The Signature of All Things

she continued to resist. Moreover, she refused to allow him to discuss her theory with anyone else. Her reluctance brought nothing but frustration to her good uncle, who believed Alma’s theory both important and very probably correct. He accused her of being overly timid, of holding back. Specifically, he accused her of fearing religious condemnation, should she make public her notions of continuous creation and species transmutation.
    “You simply do not have the courage to be a God-killer,” said this good Dutch Protestant, who had attended church quite devoutly every Sabbath of his life. “Come now, Alma—what are you afraid of? Show a little of your father’s audacity, child! Go forth and be a terror in the world! Wake up the whole barking dog-kennel of controversy, if you must. The Hortus will protect you! We could publish it ourselves! We even could publish it under my name, if you dread censure.”
    But Alma was hesitating not from fear of the church, but from a deep conviction that her theory was not quite yet scientifically incontrovertible. A small hole existed in her logic, she felt sure, and she could not deduce how to close it. Alma was a perfectionist and more than a little bit of a pedant, and she certainly was not going to be caught publishing a theory with a hole in it, even a small hole. She was not afraid of offending religion, as she frequently told her uncle; she was afraid of offending something far more sacred to her: reason .
    For here was the hole in Alma’s theory: she could not, for the life of her, understand the evolutionary advantages of altruism and self-sacrifice. If the natural world was indeed the sphere of amoral and constant struggle for survival that it appeared to be, and if outcompeting one’s rivals was the key to dominance, adaptation, and endurance—then what was one supposed to make, for instance, of someone like her sister Prudence?
    Whenever Alma mentioned her sister’s name, with respect to her theory of competitive alteration, her uncle groaned. “Not again!” he would say, pulling at his beard. “No one has heard of Prudence, Alma! No one cares!”
    But Alma cared, and the “Prudence Problem,” as she came to call it, troubled her mind considerably, for it threatened to undo her entire theory. It especially troubled her because it was all so personal. Alma had been the intended beneficiary, after all, of an act of great generosity and self-sacrifice on Prudence’s part almost forty years earlier, and she had never forgotten it. Prudence had silently given up her one true love—with the hope that George Hawkes would marry Alma instead, and that Alma would benefit from that marriage . The fact that Prudence’s act of sacrifice had been utterly futile did not in any way diminish its sincerity.
    Why would a person do such a thing?
    Alma could answer that question from a moral standpoint ( Because Prudence is kind and selfless ), but she could not answer it from a biological one ( Why do kindness and selflessness exist? ). Alma entirely understood why her uncle tore at his beard whenever she mentioned the name Prudence. She recognized that—in the vast scope of human and natural history—this tragic triangle between Prudence, George, and herself was so tiny and so insignificant that it was almost farcical to raise the subject at all (and within a scientific discussion, no less). But still—the question would not go away.
    Why would a person do such a thing?
    Every time Alma thought about Prudence, she was forced to ask herself this question again, and then watch helplessly as her theory of competitive alteration fell apart before her eyes. For Prudence Whittaker Dixon, after all, was scarcely a unique example. Why did anyone ever act beyond the scope of base self-interest? Alma could make a fairly persuasive argument as to why mothers, for instance, made sacrifices on behalf of their children (because it was advantageous to continue the family line), but she could not explain why a soldier would run straight into a line of bayonets to protect an injured comrade. How did that action bolster or benefit the brave soldier or his family? It simply did not: through self-sacrifice, the now-dead soldier had negated not only his own future, but the continuation of his bloodline, as well.
    Nor could Alma explain why a starving prisoner would give food to a cellmate.
    Nor could she explain why a lady would leap into a canal to save anotherwoman’s baby, only to