Like all evolutionary stories, it is really two—of how the land bridge evolved, and of how people discovered it. Evolution occurs in geological time … - David Rains Wallace

Central America aroused my curiosity after twenty years of an education that had seemed largely to dull it. I had been a mediocre student, partly because I was lazy, but also because my enthusiasms seldom followed the curriculum. Curiosity was encouraged in theory, but students were supposed to be curious about what the authorities wanted to teach. In Central America, there were no authorities, or none that I was supposed to consult. Trees had no labels or park rangers to identify them, and I suddenly wanted to know what they were.

Flatness implied infinite extension, or at least a limitedness less inherent than that of the spherical, where every movement forward leads one step closer to the starting point.
Perhaps human values have yet to assimilate the earth’s shape. Although every physical evidence suggests that endless forward movement, endless growth, is impossible on a sphere, civilization is trying to grow endlessly. Our economics and politics are based on endlessness, and even our ideas of organic evolution, which of all things should have transcended flat-earth thinking, have an essential two-dimensionality.

My ignorant journey had started a change in my thinking. I’d come south unconsciously regarding life as something to be adapted to desire. I disliked the usual way civilization reshapes nature by turning landscapes into suburbs or theme parks, yet my tropical daydream was also an attempt, psychological rather than technological, to make the landscape a desirable artifice. Central America’s roller coaster of diversity had showed me how unimaginative that attempt was.