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“I agree,” Levine continued, “that the fossil record is not helpful in addressing extinction Particularly if your thesis is that behavior is the cause of extinction—because bones don’t tell us ree that your behavioral thesis is untestable In point of fact, it iht of it”

The room was silent At the podium, Malcolm frowned The e told he had not thought through his ideas “What’s your point,” he said

Levine appeared indifferent to the tension in the roo the Cretaceous, Dinosauria idely distributed across the planet We have found their remains on every continent, and in every climatic zone—even in the Antarctic Now If their extinction was really the result of their behavior, and not the consequence of a catastrophe, or a disease, or a change in plant life, or any of the other broad-scale explanations that have been proposed, then it seeed their behavior at the same time, everywhere And that in turn means that there may well be some remnants of these animals still alive on the earth Why couldn’t you look for them?”

“You could,” Malcolm said coldly, “if that a use for your time”

“No, no,” Levine said earnestly “I’m quite serious What if the dinosaurs did not become extinct? What if they still exist? Somewhere in an isolated spot on the planet”

“You’re talking about a Lost World,” Malcolly Scientists at the Institute had developed a shorthand for referring to common evolutionary scenarios They spoke of the Field of Bullets, the Gambler’s Ruin, the Game of Life, the Lost World, the Red Queen, and Black Noise These ell-defined ways of thinking about evolution But they were all—

“No,” Levine said stubbornly “I a literally”

“Then you’re badly deluded,” Malcolm said, with a dismissive wave of his hand He turned away from the audience, and walke

d slowly to the blackboard “Now, if we consider the i ourselves, what is the minimal unit of life? Most contemporary definitions of life would include the presence of DNA, but there are two exaest to us that this definition is too narrow If you consider viruses and so-called prions, it is clear that life may in fact exist without DNA”

At the back of the room, Levine stared for a an to make notes

The Lost World

Hypothesis

The lecture ended, Malcolm hobbled across the open courtyard of the Institute, shortly after noon Walking beside hi from Africa Malcolm had known her for several years, since he had been asked to serve as an outside reader for her doctoral thesis at Berkeley

Crossing the courtyard in the hot summer sun, they made an unlikely pair: Malcol on his cane; Harding coetic in shorts and a tee shirt, her short black hair pushed up on her forehead with sunglasses Her field of study was African predators, lions and hyenas She was scheduled to return to Nairobi the next day

The two had been close since Malcol had been on a sabbatical year in Austin, and had helped nurse Malcolm back to health, after his many operations For a while it seemed as if a romance had blossomed, and that Malcol had gone back to Africa, and Malcolone to Santa Fe Whatever their former relationship had been, they were now just friends

They discussed the questions that had come at the end of his lecture From Malcolm’s point of view, there had been only the predictable objections: that s owed their existence to the Cretaceous extinction, which had wiped out the dinosaurs and allowed the mammals to take over As one questioner had pompously phrased it, “The Cretaceous allowed our own sentient awareness to arise on the planet”