Science of Discworld III

planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
    1 See Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos (Viking, 1994).
    2 In their 1980 book Autopoiesis and Cognition , Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela confused this kind of recursion with a life force, and called it ‘autopoiesis’. Many self-consciously modern management experts cite this concept, without having the foggiest idea what it is.
    3 When Jack started at Birmingham University in the 1950s, the factory behind the university made cooking pots for missionaries, just like the ones that were popular in the cartoons in Punch – with the missionaries as ingredients, not cooks, you appreciate. No doubt the same factory had once made the original sauce vats used in Madagascar and Goa.
    4 Details can be found in many personal diaries, such as those kept by the foremen of the spinning and weaving mills in Lancashire as exercises in writing for their evening classes. We learn that sexual engagement with women employees was sometimes necessary for these men, in order to retain the respect of their colleagues, to maintain obedience by the workforce, even when they found it horrible themselves. In the armed forces, of course, and in prisons, the social ‘rules’, the peer pressure to sin grossly, were too powerful to resist, too awful for us to contemplate now.
    5 Sorry, it’s one of those horrible Graeco-Latin hybrids. But, like ‘television’, it’s comprehensible.

TWENTY-FIVE
THE ENTANGLED BANK
    I T WAS MIDNIGHT IN THE museum’s Central Hall when the wizards appeared. There were a few lights on; just enough to see the skeletons.
    ‘Is this a temple of some kind?’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, patting his pockets for his tobacco pouch and a packet of Wizlas. ‘One of the weirder ones, perhaps?’
    +++ Indeed +++ boomed the voice of Hex from the middle air. +++ In all the universes of the The Ology , it was the Temple of the Ascent of Man. Here, it is not +++
    ‘Very impressive,’ muttered the Dean. ‘But why don’t we just show him the big snowball? He’d be pretty pleased to know it was because of him humans got away.’
    ‘We’ve scared the poor chap enough, that’s why!’ snapped Ridcully. ‘He’ll understand this . Hex says they started building when Darwin was alive. Stuffed animals, bones … it’s the kind of thing he knows. Now stand back and give the chap some air, will you?’
    They stepped away from the chair on which Charles Darwin had been transported, wreathed in the blue light. Ridcully snapped his fingers.
    Darwin opened his eyes, and groaned.
    ‘It never ends!’
    ‘No, we’re sending you back, sir,’ said Ridcully. ‘That is, you’ll soon wake up. But we thought there is something you should see first.’
    ‘I’ve seen enough!’
    ‘Not quite enough. Lights, gentlemen, please,’ said Ridcully, straightening up.
    Light is the easiest magic to do. A glow rose in the hall.
    ‘The Museum of Natural History, Mr Darwin,’ said Ridcully, standing back. ‘It opened after your death at a venerable age. It’s your future. I believe there is a statue to you here somewhere. Place of honour, no doubt. Please listen. I would like you to know that because of you, humanity turned out to be fit enough to survive.’
    Darwin stared around at the hall, and then looked askance at the wizards.
    ‘The phrase “survival of the fittest” was not—’ he began.
    ‘Survival of the luckiest in this case, I fear,’ said Ridcully. ‘You are familiar with the idea of natural catastrophes throughout history, Mr Darwin?’
    ‘Indeed! One only has to examine—’
    ‘But you will not have known that they wiped intelligent life from the face of the globe,’ said Ridcully, sombrely. ‘Sit down again, sir …’
    They told him about the crab-like civilisation, and the octopus-like civilisation and the lizard-like civilisation. They told him about the snowball. 1
    Darwin, Ponder thought, bore up well. He didn’t scream or try to run away. What he did do was, in a way, worse: he asked questions, in a slow, solemn voice, and then asked more questions.
    Strangely, he kept away from ones like ‘how do you know this?’ and ‘how can you be so sure?’. He looked like a man anxious to avoid certain answers.
    For his part, Mustrum Ridcully very nearly told the whole truth on several occasions.
    At