The Signature of All Things

comforts of dominance—that is, until some other, superior, competitor came along, or a necessary resource vanished. During the course of this never-ending battle for survival, the very design of species inevitably shifted.
    Alma was thinking somewhat along the lines of what the astronomer William Herschel had called “continuous creation”—the notion of something both eternal and unfolding. But Herschel had believed that creationcould be continuous only at the scale of the cosmos, whereas Alma now believed that creation was continuous everywhere , at all levels of life—even at the microscopic level, even at the human level. Challenges were omnipresent, and with every moment, the conditions of the natural world changed. Advantages were gained; advantages were lost. There were periods of abundance, followed by periods of hia‘ia —the seasons of craving. Under the wrong circumstances, anything was capable of extinction. But under the right circumstances, anything was capable of transmutation. Extinction and transmutation had been occurring since the dawn of life, were still occurring now, and would continue to occur until the end of time—and if that did not constitute “continuous creation,” then Alma did not know what did.
    The struggle for existence, she was certain, had also shaped human biology and human destiny. There was no better example, Alma thought, than Tomorrow Morning, whose entire family had been annihilated by unfamiliar diseases brought upon them by the Europeans’ arrival in Tahiti. His bloodline had nearly been rendered extinct, but for some reason Tomorrow Morning had not died. Something in his constitution had enabled him to survive, even while Death had come harvesting with both hands, taking all others around him. Tomorrow Morning had endured, though, and had lived to produce heirs, who may even have inherited his strengths and his extraordinary resistance to illness. This is the sort of event that shapes a species.
    What’s more, Alma thought, the struggle for existence also defined the inner life of a human being. Tomorrow Morning was a pagan who had transmuted into a devout Christian—for he was cunning and self-preserving, and had seen the direction the world was taking. He had chosen the future over the past. As a result of his foresight, Tomorrow Morning’s children would thrive in a new world, where their father was revered and powerful. (Or, at least, his children would thrive until another wave of challenge arrived to confront them. Then they would have to make their own way. That would be their battle, and nobody could spare them it.)
    On the other hand, there was Ambrose Pike, a man whom God had blessed fourfold with genius, originality, beauty, and grace—but who simply did not have the gift of endurance. Ambrose had misread the world. He had wished for the world to be a paradise, when in fact it was a battlefield. He had spent his life longing for the eternal, the constant, and the pure. Hedesired an airy covenant of angels, but was bound—as is everyone and everything—by the hard rules of nature. Moreover, as Alma well knew, it was not always the most beautiful, brilliant, original, or graceful who survived the struggle for existence; sometimes it was the most ruthless, or the most lucky, or maybe just the most stubborn.
    The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught but a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it—even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.
    Alma called her idea “A Theory of Competitive Alteration,” and she believed she could prove it. Naturally, she could not prove it using the examples of Tomorrow Morning and Ambrose Pike—although they would live forever in her imagination as outsized, romantic, illustrative figures. Even to make mention of them would be grossly unscientific.
    She could, however, prove it with mosses.
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    A lma wrote quickly and copiously. She did not slow down to revise, but would simply tear up old drafts and begin again from scratch, nearly every day. She could not slow her pace; she was not interested in slowing her pace. Like a besotted drunk—who can run without falling, but who cannot walk without falling—Alma could only propel herself through her idea with blind speed. She was afraid to slow down and write more carefully, for she