DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991)
by Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland has proven himself—with 21 books in 19
years—to be unfailingly original, tirelessly inquisitive and an
artist unafraid to take risks. It’s a slam dunk to include Coupland’s
famous “magazine-style” first novel Generation X (1991) when citing
the foremost titles by B.C. authors, so much so that one can
easily overlook its important subtitle. Just as George Orwell’s Animal
Farm was first released as Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, Coupland’s
round-the-world-in-multiple-translations debut has a seldom-mentioned
subtitle, Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which indicates
Coupland operates as a social commentator as much as a novelist.
His increasingly poignant, barometer-like readings of popular culture
bristle with a reluctant wit.
Born in 1961 on a Canadian Armed Forces Base for NATO in
Germany, Coupland attended Sentinel High School in West Vancouver
where he had a non-religious upbringing. His adjunct career
as a sculptor led him to attend the Emily Carr College of Art
and Design in Vancouver, the Hokkaido College of Art and Design
in Sapporo and the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan. In
1987, he began describing his own “twentysomething” generation
for Vancouver magazine, edited by Malcolm Parry. During a stint
with Vista magazine, he revised his Vancouver article on Gen-X as a
comic strip. He was subsequently contracted to write a non-fiction
handbook on Generation X. Coupland went to Palm Springs and
completed his “edgy, funny and hip” story of three young refugees
from the world of yuppie wannabe-ism who are under-employed,
over-educated and intensely private. The manuscript was rejected
by 15 Canadian publishers and 14 American publishers before it
appeared in 1991.
Since then Coupland has been increasingly concerned with characterization
in his novels, while also working as a designer and
visual artist. Recent novels have dealt with faith, or acknowledgement
of God, or lack thereof, amid the diversions of a consumer
culture and technology. Hey Nostradamus! (2003) explores the aftermath
of a fictional shooting spree in North Vancouver’s Delbrook
High School cafeteria. Microserfs (1995) used the corporate backdrop
of Microsoft headquarters in Seattle to depict the high-tech
and somewhat geeky lives of employees “who realize they don’t
have lives.” Some plots can be far-fetched. In Girlfriend in a Coma
(1998), a high school senior named Karen Ann McNeil descends
into a coma after a skiing accident—and gives birth to a child
nine months later. She remains comatose for 18 years. Set in the
near future when honeybees are almost extinct, Generation A (2009)
starts when five people around the world are stung simultaneously.
Coupland has produced eight non-fiction titles, including
appreciations of Terry Fox, the city of Vancouver and Marshall
McLuhan. In 2010, he began his own clothing label with Roots.

Gold! Miners Rush In

Life settled into a comfortable rhythm for the Reverend Cridge and
his wife until Sunday morning, April 25, 1858, when the Commodore,
an American side-wheel steamer from San Francisco pulled into Victoria
harbour. Victorians walking quietly home from church gazed in awe
at the jam-packed decks of the steamer as it cleared the point and anchored
at the pier. It was the largest number of newcomers ever to arrive at one
time. Men of every description poured off onto the dusty village streets.
They wore red flannel shirts and carried heavy packs and deadly looking
bowie knives; many had a revolver openly visible in a holster on their hip.
They were a motley group of adventurers with the gleam of gold in their
eyes, and they were hell-bent for the mainland, where they dreamed a fortune
awaited them. These were the first of the thousands of miners and
hangers-on who would pass through the little settlement on their way to
the recently discovered Fraser River goldfields.
For the minister and the community fathers, the gold rush of the next
few years, first on the Fraser and later in the Cariboo, was a tumultuous
time. They knew the visitors would not stay long, but they wondered how
the settlement could withstand the onslaught, particularly when liquor
flowed freely. One observer noted that problems might soon abound because
among the miners were “gamblers, loafers, thieves and ruffians.”1
The Reverend Cridge was well aware of the potential problems. He knew
most of the men were seeking gold, not God, but felt he had an obligation
to minister to them all. He held outdoor services at the fort for anyone
who wanted to attend, and drew a surprising number, as high on some
occasions as four hundred — miners as well as others.
