"Along the San Pennatus Fault" (1986)

“But we haven’t any wings, father,” Job Salto protested. “You have feathers, and feathers are certainly an intimation of wings. Some of you even have a few elbow-feathers. I will call them pinion-feathers, and perhaps your elbows will have turned into wing-pinions by tomorrow.”

But Darwinism and all the denials that make it up does give silly and evil answers; and it is guilty of Mistakes of Interpretation against dozens of sciences as well as against the Word of God. — unpublished letter to the editor of The Wanderer, 1987

"Along the San Pennatus Fault" is another Lafferty satire of Charles Darwin and company. This time, he goes after the Neo-Darwinian consensus. The story's premise targets Richard Goldschmidt (1878–1958) and his famous phrase, "hopeful monsters." A German-born geneticist, Goldschmidt argued that significant evolutionary change can happen in large jumps rather than by tiny steps. He coined the term hopeful monsters in a 1933 paper. Seven years later, in The Material Basis of Evolution, he gave Lafferty the ammunition:

I think that this idea of the hopeful monster has come into its own only recently. Only now is the exact basis for an appraisal of its evolutionary significance available. This basis is furnished by the existence of mutants producing monstrosities of the required type and the knowledge of embryonic determination, which permits a small rate change in early embryonic processes to produce a large effect embodying considerable parts of the organism.

These macromutations are what Lafferty is out to ridicule, although the language of saltations and the Stephen Stanley character satirizes Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002), the American paleontologist, popularizer of science, and public adversary of Richard Dawkins. Gould advanced a different challenge to strict gradualism: punctuated equilibrium, the theory he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The idea is that the fossil record often shows prolonged periods of relative stasis (little net change) punctuated by comparatively rapid bursts of evolutionary change.

The difference between Goldschmidt and Gould is that Goldschmidt's theory pinpoints discontinuous change driven by significant developmental shifts within individual organisms. Gould, by contrast, kept natural selection and population processes central. He and Eldridge argued that evolution can be geologically abrupt without requiring single-step "hopeful monster" transformations. Lafferty has a lot of fun with this kind of wrangling. He imagines neo-neo-Darwinians and the one outlier, a neo-neo-neo-Darwinian. Goldschmidt is the neo-neo; Gould the neo-neo-neo.

The story is set around San Pennatus ("Holy Feathers") Fault College. A group of biotechnic directors monitors the area for sudden evolutionary saltations, and everyone in charge is keen on spotting early anomalies. There is a flying turtle named Sydney and a talking anaconda with multicolored eyes. The directors have twelve children between them, and these children secretly use stolen laboratory supplies to create a substance called Euelpis Elixirion Papia Pedema. That translates to something like "the Hopeful Elixir of the Papyrus Leap," though Lafferty has Irene translate it for us as "the Happy Hopping Duck Elixir," punning on the Greek word for duck, papia. The eldest child is Anatole Prorok. He spikes the local reservoir with the elixir. As a result, everyone who drinks the water begins to display physical traits such as facial feathers, tail feathers, and duck feet.

The twelve children are the first to be transformed. Their parents parade them before the media as evidence of a successful evolutionary breakthrough.

A cheer went up from the crowd in the big banquet-hall lecture-room when the twelve young persons duck-walked in. "Behold!" cried Anselm Salto, "the final vindication of saltatory evolution! And it’s come about just as we predicted that it would, by quantum speciation. As the immortal Stephen Stanley wrote, 'It is generally agreed that quantum speciation takes place within very small populations — some would say populations involving fewer than ten individuals.' Well, twelve individuals comes very close to being less than ten.”

At one point, the miserable misanthrope Titus Chesty tries to attack the mutated children, only for the townspeople themselves to consume the spiked water and undergo the same transformations. As the directors and members of the media sprout feathers and discover how terribly hard it is to sit down, they debate the scientific merits of the changes. Anatole offers the reader a characteristic Lafferty epistemology, explaining that the reality of the mutation depends on the observers' perceptions.

Then Providence intervenes. A heavy rainstorm flushes out the reservoir. The elixir wears off for the general population and for the twelve children. Following the hopeful-monster episode, Anatole decides to abandon biotechnology for a more erudite field of study. The directors mourn the loss of a potential new species.

The story ends with a standoff at the shack of Titus Chesty. His duck-like mutation appears to be permanent: his elbows might be on their way to becoming wing pinions. Government lawyers now want to seize him as a World Resource under the Biotechnic Act of 2012. But Chesty is barricaded in his home, ready to shoot the nose off anyone who approaches.

