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Darwin was suggesting an idea even larger than natural selection: that the universe is governed by laws, not by divine whim, and that the transmutation of species by natural selection is merely one of those laws. He finished the rough sketch with a burst of eloquence. It was oddly consoling, Darwin noted, that from the hard Malthusian struggle involving “death, famine, rapine, and the concealed war of nature” had come a great good, the creation of the higher animals. “There is a simple grandeur,” he wrote, in the view of life with its powers of growth, assimilation and reproduction, being originally breathed into matter under one or a few forms, and that whilst this our planet has gone circling on according to fixed laws, and land and water, in a cycle of change, have gone on replacing each other, that from so simple an origin, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal changes, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been evolved. He had made a big move toward putting his thoughts forward. But it was only a private memo to himself.
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
David Quammen
The Great Central Valley is drained by two principal rivers, one flowing south and the other north. They meet in the valley and discharge themselves together into San Francisco Bay. The north-flowing river is the San Joaquin. The south-flowing river is the Sacramento, with its tributary the Feather River, which is dammed to reserve the snowmelt of the Sierra Nevada, not only to flood the rice fields and irrigate the other crops of the valley but also to travel six hundred miles in a life-support tube that is taped to the nose of Los Angeles. Rivers with common deltas are rare in the world. It would be difficult to name more pairs of them than the Kennebec and the Androscoggin, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin.
Assembling California
John McPhee
The fact that this was “hard” intelligence based on actual photos was what is now called sensitive compartmented information (SCI), higher than Top Secret. Access to it required a Keyhole (K) clearance, higher than Top Secret, which I didn’t have at the time. The existence of clearances higher than Top Secret was in those years itself a well-kept secret, along with the nature of the information each of them covered and the actual information itself. It was extremely unusual for anyone holding such a clearance to give any hint of these secrets to someone who didn’t have the special clearance. The penalty for a security breach of that nature was to be dropped immediately, within minutes of the discovery of the indiscretion, from the computer listings of those with access to the special clearances. That meant exclusion from the list of those who counted in national security discussions within the government—those who had access to this information and could talk freely among themselves. That sanction helped keep those secrets very, very well. Leaks to the press were nonexistent, either about the clearances, the intelligence means, or the contents of the information. Breaches of discipline, either deliberate or inadvertent, even to close colleagues who hadn’t been specially cleared, simply didn’t occur, with few exceptions.
The Doomsday Machine
Daniel Ellsberg
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