The Sacred Depths of Nature Ursula

Goodenough
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 ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE SACRED DEPTHS OF
NATURE

“This book is a gem. Not only are the science passages an exquisite
introduction to astronomy, cell biology, and evolution, but her
reflections on the meaning she personally derives from such
knowledge leave the reader yearning for more. Her passages on the
meaning of death—indeed, a celebration of death, for the kind of life
and love only it can call forth—is unsurpassed by all the outpourings
from the humanities. She is fully, intimately, restfully at home in the
universe, in her version of divinity: the sacred depths of nature. And
then, able to draw no more from either the science or her own soul,
she offers up a poem or psalm from various of the world’s wisdom
traditions.”—Connie Barlow, Eco-activist, author of Green Space,
Green Time: The Way of Science
“A truly fascinating, wide-ranging, beautifully written, and eye-
opening book that considers the origins of earth, the origins of life
itself, where we are now, where we are most likely heading, and the
importance of developing a shared global cosmology and ecomorality
that can benefit us all in the future.”—Marc Bekoff, Ecology and
Evolution, University of Colorado, author of Rewilding our Hearts:
Building Pathways of Compassion and Coexistence
“Ursula Goodenough argues passionately, wisely, and even lyrically
for a new, modern, scientifically informed worldview that can tell us
both about the universe we inhabit and the moral rules we need to
inhabit it well. This is a wonderful account of the history of life by a
great biologist. It invites us to find in modern science the profound
sense of wonder and belonging, and the deep ethical sense present
in all the world’s religious traditions.”—David Christian, History,
Macquarie University, author of Origin Story: A Big History of
Everything
“Even better the second time around! Engagingly and clearly written,
replete with striking metaphors—especially ones from music—and
with conscientious respect for the scientifically untrained reader. A
convincing demonstration of the integral relation between
generously open-minded natural science and equally receptive, non-
dogmatic religious thought. The two are shown to interact with,
jointly inform, and mutually inspire one another in Goodenough’s
engrossing version of Religious Naturalism. Here the compelling
sacredness of all living and non-living nature is brought into sharp
focus.”—Donald Crosby, Philosophy, Colorado State University, author
of Sacred and Secular: Responses to Life in a Finite World

“Not since Loren Eiseley or Lewis Thomas has biology had such an
eloquent spokesperson, nor one with so much heart. Finally,
someone who can breathe life into molecules and make us feel it.”—
Terrence Deacon, Anthropology and Cognitive Science Program,
University of California, Berkeley, author of Incomplete Nature: How
Mind Emerged from Matter
“What perfect timing for this revised edition of Ursula Goodenough’s
classic, The Sacred Depths of Nature. As we witness and experience,
emotionally and socially, the unraveling of the biosphere and
industrial civilization, a meaningful, reverential worldview grounded
in evidence is more relevant than ever. An excellent introduction to
the religious naturalist orientation! Only my wife, Connie Barlow’s
Green Space Green Time, is even in the same league. Bravo,
Ursula!”—Michael Dowd, Ecotheologian, author of Thank God for
Evolution
“Tender, yet passionate, Goodenough immerses us in a collective
spiritual vision, allowing us to discover and feel the numinous in
science, synthesizing these understandings and the religious impulse
without doing harm to either. Our best hope for a future.”—Anne
Druyan, Writer, director, and producer of COSMOS and cocreator
with Carl Sagan of the motion picture CONTACT
“The Sacred Depths of Nature is both a spiritual exercise and a
sophisticated, crystal clear, and lyrical primer on what science
teaches us about this wondrous universe and the mysterious gift
that is being here at all.”—Owen Flanagan, Philosophy, Duke
University, author of The Geography of Morals

“Hosanna! Here, now, this! The new revised version of The Sacred
Depths of Nature is manna from heaven on earth. Muons and
neutrinos, eukaryotic sex and somatic death, covenant with mystery,
Goodenough’s Gospel of Life is the true myth we and our planet
desperately need.”—Michael S. Hogue, Meadville Lombard
Theological School, author of American Immanence: Democracy for
an Uncertain World
“At once expansive and intimate, empirical and immanent, analytical
and intuitive, material and spiritual, science and poetry get to dance
joyfully together in these pages. The Sacred Depths of Nature allows
us to see and celebrate our fundamental kinship with all beings,
united by the forces that propel life’s improbable unfolding. In this
time of crisis, we urgently need the planetary ethic that resists the
degradation of the shimmering world.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, Center
for Native Peoples and the Environment, SUNY-ESF, author of
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and
the Teachings of Plants
“This book is a treasure for all those who seek to connect with a
deeper meaning in the universe without jettisoning empirical
scientific evidence. Ursula Goodenough dissolves the conventional
split between science and religious orientation, showing with
delightful prose and breathtaking examples how a deeply scientific
investigation can naturally lead us to a ‘covenant with mystery’ and a
‘credo of continuation.’ ”—Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning
Instinct and The Web of Meaning
“Thank you, Ursula Goodenough, for telling us the science-based
story of life on earth and the wonders of our universe in a way that
brings them down to the level of our hearts, and deeper still, to the
very place from where our prayers come.”—Peter Mayer, Singer and
songwriter, lyricist of “Blue Boat Home”

“I am so glad this important book is being revised for our time. It is

wise, calm, and compassionate; it treats us as the mature, complex,
and fascinating creatures that we are, and in so doing helps point
the way towards a future where we act together far better than at
present.”—Bill Mckibben, Founder of 350.org, author of The Flag, the
Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his
Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened
“To experience the sacred, we need not ask the WHY question,
which is, after all, unanswerable. In this absolutely amazing book,
biologist Ursula Goodenough shows us that pondering the HOW of
things brings us face-to-face with that which is sacred. Through
science, poetry, and her own remarkable personal stories,
Goodenough shares her profound religious stance as a Credo of
Continuation.”—Jennifer Morgan, President, Deeptime Network
“An engaging, authoritative account of the evolution and molecular
basis of life from the perspective of a religious naturalist who
rejoices in the complexity and wonder of the natural world. A
successful cell biologist and gifted writer, Goodenough weaves
together our scientific understanding of the appearance, place, and
workings of life on earth in the context of the diversity of religious
traditions. The book will inspire both scientists and non-scientists to
appreciate the magic of our existence and the necessity to preserve
that which makes it possible.”—Thomas Pollard, Molecular, Cellular
and Developmental Biology, Yale University, co-author of Cell
Biology, 4th edition
“Goodenough’s masterpiece unites the beauty of biology and the
wonders of evolution in a magnificent, heartfelt celebration of life.
Like its author, this book is eloquent, vibrant, inspiring, and truly
one-of-a-kind.”—Barbara Smuts, Psychology, University of Michigan,
author of Sex and Friendship in Baboons
“Incisive, comprehensive, witty, and beautiful, with paragraph after
paragraph of lucidity and significance. We could be witnessing one of
the most important cultural events of the last three centuries—the
moment when scientists themselves take their role seriously in
forging a planetary wisdom.”—Brian Swimme, Evolutionary
cosmologist, California Institute of Integral Studies, coauthor of The
Journey of the Universe
“Goodenough gives us a new bridge between science and religion
that is both eloquent and elegant. She offers us the poetry, power,
and passion of her vision of nature, a vision born from scientific
knowledge, nurtured by religious sensibility, and inspired by nature
itself. Such a pathbreaking interdisciplinary work illumines the way
for each of us—embracing an ecomorality that is comprehensive and
compelling.”—Mary Evelyn Tucker, School of the Environment and
Forum on Religion and Ecology, Yale University, coproducer of the
film Journey of the Universe
“A delicious account of the grandeur and intricacies of natural reality
that will have you falling in love with the beauty of scientific
knowledge while honoring the grand wisdom of religious valuing.
The new chapters on human evolution, human morality, and
ecomorality reveal why The Sacred Depths of Nature remains a
remarkable gift for our generation. Goodenough demonstrates, in
her inimitable lucid, poetic style, a religious naturalist orientation
that is uniquely positioned to address—all at once!—such urgent
topics as systemic, structural racism, cultural imperialism, and
environmental injustices.”—Carol Wayne White, Religious Studies,
Bucknell University, author of Black Lives and Sacred Humanity:
Toward an African American Religious Naturalism
“I have been waiting years for this paean to the universe. With
lustrous turns of phrase, skillful explanations of nature, a profound
vision of the past, and a prescient sense of the future, Ursula
Goodenough reintroduces us to the present moment, the fulsome
present, bursting with an invitation to gratitude and reverence.
There’s not a single person on this planet who doesn’t need and
deserve this book.”—Wesley J. Wildman, School of Theology and
Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences, Boston University, author
of Spirit Tech
“The first edition of The Sacred Depths of Nature was a revelation to
me. Before reading it, I had no idea that the workings of a single cell
were so elaborate as to be awe-inspiring. This second edition has
brought many more such revelations. Illustrated with lovely photos
and poems from wise poets, this is a detailed short treatise on the
science of life. It proves once again that a science book can be a
page-turner. I learned from every page and could not wait for the
next one.”—Paul Woodruff, Philosophy, University of Texas Austin,
author of Living Toward Virtue: Practical Ethics in the Spirit of
Socrates
“What a beautiful, lyrical, lively, fascinating, and outstanding book.
Delightful to read. Awesome achievement.”—Richard Wrangham,
Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, author of The
Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and
Violence in Human Evolution
 URSULA GOODENOUGH