The majority of the newcomers were from the United States, and they
greatly outnumbered the mostly British residents. Their visits might be
short term, but they brought to the fore festering concerns that had until
then been held in abeyance. Since the first news of gold in California and
Oregon in the 1840s, a considerable number of men had slipped away to
try their luck in the south. Many knew that unlike the area under the control
of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the United States had plenty of free
land available. With this recent news of gold along the Fraser River and
in the creeks of the Cariboo, Governor James Douglas knew he must contend
with a double problem: a new and larger exodus by some of his settlers
in search of free land to the south and a major influx from the United
States heading for the Fraser River.
It was impossible to tell how many of the newcomers might remain in
Victoria for any length of time, but when they came, Douglas, ever the old
trader and canny businessman, wanted to capitalize on their presence. He
quickly stocked the Hudson’s Bay Company’s warehouses to meet the
anticipated demand. Astute American merchants also moved supplies into
the colony, looking for their own bonanza. Most miners had packed as
much basic equipment as they could carry, but they still needed food,
clothing and tools, along with transport across the Strait of Georgia to the
mainland. Men arrived in a steady stream to replace the numbers that
daily crossed the strait in every manner of improvised craft. The larger
vessels looked the safest, but they often carried three and four times as
many passengers as they were designed for, and their holds were jammed
with freight for the journey to the interior.
While the men from the Commodore did not pack the pews in Christ
Church or regularly attend the outdoor services, they moved on quickly
and caused little trouble, lessening residents’ original fears. Their only objective
was to buy provisions and then carry on across the Strait of Georgia
to the mainland and travel up the Fraser River. Gold rush fever had infected
men of every occupation and trade, and they left their businesses and
jobs to join in the hunt. Some tried the overland route from the United
States, but with “Indian trouble” in Washington State, the bulk of the gold
seekers chose all sorts of small craft to travel up the coast to Fort Victoria.
Vancouver did not yet exist. The Reverend Cridge contacted the Colonial
Church and School Society back in England, requesting pastors for the
mainland where the miners would settle. He asked for two ministers, one
for the diggings in the Cariboo and one to assist him in Victoria. But help
would not arrive for months. Meanwhile, other denominations were also
sending ministers to serve the burgeoning populace of Vancouver Island
and the mainland.
Victoria’s primitive streets and trails were soon chewed up by the population
that had suddenly doubled. A sea of tents and crude shacks appeared
around the perimeter of the fort, and the need for lumber sharply increased
as two hundred rough-and-ready buildings were thrown up. Muir’s sawmill
in Sooke as well as the one at the fort could hardly keep up with the
demand. When it rained the roads were worse than ever, and drays sank
up to their axles. Residents and storekeepers laid down planks to make
walking easier, but as Mary pointed out to her family, if you went visiting
or to a shop, almost all your clothes then had to be washed. Fresh water
was in short supply, and an awful reek wafted from the latrines that had
been dug for the newcomers.
Prices for seafood soared and some of the Songhees made a considerable
amount of money. Their women sometimes approached the visiting
miners to satisfy their needs. The price of building lots soared from fifty
and seventy-five dollars to three thousand and more. An American company
started the first real newspaper, the Victoria Gazette, and the express
freight company Wells Fargo moved in. Victoria was suddenly transformed
from a sleepy English frontier community to a bustling wild-west
town. When several well-dressed ladies of the night with their own views
on moneymaking arrived from California, the Reverend Cridge and other
community leaders identified new concerns for the permanent residents.
Those first miners who arrived in the spring of 1858 were the forerunners
of an estimated twenty-five thousand who passed through Victoria
during the Fraser and Cariboo gold rushes. At the peak of the rush, in July
1858, in one ten-day period vessels brought an estimated fifty-five hundred
to Esquimalt harbour, the naval base north of Victoria. Most of them stayed
only long enough to vie for scarce and overpriced boat transportation.
