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A. There is as much reason for us to be here as there is for anything else. It is like Back to the Future, Part II. In the movie Doc Brown goes to a blackboard and draws a chart. The top line is history as it actually occurred. But if you make this teeny little change, which is Biff Tannen getting that sports almanac, then history veers off. It isn't that it is random that it happened the second way. You see, people mistakenly think that my book Wonderful Life is a claim that evolution is random, totally chaotic and unexplainable. That is not what historical explanation holds. It holds that what actually happened makes sense. It's just that what actually happened is one of a billion possible alternatives, and you'd never get it to run exactly the same way again.
Q. Why did you name your new book on the Burgess Shale fossil bed in Canada after Frank Capra's movie It's a Wonderful Life?
A. In part it is a double entendre because the animals in the Burgess Shale are so peculiar and wonderful. It is also because the movie illustrates this fundamental concept of contingency: that is, George Bailey is about to commit suicide because Mr. Potter has stolen some money, which is going to drive Bailey's firm into bankruptcy, and he figures his life has been utterly insignificant. He says, "I wish I had never been born," and then follows that famous ten-minute scene that shows the town of Bedford Falls had George Bailey never been born. It is an alternate reality, like the town with Biff Tannen's hotel. Everybody is much worse off in the town because Mr. Potter owns it now. Therefore even apparently insignificant things, like one man's life in a small town, make an enormous difference.
Q. Does extinction mean failure?
A. Extinction is the fate of all creatures ultimately. That's why it is so arrogant of us to think of dinosaurs as unsuccessful because they are dead. After all, they were around for 120 million years or so, and we have been around for only 250,000. And what's the chance that we're going to live for 500 times longer than we have already?
Q. Hasn't human progress brought us to a point where technology might cause our own extinction?
A. I think that is why our prospects for survival are really not great. People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.
Q. What do you think is going to happen to humankind?
A. I have no idea. It's too complicated to predict because both extreme alternate scenarios are perfectly reasonable, namely complete self-immolation and destruction on the one hand, and overcoming of issues and decent lives for all people on the other. Nobody knows, despite the fact that there are a certain number of people who are willing to appear as pundits on television and proclaim the nature of the future. They don't know any more than you or I.
Q. If all creatures eventually vanish, humans don't have a future, because we will either become extinct or evolve into another life form.
A. Yes, but that something else we evolved into would still be our legacy, so that's all right.