THE SACRED DEPTHS OF NATURE

How Life Has Emerged and Evolved
SECOND EDITION
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
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certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Ursula Goodenough 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
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Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Goodenough, Ursula, author.
Title: The sacred depths of nature : how life has emerged and evolved / Ursula
Goodenough.
Description: Second edition. | New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022030828 (print) | LCCN 2022030829 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197662069 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780197662083 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Biology—Philosophy. | Biology—Religious aspects. |
Naturalism—Religious aspects. | Nature—Religious aspects.
Classification: LCC QH331 .G624 2023 (print) | LCC QH331 (ebook) |
DDC 570.1—dc23/eng/20220923
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022030828
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022030829
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197662069.001.0001
 For:
Rachel Cowan
Joan Goodwin
Esther Hopkins
 CONTENTS

Personal 1997 (first edition)

Personal 2022 (second edition)

Introduction
How This Book Is Put Together
1. Origins of the Earth
2. Origins of Life
3. How Life Works
4. How an Organism Works
5. How Evolution Works
6. The Evolution of Biodiversity
7. Awareness and the I-Self
8. Interpretations and Feelings
9. Sex
10. Intimacy
11. Multicellularity and Death
12. Human Evolution
13. Human Morality and Ecomorality
Epilogue: Emergent Religious Principles
Epilogue: The Religious Naturalist Orientation
Endnotes 1: Legends to Cover and Chapter Frontispieces and
Text Figure Credits
Endnotes 2: Further Readings/Resources and Text Credits
Index
 PERSONAL 1997 (FIRST EDITION)

No question about it: I’m writing this book because of my father. He

started out as a Methodist preacher but became absorbed—no,
obsessed—with a need to understand why people are religious. As
Professor of the History of Religion, he poured out book after book
on the ancient Jews and early Christians: their art, their texts, their
motivations. And then he brought it all home, to me sitting there
after dessert trying to look inconspicuous while he and the other
Yale scholars drank a great deal of wine and held forth on Plato and
Paul and Freud and Sartre. Dad began his famous undergraduate
course, The Psychology of Religion, by announcing “I do not believe
in God.” He ended one of his last books by admitting “I still pray
devoutly, and when I do I forget my qualifications and quibbles and
call upon Jesus—and he comes to me.” He was a larger-than-life
father, passionate and outrageous and adored. When he died of
cancer when I was twenty-two, it was almost more than any of us
could bear.
I went to college with 1950s expectations: find a husband, raise
two children, and continue to read novels. But everything changed
when I took Zoology 1 as a distribution requirement. Nothing in my
girls-school training had led me to understand that creatures are
made up of cells and genes and enzymes, that life evolves, that
kidneys control blood electrolytes. I was astonished. Better still, I
was good at it. And Dad was quite as excited about my unexpected
calling as I was. “Ursula a scientist! How splendid!” What a father.
For the next twenty-five years or so I played it straight: biology
professorships, research projects, federal grants, graduate and
undergraduate teaching. I still do all those things, and with as much
pleasure and satisfaction as ever. But as my five children grew and
there was more time for myself, my father’s question returned. Why
are people religious? And then: Why am I not religious?
But was that true? What is being religious anyhow? What about
the way I feel when I think about how cells work or creatures
evolve? Doesn’t that feel the same as when I’m listening to the St.
Matthew Passion or standing in the nave of the Notre Dame
Cathedral?
So I joined Trinity Presbyterian Church and spent the next decade
singing in the choir, reciting the liturgy and prayers, hearing the
sermons, participating in the ritual. I came to understand how this
tradition, as played out in a middle-class, mostly white congregation,
is able to elicit states of serious reflection, reverence, gratitude, and
penance. But all of it was happening in the context of ancient
premises and a deep belief in the supernatural. What about the
natural? Was it possible to ground such religious sensibilities in the
context of a fully modern, up-to-the-minute understanding of
Nature?
And so I started reading and listening and reflecting, and out of it
has emerged this book. Certainly the most important dialogue has
been with Loyal Rue, who has explained to me most of what I
understand about theology and philosophy and who has insisted that
we scientists speak of what we know and feel. Early on I happened
onto an improbable collection of people composing the Institute on
Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS), and while the input of many in
IRAS has been seminal, this is particularly true for Gene d’Aquili,
Connie Barlow, Michael Cavanaugh, Tom Gilbert, Ward Goodenough,
Phil Hefner, Bill Irons, Sol Katz, Ted Laurenson, Karl Peters, Bob
Schaible, and Barbara Whitaker-Johns. Kirk Jensen of Oxford
University Press has provided generous and unwavering support;
Carl Smith has helped me understand and experience the religious
impulse; John Heuser has continuously infused his perspectives and
wisdom; Sine Berhanu and Jeanne Heuser have nurtured my
spirituality; Pam Belafonte, Elizabeth Marincola, Sharon Olds, and
Betsy Weinstock have nurtured my courage; my children—Jason,
Mathea, Jessica, Thomas, and James—bless my life in countless
ways; and no one can emerge from a consideration of religion
without thanking William James.
 PERSONAL 2022 (SECOND EDITION)

In the 25 years since I wrote the first edition of this book, I

continued as a biology professor for 20 years and then retired to
Martha’s Vineyard to celebrate my remaining years within oak forests
abutting wetlands and the open ocean. Along the way I taught cell
biology and evolution courses, participated in exciting scientific
research with wonderful colleagues and trainees, and welcomed nine
grandchildren.
But after the book was published, I acquired a second life. As an
advocate for the religious naturalist orientation (p. 219), I spoke at
numerous venues—college seminars, sermons, church-basement
discussion groups, conferences, book clubs. I wrote journal articles
and blog essays and was interviewed and reviewed. I joined others
in founding the Religious Naturalist Association (RNA,
https://religious-naturalist-association.org) that in 2022 has some
900 members in 50 states and 40 countries. I shared ideas and
feelings with those who embraced the religious naturalist trajectory
and with those who offered critiques, thereby greatly expanding and
clarifying my understandings. My second life has been both
exhilarating and humbling, and the many new ideas and
perspectives presented in this second edition were incubated in this
rich context.
The mentors, supporters, and family whom I acknowledged in
1997, most of whom, although sadly not all, are happily alive and
well in 2022, are thanked again for their invaluable input and their
continued belief in me. The concept of emergence anchored much of
the first edition, but Terry Deacon and Jeremy Sherman have greatly
expanded my understanding of its dynamics in their writings and in
many conversations. Over the years, I have greatly benefited from
the wisdom and support of Claude Bernard, Thomas Berry, Rachel
Cowan, Susan Dutcher, Terry Findlay, Carol and Daniel Goodenough,
Joan Goodwin, Billie Grassie, John Grim, Sam Guarnaccia, Joe
Heitman, Michael Hogue, Esther Hopkins, Michael Kalton, Jason
Keune, Kent Koeninger, Todd Macalister, Sandra Masur, Sabeeha
Merchant, Jennifer Morgan, Janet Newton, Bill Orme-Johnson, Irving,
Sarah, and Alessandra Petlin, Lynne Quarmby, Edmund Robinson,
Robyn Roth, Jeremy Rutledge, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Barbara
Smuts, JD Stillwater, Tricia Swift, Brian Swimme, Mary Evelyn Tucker,
Sabine Waffenschmidt, Carol Wayne White, Wesley Wildman, Paul
Woodruff, and Michael Wysession. I have also greatly benefited from
the insights posted on IRAS and RNA social-media forums.
And my grandchildren—Isabella, Delilah, Oliver, Lola, Zora,
Luciano, Theodore, Leonardo, and Henry—bless my life in countless
ways.
 INTRODUCTION