Some tried in desperation to row and paddle their way across the cold,
often storm-swept waters of the Strait of Georgia in makeshift craft, hopping
from one island to the next. How many drowned in their efforts to
reach the mainland is unknown. Others, mostly merchants, stayed in
Victoria and established businesses, a few of which still exist.

Introduction

JUST OVER 150 YEARS AGO, in June 1858, the English naturalist Charles
Darwin, tucked away in the Kent countryside, received a manuscript from
a young colleague, Alfred Russell Wallace, presenting his thoughts on
nature. So innovative were these ideas, and so like Darwin’s own, finally
about to be published after twenty years, that he determined to work on a
joint publication with Wallace for the Linnean Society. This marked the
beginning of a revolution in science, and a year later, Darwin published
On the Origin of Species. The first printing sold out in a single day — lucky
author! — and it is safe to say that nothing in biology was ever the same
again.
Their main idea that species evolve and descend from one another —
most of them disappearing in the great expanse of time — would change
the way we see the world. If Darwin and Wallace had merely been content
to present this theory, already advanced by others, their influence would
not have been as great. But they went further, explaining natural selection,
the mechanism by which evolution occurred, and convincingly showing
how it functioned. Because religious dogmas at the time preached that
species were fixed and unchanging, an inevitable clash occurred.
Today, having just celebrated the 150th anniversary of its publication
with exhibitions, books and films, the theory of evolution by natural selection
is, for scientists, unshakeable. Of course, it does not explain everything
in complete detail, even in much-studied organisms like mice, even more
so in humans, but it is a solid scientific theory, tested and proven, despite
repeated criticisms for more than a century. It is the indispensible framework
in which to explain life. As the American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky
said in 1973, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light
of evolution.”
During the filming of a documentary for Radio-Canada in 2008, I asked
Richard Dawkins of Oxford University — a well-known defender of Darwin,
who has written eight books on the biology of evolution — about the
role of Darwin’s ideas. Here is how he replied:
I think that Darwin’s idea is perhaps the most powerful idea that any
human mind ever had in the sense that it did the most explanatory work
that actually changed the way people think, because before Darwin came
along, the whole of the living world, all this magnificent complexity and
beauty and elegance and diversity had no explanation at all. People knew it
was there, and they were describing it, but nobody knew what caused it;
nobody knew how it came into being. Darwin changed all that.
For the rest of society, it may not be so clear. Among the broad public, the
theory’s success is mixed. Often poorly known or understood, it is easily
confused with gross oversimplification (“survival of the fittest,” for example).
It is frequently challenged by fundamentalist religious belief, which
is experiencing a resurgence across the globe, and my personal crystal ball
tells me it will be a hot topic for years to come. Creationists or neo-creationists
in the Intelligent Design movement will redouble their attacks on
evolution, and this is all the more reason to discuss it publicly and show its
full power and subtlety.
This public debate is partly the context that gives rise to the present
book. It appears useful nowadays to discuss these fundamental ideas about
living things, as well as the gulf that separates scientists from the rest of
society. If science is publicly repudiated, it loses credibility and its ability,
notably among decision-makers, to solve important problems for the
planet, especially climate change and the massive loss in biodiversity. Of
course, not everything can be solved by science, but it does provide for an
exchange of ideas that esoteric or religious beliefs cannot replace without
leaving humanity and the planet at great risk.
This book springs also from the desire to provide concrete examples to
show how the science of evolution has been refined over the past 150 years.
Today, by integrating modern learning in genetics and molecular biology,
that science is more powerful and unassailable than ever. Both Darwin and
the ideas that have developed in his wake are important and fascinating.
