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One hundred million votes transmitted over cell phones and
the Internet have chosen seven new wonders of the world.

Like the seven old wonders, they honor ancient architectures,
each magnificent in its art: The Great Wall of China; Petra, the
pink ruins of a Jordanian city; Mexico’s Chichen Itza, the ruins
of a Mayan city; Peru’s Machu Picchu, the remains of an Incan
city; Rome’s Colosseum; India’s Taj Mahal; and the statue of
Christ blessing Rio de Janeiro.

But is the measure of a world wonder more than ancient
bricks and mortar? In the end, built things are ephemeral. They
demand a pilgrimage to a place. Perhaps more wondrous is the
pilgrimage to an idea, one that endures, sustains, and is embod-
ied in our sense of place.

First, for me, among world wonders is the biosphere, the
Earth as a breathing, pulsing planet. It alone in our solar system
has a wealth of plants, animals, and microbes, some 15 million
species, that provide our food, fuel, fiber, and pharmaceuticals;
that clean our air, water, and soil; that buffer against drought and
floods; that make the planet blue, looking down from space or up
from Earth. The life of the planet is priceless and irreplaceable.

Second is our place in the universe. The discoveries of
Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein freed humans from
being at the center of all things. Indeed, there is no center of all
things. The Earth is not at the center of the solar system. It is in a

galaxy that is hurtling away from all other galaxies. Humans are
not the center of creation. Our biological origins, more than 3 bil-
lion years in the making, are shared genetically and geologically
with all of life on Earth. Relativity theory tells us that gravity
defines the shape of space and time. Without Earth’s mass, which
induces gravity, space and time have no meaning. This sounds like
magic and, in a way, it is. If humans are special, it is because we
can discover this magic about the universe and our place in it.

Third is freedom of expression. In architecture, art, prose,
poetry, song, symphony, dance, science, and speech, lives the free-
dom of the mind to think and create across the human registers.
From Monet’s “Water Lilies” to Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” from
Beethoven’s Fifth to gangsta rap, from Machu Picchu to Rio’s
shanty town, human expression is free to be structured or
unstructured, to engender beauty or revulsion, inquiry or apathy.

Fourth is freedom of communication. What made humans
human is our ability to gather information, manage it, store it,
make it into knowledge, and tell it to everyone else. The infor-
mation age did not begin in the 1990s. It began four million
years ago, ever since we sensed our environments, natural and
cultural, and passed on what we learned through stories, rock
carvings, print, and now the Internet. The Web is today’s ulti-
mate democratization of knowledge, communicating what we
think and what we think we know.

Fifth is freedom of equality under the law. Neither nature
nor nurture can take credit for “all men are created equal,” but
the law can. In fact, nature guarantees an inequality of genes
among individual humans — it’s why six billion people on
Earth are each different from one another.

256 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 14, NUMBER 4  •  DECEMBER 2007 KRISHTALKA

C O M M E N T A R I E S

Six Wonders are Enough1

Leonard Krishtalka

Biodiversity Institute at Kansas University, Lawrence, Kansas

Rome’s Colosseum was chosen as one of the seven new wonders of the
world.

Unlike structures of bricks and mortar, the biosphere alone in our solar
system has a wealth of plants, animals, and microbes, some 15 million
species, that provide our food, fuel, fiber, and pharmaceuticals; that
clean our air, water and soil; that buffer against drought and floods;
that make the planet blue, looking down from space or up from Earth.
The life of the planet is priceless and irreplaceable.

1 Originally published in the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World &
News on 19 July 2007.



Nurture guarantees an inequality of “memes,” the cultural
and social attributes people learn from other people, beginning
with their parents. The law, imperfect as it might be in practice,
levels nature and nurture for rich or poor, tall or short, white or
black or any color, educated or not.

Sixth is the Mayan calendar. A year should be elegant. But
with 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46 seconds, it’s mathemat-
ically deranged. Same for months. Some have 30 days, some 31,
and one has 28 when it doesn’t have 29. A 7-day week isn’t celes-
tially special either. It makes for 52.1428 weeks in a solar year
and 50.571 weeks in a lunar year. Lunacy. Our calendar is out
of kilter because the earth’s orbit of the sun (a year), the moon’s
orbit of Earth (a month), and the earth’s rotation (a day) are
badly out of sync.

The solution is an ancient wonder of the world, the Mayan
calendar. It has 60 six-day weeks for an even 360 days in the
year. That leaves an untidy 5 days and change in the solar year
after Week 60, which, if I were in charge, would be the only
period allowed for electioneering.

There is no seventh wonder. Frankly, we need to be freed
from the number seven. Seven has become the cardinal sum of
our species, the most resonant number on Earth. It is conse-
crated biblically: seven days of creation, seven years of plenty,
seven lean years, seven deadly sins, seven sacraments. Geography
wanders the seven seas and the seven hills of Rome.

History recounts the Seven Years War, the Seven-Day war,
and the “Seven Against Thebes.” And the media gives us “Seven
Samurai,” “The Magnificent Seven,” and “The Seven Year Itch.”
Even the human head rests atop seven neck vertebrae. Six won-
ders of the world are enough.

We have recently returned from a herpetological society
meeting in St Louis. This is an annual event that we

highly recommend to anyone who has not experienced it yet.
For a week or so, hundreds of herpetologists from around the
world meet, talk, eat, and party. For a week, one is surrounded
by enthusiastic people who share a similar passion and can tell
tales of places you haven’t been and species you have not seen.
Three such major events will be held in the Americas in 2008:
the Latin American herpetological congress will be held in Cuba,
the North American joint meetings will be in Montreal, and the
World Congress of Herpetology will meet in Manaus, Brazil.

One of the often-discussed issues was the status of higher
education. Many of the attendees are students or faculty at pub-
lic universities, and this is an issue about which they care deeply.
A common complaint in recent years has been the ongoing pri-
vatization of American public education. According to Florida
International University, per-student funding was 16% lower in
2003 than it was four years earlier. The percent of total public
university revenues provided by state governments, according to
the National Center for Education Statistics, declined from over
45% in 1980–81 to about 36% in 2000–01. In 2003, an
alarmed Wall Street Journal reported that state aid accounted for

The discoveries of Galileo (pictured), Copernicus, Darwin, and
Einstein freed humans from being at the center of all things.

The Ongoing Privatization 
of Public Universities

Gad Perry, Texas Tech University

Steve Mackessy, University of Northern Colorado

Jack Sites, Brigham Young University

Neil Ford, University of Texas at Tyler

IGUANA  •  VOLUME 14, NUMBER 4  •  DECEMBER 2007 257COMMENTARIES