When people talk about religion, most soon mention the major
religious traditions of our times, but then, thinking further, most
mention as well the religions of indigenous peoples and of such
vanished civilizations as ancient Greece and Egypt and Persia. That
is, we have come to understand that there are—and have been—
many different religions; anthropologists estimate the total in the
thousands. They also estimate that there have been thousands of
human cultures, which is to say that the making of a culture and the
making of its religion go together: each religion is embedded in its
cultural history. True, certain religions have attempted, and variously
succeeded, in crossing cultural boundaries to “convert the heathens,”
but the invaded cultures usually put their unmistakable stamp on
what they import, as evinced by the pulsating percussive Catholic
masses sung in Africa.
In the end, each of these religions addresses two fundamental
human concerns: How Things Are and Which Things Matter. How
Things Are is articulated as a Cosmology or Cosmos: How the
natural world came to be, how humans came to be, what happens
after we die, the origins of evil and tragedy and natural disaster and
love. Which Things Matter becomes codified as a Morality or Ethos:
the Judaic Ten Commandments, the Christian Sermon on the Mount,
the Five Pillars of Islam, the Buddhist Vinaya, the Confucian Five
Relations, and the understandings inherent in numerous indigenous
traditions.
The role of a religion is to integrate the Cosmology and the
Morality, to render the cosmological narrative so rich and compelling
that it elicits our allegiance and our commitment to its attendant
moral understandings. As a culture evolves, a distinctive Cosmos and
Ethos appear in its co-evolving religion. For billions of us, back to the
early humans, the stories, ceremonies, and art associated with our
religions-of-origin have been central to our lives.
I stand in awe of these religions. I have no need to take on their
contradictions or immiscibility, any more than I would quarrel with
the fact that Scottish bagpipe ceremonies coexist with Japanese tea
ceremonies. And indeed, the failure of Soviet Marxism to obliterate
Russian Orthodoxy, and of Maoism to obliterate Buddhism,
Confucianism, or Daoism, and of Christianity to obliterate indigenous
understandings, reminds us that projects designed to overthrow
religious traditions face strong headwinds.
My concern is very different. As I witness contemporary efforts to
generate planetary consensus, I see many high-minded and earnest
people attempting to operate within an amalgam of economic,
military, and political arrangements, and I find myself crying out “But
wait! Where is the religion? What is orienting this project besides
fear and greed? Where is the shared cosmology and the shared
morality?”
That we need a planetary ethic is so obvious that I need but list a
few key words: climate change, ethnic cleansing, fossil fuels, habitat
and species preservation, human rights, hunger, inland waterways,
infectious disease, nuclear weapons, oceans, pollution, population
pressures. To my ear, conversations on these topics are largely
cacophonies of national, cultural, and denominational self-interest.
Without a common religious orientation, we basically don’t know
where to begin, nor do we know what to say or how to listen, nor
are we motivated to respond.
My agenda for this book is therefore to outline some possible
foundations for such a planetary ethic, an ethic that would make no
claim to supplant existing orientations but would seek to coexist with
them, informing our global concerns while we continue to orient our
daily lives in our cultural/religious contexts.
Any planetary foundation needs to be anchored in a shared
worldview—a culture-independent, globally accepted consensus as
to how things are. From my perspective, this part is easy. How
things are is, well, how things are: our science-based
understandings of Nature: the Big Bang, the formation of stars and
planets, the origin and evolution of life and sentience on Earth, the
very recent advent of language-based consciousness in humans, and
the concomitant evolution of human cultures. As science-based
inquiry continues, our current understandings will deepen and
evolve, but a core narrative is in place:

The universe is a single reality—one long, sweeping spectacular process of

interconnected events. The universe is not a place where evolution happens,
it is the evolution happening. It is not a stage on which drama unfolds, it is
the unfolding drama itself. If ever there were a candidate for a universal story,
it must be this story of cosmic evolution . . . .The story shows us in the
deepest possible sense that we are all sisters and brothers—fashioned from
the same stellar dust, energized by the same star, nourished by the same
planet, endowed with the same genetic code, and threatened by the same
evils. This story, more than any other, humbles us before the magnitude and
complexity of creation. Like no other story it bewilders us with the
improbability of our existence, astonishes us with the interdependence of all
things, and makes us feel grateful for the lives we have. And not the least of
all, it inspires us to express our gratitude to the past by accepting a solemn
and collective responsibility for the future.
—Loyal Rue

This, I believe, is the story that can unite us, because it is true for us
all. It is Everybody’s Story.
But that potential carries a crucial caveat. A cosmology works as a
religious cosmology only if it resonates, only if it makes the listener
feel religious. Yes, the beauty of Nature—sunsets, woodlands, bird
song—readily elicits religious responses. We experience awe and
wonder at the grandeur, the poetry, the richness of the natural
world; it fills us with joy and thanksgiving. Our responses to
accounts of the workings of Nature, on the other hand, are often far
less positive. The scientific accounts of how things are, and how
they came to be, are more likely, at least initially, to elicit alienation,
disenchantment, anomie, and nihilism rather than the celebration
just offered by Loyal Rue. Such responses are not likely to motivate
allegiance or a spiritual/ethical orientation.
This alienation has several sources that are considered in various
chapters of the book. Here I suggest that a primary source derives
from the way that scientific understandings are commonly
presented. The language of scientists, while conveying essential
precision and depth to other scientists, too often conveys a view of
the natural world that can feel cold and mechanical to the outsider.
Moreover, the language is often obscure, generating the
understandable response that “I can’t get my mind around all that
stuff.” And, alas, our science curricula in the schools, while often
creative and stimulating, have all too often been experienced as
difficult, dry, and boring except for “those science nerds who were
good at it.”
This book therefore seeks to present an accessible and engaging
account of our science-based understandings of Nature, with a focus
on planetary life, and then suggest ways that this account can elicit
abiding, fulfilling, and joyous religious responses, generating what
has been called a religious naturalist orientation (p. 219), an
orientation poised to participate in the development of a planetary
ethos. Once we experience a solemn gratitude that we exist at all,
share a reverence for how life and the planet work, and
acknowledge an imperative that both continue to flourish, our
conversations will be infused with intimations of the sacred depths of
Nature and our responsibility to nurture that which we deem sacred.
A key component of any religious cosmology is its focus on the
human. Even as we acknowledge that our advent on the planet was
but an evolutionary moment ago, even as we gaze into the heavens
with urgent questions about our significance, the significance and
future of humankind remain central to our religious sensibilities.
The religious naturalist orientation has no problem here. Being at
home with our natural selves is the prelude to both morality and
ecomorality, and there are many ways to see human beings as noble
and distinctive even as we are also animals who are inexorably part
of the whole. A planetary ethic must be anchored both in an
understanding of human nature and an understanding of the rest of
Nature. This, I believe, can be achieved if we all start out with the
same kinds of perspectives on how human nature flows forth from
whence we came.
 HOW THIS BOOK IS PUT TOGETHER

A Lutheran-raised friend who read an early draft of the first edition

of this book remarked that it was set up like a Daily Devotional
booklet, also found in Evangelical and Catholic traditions. A Daily
Devotional, he explained, contains a collection of short bible-based
stories, each followed by a religious meditation on the story’s theme.
While I wasn’t familiar with the genre, that’s basically how the
chapters of this book are constructed.
Each chapter begins with a story about the dynamics of Nature.
Most are about biology since that is what I best understand, and
most are about biology at the level of molecules and genes and
cells, since this is what cries out to be understood. The stories
recount what has been called the Epic of Evolution or Journey of the
Universe or, my favorite, Everybody’s Story: our current
understandings of the origins of the universe and the planet; the
origins of chemistry and life; the workings of cells and organisms;
the patterns of biological evolution and the resultant biodiversity;
awareness and feelings; sex and intimacy; multicellularity and death;
human evolution; and morality and ecomorality. Throughout, I have
done my best to bridge C.P. Snow’s “two cultures”—persons fluent in
science-based worldviews vs. persons oriented within the arts and
humanities. For readers not well versed in scientific concepts and
terminology, I have tried to render my accounts accurate,
understandable, and meaningful. Those who know the terrain will, I
hope, find themselves engaged by the analogies and story lines that
are used to explain the familiar.
I often use anthropomorphic language in these descriptions—
amino acids prefer to do something and enzymes recognize
something—because that’s how we humans think: we follow
narratives with protagonists that have agency. Indeed, biologists use
such analogies/metaphors all the time; we speak of orphaned
receptors and proteins that serve as chaperones and genes that
hitchhike. While we hold robust science-based understandings of the
molecules and mechanisms of which we speak, it’s usually easier to
communicate those understandings in carefully chosen
anthropomorphic frames that convey the essence of a process.
Then, at the end of each story, I offer a short response, the
analogue of the Christian meditation, as a nontheistic religious
naturalist (p. 219). These reflections draw heavily on traditional
religious concepts and on readings and conversations, but in the
end, each reflection is personal, describing the particular
religious/spiritual sensibility elicited in me when I think about a
particular facet of the story. For example, the existence of the
Cosmos invokes in me a sense of mystery; the exuberance of
biodiversity invokes humility; and an understanding of the evolution
of death offers me helpful ways to think about my own death. If the
religious naturalist orientation is to flourish, it will be because other
writers find themselves called to reflect on the dynamics of Nature
from their own cognitive, experiential, and cultural perspectives—in
which case this book will become one of a series of Daily
Devotionals.
Human memory, they say, is like a coat closet: The most enduring
outcome of education is that it creates rows of coat hooks so that
later on, when you come upon a new piece of information about
something, you have a hook to hang it on. Without a hook, the new
information falls on the floor. Some readers with scanty scientific
backgrounds have told me that while they were reading one of my
stories about Nature, it felt like they understood everything I said,
but the next day they could scarcely remember a thing about it.
No hooks, I explain. Then I remind them that there isn’t going to
be a test, and that as they were reading they were creating hooks
for their next encounters with scientific explanation. And then the
important part: The point of hearing a story for the first time is not
to remember it but to experience it.
 CHAPTER 1

