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painful decision to pull the tube and start death’s clock. It took a little over a week. The end came at 7:00 P.M. on Saturday, September 2, 2000. My dad, Richard, my wife, Kim, and my daughter, Devin, were present with me, holding Mom, telling her that it was okay to let go, and that we loved her. She was not conscious her final day so, as far as I know, she did not experience death. Instead, she slipped into unconsciousness, or some sort of altered state, until her body finally gave out. I believe it was a painless parting, and I am wholly comforted by the fact that just days before she was able to respond by squeezing our hands, so I took advantage of her awareness, however partial it might have been, by repeating over and over, dozens of times, “I love you, Mama. You were a great mother and a heroic person. Wise owl, brave soul. A life well lived. It’s okay to say good-bye.”

The surgeries, radiation treatments, and drug therapies were brutally hard on Mom, but as she told her sister, my beloved aunt Mary, in a touching handwritten note in a greeting card (the time and occasion for which I do not know), “We’ve shared lots of good times too! Remember—Tough times don’t last, but tough people do.” My mom was tough to the end. Through excruciating physical trauma she remained heroic and graceful, maintaining her perspective on life as a search for meaning through worthy challenges, authentic relationships, and the desire to be fair to all people and to always do the right thing. She did so not because it was required or expected, not for external rewards or public recognition, but because she would be a better person for it, and because we would all be better for it.

Too often, I think, we gloss over the messiness of living and the unpleasantries of life, particularly at the beginning and end, as if birth and death are shadowlands accessible only to a chosen few. We suppress or ignore some of the deepest and most meaningful events of the human condition—denial is not just a river in Egypt. It is in those shadowlands, however, where we face the termini of life and share the full experience of the hundred billion who came before us and know authentically what it means to be human.

Figure 7.1. The author’s mother as a young woman, the author and his mother at graduation, and his mother and father, just before the end.

PART III

SCIENCE AND THE (RE)WRITING OF HISTORY

8

Darwin on the Bounty

The How and the Why of the

Greatest Mutiny in History

“You would have made an excellent historian;

you have a profound contempt for facts.”

—the character of William Bligh as portrayed by

Charles Laughton in the 1935 film The Mutiny on the

Bounty, grilling an officer over missing coconuts

IN THE EARLY MORNING hours of April 28, 1789, one month after departing the South Pacific island of Tahiti, the crew of the HMS Bounty—a tiny merchant ship loaded with over a thousand pots of breadfruit trees bound for the Caribbean islands where they would be delivered as cheap slave fodder—awoke to the shouts and screams of a handful of men led by the ship’s master’s mate, Fletcher Christian, determined to overthrow the command of William Bligh and return the ship to Tahiti. Over the course of the next couple of hours the mutiny on the Bounty unfolded, resulting, over the course of the next couple of centuries, in an unforgettable tale that has taken on a life of its own and grown to mythic proportions.

Thousands of articles, hundreds of books, and five feature films have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to capture the gravitas of the mutiny on the Bounty, one of the most notorious events in naval history. Although the mutiny historiography is compendiously rich, I contend that the various theories proffered to explain the event and its participants all operate at a proximate historical causal level. Since the event has primarily been recounted and analyzed by historians who operate at this immediate level of who did what to whom and when, this makes sense. I suggest that an ultimate evolutionary causal level