A Conversation with a Lizard or Theory as Playground
For some time now I've been basking in Jostein Gaarder's Maya. Gaarder, despite the fact that he is translated from Norwegian, can make for very filling reading (you try eating 3 lbs of cheesecake and see where you end up!) but the density of his work owes itself more to unique thoughts and perspectives than to the wordsmanship that usually grips me.
Enter Maya: an evolutionary biologist, shortly after surviving a life confronting flight and a mystical Spaniard couple find himself writing to his estranged wife, questioning the frightening implications of evolution. How he does this is odd: a mixture of eavesdropping and mulling over reptiles and amphibians.
Yes, reptiles; our very own ancestors - the pentadactyl vertebrates that were once destined for utter dominion of the planet until that unfortunate meteor incident...
It was my own history I was seeing, my own ancestors. Not my direct lineage back to small, mammal-like reptiles that lived here a couple of hundred million years ago - but further back to a primitive reptile, an amphibian, a lobed-finned fish, an invertebrate, and right back to the world's very first living cell...
Such contemplation is harrowing at best and maddening at worst. There is a charming stand off with a gecko which yields the following candid submission:
That's quite possible, of course, and I've no problems envisaging a brain that might, for instance, be able to learn the entire Encyclopedia Britannica by heart. I don't even find it difficult to imagine a single mind capable of absorbing the whole of man's collected wisdom. What I do doubt is whether, theoretically, it's possible to understand a lot more about the secrets of the universe than humans do already. So every question I'm posing boils down to the problem of whether the universe itself has more secrets to divulge. I mean, if you find a piece of meteorite, you can start calculating how much it weighs, its specific gravity and, most importantly, its chemical composition. But when that's all done, it's impossible to wring further secrets from the rock. After that, it's just what it is, and what it's always been. So it can be put aside, perhaps to gather dust in a museum. But we're no wiser. For what is a stone?
Indeed, the links between knowledge and meaning are at best tenuous. But that does not preempt our questions or the search we all undertake.
If there is a god, he is not only a wizard at leaving clues behind. More than anything, he's a master of concealment. And the world is not something that gives itself away. The heavens still keep their secrets. There is little gossip amongst the stars...
Is God such a wizard or is He so very complex that we glimpse the etch of His fingerprint and are overwhelmed by infinity? Does God use our mathematics to make things and if not, can we use our mathematics to describe Him? As we acquire more knowledge we become less anthropocentric and it scares us because we become increasingly smaller elements of an incomprehensible vast universe.
The book is delightful; Gaarder uses a variety of tools to lead the reader through his playful treatment of the quagmire of evolution. The only shortcoming of the book is that for those of us with a less than rigorous understanding of the theory many an allusion will be missed.
8:30:11 PM 
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