Origins of the Earth

INFINITIES AND INFINITESIMALS

To our knowledge, everything in our universe, including the Earth
and its living creatures, obeys the laws of physics, laws that became
manifest in the first moments of time. Much of what we know about
the physical universe, like the curvature of spacetime and the
behavior of sub-atomic entities as both particles and waves, is very
difficult to conceptualize, even for people who spend their lives
thinking about such things (Richard Feynman: “If you think you
understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum
mechanics.”).
As physicists and mathematicians probe ever more deeply, they
present us with ever more mind-boggling concepts, like the idea that
sub-atomic particles may in fact be minute, vibrating “superstrings”
of space, that our four-dimensional universe may actually be ten- or
eleven-dimensional, that the observable universe may be much
smaller than the true universe, and that there may be other
universes besides our own. We are introduced to other stars that
also have orbiting planets and presented with ever more bizarre
observations about black holes. We learn that “ordinary matter”—the
subatomic particles and luminous atoms that we and the Earth and
the stars are made of—is only ~5% of the universe. Much of the rest
(~25%) is enigmatic “dark matter,” which doesn’t interact with light
nor with ordinary matter in any way except through gravity. And
most (~70%) is the even more enigmatic “dark energy” that
participates in the expansion of the universe, characterized by a
physicist friend as “pushy-outty stuff.”
Fascinating as these known and speculative manifestations of
physics may be, they are not central to our story of life. Why?
Because when Earth life was coming into being, some ten billion
years after the universe had come into being, the laws of physics
were a given. Life had no choice but to originate and evolve in the
context of quantum indeterminacy and quarks held together by
gluons and gravitational and magnetic fields and thermodynamics.
Therefore, while the laws of physics underlie all of life, and constrain
what can and cannot occur in living beings, we can describe how life
works without referring to them, in much the same way that we can
describe what a painting looks like without referring to the light-
absorption spectra of its pigments.
What is central to the origination of Earth life is the history of the
universe—the cosmic dynamics that have yielded our galaxy, our
star, our planet, and the atoms that form living beings. We can tell
the story sparingly, without pausing to define terminology, allowing
the flow of events to suggest the enormous times and distances
involved.

THE UNIVERSE STORY

The observable universe is currently estimated to be 13.8 billion
years old. In the beginning, everything that is now the universe,
including all of its ordinary matter and dark matter and dark energy,
was concentrated in a singularity, smaller than the size of a pinhead,
that was unimaginably hot
(100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit
by some estimates) and unimaginably dense. It all let loose during
an event called the Big Bang—a misleading term in that there wasn’t
an audible explosion. Instead, the singularity expanded very rapidly,
carrying all the matter and energy with it, accompanied by an event
called cosmic inflation that created inhomogeneities in the expanding
space.
During the first three minutes of this expansion, all sorts of high-
energy physics took place that yielded the current tally of subatomic
particles in the universe, including single protons (hydrogen nuclei),
neutrons, and electrons. A small portion of the protons and neutrons
went on to fuse into helium nuclei and an even smaller proportion
into lithium nuclei. And then things started to settle down, with the
space continuing to expand and cool until, after ~400,000 years,
temperatures were low enough that the hydrogen and helium nuclei
could acquire electron shells and become stable hydrogen and
helium atoms. The expansion continued for another 13.8 billion
years to yield the present observable universe estimated to be
60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles in diameter.
Once hydrogen atoms formed, the stage was set for the creation
of galaxies and stars. The spatial inhomogeneities that had formed
during cosmic inflation were amplified by the gravitational properties
of dark matter, creating huge lumps called dark matter halos.
Hydrogen atoms fell into the centers of these halos and initiated star
formation. The gravitational field of each proto-star pulled the
hydrogen atoms closer and closer together, colliding with one
another in a gaseous state until the temperatures became so high
that they were stripped of their electrons. The resultant hydrogen
nuclei then started to fuse, forming new helium nuclei. The fusion
reactions released heat, causing the gas to expand and
counterbalancing the tendency of the center to contract due to
gravity. As a result, each star stabilizes in temperature and mass,
burning its hydrogen nuclear fuel.
What happens next depends on the mass of the star. Low-mass
stars, which are the most numerous, fuse all their hydrogen nuclei
into helium nuclei without going through later stages, while
intermediate- and high-mass stars follow more dramatic pathways.
Once the hydrogen starts to run out in an intermediate-mass star, its
center starts to contract again, eventually becoming so dense and
hot that its helium nuclei start to fuse together, forming larger nuclei
like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and other “light elements” of the
periodic table. Such a star, called a red giant, puffs away its outer
layers, seeding its galaxy with its newly minted light elements,
including most of the carbon in the universe, and leaving behind a
remnant known as a white dwarf. A white dwarf may subsequently
explode, releasing elements such as calcium and iron.
A high-mass star goes through a red-giant phase as well, but its
core keeps collapsing, getting hotter and hotter and forming heavier
and heavier nuclei until it starts to make iron, which can’t be
processed further. When a critical amount of iron accumulates, the
core is crushed by gravity, and the shock waves generated by the
crushing process cause a huge explosion in the star’s outer layers—a
supernova—releasing its newly forged elements, including most of
the oxygen and magnesium nuclei in the universe, and leaving
behind a remnant called a neutron star. Neutron stars may
subsequently collide/merge with one another, creating and seeding
the surrounding space with the nuclei of such “heavy elements” as
gold, silver, and the radioactive thorium and uranium.
The nuclei that are released into space from dying stars proceed
to cool, acquire electrons, and become atoms. Some then join
primordial hydrogen atoms to form more complex second-generation
stars. The second-generation stars proceed to burn their hydrogen,
and the more massive ones then collapse, creating new elements in
the process. Their released atoms proceed to join primordial
hydrogen to form third-generation stars that are yet again more
complex. Such birth-and-death stellar cycles are destined to continue
into the future, albeit the rate of star formation is decreasing as the
universe ages.
Stars cluster together within galaxies that are shaped by dark-
matter halos. Our current universe contains ~200 billion massive
galaxies, plus numerous small ones, each populated by ~100 billion
stars. Which takes us to our own context: The Milky Way.

THE EARTH STORY

The Milky Way (chapter frontispiece) is an enormous spiral galaxy,
embedded in and surrounded by its dark-matter halo, containing
~100 billion stars, and the Sun, located in one of its spiral arms, is a
second- or third-generation intermediate-mass star. The Sun is ~4.6
billion years old and has enough hydrogen to burn for another ~5
billion years. As its hydrogen begins to run out, it will follow the
sequence described earlier for intermediate-mass stars, becoming a
red giant, and the Earth will spiral into it and be absorbed.
Another important feature of the Sun, and any star, is that as it
ages, it keeps getting brighter—more luminous, radiating more
photons—an effect related to its ever-increasing content of helium
nuclei. A billion years from now, the Sun will be ~10% brighter than
it is now, and the resultant heat is predicted to evaporate all the
water from the Earth’s surface. It’s important to remember, in
reading the previous sentence, that a billion years is a very long
time.
While the Sun was forming, some of the surrounding material
assembled into aggregates that collided and merged with one
another and eventually stabilized as its orbiting planets, moons, and
comets. Planet Earth acquired generous endowments of iron that
formed its broiling core, siliceous magma that formed its thick liquid
mantle, and a thin silicon-based crust that floated on top of the
mantle. Gases that were trapped in the Earth’s interior, including
water vapor, were released through fissures in the crust and became
trapped by gravity to form the early atmosphere. The floating crust
then settled into large masses, occasionally breached by volcanic
magma, that drift and crash into one another in a slow but
continuous geological activity called plate tectonics, defining and
redefining the continents and ocean basins. After about a billion
years of consolidation—to repeat, a billion years is a very long time
—the physical conditions on Earth became such that life could
originate and continue.

REFLECTIONS
I’ve had a lot of trouble with the universe. It began soon after I was
told about it in physics class. I was perhaps twenty and went on a
camping trip, where I found myself in a sleeping bag gazing up into
the crisp Colorado night. Before I could look around for Orion and
the Big Dipper, I was overwhelmed with terror. The panic became so
acute that I had to roll over and bury my face in my pillow.

