The aging Volvo cuts through the drizzly New Haven night, darting expertly through the rush-hour traffic. The driver, Elisabeth Vrba, keeps a nervous eye on the rearview mirror.
The last time I got stopped, the policeman kept me waiting 15 minutes while he lectured me on the hazards of speeding, she says. He was terribly nice, but it was such a waste of time.
Time is never far from Vrba’s mind; she is acutely, almost painfully aware of its passage. She talks as fast as she drives, the ideas pouring forth so rapidly that they sometimes collide. Vrba is aware of this and says that her students complain of it, but she doesn’t apologize. In the heady and competitive scientific circles she travels in, waiting patiently for less nimble minds to catch up can be counterproductive.
Vrba’s anxiety about time stretches easily from minutes to millennia--the time it takes for evolution to work. She is a biologist and paleontologist by training, and an evolutionary theorist by inclination. She works in an area in which evidence is scarce and hypotheses are tightly held, where one bold, well-supported idea can launch a scientist out of obscurity and into the limelight. Vrba, who will turn 51 this month and holds a tenured chair in the department of geology and geophysics at Yale, has had several such ideas.
Best known among them is the turn-over pulse hypothesis, a notion that may very well explain the curious evolutionary bursts that first separated our lineage from the apes and later pushed our forebears toward bigger brains, dexterous hands, tool making, and other attributes of modern humanity. Those bursts, Vrba argues, caught other species at the same time, and the consequences can be read in the fossil record. They were bursts not just of creativity but also of destruction, killing off some species while playing midwife to new ones.
