whereas the commonwealth, if anything should befall him, would have no rest and, being involved in another civil war, would be in a worse state than before.
~ Suetonius, Caius Julius Caesar 86
Here I digress freely about Julius Gaius, discussing his figure and influence on history, his character, his accomplishments, his idiosyncrasies. Yeah, folks: I'm having great fun! Won't you join me...?
Caesar and the res publica
Caesar was at the pinnacle of his power when he returned from Spain in 45, yet within a year, he was once again facing problems with the optimates, and had seemingly lost the support of the ever fickle populace of Rome. What had happened?
The problems lay with Caesar himself, and the nature of his absolute power. In his impatience with fossilized custom, he often denigrated the Republic:
The res publica is an image not a reality
--- The majority of the conservative aristocracy failed to understand this, just as Caesar failed to truly understand the resentment the aristocracy felt for him on account of this. In Caesar they only saw the threat of a King, a word which was inextricably linked with the word "tyrant" in Roman history.
It seems likely that elements within the Senate set out to make this likeness even more distinct:
Cicero made the first proposals to the Senate for conferring honours upon him, which might in some sort be said not to exceed the limits of ordinary human moderation. But others, striving which should deserve most, carried them so excessively high, that they made Caesar odious to the most indifferent and moderate sort of men, by the pretensions and extravagance of the titles which they decreed him. His enemies, too, are thought to have had some share in this, as well as his flatterers. It gave them advantage against him, and would be their justification for any attempt they should make upon him; for since the civil wars were ended, he had nothing else that he could be charged with.
~ Plutarch, Life of Caesar
No matter what Caesar did, the optimates could twist and turn it to make it appear tyrannical. After Caesar's reform of the calendar Cicero, when told that a new moon would rise next day said,
Yes, in accordance with the edict,
as if to imply that even this depended on the pleasure of Caesar.
And one day, as Caesar was coming down from Alba to Rome, some were so bold as to salute him by the name of king; but he, finding the people disrelish it, seemed to resent it himself, and said his name was Caesar, not king. Upon this there was a general silence, and he passed on looking not very well pleased or contented. Another time, when the senate had conferred on him some extravagant honours, he chanced to receive the message as he was sitting on the rostra, where, though the Consuls and Praetors themselves waited on him, attended by the whole body of the Senate, he did not rise, but behaved himself to them as if they had been private men, and told them his honours wanted rather to be retrenched than increased.
~ Plutarch, Life of Caesar
The concept of making Caesar King had been put in circulation, whether by Caesar himself or his enemies, and it would not leave. The Roman constitution allowed only one way for a man to exercise absolute rule, and that was through being Dictator. However, Sulla's abuse of this title indicated that this was not the appropriate solution to the problem.
Republican tradition allowed noble men to compete for offices and honor by climbing the cursus honorum, but Caesar's position as head of state made this impossible. It was amongst this group of disgruntled patricians that his most implacable enemies appeared. For both people and Senate libertas, "freedom", meant the preservation of the mos maiorum; tradition. Thus, the aristocracy felt that Caesar had robbed them of their freedom, and this became their rallying cry.
Caesar experimented with various forms of rule. His last was to accept the powers of the magistracies without actually occupying them; in this way he could control the government without obstructing the careers of the aristocrats -- 17 years later, Augustus was to demonstrate that this could have been the correct solution to the problem.
Caesar spent the last months of his life preparing a huge military campaign against Parthia to avenge the defeat of Crassus. The reasons for this have been widely discussed both by pro and anti-Caesareans. One can suppose that Caesar was avoiding the issue by once again setting off for war - his close friend Gaius Matius was to write a few days after the assassination:
...if Caesar with all his genius could not find a way out, who will do so now?
Perhaps Caesar realized that only war against external enemies could unite the Roman people, after all the hatred of half a century of civil war. Or in the words of Livy:
externus timor maximum concordiae vinculum - nothing causes unity like fear of the external.
Moreover, it provided employment for the remainder of the thirty five legions who had fought in the civil war. Would Caesar have succeeded in recapturing the lost dominions of the Alexander's empire for the hellenestic world? The fate of Crassus had shown that the plains of Mesopotamia favoured Parthian cavalry -- could Caesar' military genius have offset this disadvantage? One can only guess, for his assassination condemned Rome to yet another destructive round of civil wars, and she would never again possess sufficient manpower to conquer and hold the plains of Babylonia.