• All the stars that I see are part of but one galaxy.
• There are billions of galaxies out there, with billions of stars in each one,
occupying magnitudes of space that I cannot begin to imagine.
• Each star is forming, dying, accreting, dying again, fusing atomic nuclei
under enormous temperatures and pressures.
• Our Sun too will die, frying the Earth to a crisp during its heat-death,
spewing its bits and pieces out into the frigid nothingness of curved
spacetime.

The night sky was ruined. I would never be able to look at it again. I
wept into my pillow, the long slow tears of adolescent despair. When
I later encountered the famous quote from physicist Steven
Weinberg—“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more
it seems pointless”—I wallowed in its poignant nihilism, and I froze
before Stephen Hawking’s question: “What is it that breathes fire
into the equations and makes a universe for humans to describe?” A
bleak emptiness overtook me whenever I thought about what was
going on out in the Cosmos or deep in the atom, so I did my best to
not to think about such things, and thought about biology instead.
But since then, I have found a way to defeat the nihilism that
lurks in the infinite and the infinitesimal. I have come to understand
that I can deflect the apparent pointlessness of it all by realizing that
I don’t need to seek a Point. In any of it. Nor do I need an answer to
Hawking’s question. Instead I can see it as the locus of Mystery.

• The Mystery of why there is anything at all, rather than nothing.

• The Mystery of where the laws of physics came from.
• The Mystery of why the universe seems so strange.

Mystery. Inherently shrouded in its own absence of category, its

own absence of an answer.
The word God is often used to name this mystery. A theological
view known as Deism, for example, proposes that God created the
universe, authored the equations and laws that govern it,
orchestrated the Big Bang, and then stepped back and allowed
things to pursue their own course. Deism doesn’t work for me
because I can only think of a creator in human terms, and the
concept of a human-like creator of muons and neutrinos and black
holes has no meaning for me. But more profoundly, Deism spoils my
Covenant with Mystery. To assign attributes to Mystery, to give it a
name and a mind, is to disenchant it, to take away its luminance.
I think of the ancients ascribing thunder and lightning to godly
feuds and I smile. The need for explanation pulsates in us all. Early
humans, bursting with questions about Nature but with limited
understanding of its history and dynamics, explained things in terms
of supernatural persons and person-animals who delivered the
droughts and floods and plagues, took the dead, and punished or
forgave the wicked. Explanations taking the form of unseen persons
and animals were the best option when persons and animals were
what we felt we best understood. Now, with our understanding of
Nature arguably better than our understanding of persons, Nature
can take its place as a strange but wondrous given.
 The realization that I needn’t have answers to the Big Questions,
needn’t seek answers to the Big Questions, was an epiphany. I lie on
my back under the stars and the unseen galaxies and I let their
enormity wash over me. I assimilate the vastness of the distances,
the impermanence, the fact of it all. I go all the way out and then I
go all the way down, to the fact of photons without mass and gauge
bosons that become massless at high temperatures. I take in the
abstractions about forces and symmetries and they caress me, like
Gregorian chants, the meaning of the words not mattering because
the words are so haunting.
Mystery generates wonder, and wonder generates awe. The gasp
can terrify, or the gasp can emancipate. As I dwell within cosmic and
quantum Mystery, I wander back through the centuries and
encounter the essence of Lao Tzu:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the
eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven
and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand
things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one sees the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source
but differ in name.
This appears as darkness,
Darkness within darkness,
The gate to all mystery.
Lao Tzu, ~600 BCE
 CHAPTER 2

Origins of Life
Most religions have an account of the origins of life. The Abrahamic
traditions offer two narratives: Genesis 1, the spare, poetic account
of six days of creation whose sequence, from the simple to the
complex, mirrors our current understanding of what happened over
billions of years, and Genesis 2, the morality-laden account of the
garden of Eden. The Pueblo peoples tell of a primordial home
beneath a lake where humans, gods, and animals lived together
while the earth above was still soft and “unripe.” The Kogi peoples of
Columbia describe a Supreme Deity: “The mother of our songs, the
mother of all our seed, bore us in the beginning of things. . . . She is
the mother of the thunder, the mother of the streams, the mother of
trees and of all things.” Certain Hindu teachings speak of the
Brahmanda, the cosmic egg from which all creatures came forth.
The Yaruro peoples of Venezuela tell of the water serpent Puana
who created the world, his brother Itciai, a jaguar, who created
water, and their sister Kuma, wife of the Sun, who made the Yaruro
peoples.
While these are wonderfully engaging narratives, we recognize
their cultural embeddedness and their contradictions with our
present understandings of the natural world. When we look to
science-based understandings for an origin story, we find a different
kind of poetry.

THE PLANETARY MATRIX

Geologists speak of the biosphere, the parts of the earth where life
is found, but I prefer the concept of a planetary matrix, a matrix that
came to include life. The word matrix derives from the Latin mater,
meaning both mother and fertile woman, and is translated in late
Middle English as womb. The planetary matrix came into being
about a billion years before life originated (Chapter 1). Life then
emerged from within it, using some of its materials, and flourished
within the wondrous and ever-changing habitats that it provided—
the oceans, skies, lands, and inland waterways. Life has distinctive
properties, as we’ll be exploring throughout this book, but volcanos,
plate tectonics and the atmosphere have distinctive properties as
well. Life is one of the many manifestations of the ever-transforming
planetary matrix, a matrix that Thoreau experienced as being
imbued with spirit:
 The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass.
It is a body, has a spirit;
is organic and fluid to the influence of its spirit
and to whatever particle of that spirit is in me.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1851

and a matrix that Rachel Carson experienced geologically:

For the differences I sense in this particular instant of time that is mine are
but the differences of a moment, determined by our place in the stream of
time and in the long rhythms of the sea. Once this rocky coast beneath me
was a plain of sand; then the sea rose and found a new shore line. And again
in some shadowy future the surf will have ground these rocks to sand and will
have returned the coast to its earlier state. And so in my mind’s eye these
coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which
there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality—earth becoming fluid as the
sea itself.
—Rachel Carson, 1955

To think about how life might have originated within this matrix,
we’ll first look at what chemistry entails and then consider the kinds
of chemistry needed to generate the first living organism. The
organism we’ll consider, called an autogen, is hypothetical, an
invention; no one knows what the first organism was really like. But
as we get to know the autogen, we come to understand the basics
of what it is to be alive in a biological sense.

THE ORIGINS OF CHEMISTRY

In the beginning there was high-energy physics, but with the cooling
of the universe we encounter chemistry. The core participants in a
chemical reaction are atoms, whose size is unimaginably small:
enlarging an atom to the size of an apple is equivalent to enlarging
an apple to the size of the Earth. An atom’s central nucleus carries a
positive charge that is balanced by the negative charge contributed
by its shell of electrons. When atoms lose or gain electrons from
their shells they become either net positively charged or net
negatively charged, a process called ionization. Chemistry allows
atoms and ions to form various kinds of bonds with one another via
a sharing of their electrons or a neutralization of their charge,
thereby forming minerals and molecules; it also allows smaller
molecules to associate into larger molecules.
Like everything else, chemistry is reducible to physics, but
chemistry takes place only under certain conditions. There are four
conditions that are important to our story.

• Chemistry requires the flow of energy—the capacity to do work—from a

source to a sink. The Earth has two massive sources of energy: the Sun, of
course, and also its own molten interior, pulsing with radioactivity, that helps
warm the oceans and the continents. The energy sink is, ultimately, the
universe itself, most of which is only a few degrees above absolute zero. As
energy flows, bonds can form between atoms and hence chemistry can
occur.
• Chemistry cannot occur when atoms are so hot that they fall apart into
subatomic particles, as in the interiors of stars. It also cannot readily occur
when all the atoms are locked up together as solids. When temperatures are
such that atoms and molecules can coexist in their various forms—solids,
liquids, and gases—this is a sign that the system is enjoying energy flow
and that chemistry can proceed.
• Some atoms are more likely to engage in chemistry than others. Helium, for
example, exists only as helium, whereas carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen,
oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur—the Big Six in modern organisms—are
poised to form electron-sharing bonds with one another under conditions of
energy flow: hydrogens readily share electrons with oxygens to form
molecules of water; carbons readily share electrons with oxygens to form
molecules of carbon dioxide.
• The probability of forming chemical bonds can be influenced by the
presence of materials called catalysts—minerals or molecules that enhance
the probability and hence the rate that a given interaction will occur without
themselves being chemically altered in the process. Some catalysts are
metals, like deposits of iron or copper, whose charged surfaces increase the
likelihood that energy flow will occur between interacting atoms. Other
catalysts are organic (carbon-based) molecules called enzymes, whose
shapes serve to bring reactants close enough together that bonds are likely
to form between them.
 EMERGENT PROPERTIES
We are now poised to introduce a key concept, called emergence,
that will appear in many contexts throughout this book.
Stable chemical relationships between materials often generate
what are called emergent properties: the tee-shirt meme for this is
“Something Else from Nothing But.” A water molecule is nothing but
an oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms bonded in a V-shaped
configuration, but when many liquid water molecules are frozen,
their bonds form an open lattice with the emergent property called
buoyancy—ice floats. Under certain freezing conditions they can also
generate the something-else called the snowflake. A mineral displays
the emergent property called its hardness; materials that foster the
flow of chemical reactions possess the emergent property called
catalytic capacity.
Another tee-shirt meme: Emergence is Nature’s Mode of
Creativity.