I don’t particularly enjoy this story. Readers who do enjoy it will likely take it as Lafferty being silly. California satire? Check. Governmental regulation satire? Check. Of course, Lafferty does not argue directly in his fiction. Because I know how dead serious he is about Charles Darwin, I find it depressing to see his satirical powers working at low wattage. This judgment has nothing to do with Lafferty’s writing at the level of the line or with his verbal wit throughout the story. There, he often succeeds. Instead, it has to do with how little Lafferty does with the idea of the hopeful monster beyond one obvious joke that inspired the story and that he expects the reader to catch. It is Emily Dickinson's famous line that "Hope is the thing with feathers."

“But we haven’t any wings, father,” Job Salto protested. “You have feathers, and feathers are certainly an intimation of wings. Some of you even have a few elbow-feathers. I will call them pinion-feathers, and perhaps your elbows will have turned into wing-pinions by tomorrow.”

That is why Lafferty begins with hopeful monsters, why he mentions the word feathers an extraordinary twenty-three times, and why he ends with the Titus Chesty set piece that includes the following lines:

“It’s a hope, it’s a hope!” Masterman Jordan spoke fervently.

Lafferty's fervid irritation with Darwinian evolution motivates the story, not any new idea about the subject. He builds the story along the palimphanic-associations of hope, but he does not become palimphanic or oceanic. The critique is negative, not visionary. What he says is what he had been saying for a long time—and here he says it worse, and with less ingenuity. As I have discussed, Lafferty rejected all forms of evolution, including theistic evolution, as peak forms of modern credulity, just as he rejected all forms of abiogenesis.

He was to tell Ed Babinski:

Etymologically every “species” is “special,” and so it will remain. A child of two years old will know that a dog is a dog whether it is a St. Bernard or a Chihuahua. And he will know that a cat is a completely different sort of creature, even though it is the same size and color as his dog. And a child of two years old would know immediately that a Neanderthal Man or a Cro-Magnon Man and a Grimaldi Man were men indeed; and that a Java Man or an Australopithecus were not men; that the difference between them and men was wider than the world. “What can a man receive in exchange for his soul?” Christ asks somewhere. If a person trades his immortal soul for Evolution then he trades it for circular-reasoning drivel. Biology and zoology and cosmology and geology and astronomy have all been turned into circular-reasoning monstrosities to accommodate evolution. Or such was the case for a hundred years or so. Science has now pretty well cleaned itself from the pseudo-sciences that owed their being to evolution. But the popular mind lags fifty or more years behind the facts, and sadly the popular mind still is likely to believe that there is some substance in evolution. But it is so goofy to be unhorsed by gnats! You are wasting your talent, Ed.

Did someone think this was about ducks and a light ribbing of scientists?

In "Along the San Pennatus Fault," Lafferty burlesques his old enemy, but it less interesting than elsewhere in his fiction. Why ducks? Ducks are one of Lafferty's private symbols for being a real know-nothing. Why a flying turtle? Galapagos. Why Chardin Deepforge? The Omega Point as forgery. Why a serpent that is having a great time? Indeed.

The satire turns on the Darwinian directors being fooled by their own children, who are fooling around. The neo-Darwinians reject design, so they can't see that the macromutation has been designed/engineered by the kids. The smartest of the kids realizes that the evolutionary science racket amounts to being a form of disciplinary underachievement. He wants a real field of study.

There are, to be sure, small Lafferty touches—such as the children breaking the clay cups they drink from, an allusion to Jeremiah 18 and 2 Corinthians 4:7, with the children enfiguring the rejection of humanity as earthen vessels to become “hopeful monsters” (read Lafferty's "The Hands of the Potter: An Idyll"):

All of them drank off their brimming cups with slurping gulps. Then all of them smashed their ritual clay cups on a rock. This is a technique that is not in the repertoire of every biotechnician.

There is a pun on penates, the pantry gods all being Darwinian luminaries. There is a worthwhile critique of institutional authority and shortsightedness. There is an interesting wrinkle around the midpoint, with some implications for how consensus reality falls short of foundational features of Prime; the falsity of Darwinian evolution is one of these features for Lafferty. That implies epistemological access to some foundation beyond consensus reality, even though (let’s just use Lafferty's language) any single person’s chosen ambient is highly subjective. This is Lafferty’s least imaginative anti-evolution allegory.

Along the San Pennatus Fault Notes.pdf

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