One other passion of my elementary school years I still haven't mentioned was a deep fascination with the evolution of the living species. For a period of time before my parents split and before my paternal grandfather died, every weekend my father would pay a visit to his parents who were at the time still living in a comfortable apartment in the city center. He would take me with him, and as a reward he would then take me to the Museum of Natural History, not far from where my grandparents lived. There I spent a great deal of time looking at fossils, from the early ammonites to the impressive skeleta of the large dinosaurs. I thought the slow motion of geological eras, during which living species slowly changed into other species, climbing slowly up the road of complexity, was the most beautiful vision of life that one could possibly envision. I was dimly aware that some religions postulated the simultaneous creation at some ridiculously recent age of all living species simultaneously, but that was clearly a lie in the face of the fossil and geological evidence one can find accumulated in huge amounts in every corner of the earth, and anyway even the religious people themselves (at least in that part of the world) seemed utterly unconvinced of their own creation myths and dismissed them readily as "metaphors". Evolution by natural selection was beautiful and fascinating, and wonderful for a child to contemplate.
I was intrigued by some obvious questions: at what stage in the evolution had intelligence first appeared. Sure enough, one needs large brains and that sets a limit in time, but what about the few hundred million years during which dinosaurs had been the most highly evolved species on the globe, they had large brains alright, sometime even a secondary brain down the spinal cortex presumably involved in that part of the neural activity the cortex takes care of in our bodies as well. Well, what about them? The big carnivores walked in upright position, another feature that was often linked to the emergence of intelligence in primates evolving into hominids. Had they developed comparable intelligence at any stage before their extinction? If they had, would anything in the fossils record remain that could be used to prove it unmistakably? In other words, would the tools fabricated by early hominids have survived for archaeologists to see if they had been not hundreds of thousands of years old but hundreds of millions of years older? Of course I did not have answers to such questions, but in the way a child's mind operates, I fantasized about it endlessly.
Seeing my growing interest in the evolution of life on earth, my mother gave me as a present the beautiful book "Life before man": the natural history book authored by the Czech palaeontologist Zdeněk Špinar and beautifully illustrated by the Czech painter Zdeněk Michael František Burian. It became one of my favorite books of that early period. I spent endless time reading it many times over, fascinated by Burian's very careful reconstructions of life scenarios in the early ages of life on earth. I especially came to appreciate the difference between a job well done, and carefully justifiable on the basis of scientific evidence, like the author and illustrator of this book had done, and the careless inaccurate things that children were normally fed in books directly aimed at them (Špinar's book was not meant as a children's book). I think it help me develop that critical sense that distinguishes what is well done from what is not, and ultimately what is science from what is not. The earlier one develops this sensitivity in life the least likely one is, later on, to fall into the lure of pseudoscience, fringe science, and all that.
My father also bought me a set of models of dinosaurs to play with. They were very nice models, the analogs of the Burian illustration as opposed to the drawings in children's books. They were not the cheap bags of dubious plastic dinosaur-like toys sold to children in street fairs and toy stores, but more accurate models based on reconstructions in museums and made of far better material. I suspect these were also not thought of as children's toys. I did play with them though, as play and thought are still indistinguishable at that age. My favorite game was to construct scenarios, three-dimensional analogs of the Burian life scenes in the prehistoric world. I set the stage on my room floor, used collected rocks and pieces of wood to create a landscape, ferns and small plants and the dinosaurs models to populate it and imagined stories to unfold it in time. There in those artificial landscapes all my thoughts and questions about the origin of intelligent life, about the rise and fall of species, became concrete tangible events acted out in a play.
While I speculated about life on the early Earth, I naturally also speculated upon life beyond Earth. That was the time, as I mentioned already, when I was also exploring my mother's science fiction collection. Again there were recurrent questions that especially attracted me: would it happen that on other world with conditions similar to the Earth, if such existed somewhere in the cosmos, life might have followed the same initial steps and then diverged, with another branch of evolution becoming the one giving rise to higher intelligence? What if only marine life were available? It was also the time when I had my great fascination for the Pacific Ocean and its life forms and its human cultures on the scattered islands.
I started looking more and more closely and carefully at seashells. The variety of forms, the patterns on the shells, that again seemed to embody in a single branch of the large evolutionary tree of life on earth the full spectrum of enormous complexity of forms that evolution is capable of generating. I read and learned about the way shells grow, the way pattern form, their algorithmic beauty. I imagined worlds on which this line had become the one that would lead to higher life forms and eventually to intelligence. What would be then the chances of contact with an alien civilization that descended from seashells?
All these thoughts and questions were played out in new landscapes were seashells and alien worlds and ancient earths were concocted.
This material way of expressing thoughts through scenarios and storytelling came gradually to an end as I approached the preadolescent stage. Thought got gradually internalized and play diverged into a different sort of entertainment. The more sophisticated the manipulation of language became, the less the need for visualization and implementation of thoughts into material objects. Writing soon took over as the main mean of expression, gradually suppressing the visual modes and the more manual forms of creativity. Artists are the people who manage to revert this process, or those for whom it never happens or to a far lesser extent. I make the shift to verbal expression very rapidly, around the time when I underwent that rite of passage at the end of elementary school and into the next cycle. The last large scenarios built in my room go back to that year: afterwards the wood and stones were dismissed, the dinosaur models and the seashell receded to a passive role of room decorations and became silent.