Assassination
The soul of the plot seems to have been Gaius Cassius Longinus, whom Caesar had pardoned after Pharsalus and honoured. He now felt himself disregarded because he was not to receive a command in the forthcoming campaign against Parthia. He persuaded his brother-in-law Marcus Junius Brutus, whose great claim to fame was his descent from the Junius Brutus who had murdered Rome's last King, to join the plot.
Brutus was a doctrinal fanatic, married to the equally fanatic Porcia, daughter of Cato the Younger. He was a merciless man, notorious for usury and not above demanding interests of up to 48% on loans. Like Cassius, he had fought on Pompeius's side at Pharsalus, but had later accepted Caesar's clemency. Caesar acted as father to Brutus, having once had an affair with Servilia, the mother of Brutus (though there is no truth in the claim that Caesar was the father of Brutus), and had secured the election of Cassius and Brutus to the position of Praetors. But once Brutus had got the idea into his head, he became obsessed with the thought of showing himself the equal of his ancestor and father-in-law. Together, he and Cassius plotted the death of Caesar.
Did Caesar know of the plot? It seems certain that news of it had leaked out, to judge by the veritable flood of omens and warnings which preceded the days before his death. But Caesar disregarded all these, as he for years had disregarded all threats to his life. His words, quoted by William Shakespeare in his famous play, give a vivid picture of Caesar's philosophy toward death:
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
By this principle Caesar lived, and died.
Casca gave him the first cut in the neck, which was not mortal nor dangerous, as coming from one who at the beginning of such a bold action was probably very much disturbed; Caesar immediately turned about, and laid his hand upon the dagger and kept hold of it. And both of them at the same time cried out, he that received the blow, in Latin, "Vile Casca, what does this mean?" and he that gave it, in Greek to his brother, "Brother, help!" Upon this first onset, those who were not privy to the design were astonished, and their horror and amazement at what they saw were so great that they durst not fly nor assist Caesar, nor so much as speak a word. But those who came prepared for the business enclosed him on every side, with their naked daggers in their hands. Which way soever he turned he met with blows, and saw their swords levelled at his face and eyes, and was encompassed like a wild beast in the toils on every side.
For it had been agreed they should each of them make a thrust at him, and flesh themselves with his blood; for which reason Brutus also gave him one stab in the groin. Some say that he fought and resisted all the rest, shifting his body to avoid the blows, and calling out for help, but that when he saw Brutus's sword drawn, he covered his face with his robe and submitted, letting himself fall, whether it were by chance or that he was pushed in that direction by his murderers, at the foot of the pedestal on which Pompeius's statue stood, and which was thus wetted with his blood.
~ Plutarch, Life of Caesar
There were more than sixty conspirators. Some were merely old enemies, turncoats who had accepted Caesar's pardon and turned again at the first chance to do so. Others were men who had been disappointed in their expectations, who had not profited as much from Caesar's victory as they had expected. Brutus's ancestry and the so-called freedom of the Roman Republic were the pretexts for the murder of Caesar. But even those who acted on principle (if any did) were blind to the fact that the reign of the Roman nobility was broken beyond recall. Even Caesar would have been unable to overthrow the system, if its destruction had not been long overdue. By making him a martyr, they merely condemned the world to thirteen more bloody years of civil war.
The Character of Caesar
Caesar had won his way to power with an army, but unlike Sulla, he had no intention of building his empire on it. He had disbanded most of his legions, and he soon sent home his bodyguards, though he must have been well-aware of the risk of assassination. When plots against his life were revealed, he took no other action than to publish the names of offenders in public.
Characteristically, Cicero once wrote to Caesar:
You usually never forget anything other than insults.
As Bernard Shaw says in his evaluation of Caesar: a man too magnanimous to be insulted, has nothing to forgive. However, no matter how much clemency and forgiveness he displayed, the old Roman aristocracy could not fail to hate him. At the same time, his own supporters were beginning to become increasingly hostile. Many of these men, destitute when they joined Caesar, had hoped to attain riches and glory in the fruits of his victory, but Caesar could not, and probably would not, satisfy their lusts.
What drove Caesar on to his own doom? Seneca perhaps puts it best:
Glory, ambition, and the refusal to set bounds to his own pre-eminence.