THE PRIMORDIAL SOUP

So, now back to our story of life’s origins.
Two kinds of chemistry were needed to get life going: the
chemistry that generated small “molecular building blocks” of life,
such as water, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen
sulfide, and the chemistry that combined these building blocks into
larger but simple carbon-based molecules such as formate, acetate,
pyruvate, and urea, collectively forming what is called the
“primordial soup.”
Building blocks and soup molecules are posited to have been
chemically forged in two kinds of factories. The first are tiny specks
of matter, about the size of talcum particles, called interstellar dust
because they form huge clouds of matter between the stars, soaking
up the elements released from stellar catastrophes. Since they are
floating out in space, the specks are inherently cold, but as nearby
stars pulse them with radiation, they heat and cool, heat and cool,
an energy flow that has allowed hundreds of different kinds of small
carbon-based molecules to form on their surfaces. As comets and
meteors passed through the dust and crashed into the early Earth,
they brought with them cargos of these molecules, which dissolved
in its waters and became available to incipient life.
The second factories are thought to have been deep-sea
hydrothermal vents, illustrated in the chapter frontispiece, wherein
ocean water first seeps into fissures in the Earth’s crust, heats up,
and then circulates back into the cold oceans, creating a gradient of
energy flow that again permits the chemical synthesis of building
blocks and carbon-based soup molecules.

THE AUTOGEN MODEL FOR THE ORIGIN OF

LIFE
We can now ask how life might have emerged out of such a
primordial soup. All origin-of-life hypotheses are by definition
speculations since the original lifeform, arising some 3.7 billion years
ago, no longer exists, having instead evolved into the DNA-based,
lipid-membrane-based, protein-mediated organisms that live on
Earth today.
Considered here is an origin-of-life model that says nothing about
what the first lifeforms were made of and instead focuses on how
they might have organized themselves as stable entities, called
autogens, using the soup molecules that were locally available. This
allows us to lift up what being alive entails.
Simple soup molecules have the potential to form bonds with one
another and form larger molecules, but such reactions require a
large energy flow and hence rarely occur on their own. Catalysts
serve to bring molecules together in particular configurations,
lowering this energy requirement and rendering such reactions far
more probable. A key feature of the autogen is that it has the
capacity to produce its own catalysts, using available soup
molecules, and thereby to generate what are called autocatalytic
cycles.
 A drawing of an autocatalytic cycle is shown in Figure 2.1. Soup
molecules, generically called substrates, each have an individual
shape, represented in the drawing as ovals, rectangles, and
diamonds. Starting at the top, two rectangles form a chemical bond
between themselves to create molecule B, a reaction catalyzed (+
sign) by molecule A. Molecule B, in turn, catalyzes the bonding of
two diamonds to form C, and C catalyzes the bonding of two ovals to
form A, and the cycle starts over again, and round and round it
goes. As long as substrates are available, more and more of the A,
B, and C catalysts will be synthesized.

Fig 2.1 Autocatalytic cycle (something else) using primordial soup molecules
(nothing but).
 A cycle like the one drawn in Figure 2.1 would quickly come to a
halt if the catalysts were to diffuse away from one another—they
need to be close together for the cycle to operate. Hence a second
feature of the autogen is that it encloses its autocatalytic sets.
Figure 2.2 shows a way that such containment might be
accomplished. The upper drawing shows a second version of an
autocatalytic cycle: in this case, catalyst C is generated from
substrates A + B in the soup and catalyst F is generated from
substrates D + E. The key innovation is that F is a multi-tasker: one
of the flat surfaces of its triangular shape serves to catalyze the A +
B reaction, while its edges associate with the edges of other F
triangles to form a container or capsid, the catalytic surfaces facing
the interior, which encloses sets of C catalysts and substrates. The
art in the lower part of Figure 2.2 illustrates the essence of these
events: it’s all about molecular shapes and shape-shape interactions.
Fig 2.2 Autocatalytic cycle (upper) and autogens formed when catalysts are
enclosed within self-assembling capsids (lower).
 The resulting hypothetical entity, drawn in Figure 2.2, is called an
autogen. Its sequestered cycles come to a stop once it uses up its
sequestered substrates, and it enters dormancy, analogous to
becoming a bacterial spore or a seed. But if at some later time the
capsid loses its integrity and new soup molecules penetrate it, the
cycle starts up again, events drawn in Figure 2.3. The breach would
subsequently be prone to re-seal, but not before new catalysts and
capsids molecules are synthesized.

Fig 2.3 Autogen capsid disruption (left) and autogen replication (right).

A third core feature of the autogen, called replication, is also

illustrated in Figure 2.3. Successive rounds of the cycle have
generated enough F molecules that, when assembly occurs, two
catalyst-containing capsids—and hence two autogens—are able to
self-assemble rather than just one.
We need reminding at this juncture that any such original
lifeforms presumably operated on a very leisurely time scale
compared with the pace set by modern organisms. It might have
been thousands of years before the first autogen gave rise to a
second. There was no reason, of course, to be in any hurry. The
important thing was to persist: the autogen became embodied and
propagated that embodiment.

EMERGENT DYNAMICS
We can now consider the autogen in the context of emergence (p.
25). Each of the soup molecules, and each of the catalysts, and each
of the capsid subunits, is nothing but atoms-bonded-together, but
these interactions generate something else—distinctive molecular
shapes that allow catalysts to interact with substrates and capsid
molecules to fit together, as illustrated in Figure 2.2.
In addition to these emergent properties that are based on shape,
the autogen also displays what are called emergent dynamics.
Autocatalysis and containment and propagation are dynamic in that
each is causally connected over time: one thing leads to the next
which leads to the next; something is happening. Molecular shapes
again serve as the nothing-buts, but in this case they yield emergent
dynamics—the operation of the cycle, the self-assembly of the
capsid, and the propagation of the autogen.
Emergent dynamics arise as the consequence of constraints. The
law of entropy describes what happens to materials over time in the
absence of constraint—a drift into random homogeneity. Autogens
and subsequent lifeforms push back against this tendency by
performing highly constrained chemistry, chemistry restricted to the
regenerative interactions that keep them alive. The constraints are
generated by shapes that render some chemical and morphogenetic
associations highly probable, and hence the rest increasingly
improbable. By constraining material interactions to generate useful
emergent properties and dynamics, lifeforms are able to reverse the
entropic tide and generate order and reproducibility and
continuation.
 DNA, RNA, AND PROTEIN
The autogen displays key features of life—self-organization,
substrate acquisition, propagation—without possessing a separate
coding mechanism to specify these features. By contrast, all modern
lifeforms make use of coding systems called genomes, usually DNA-
based but sometimes RNA-based, whose genes encode instructions
for the synthesis of the proteins needed to generate the lifeforms.
Proposals are on offer as to how autogen-like lifeforms might have
become encoded, and many origin-of-life proposals in fact reverse
the sequence we’ve presented here, instead suggesting that RNA
molecules came first (the “RNA World”), prior to any autogen-like
creature, and then in various ways came to encode embodied
beings. In either case, RNA and DNA show up early in all origin-of-
life scenarios.
A key feature of DNA (and RNA) is that it is readily copied and
hence distributed to daughter organisms. Four kinds of nucleotide
molecules, called A, T, G, and C, line up in a particular sequence—
e.g., CGCATTCC—and are then bonded side-by-side to form a long
strand or polymer called a polynucleotide. The shapes of the
nucleotides in the polymer allow them to form associations with free-
floating nucleotides in accordance with the following rule: A always
associates with T, and G always associates with C. Once the free
nucleotides are lined up by such associations, they form side-to-side
bonds with one another to create a second strand, a new daughter
strand, whose nucleotide sequence, GCGTAAGG, is complementary
to (akin to “the mirror image of”) the mother strand. When the
daughter strand is subsequently copied, the CGCATTCC sequence of
the mother is recapitulated in the granddaughter strand. The
nothing-buts here are the shapes of the nucleotides responsible for
the A/T and G/C pairings and the enzymes that catalyze the bonding
of the aligned nucleotides into strands; the something-else is the
emergent dynamic called DNA replication.
A second key feature of DNA is that it is readily encoded via the
sequence of nucleotides along its strands—the CGCATTCC in our
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Title: A friend of Marie-Antoinette (Lady Atkyns)

Author: Frédéric Barbey

Author of introduction, etc.: Victorien Sardou

Release date: September 19, 2023 [eBook #71679]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Chapman & Hall, Ltd,

1906

Credits: MWS and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at

https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet
Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A FRIEND

