An Evolutionary Puzzle

A little more than two years ago, I asked the woman who is now my wife to marry me as snow began to fall in Central Park. The ruse I employed to get her out to the spot was the excuse that I wanted to make sure I saw the special Darwin exhibition before it moved elsewhere (which was true), knowing that after a visit to the AMNH we'd traditionally sit out by the pond across the street for a little while. By the time we made it back to the her house, though, enough snow had fallen to make driving treacherous, so it looked like I was going to have to crash on the couch that night. To pass some of the late hours though, we pulled out a Photomosaic puzzle of a space shuttle, a jigsaw that we would sadly never complete.

Up until last night I had largely forgotten about the puzzle; it didn't seem to have any major relevance to events that came before or afterward. Yet while I was reading through Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory and watching an episode of the Simpsons, the proverbial lightbulb went off in my head. While it might not have been the most high-class spurs to inspiration, the trigger involved the character Snake explaining how he had made a photomosaic of himself out of photos he had stolen from the wallets of elderly people. The memory photomosaic puzzle that had been left uncompleted came leaping up from whatever recesses it was relegated to, and it had taken on a new relevance.

Before proceeding, though, I should probably note that your own mileage may vary as far as the utility of the following analogy goes. As someone who's primarily interested in the fossil record (and not as well-versed in genetics as I probably should be), the way the puzzle came together (or rather, didn't) definitely struck a chord with me. In the course of your own studies or research you might deal with entirely different lines of evidence for evolution to which my analogy holds no relevance, so I don't mean the following as an overarching theme for all evolutionary biology or even all paleontology. At best, it's probably a personal "AHA!"-type moment that you may or may not be able to relate to.

In any case, the chief obstacle in putting together the photomosaic puzzle was that each piece contained at least one smaller picture, and while the standard strategy of finding the corners and edges gave me the outline of the puzzle, proceeding further was much more difficult. Some parts seemed more likely to fit in one section over others, but much of the process was tediously trying to link the smaller clues together in the hopes that a larger pattern would soon emerge. This was nearly maddening at times because I knew larger patterns were present (the fully put-together image on the front of the box teasing me as I went along), yet they were difficult to directly access.

At times it seems that my understanding of evolution has started to come together in much the same way. The overall pattern seems obvious, but when it gets down to individual data points (the individual photos of the mosaic) it can be difficult to determine where they fit. Smaller patterns can often be put together and fit where they sit best within the larger scheme, but mistakes are made, unfilled spaces remain, and isolated islands of facts may shift around within the framework. In an ordinary puzzle it is relatively easy to look at a piece and say "Ah, this is sky blue and probably belongs to the sky above the sweet kitten like I see on the box."* In a photomosaic puzzle, by contrast, you might have an idea where once piece goes but it will only make sense if it's properly linked to the surrounding pieces. Indeed, the small and large patterns both need to be understood if they're to be properly put together to support each other, and this task was (at least in the case of the puzzle) too much for me to effectively handle.

*Because as long as there are puzzles, there will be puzzles of kittens lolling about in the grass.

As I noted before, though, this short aside on the "evolutionary puzzle" might not hold any real relevance, or it may crumble as I poke it a bit more in my head. Still, I at least appreciate the fact that something as simple as a toy puzzle was enough to get the machinations of my thought process fixated on pattern and place in my own attempts to understand evolution. I may end up abandoning the analogy or it might come in handy, but either way it has proved to be a useful intellectual trigger.