For the ancient Roman, to achieve fame - personal dignitas - was the overriding desire of existence. Cicero himself seemed dazzled by the thoughts of being immortalized, at least in his earlier years. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he invoked the infringement on his personal dignitas as one of the reasons for the war. Such motives may seem strange to modern minds, but such had been the Roman mentality for hundreds of years, and it had driven them from being a small village on the banks of the Tiber to becoming an empire spanning the entire Mediteranean world.
In his ambition and quest for glory, Caesar was no different from the average Roman noble of his time, nor in his willingness to put his own honor above the safety of the state. Though he could be brutal and ruthless at need, he tended by nature toward clemency and generosity. Though not all his appointments to provincial governorship were of high quality, it is known that several appointees where chosen specifically for their incorruptibility and humanity, especially for the much ravaged eastern provinces.
From his acts, it is likely to suppose that he stood above many of the prejudices of his time, he clearly attempted to stand above class, party or race. He certainly stood far above most of his associates and opponents, none of whom seemed to have influenced him (though he was generous to their requests). It is impossible, from the available evidence, to divine Caesar's true intentions (though historians have attempted to for 2,000 years); Caesar himself clearly did not consider his own power to be monarchial in role (he did not, for example, specify any heir to it) - and he knew that his death would be the signal for renewed civil war.
That Caesar was a genius is uncontested; the scope of his achievements, his military conquests, his legislation, and his literary works all bear testimony to the breath and scope of his mind. As a conquoror, reformer, and politician, Caesar, even among those whose acts have changed the world, stands out as one of the great men of all time.
~ Click here to go to the website of the clickable reconstruction above, where you'll find most of the buildings of the Roman Forum. A few important buildings, places and roads are not visible on this drawing, but you'll find them listed on said webpage and on clicking on them you'll be linked to a description or a recent photograph of their remains. Enjoy a trip back in time...
Epilogue (43 - 31 BCE)
Caesar's death paralyzed Rome. All the assassins were insignificant men, whose lives only had meaning while Caesar lived and used them. Only now, with the deed done, did they experience their own lack of ability. Neither the unpopular Cassius or the fanatic Brutus possessed the talents required to bring about reforms or forge a new leadership in Rome. The murderers had been naive in hoping that the leadership of the Senate would be restored, but both it and the Public Assemblies acted like sheep in the times to come.
There could be no peace while there were ambitious men willing to employ armed force to reach their political goals. Using Caesar's will, Marcus Antonius inflamed the Roman populace against the assassins. The houses of Brutus and Cassius were burnt, and the murderers fled from the city. Antony was supported by another of Caesar's commanders, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. Pursuing the assassins to Modena, Antony defeated them and looked set to make himself undisputed master of Rome.
There was only one small problem. In his will, Caesar had left three quarters of his estate to the eighteen year old Gaius Octavius, son of his niece Atia. The youth had been sent to Greece to serve with the Legions in the imminent war against Parthia, and now returned at the head of Caesar's veteran legions to claim his inheritance. Suddenly, the Caesarian party found itself divided.
Cicero was quick to utilize the possibilities and began a series of orations against Antony known as the Philippics. Because Antony treated Octavian like a child, relations between the two grew increasingly tense. Eventually, a new civil war began between Octavian and the Senate on the one hand and Marcus Antonius and Lepidus on the other.
Antony and Lepidus were defeated and fled to Gaul and Spain, and the Republicans seemed to be firm in the saddle. Brutus and Cassius had consolidated themselves in the east, and the Senate controlled Italy and Africa. Ignoring Octavian, it then proceeded to dole out commands and titles as it had always done.
But Octavian had no intention of being ignored, and was determined that Caesar's murderers should pay for their crime. Occupying the city with his legions, he forced the senate to elect him sole consul. But Octavian did not become over-confident and to strengthen his position made peace with Antony and Lepidus. This new alliance was the second triumvirate.
The result was a veritable blood bath. Where Caesar's clementia had failed, Octavian and Antony imitated Sulla by proscribing their foes, and 2,500 noble Romans, including Cicero himself, were murdered. They then turned their arms against the assassins, meeting and defeating them in 42 at Philippi. Within 3 years, all who had participated in, or had any connection to the conspiracy, were violently dead.