OF MARIE-ANTOINETTE (LADY ATKYNS) ***
 A FRIEND OF
MARIE-ANTOINETTE
(LADY ATKYNS)
 Madame Charlotte Atkyns.
(After a miniature in the possession of Count Lair.)
[Frontispiece.
 A FRIEND OF
MARIE-ANTOINETTE
(LADY ATKYNS)

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH

OF
FRÉDÉRIC BARBEY

WITH A PREFACE
BY
VICTORIEN SARDOU
OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY

LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd.
1906
 PREFACE
When I brought out at the Vaudeville in 1896 my play, entitled
Paméla, Marchande de Frivolités, in which I had grouped together
dramatically, with what verisimilitude I could, all the various Royalist
attempts at rescuing the son of Louis XVI., the Dauphin, from the
prison of the Temple, there were certain scholars who found fault
with me for representing an Englishwoman, Lady Atkyns, as the
protagonist, or at least the prime mover in the matter of his escape.
Some of them went so far as to accuse me of having invented this
character for the purpose of my piece.
Lady Atkyns, certainly, has left but few traces of her existence; she
was a Drury Lane actress, pretty, witty, impressionable, and good—it
seems there were many such among the English actresses of the
time. Married (we shall see presently how it came about) to a peer,
who gave her wealth at least, if not happiness, and who does not
appear to have counted for much in her life, Lady Atkyns became a
passionate admirer of Marie-Antoinette; she was presented to the
Queen at Versailles, and when the latter was taken to the Temple,
the responsive Englishwoman made every effort to find her way into
the prison. She succeeded by the use of guineas, which, in spite of
the hatred professed for Pitt and Coburg, were more to the taste of
certain patriots than the paper-money of the Republic.
Lady Atkyns suggested that the Queen should escape dressed in
her costume, but the Royal prisoner would not forsake her children.
There is a tradition that in refusing the offer of her enthusiastic friend,
Marie-Antoinette besought her good offices for the young Dauphin,
while putting her on her guard against the intrigues of the Comte de
Provence and the Comte d’Artois. However, most of these facts were
still in doubt, resting only on somewhat vague statements, elliptical
allusions, and intangible bits of gossip, picked up here and there,
when, one day, my friend Lenôtre, who is great at ferreting out old
papers, came to me, all excitement, with a document which he had
come upon the evening before in a portfolio among the Archives of
the Police.
It was a letter, dated May, 1821, and addressed to the Minister by
the director of the penitential establishment of Gaillon. This official
was disturbed over the proceedings of a certain “Madame Hakins or
Aquins.” Since the false Dauphin, Mathurin Bruneau, sentenced by
the Court of Rouen to five years’ imprisonment, had become an
inmate of that institution, this foreigner had installed herself at
Gaillon, and had been seeking to get into communication with the
prisoner. She seemed even to be bent upon supplying him with the
means of making his escape.
I drew from this the obvious conclusion that if in 1821, Lady Atkyns
could bring herself to believe in the possibility of Mathurin Bruneau
being the son of Louis XVI., it must be because she had good
reasons for being convinced that the Dauphin had escaped from the
Temple. And this conviction of hers became of considerable
importance because of the rôle she herself had played (however little
one knew of it) in the story of the Royal captivity.
It was quite clear that after her promise to the Queen, the faithful
Englishwoman, who, as we have seen, was not afraid to
compromise herself, and who was generous with her money, must
have kept in touch at least with all the facts relating to the Dauphin’s
imprisonment, learning all that was to be learnt about the Temple,
questioning everybody who could have had any contact with the
young captive—warders, messengers, doctors, and servants. If after
such investigations, and in spite of the official records and of the
announcement of his death on June 9, 1798, she could still believe
twenty-six years later that the prince might be alive, it can only be
because she was satisfied that the dead youth was not the Dauphin.
Had she herself got the Dauphin out of prison? Or had she merely
had a hand in the rescue? By what process of reasoning had she
been able to persuade herself that an adventurer such as this
Bruneau, whose imposture was manifest, could be the Dauphin?
Why, if she believed that the Prince had been carried away from the
Temple, had she kept silence so long? If this was not her belief, why
did she interest herself in one of those who had failed most pitifully in
the impersonation of the prince? Lenôtre and I could find no answer
to all these questions. To throw light upon them, it would have been
necessary to undertake minute researches into the whole life of Lady
Atkyns, following her about from place to place, learning where she
lived during the Revolution, ascertaining the dates of all her sojourns
in Paris, studying all the facts of her existence after 1795, together
with the place and date of her death, the names of her heirs, the fate
of her correspondence and other papers—a very laborious piece of
work, still further complicated by the certainty that it would be
necessary to start out upon one’s investigations in England. We did
not abandon all idea of the task, however; but time lacked—time
always lacks!—and we talked of it as a task that must wait for a year
of leisure, knowing only too well that the year of leisure would never
come.
Chance, upon which we should always count, settled the matter
for us. Chance brought about a meeting between Lenôtre and a
young writer, just out of the École des Chartes, M. Frédéric Barbey,
very well informed, both through his earlier studies and through
family connections, concerning what it is customary to designate “la
Question Louis XVII.” M. Barbey had the necessary leisure, and he
was ready to undertake any kind of journey that might be entailed;
he revelled in the idea of the difficulties to be coped with in what
would be to him an absorbing task. Lenôtre introduced him to me,
and I felt certain from the first that the matter was in good hands. M.
Barbey, in truth, is endowed with all the very rare qualities essential
to this kind of research—a boundless patience, the flair of a collector,
the aplomb of an interviewer, complete freedom from prejudice, and
the indomitable industry and ardent zeal of an apostle.
M. Barbey set out for England at once, and came back a fortnight
later, already possessed of a mass of valuable information regarding
the early life of our English Royalist, including this specific item: Lady
Atkyns died in Paris, in the Rue de Lille, in 1836. An application to
the greffe de paix of the arrondissement resulted in M. Barbey’s
obtaining the name of the notary who had the drawing up of the
deeds of succession. At the offices of the present courteous
possessor of the documents, after any amount of formalities and
delays and difficulties, over which his untiring pertinacity enabled him
to triumph, he was at last placed in possession of an immense pile of
dusty papers, which had not been touched for nearly seventy years:
the entire correspondence addressed to Lady Atkyns from 1792
down to the time of her death.
That was a red-letter day! From the very first letters that were
looked at, it seemed that henceforth all doubts would be at an end:
the Royal youth had assuredly been carried away from the Temple!
Between the lines, beneath all the studiously vague and discreet
wording of the correspondence, we were able to follow, in one letter
after another, all the plotting and planning of the escape, the
anxieties of the conspirators, the precautions they had to take, the
disappointments, the treacheries, the hopes.... At last, we were on
the threshold of the actual day of the escape! Another week would
find us face to face with the Dauphin! Three days more...! To-
morrow...! Alas! our disappointment was great—almost as great as
that of Lady Atkyns’s fellow-workers. The boy never came into their
hands. Did he escape? Everything points to his having done so, but
everything points also to his having been spirited away out of their
hands just as he was being embarked for England, where Lady
Atkyns awaited feverishly the coming of the child she called her King
—her King to whose cause she made her vows, but on whose face
she was destined probably never to set eyes, and whose fate was
for ever to remain to her unknown.
Such is the story we are told in this book of Frédéric Barbey’s—a
painful, saddening, exasperating story, extracted (is it necessary to
add?) from documents of incontestable authenticity, now made use
of for the first time.
But can it be said to satisfy fully our curiosity? Is it the last word on
this baffling “Question Louis XVII.,” the bibliography of which runs
already to several hundreds of volumes? Of course not! The record
of Lady Atkyns’s attempts at rescuing the Prince is a singularly
important contribution to the study of the problem, but does not solve
it. What became of the boy after he was released? Was this boy that
they released the real Prince, or is there question of a substitute
already at this stage? Did Marie-Antoinette’s devoted adherent
succeed merely in being the dupe of the people in her pay? At the
period of her very first efforts, may not the Dauphin have been
already far from the Temple—hidden away somewhere, perhaps
gone obscurely to his death, in the house of some disreputable
person to whom his identity was unknown? For must we not place
some reliance upon the assertions of the wife of Simon the
shoemaker, who declared she had carried off the Prince at a date
seven months earlier than the first steps taken by Lady Atkyns? It is
all a still insoluble problem, the most complex, the most difficult
problem that the perspicacity of historians has ever been called upon
to solve.
The most important result of this new study is that it relegates to
the field of fiction the books of Beauchesne, Chantelauze, La
Sicotière, and Eckart among others; that it disproves absolutely the
assertions of the official history of these events—the assertion that
there is no room for doubt that the Dauphin never left his cell, that he
