The Evolution of Jane by Cathleen Schine Page A

eponymous property across the street from us, that man was an animal, and she began to cry and had to go home. That surprised me, for of all the information I received from my brothers, man's membership in the animal family was the easiest for me to accept—much easier than the secret of sexual reproduction, for example, which my brothers had also revealed to me, but which I did not divulge to Jennifer, not out of delicacy but simply because I thought the boys were making the whole thing up.
    Was I insufficiently cognizant of the Nobility of Man? Was that the real reason I accepted this subversive information, which so distressed and still distresses Darwin's critics? Or was it that, as a child, a person of not only lowly physical stature but also inferior social status, I was able more easily to identify with my brothers and sisters of the animal kingdom?
    Only someone like Darwin, I think, a member of the ruling class of a ruling nation in its most glorious days of empire, would have the confidence to recognize man's consanguinity with the animal kingdom. Only such a man of wealth and what they used to call breeding, and learning, too, would possess the natural grace and generosity necessary to recognize mankind emerging triumphant from the squirming microscopic jelly at the bottom of his collecting net. And who better to appreciate this imperial Victorian insight into our low origins than a child, both arrogant and aggrieved?
    The gradual evolution of each species was one of those scientific ideas that struck me as thrillingly true when I first learned of it, not through its novelty, but through its intimacy, as if rather than first meeting the theory of evolution, I'd recognized it after a long, warm acquaintance. That the world was constantly changing appealed to me, although it raised new questions. For example: How could you be certain of anything? And on a more personal note, if I was shedding skin, which Fred assured me I was; if I was growing, which I could see for myself, then at what point was I me? Wasn't I just a part of me? Or a different me?
    A rose was a rose when it was just a prickly stalk in the ground, my mother said, trying to soothe me. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, my father inevitably added.
    "But I'm not a rose," I said.
    "And you don't smell sweet, either," Andrew said.
    "Changing your name to Rose? That's wonderful, Barlow, dear," Aunt Anna said.
    I played the violin for years, laboriously practicing, never really making much progress. Perhaps part of my problem was that as I practiced, my finger slipping a hairsbreadth to distort a G to a something unnameable, I would be thinking, How did the G get to sound right and the something unnameable so wrong? Who says so? In chemistry class or algebra or geometry, the laws of nature were scrawled on the blackboard, as clear as day. But to me, they were as arbitrary, as frivolous, as the rules of Parcheesi.
    I told Gloria about my problems with this sort of thing. It was in the nature of a confession. She was, after all, a science teacher.
    Gloria explained to me that I was a nominalist.
    "Lamarck was a nominalist. The Enlightenment was big on nominalism. You're in very good company. You're wrong, but you're in good company."
    In her best science-teacher voice, she explained that a nominalist thinks there are no real divisions of organisms into species, just an endless, gradual arc of individuals. The divisions are no more than arbitrary names given by scientists for their own convenience.
    "I'm very radical, it sounds like."
    "You? I should hardly think so," Gloria said.
    I watched Martha climb back down the steps carrying her wet suit. Then she disappeared into her cabin. She was friendly enough to me, I thought, though no friendlier than she was to, say, Mrs. Tommaso. In a way, I understood and was even grateful. This camaraderie business was nothing to be sneered at—a kind of friendship vacation, all the comforts of home and no