But Rome was to be racked by eleven more years of civil war. Octavian nosed Lepidus from power, and with the help of his friend Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, defeated Sextius Pompeius at sea. Finally, in 31 BC, he and Agrippa destroyed Antony and Cleopatra's fleet at Actium. Antony and the Queen committed suicide, and her son Ptolemy Caesarion, said to be remarkably like his father in looks, was murdered on Octavians's order. Having rid himself of all rivals, Octavian continued the work begun by his beloved adoptive father, and when Caesar was deified, called himself "Son of God"; Caesar divi filius. He was also wise enough to avoid the mistakes commited by Caesar.
As a statesman and politician, he surpassed Caesar. Whereas Caesar had been decades ahead of his time, Octavian worked within the Constitution to fulfil his adoptive father's task. In his time, Caesar had laid bare the weaknesses of the Roman Republic, and marked out the times to come. Octavian's remedies were so thorough that, at his own death, fifty eight years after Caesar's, the republic was nothing but a memory.
aim was the highest which a man is allowed to propose himself - the political, military, intellectual, and moral regeneration of his own deeply decayed nation . . . The hard school of thirty years' experience changed his views as to the means by which this aim was to be reached; his aim itself remained the same in the times of his hopeless humiliation and of his unlimited plenitude of power, in the times when as demagogue and conspirator he stole towards it by paths of darkness, and in those when, as joint possessor of the supreme power and then as monarch, he worked at his task in the full light of day before the eyes of the world. . . . According to his original plan he had purposed to reach his object . . . without force of arms, and throughout eighteen years he had as leader of the people's party moved exclusively amid political plans and intrigues - until, reluctantly convinced of the necessity for a military support, he, when already forty years of age, put himself at the head of an army.
"They would have it thus," said Caesar as he gazed upon the Roman dead at Pharsalus, half in patriot grief for the havoc of civil war, half in impatience and resentment. They had cheated Caesar of the true glory of a Roman aristocrat - to contend with his peers for primacy, not to destroy them. His enemies had the laugh of him in death. Even Pharsalus was not the end. His former ally, the great Pompeius, glorious from victories in all quarters of the world, lay unburied on an Egyptian beach, slain by a renegade Roman, the hireling of a foreign king. Dead, too, and killed by Romans, were Caesar's rivals and enemies, many illustrious consulars. . . . Cato chose to fall by his own hand rather than witness the domination of Caesar and the destruction of the Free State.
That was the nemesis of ambition and glory, to be thwarted in the end. After such wreckage, the task of rebuilding confronted him, stern and thankless. Without the sincere and patriotic co- operation of the governing class, the attempt would be all in vain, the mere creation of arbitrary power, doomed to perish in violence . . . Under these unfavourable auspices, . . . Caesar established his Dictatorship. . . . . In the short time at his disposal he can hardly have made plans for a long future or laid the foundation of a consistent government. Whatever it might be, it would owe more to the needs of the moment than to alien or theoretical models.
Stoic philosophy was first developed in the Hellenistic world after 300 B.C. The Stoic worldview is one of a rationally governed universe of material entities, each answering to its controlling principle ("logos") and thus participating in the overall cosmic logos. In its most developed form, Stoicism takes the lawfulness of the cosmos as the model on which human life is to proceed. The rule of law is the defining mark of our humanity, installing locally what the logos furnishes universally. The overarching philosophy of Rome was that of the Stoics, whose commitment to rationality and the rule of law provided a durable intellectual foundation for Rome's imperial administration of much of the known world.
According to the Stoics, the cosmos is ruled by law, which is evidence enough of a rational principle behind all natural phenomena. The cosmos is understood by rational beings to be itself a model of rational order. The intrinsic ordering principle ("logos") of the world can be known only to a creature in possession of a kindred principle. Only by way of language does one qualify for membership in that moral order of the universe, and thus human beings stand apart from the balance of nature. Man is the only creature capable of thought and speech. The human community is, above all, a linguistic community.
What has real existence for the Stoic is "body," but Stoicism accepts as "body" that which may take the form of fire and breath (pneuma). To regard something as existing is to recognize it as having causal power, which entails corporeality of some sort. Thus, justice and moral precepts are "bodies" in that they have perceptible consequences. They are "active" principles as contrasted with passive principles of "dead matter."