lived and suffered and died there. Henceforward, it is an established
fact, absolutely irrefutable, that during nearly five months, from
November, 1794, to March, 1795, the child in the jailer’s hands was
not the son of Louis XVI., but a substitute, and mute. How did this
deception end? Was the issue what was expected? The matter is not
cleared up; but that this substitution of the Prince was effected is
now beyond dispute, and this revelation, instead of throwing light
upon the impenetrable obscurity of the drama, renders it still more
dense. This mute boy substituted for the boy in prison, who was
himself possibly but a substitute; these sly and foolish guardians who
succeed to each other, muddling their own brains and mystifying
each other; these doctors who are called to the bedside of the dying
Prince, and who, like Pelletan, long afterwards invent stories about
his death-bed sufferings—though at the actual time of his death they
were either so careless or so cunning as to draw up an unmeaning
procès-verbal, as to the bearing of which commentators for more
than a century have been unable to agree;—all these official
statements which establish nothing; the interment recorded in three
separate ways by the three functionaries who were witnesses; the
obvious, manifest, admitted doubt, which survived in the minds of
Louis XVIII. and the Duchesse d’Angoulême; the manœuvres of the
Restoration Government, which could so easily have elucidated the
question, and which, by maladresse or by guilefulness, made it
impenetrable, by removing the most important documents from the
national archives; finally, the foolish performances of the fifteen or so
lying adventurers who attempted to pass themselves off as so many
dauphins escaped from the Temple, and each of whom had his
devoted adherents, absolutely convinced of his being the real prince,
and whose absurd effusions, when not venal, combine to produce
the effect of an inextricable maze; these were the factors of the
“Question Louis XVII.” The worst of it all is that one must overlook no
detail: it is only by disproving and eliminating that we can succeed in
bringing out isolated facts—solid, indisputable facts that shall serve
as stepping-stones to future revelations.
It is necessary to study, scrutinize, and reflect. One opinion alone
is to be condemned as indubitably wrong: that of the historians who
see nothing in all this worthy of investigation and of discussion, to
whom the story of the Dauphin is all quite clear and intelligible, and
who go floundering about over the whole ground with the calm
serenity of the blind, assured of the freedom of their road from
obstruction, and that they cannot see the obstacles in their way.
Frédéric Barbey’s work unveils too many incontestable facts of
history for it to be possible henceforth for any one to see in this
marvellous enigma nothing but fantasies and inventions.
VICTORIEN SARDOU.
 INTRODUCTION
To tell once again the oft-told story of Queen Marie-Antoinette; to
go over anew all the familiar episodes of her sojourn at the Tuileries,
her captivity in the Temple, her appearance before the Revolutionary
tribunal, and her death; to append some hitherto undiscovered detail
to the endless piles of writings inspired by these events, and in our
turn sit in judgment alike upon her conduct and the conduct of her
enemies, and, as a natural sequence, upon the Revolution, its work
and its issues: to do any or all of these things has not been our
intention.
This book has a less ambitious aim—that of restoring the picture
of a woman, a foreigner, who was brought by chance one day to
Versailles on the eve of the catastrophe, whom the Queen honoured
with her friendship, and who knew no rest until she had expended all
her energy and all her wealth in efforts to procure the liberty not only
of Marie-Antoinette herself, but of those belonging to her. How Lady
Atkyns set out upon her project, whom she got to help her, what
grounds for hope she had, and what hindrances and
disappointments she experienced, the degrees of success and of
failure that attended all her attempts—these are the matters we have
sought to deal with.
In the maze of her plots and plans, necessarily mixed up with the
enterprises of the émigrés and of the agents of the counter-
revolution—up above the network of all these machinations within
France and without—one luminous point shines forth always as the
goal of every project: the tower of the Temple. All around the
venerable building strain and struggle the would-be rescuers of its
prisoners. Its name, now famous, instils into the Royalist world
something of the terror that went forth of old from the Bastille. What
went on exactly inside the dungeon from 1792 to 1795? The
question, so often canvassed by contemporaries, is still where it
was, crying out for an answer. However hackneyed may seem the
matter of the Dauphin’s imprisonment, we have not felt warranted in
deliberately avoiding it. Had we been so minded when embarking
upon this study (the voluminous bibliography of the subject is
calculated to discourage the historian!), we should in any case have
been forced into its investigation by a heap of hitherto unpublished
documents which we unearthed.
This leads us to the enumeration of the sources whence we have
drawn the materials for our work.
All that has been hitherto known of Lady Atkyns amounts to very
little. M. de la Sicotière, coming upon her name in the course of his
study of the life of Louis de Frotté, refers to her merely in a brief
note, necessarily incomplete.[1] Four years later, M. V. Delaporte, on
the occasion of the centenary of Marie Antoinette, published in his
Études a correspondence in which the name of the Queen’s English
friend repeatedly appeared. These papers caught our attention.
Under the friendly guidance of M. Delaporte we sought to recover
the papers which Lady Atkyns left behind her on her death. In the
course of systematic researches, into the nature of which we need
not enter here, we were enabled by an unlooked-for piece of good
luck to lay hands upon the entire collection of Lady Atkyns’s
correspondence, covering her whole life. This correspondence,
docketed and arranged by the notary entrusted with the regulating of
the affairs of the deceased, was found lying in the archives of the
notary’s study, where, by the permission of the present owner of the
documents, I was able to consult them.
The letters are all originals. Some of them, of which copies had
been made by some one unidentified, had been destined probably
for use in supporting claims put forward by Lady Atkyns. Many
letters, unfortunately, are missing, having been confided by the too
trustful lady to members of the Royal Household or to Louis XVIII.
himself.
To know what value to attach to these letters, it was necessary to
know something about the writers. Apart from General Louis de
Frotté, who has been made the subject of a detailed biography, the
characters mixed up with Lady Atkyns’s adventures appear for the
first time upon the stage of history.
The Archives Nationales, and those of the Ministry for War and the
Ministry for Foreign Affairs, enable us to recall these forgotten
worthies with sufficient accuracy. We have made use in the same
way of the Municipal Archives of Dunkerque in our account of the
flight of the Chevalier de Conterne and his companion out of the
kingdom; of the Archives of Lille; and of the Archives of the Grand
Duchy of Baden, preserved at Carlsbad.
This bald enumeration suffices to indicate the spirit in which our
task has been conceived and carried out. In a question such as this,
obscured and confused by any number of dubious second-hand and
third-hand testimonies and untrustworthy narratives, it was
necessary to get hold of absolutely irrefutable documents. Letters
from contemporaries seemed to us to fulfil better than anything else
the conditions thus imposed. They have made it possible for us to
supplement in large measure the information acquired from the
Archives of the State: many of these letters are derived from private
family archives which have most generously been placed at our
disposal.
Thanks to these friendly helpers, we have succeeded in
completing a task undertaken in a spirit of filial affection. We cannot
forget her who guided and took part in our researches and helped
with her sympathy and encouragement. To her it is that we must
make our first acknowledgment of indebtedness, and then to the
historian to whom this book is inscribed, and whose valued and
assiduous help we have never lacked.
We have to express our gratitude also to all those who have
helped us with their advice and good offices: the Duc de La
Tremoïlle, Member of the Institute; the Marquis de Frotté; Comte
Lair; General de Butler; our lamented confrère, M. Parfouru, archivist
of the Department of Ille-et-Vilaine; and to M. Coyecque; M. Lucien
Lazard, assistant archivist of the Department of the Seine; M.
Schmidt, keeper of the Archives Nationales; M. Desplanque,
municipal librarian at Lille; M. Georges Tassez, keeper of the Lille
Archives; M. Edmond Biré; M. le Dr. Obser, the learned editor of the
political correspondence of Karl Friedrichs von Baden; M. Léonce
Pingaud; M. Barthélemy Pocquat; our colleague and friend, M. E. L.
Bruel; and to Mr. Freeman O’Donoghue, of the Print Room of the
British Museum.
Paris,
March 22, 1905.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] The particulars given by O. Alger in Englishmen in the
French Revolution, London, 1889, pp. 125-126, reproducing and
condensing information already available, including that which we
owe to the Comtesse MacNamara, are not of any interest.
 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Chevalier de Frotté 1
II. London 36
III. The Odyssey of a Breton 69
Magistrate
IV. The Mystery of the Temple 94
V. The Mystery of the Temple 125
(continued)
VI. The Friends of Lady Atkyns 139
VII. The “Little Baron” 166
VIII. After the Storm 206
Epilogue 229
Appendix 235
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
TO FACE PAGE
Madame Charlotte Atkyns Frontispiece
(After a miniature in the possession of Count Lair.)
Charlotte Walpole, in “The Camp” 12
(After an engraving in the British Museum.)
Jean-Gabriel Peltier, 1765-1825 44
(After an engraving in the British Museum.)
Marie-Pierre-Louis, Count de Frotté, 140
1766-1800
(After a portrait belonging to the Marquis de Frotté.)
 A FRIEND OF
MARIE-ANTOINETTE
(LADY ATKYNS)