The Origin of Species

The Origin of Species was published November 24, 1859. You might calender that date as man’s fall—at least from an evolutionary point of view. No more were they made in the image of God. Rather apes turned out to be the forebears. But when and how did reason and consciousness arrive? Was it by way of the toolmaking of the Australopithecine era 3.2 million  years ago of which the fossilized Lucy is the prime extant remnant? How does Stephen J. Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium fit in?” It’s nice to look at life as a temporal food chain curiously similar to the Elizabethan world’s “great chain of being” but nature is more about accident than intention. Is this literally and figuratively a new Ice Age?

read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy (with a painting by Hallie Cohen), The East Hampton Star