It can be argued that the Stoics (not the French of the 1780s or the authors of the Constitution) first formulated the concept of "natural rights." Natural rights are different from rights guaranteed by a constitution or the laws of a polis; those can be taken away. Natural rights are those inhering in a being because of its nature as a being of a certain sort. The rational and linguistic nature of human beings means they have certain liberties others do not. Since the rule of law is something a rational being recognizes as natural, rational linguistic beings have the right to question whether the laws of a polis are in accord with reason, or are tyrannical and arbitrary. No person has the right to legislate for himself. Deviations from the rule of law are unnatural, a threat to the very rule of nature itself.
Emotion and passion are what most contradict reason. Only a man is able to control his animality and ultimately to surface as a fully rational being, now sharing in the universal logos. The right disposition to have is that of apatheia; not "apathy" in the sense of indifference, but "resignation" before the fact that the cosmic order is determinative. "Never say of anything that I've lost it," writes Epictetus, "only that I've given it back." We bring about our own suffering and unhappiness by corrupting our reason and surrendering it to irrational desires and aspirations. It is only by violating the dictates of reason -- for example, by wanting what is either unattainable or what is not in our interest -- that we bring about our own unhappiness.
What is "natural" must be "good," for there can be no standard of goodness external to nature itself. The apparent errors of creation, evil in the world, accidents, and seemingly chance vents are illusory. The percipient sees the cosmos only from a local perspective. Behind a local chaos stands the larger order of things, the entire system, as it were, being the expression of the logos. The only real evil, then, is not in the "logos" but in the moral weakness of men. This argument will later be taken up by the Christians in theorizing about sin.
The Stoics depart from the Epicureans on the nature of the good life. The Epicureans are resolutely materialistic. But their creed was not "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die" -- far from it. The sole goal of life is to avoid pain and get pleasure, and put off the day of death. Where the Stoics valued friendship as central to rational community, the Epicureans use friends to achieve their central goal. Apatheia and resignation have a similar end: the avoidance of suffering. The Epicurean creed is never to want anything so much -- drink, pleasure, money -- that its absence will cause pain.
The Epicurean personal code and the Stoic therefore resembled one another. The only way to tell a Stoic from an Epicurean was to ask where they would choose to live. The Epicurean would be found on his country estate, living moderately away from the dangerous excitements of the city. The Stoic would be found in the city, in the senate, and the court, arguing cases and making law -- the frank, upright figure we see in a hundred Roman portrait busts.
The Stoics hold a debt to Aristotle and Plato and it is twofold. They claim the authority of these great figures of a past very different from the imperialistic Hellenistic and then Roman world. They take from Aristotle and Plato's Republic the view of reason as the defining human characteristic, the emphasis on the rule of reason over passion, and the idea of law as the expression of rationality.
The Roman educated class was brought up by Stoics; the Roman intellectual spoke and read Greek and looked to Greece for models in philosophy and art. The Stoic philosophy was exactly suited to the Roman empire that would govern the Western world for a millennium, in its rule bringing into being much that we call "Western civilization." It was the supporting philosophy of a society that had little devotion to doing philosophy. It was the very air that Roman civilization breathed, and would be breathing as Christianity arrived on the scene.
I do wonder, though, whether the emotion is, as it were, "in the music" or merely in our reaction to the music. Let me explain what I mean. You could, I suppose, think that when we called music sad or mournful or happy or said that it expresses unfulfilled longing, we mean nothing more than that it evokes such sentiments "in us." And there might be no deep explanation of why just these sound sequences should evoke just these sentiments or feelings in us. Maybe psychology might eventually reveal something deep. But there might be nothing more than brute fact or something about evolution or something about cultural constructions.
My thought is that when we call a piece of music sad, we are saying both something about its, as it were, intrinsic musical character -- albeit indirectly -- and also something about our response to it. In particular, by calling the music sad, we "license" certain emotional reponses as "appropriate" in light of the intrinsic musical character of the piece. If you aren't moved to sadness by sad music, you've in a way misperceived the music. Or that, at any rate, is what I believe at the moment.
One of my long-standing philosophical ‘worries’ is what I describe as a ‘cognitive dilemma’ in relation to musical communication. How can an art form which lacks a discursive element and addresses itself primarily and indeed immediately to the auditory sense, be discerned as conveying ‘truth’ or ‘profundity’? The power is amply attested — so much so that alone among the arts music occasionally figures as a ‘surrogate religion’. The pieces of this kaleidoscope — ideas culled from Schopenhauer, Langer, Jung and others — did not fall together until recently after reading Peter Kivy’s Music Alone, an account of his quest for musical profundity which ends (as he confessed) in failure, but from whose dissection of the presuppositions I gained a platform for a synthesis of my own.
