Stephen Jay Gould and the Pursuit of Perseverance
Photo by Mariel Wiley, developed and scanned at The Find Lab
Change, at its core, is the essence of what it means to be alive and to be human. Change is one of those “facts” of life, as they call it — something we all must face whether we’re ready or not, and honestly, it’s difficult a lot of the time. Our brains are not wired to accept change, but rather, are programmed to resist it. Change means losing a safety net, and in turn, lessening chances of survival and enduring the trials of pain and suffering. So, to accept change is to rewire the brain into defeat.
I’ve been facing a lot of changes in my life lately, as one does in their early 20s: transitions, heartbreak, grief, uncertainty and boundless opportunities to shift the outcome of my future. It’s a never-ending cycle of, Am I making the right choice? or Where do I go from here? My only answer to this gut-wrenching change is perseverance; it’s as simple as it gets, but much easier said than done.
It may as well be an initiation into life to face adversity or be shoved into finding a new direction when you realize the one you chose was a dead end. Life would be pretty stale without a little difficulty, as it’s adversity that shows us our strengths and singles out our weaknesses so that we can better prepare for next time, a next time that is inevitable but all the same transformative, but I find myself grateful, above all, for sudden shifts in footing. A new perspective is just what I need sometimes to truly grasp the big picture of life, that there is only uncertainty, which makes these ephemeral moments all the more important. I can’t help but build my foundation in these walls.
In almost every aspect of my life at the moment, I am navigating unknown waters. I know what I want to come of myself and the general direction of where I’d like to be heading, but I'm still trying to figure out exactly how often I’m supposed to be watering my plants. I still question if the steps I’m taking today will get me to the dreams that I’ve had since I was a little kid. These are not new strifes, but without perseverance through uncertainty, there would be no new beginnings, no great discoveries. Without seeing the stars, we might still believe that this, the ground that fastens us, is all there is; that there is no greater unknown waiting to be unraveled. The stars are just an encompassment of everything we’ll never reach. Imagine a world without the persistence of discoverers like Galileo. Imagine if it wasn’t ingrained into our DNA to simply keep going.
“We pass through this world but once,” American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould once wrote in The Mismeasure of Man. “Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.”
Gould was an expert in evolutionary biology and founded the theory of punctuated equilibrium (alongside Niles Eldredge), which states that evolution is characterized by moments of rapid speciation, followed by extended periods of stasis and stability in organisms. It essentially revised one of Darwin’s key points of evolution, differentiating itself from the theory that evolution happens in gradual and continuous growth. While both forms of evolution can coexist, a species only seems to evolve in one of the two ways. This discovery drastically changed the outlook on evolution. Rather than these steady inclinations of evolution, Gould found that new species were forming expeditiously and already established species were shifting and evolving just as quickly.
It’s almost hope-giving to know that from an evolutionary standpoint, we can transform in an instant — to understand that life as we know it has evolved so rapidly to its environment just to stay alive and keep going, to get us here. The stories we tell and the art we display to the world does matter. It leaves an etching of meaning in everyone that we share with ourselves and everyone who will come after us. It shows that despite the struggle, despite the hardship, despite the great unknowing, we are at our core curious and looking for connection. Sharing these ideas and spaces in every expression imaginable is what truly lets us feel the celebration of being human.
Without change, we would never evolve. We would never explore space, and there would be no hope. Civilizations would never be built. Continents would never be discovered. Without pause, we wouldn’t appreciate, breathe or allow ourselves time to process all that we have come to know. As important as it is to keep going, we must stop and look at how far we’ve come. The James Webb telescope has just sent us the deepest and clearest pixels of space human eyes have ever witnessed.
The human race has survived fallen empires, migrations, wars and evolution. Our ancestors brought us here, so I believe there is nothing to do but persevere.