When The Moon Sings - August 2, 2025

For several months now, the morning star has appeared in Savannah directly over the rising sun. It will not always be at that precise location. The morning star is actually the planet Venus, which has its own orbit. But lately, you can draw a straight vertical line between Venus and the rising sun.  It will change, but gradually.

Most changes in nature are gradual. Some say sneaky. This was the hottest week of the year, and we hope it will remain the record. I will leave it to others to dramatize the air temperature, but the water temperature at Tybee Pier is 89 degrees, some seven degrees warmer than normal. Tomorrow will be little different, but by the time we start looking at turkeys with lean and hungry eyes, air and water will have an entirely different look and feel, having changed day by day in a cooler direction.  I don’t know what the “feels like” temperature of water at 89 degrees is, but nobody will catch a chill from it.  November and December dips in the ocean will have more bite.

But some natural changes are dramatic. We will be at risk for circular weather through turkey season, according to the worthies that proclaim such things.  If one of the whirling dervishes visits, we will have chaos aplenty.  This year, the country has had a bumper crop of rude weather events – fires, tornadoes, heat dramatically above average, and floods.  We have eluded many of them, and so have been spared the difficulties that they bring.

So this week, I thought of Stephen Jay Gould and his theory of such things.  Gould was a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, but he also wrote essays that explored science for non-scientists, mostly in Natural History magazine.  I have half a bookshelf of the collected columns, and they still cause reflection and wonder.

His basic research, though he did much that was not basic, was in shelled gastropods – Gould was a snail guy.  At some point, he teamed with another snail guy named Niles Eldridge.  Eldridge similarly had ideas that snails contributed to but were not the focus of.  They published snail studies together, but also a set of more general thoughts on evolution, which they called punctuated equilibrium.

Some people think that evolution is a steady march toward some definable goal, especially when it comes to human progress.  Gould and Eldridge saw evolution as beings adapting to their environment and then refining the adaption as long as the environment stays stable.

But environments don’t stay stable.  Periodically, they become subjected to sudden events – hurricanes, fires, tornadoes, floods, and overheating are dandy examples.  Evolutionary adaption no longer works, because the environment is no longer the same.  The equilibrium has been punctuated, the pot stirred, the beings present with a new set of imperatives.  They either re-adapt, or they don’t. The popular theory that the dinosaurs disappeared when a meteorite plunged into the earth serves as an example of not adapting.

No scientific theory goes without challenge, but the dueling on this one remained curiously muted.  It seemed to make sense to those who deal with evolution professionally.  In contrast, many of Gould’s other ideas created howls of rage, some from other scientists and some from others who objected to his basic principles.  Gould participated with fang and claw in the Darwin Wars of the 80s, and was quick to correct those who used his theories for their own political or religious narratives.  Sociobiology, the idea that evolution explains human behavior, particularly irritated him, but he came to grant that some of those ideas had merit.

I watched those conflicts from the cheap seats, box of popcorn in my hand.  I have neither the intellectual firepower not the training to participate.  There may be a unified field theory for gravity and electromagnetism, as Einstein believed; I seriously doubt there will ever be a unified theory of human behavior.

But human behavior does parallel natural behavior in some ways.  Like tree frogs and land snails, we adapt to our environment, both natural and human-imposed.  Human-imposed changes to the environment, though largely invisible, exert a powerful force on us.  Compare the United States of the 1920’s with that of the 1930’s – the invisible force called economics created vast amounts of misery and worse.

They seem similar in this – every punctuation – natural disasters, but also wars, pestilence, depressions, and other human affairs, comes with a casualty list.  Non-adapters disappear, sometimes in droves, and the maimed remain to remind us of what once was.  Armed conflict, internal or external, provides the most vivid example, but any sudden shift in the human environment causes unusual degradation of life, just as shifts in the natural one.

The natural environment seems to remain stable once the punctuation has ended.  The human environment appears to be much less so.  For one thing, one bout of instability seems to lead to another, without the effects of the first being fully absorbed.  We never finish with a comma before somebody attempts to slam a semicolon somewhere in the sentence, mainly for beneficial reasons (but not always).    Our ability to sniff out trends or upcoming problems helps us survive, but we don’t always perceive correctly.  We create unnecessary punctuation.

Each punctuation, even with the best intention, creates a casualty list that far exceeds the estimate of the perpetrator, and most perpetrators don’t bother to estimate damages.  Nature has no intentions, so flood and fire have no unintended consequences.  Human activity has intentions, but the unintended ones frequently outgrow the intended.

That’s not to say we should create static, immovable societies.  They are as toxic in their ways as unstable ones, and they usually pre-suppose a significant amount of misery.  The way is clearly something between constant uproar and lack of motion.  But perhaps we should become better at calculating the cost of a change, and worse at being enchanted by ideas.