2. Sense and Mind
Kivy’s main point is that profundity must be understood as “treating a subject matter in a profound wayâ€, i.e. discursively. Accordingly the principal means of achieving profundity are verbal, in art the tools of novelists, dramatists and poets. But musicians lack those resources; therefore, as Kivy’s analysis of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier shows, no further yield than superb craftsmanship results — but how is this distinguishable from the craft of a Fabergé?
These travails point to an underlying critical malaise, namely the comprehensive prejudice that reason and cognition are inherently discursive: to understand is plainly the ability to describe what one has understood. Therefore his failure to nail down musical profundity amounts to a tacit acknowledgement of the ‘ineffability’ of instrumental masterpieces — resulting in musical ‘truths’ being consigned to its sensory modality or else to a demand for marshalling verbal paraphrase for explicit decoding.
My proposition is that both of these are blind alleys. Firstly, verbal analogues foster the illegitimate notion of a ‘residual language component’ (of which more infra). Secondly, sensory cortices are merely the incidental conveyances of communicative values; they are not possible sites for the germination of humanly significant meanings. Consider that speech is necessarily sound before it can be interpreted as utterance and thus belongs to the same sensory modality as music; but from this it follows that discrimination between words-as-sounds and words-as-meanings cannot be the work of the auditory cortex, but only of a mind.
Acknowledging this (as I think we must) argues convincingly that the reach of cognition exceeds by far the mere conversion of lexical into meaning structures. The possibility of ‘understanding’ musical structures and textures points to an arsenal of cognitive modalities in which discursive concepts occupy a strategically important, but not an exclusive or commanding vantage point.
3. The philosophical wedge: idea and symbol
(a) Schopenhauer and the Will
Schopenhauer claimed as his greatest merit the identification of the kantian noumenon as the Will. But he feels little compunction to characterise it as the whiplash of an unreasoning, unsavoury animal drive, which by being associated with an intellect creates the unbalance of evil that rules the world in spite of our best efforts. Hence the most pressing demand is for curtailment of the will’s power; and in this context Schopenhauer reaches out to the arts as a palliative, with an analysis as surprising as it is ingenious.
In contemplating works of art, he says, we are not (as Plato mistakenly assumed) dealing with second-hand perceptions or copies of an already inferior reality. Works of art are not phenomena: far from imitating phenomenal objects, they represent idealised cognitions; their subject is not a specific object, but the idea of that object; not e.g. a man in concreto, but man in his essential qualities. Artistic contemplation offers an escape from the vicious circle of willing because immersion in its idea suspends the will, as indeed Plato taught. Moreover, he finds confirmation in Kant’s ‘disinterested contemplation’ [III, §34]. His disquisitions culminate in the claim that
In art, the ideas of pure contemplation recur . . . its genesis lies in the cognition of ideas, and its supreme goal is communication of the same. [§36].
The highest rung in his taxonomy of the arts is occupied by music on account of its completely abstract nature. He calls it a “replica of the Urwille†(‘Abbild’), apt to lead a listener back to the undifferentiated ground where individualised desires and strivings are painlessly surrendered [§52].
This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious . . . because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal . . . It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us . . . The contents of the collective unconscious are known as ‘archetypes’ . . . The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear. [JBW287]
When an archetype enters consciousness, it does so as the projection of a symbolical image. But again, the essence of the whole process is its largely unconscious functioning. [JMC107].
The artist is capable of potentiating archetypal images for us, for it he who delves into the unconscious where he becomes (as it were) the sounding board or mirror for their reflection. The artist is our proxy of the inner man, who is of necessity partly unconscious, because consciousness is only part of a man and cannot comprehend the whole. But the whole man is always present, for the fragmentation of the phenomenon ‘Man’ is nothing but an effect of consciousness, which consists only of supraliminal ideas. [JMC128].
archetypes are not determined in regard to their content, but only in regard to their form, and then only to a very limited degree. A primordial image is determined as to its contents only when it has become conscious and is therefore filled out with the material of conscious experience . . . The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms. [JBW332].