For this reason, I have chosen a journalistic approach aimed at drawing
attention to the newest elements of evolution. The “star,” it might be said,
is what has come to be called “evo-devo,” a contraction used by specialists
for “evolution and development.” Emerging in the past fifteen years, evodevo
is a new way of approaching evolution that relies on recent discoveries
in the biology of embryo development and in comparative genetics. The
expression evo-devo may, at the outset, seem a sort of specialist jargon and
repel the uninitiated. It does lead, however, to a newer and deeper look at
the world of living things, and it is an approach we shall hear more and
more about.
In order to deal with the science of evolution, I have presented evo-devo
themes and accomplishments through sample case histories. Frequently, a
particular anecdote or situation leads to a discussion of a question with far
broader implications, and a fresh perspective offered by modern biology.
Thus, each chapter can be read as a stand-alone essay, much after the manner
of Stephen Jay Gould, a true master in the field. As a consequence, the
reader might want to approach them in no particular order and refer to
the glossary when encountering words or concepts that are unfamiliar.
There is, nevertheless, a thread and a progression to the ideas, as indicated
by their division into three parts. In the first chapter, I offer the
familiar example of a wooded area in southern Quebec, revisiting what we
have learned from Darwin and connecting it to what modern science has
shown us. Then in Chapter 2 we come to what DNA analysis has contributed
to Darwin’s intuitive but scientifically well-founded concept of a
tree of life that includes all species. We will then see (Chapter 3) how all
this knowledge applies to our catalogues of biodiversity and the review of
the development of a well-known sea mammal, although perhaps not from
an evolutionary viewpoint (Chapter 4).
In the second part we move into the thick of evo-devo and look at recent
discoveries in architect genes that govern the making of animals (Chapter
5). The next chapter takes us into the world of finches, above all the famous
Galapagos finches discovered by Charles Darwin (Chapter 6), but as we
shall see, it is very much a story both contemporary and universal, concerning
beaks, genes and climate change. Then we turn to two applications: the
creation of paws from fins (Chapter 7) and the panda’s curious thumb
(Chapter 8). Next comes the sensitive topic of the disturbing genetic proximity
between humans and chimpanzees (Chapter 9).
The third and last part deals with how humans play with the machinery
of evolution — so much so that evolutionary changes have become rapid
enough for scientists to refer to them paradoxically as “contemporary evolution.”
We shall see examples of these changes but also some additional
examples of species conservation, for if we are capable of harming animal
and plant species, we can also help in their conservation.
Throughout, I have kept in mind all those who like to involve themselves
in nature in their moments of leisure, and to this end I have often described
personal experiences at our lakeside cottage. This is nature recomposed, of
course, not untouched nature in the wildest state — as if such a thing still
existed. Be that as it may, these are areas rich in animal and plant life that
we cling to and wish to protect. To protect well, one must know well.
First, then, this book can be seen as an invitation to take a fresh look at
nature as it surrounds us, wherever we are, in town or country. Canadians
are certainly privileged to have ready access still to large swaths of nature,
even wild nature reserves. Although many visit them, they may be unaware
of what is offered there. No matter where we live in this country, we must
become aware of the importance of the riches around us, riches we many
not even suspect to be there.
Second, it has been my goal to lead readers toward science itself and
show the strength of what it does at an essential level that concerns us all.
It is not the simplest thing to explain how life forms are built, to explain
the source of biodiversity, or what sets humans apart from the primates. In
the background there is always the sense of how this touches us personally:
each of us different, all of us cousins. The idea that all living things —
from bacteria to men, salmon to birches —share the same genetic code has
enormous implications. Finally, as Stephen Jay Gould says in The Panda’s
Thumb:
And then, of course, there are all those organisms: more than a million
described species, from bacterium to blue whale, with one hell of a lot of
beetles in between —each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.1
The following pages contain a few of these stories drawn from recent
research, often somewhat technical, though I have tried to tidy up the technical
jargon. My goal is, above all, to offer the broadest possible public an
essential part of what modern science has to offer, something I believe each
of us can benefit from: an appreciation of the basis of living things.