Opinion Column


Fiction, fact can illuminate each other


By Ian Brindle, Community Voices


In 1946, Frank Capra directed his most popular film, It's a Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. It has been a regular feature of Christmas television for decades and will undoubtedly appear during this year's Christmas season.

One of the uplifting aspects of the movie is the reminder that our lives have a continuous impact upon others around us. In the case of Capra’s movie, he asks the question: “What if you had never existed?”

George Bailey has stayed in Bedford Falls all his life while others, like his brother, have had heroic adventures. George, played by Stewart, finds his family’s building and loan company is on the brink of bankruptcy and seeing no way out, plans to commit suicide.

However, God decides he needs a second chance. God also gives a second chance to a hapless angel, Clarence, to save George by showing him just what his hometown of Bedford Falls would be like if George had never been born. It’s not pretty.

George is not a hero in the sense that we usually think. He is a smalltown guy with a wife and a family, who does what he knows is right. At the end of the movie, everything turns out right. He find his daughter’s flower petals (Zuzu’s petals) that he had earlier thrust into his pocket — they tell him the imagined world without George Bailey was not real, he returns to his family and all’s well that ends well.

Stephen Jay Gould, the late professor of paleontology, evolutionary biology and the history of science at Harvard and New York University took the central idea in Capra’s movie to make a serious point about evolution. A terrific event happened 520 million years ago, and the record of that event was preserved in a rock formation known as the Burgess Shale.

Gould takes a very different view from Capra, as we might expect.

The Burgess Shale records a moment in time when a population of primitive life forms was exterminated by a cataclysmic event that overtook the population of soft-bodied creatures (one was named Hallucigenia!) and preserved them for paleontologists to find all those millions of years later.

Gould’s discussion in his 1992 book, Wonderful Life, asks us to understand that unlike George Bailey whose non-existence had catastrophic consequences for Bedford Falls, the mass extinction we witness in the Burgess Shale was followed by the emergence of new creatures that evolved into new species, including us.

Gould reminds us success is defined by the survivors, not the dead.

He points out the creatures that were killed off and those that survived the cataclysm did not depend on anything for survival other than “dumb luck.”

Survival of the fittest doesn’t work well with catastrophic events; well adapted and ill-adapted creatures suffered the same fate. What would have happened if the mass extinction hadn’t occurred, we will never fathom.

The wonderful thing about fiction and science is they truly can illuminate each other. We just have to look.




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