Selected Bibliography Cooke, Deryck, The Language of Music. Oxford 1959.
Dahlhaus, Carl, Die Idee der absoluten Musik. Kassel 1978.
Donald, Merlin, Origins of the Modern Mind. Harvard 1991.
Jourdain, Robert, Music, the Brain and Ecstasy. New York 1997.
Jung, Carl, ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.’ Basic Writings. New York 1959 (JBW).
—, Mysterium Coniunctionis. Princeton 1970 (JMC)
Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Frankfurt 1956.
Kivy, Peter, Music Alone. Cornell 1990.
Langer, Susanne, Philosophy in a New Key. New York 1948 (LK).
Langer, Susanne, Feeling and Form. New York 1953 (LF).
Pater, Walter, The Renaissance. Cleveland 1961.
Schopenhauer, Arthur, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Wiesbaden 1972
Laughter changes how we feel physically, and it affects our biochemistry. We are all familiar with the feeling of 'lightness' that follows deep belly laughter. Norman Cousins reported that 10-20 minutes of deep belly laughter gave him hours free from the pain of his debilitating disease. Laughter has been described as a "jogging of the internal organs." The physiological benefits of laughter-such as an increase in certain antibodies, decrease in levels of stress hormones, and a decrease in heart rate of "heavy laughers"-have been presented in numerous research studies. Laughter is also believed to stimulate the muscular and skeletal systems. Laughter serves as the physiological/biochemical element of humor.
The 'humor experience' is a synergistic interrelationship of the effects of humor as it changes cognition, emotion, and physiology. People experience humor in different ways. For example, some people are more likely to 'appreciate' wit (cognitive) without experiencing mirth or laughter. These people are likely to say they understand the a joke and like the joke but do not laugh or experience the mirth.
Others are more likely to experience mirth (emotional) without a cognitive or physiological reaction. Children, in much of what adults view as 'silly behavior,' are experiencing mirth while they may not be appreciating wit, and they may not even be laughing (although they frequently are).
We also know that we can experience laughter that is independent of wit or mirth. Spontaneous laughter or laughter contagion are examples. Even laughter that is triggered during anxiety may be an example of laughter stimulated without wit or mirth. The fullest and, most powerful, humor experience, however, is one that is experienced with all three components simultaneously.
While each of us probably has a 'primary humor receptor' (cognitive, emotional, or physiological)-or primary way of processing humor (e.g. cognitively, emotionally, physiologically)-we are likely to use all three avenues in varying amounts at varying times. The more that we can train ourselves to appreciate (cognitive), feel (mirth), and physically experience (laugh) the more potent and healthful the humorous experience will become.
For example, when we use humour directed at ourselves we learn to laugh at ourselves. Furthermore, others around us feel safe as they are not the target of the humour. When we laugh at situations the humour is once again directed away from others. Conversely, humor that is directed at others is the most dangerous and potentially harmful type of humour. For example, humour that insults or mocks specific individuals or groups of people has greater harm potential. Even when the giver of the humour is a member of the target group, others in the group may reject the humour and feel insulted or put down. Therefore, as a rule of thumb humour directed at oneself as an individual is safest, while humor directed at situations is still relatively safe, and humor directed at others is most risky and, therefore, is located at the negative end of the humour continuum.
The union view claims that love consists in the formation of (or the desire to form) some significant kind of union, a “we.†A central task for union theorists, therefore, is to cash out just what such a “we†comes to—whether it is literally a new entity in the world somehow comprised of the lover and the beloved, or whether it is merely metaphorical. Variants of this view perhaps go back to Aristotle (cf. Sherman 1993) and can also be found in Montaigne (1603/1877) and Hegel (1997); contemporary proponents include Solomon (1981, 1988), Scruton (1986), Nozick (1989), Fisher (1990), and Delaney (1996).A person in a we might find himself coming across something interesting to read yet leaving it for the other person, not because he himself would not be interested in it but because the other would be more interested, and one of them reading it is sufficient for it to be registered by the wider identity now shared, the we.[3]
Given my view that the romantic ideal is primarily characterized by a desire to achieve a profound consolidation of needs and interests through the formation of a we, I do not think a little selfishness of the sort described should pose a worry to either party.
