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TIME BEGINS
Years ago, when Lily was not quite four, we were spending one of those perfect mother-daughter mornings in the flower garden: I planted pansies while she helped by picking up the bugs for closer looks, and not eating them at all. Three is a great age. She was asking a lot of questions about creature life, I remember, because that was the day she first worked up to the Big Question. I don’t mean sex, that’s easy. She wanted to know where everything comes from: beetles, plants, us. “How did dinosaurs get on the earth, and why did they go away?” was her reasonable starting point. How lovely it might be to invoke for my child in just one or two quotes the inexplicable Mystery. But I went to graduate school in evolutionary biology, which kind of obligates me to go into the details. Lily and I talked about the millions and millions of years, the seaweeds and jellyfish and rabbits. I explained how most creatures have many children (some have thousands!) with lots of small differences between them. These specialties—things like quick hiding or slow, picky eating or just shoveling everything in—can make a difference in whether the baby lives to be a grown-up. The ones that survive will have children more like themselves. And so on. The group slowly changes. I’ve always thought of this as a fine creation story, a sort of quantifiable miracle, and was pleased to think I’d rendered such a complex subject comprehensible to a toddler. She sat among the flowers, pondering it. At