On the federation model, a third unified entity is constituted by the interaction of the lovers, one which involves the lovers acting in concert across a range of conditions and for a range of purposes. This concerted action, however, does not erase the existence of the two lovers as separable and separate agents with continuing possibilities for the exercise of their own respective agencies. [p. 165]
To summarize: if x loves y then x wants to benefit and be with y etc., and he has these wants (or at least some of them) because he believes y has some determinate characteristics ψ in virtue of which he thinks it worth while to benefit and be with y. He regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means towards some other end. [p. 157]
That a person cares about or that he loves something has less to do with how things make him feel, or with his opinions about them, than with the more or less stable motivational structures that shape his preferences and that guide and limit his conduct.
our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person, tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being affected by him. Love disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us vulnerable to the other. [1999, p. 361]
while you seem to want it to be true that, were you to become a schmuck, your lover would continue to love you,…you also want it to be the case that your lover would never love a schmuck.
It would not be a plausible move to defend any theory of the emotions to which love and hate seemed exceptions by saying that love and hate are after all not emotions. I have heard this said, but it does seem to me a desperate move to make. If love and hate are not emotions what is?
With love the difficulty is to find anything of this kind [i.e., a formal object] which is uniquely appropriate to love. My thesis is that there is nothing of this kind that must be so, and that this differentiates it and hate from the other emotions.
Love is not just an emotion people feel toward other people, but also a complex tying together of the emotions that two or a few more people have; it is a special form of emotional interdependence.
Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That one grand reason…is “because we bring out the best in each other.†What counts as “the best,†of course, is subject to much individual variation.
no matter how wonderful and lovely an individual might be, on any and all accounts, it is simply false that a romantically unencumbered person must love that individual on pain of being irrational. Or, there is no irrationality involved in ceasing to love a person whom one once loved immensely, although the person has not changed.
reason is not some external power which dictates how we should behave, but an internal power, integral to who we are.…Reason does not command that we love anyone. Nonetheless, reason is vital in determining whom we love and why we love them.
The intention in love is to form a we and to identify with it as an extended self, to identify one's fortunes in large part with its fortunes. A willingness to trade up, to destroy the very we you largely identify with, would then be a willingness to destroy your self in the form of your own extended self. [p. 78]
The first reason we have to believe that there are the literary genres is that many authors, such as Aristotle and Boileau, have written treatises to expose the rules that define them.
The second reason is that these rules have been followed by thousands of writers for many centuries, and so, for that reason, we are able to find works which perfectly exemplify the classic conception of Lyric, Tragedy etc.
The first reason we may have for believing there are no the literary genres is that there is an equally large amount of works, old and modern, but above all modern, that do not fit perfectly in any of the genres defined by the treatises.
The second reason is that some authors, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce as a case in point, say that genres do not exist . In the understanding of these authors, only individual works exist [1], which are taken account of by history, and a posteriori can be subjected by the scholar to some dubious classification according to their differences and similarities, which, being in their turn so varied and large in number as the works themselves, do not amount to groups constant and distinct enough to be labelled as 'genres'.
The third reason is that many writers, knowing the first two reasons, decided to write their books in a way that deliberately escapes the rules and regulations of all known genres. Thus exception has become rule and rule exception; and the systematic mess that followed seemed to provide extensive confirmation to Croce's argument.
The problem of genres is similar to the dispute between Realism and Nominalism: do universal concepts express realities which exist by themselves, extra mentis, or are they just a mental assembling of common characteristics that a more or less happy circumstance allowed us to distinguish in various individual beings? Are universals 'real beings' or mere 'reason beings'? Is there a horsehood or just horses? Is there a trianglehood or just triangles? Likewise, are the literary genres universal and necessary structures underlying all possible literary invention, or are they nothing more than mere formal conventions laid down by habit, comfort, and sometimes by pretentiousness?
Some contemporary scholars are inclined to compromising solutions. In their work, Theory of Literature, today a classic, René Wellek and Austin Warren state that:
The literary kind is an 'institution' - as Church, University or State is an institution. It exists, not as an animal exists or even as a building, chapel, library, or capitol, but as an institution exists. One can work through, express oneself through, existing institutions, create new ones, or get on, so far as possible, without sharing in polities or rituals; one can also join, but then reshape, institutions.
Theory of genres is a principle of order: it classifies literature and literary history... by specifically literary types of organization and structure...
Do genres remain fixed? Presumably not.[2]
