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| Photo of hammerhead on the floor of a boat by Roe Ethridge | |
HAMMERHEADS MY ASS
Fuck Darwin!
Humans assume that the natural world has some sort of preplanned design to it. Humans are wrong. Nature sprang from a little thing I like to call “chaos.” There is no grand plan, unexplainable mutations happen, and that’s that. (Oh, and PS, there is no afterlife either. Dead is dead.)
Take swordfish. Do you really think a swordfish uses its “sword” to saw through stuff and have saber duels against other swordfish? Come on. Do they wear Three Musketeers tricorner hats and shout en garde in a French accent, too? A swordfish is basically a mutant, and we have no idea yet why it’s got that long serrated thing sticking out of its face.
I’m not saying that Darwin was utterly wrong. I’m just saying that Darwin was only part of the story—like 50 percent of the picture. You also need an element of craziness, where weird things just sprout out of animals for no particular reason. Darwinism is nothing without randomness, and he had no idea where strange variations came from. What we know now is that it’s the magical wonder of DNA. Hammerheads don’t look like that because they needed to pound nails into coral. They look like that because at one point their DNA went “flibbity-bloop” and that’s what happened. They stayed that way because I-don’t-know-why-but-I-would-love-to-figure-it-out.
With a hammerhead or a spoonbill or any kind of animal that seems to be an extreme example of what you can do with anatomy or morphology, the question isn’t, “What is the function of these structures?” It’s more like, “What were the mechanisms through which these structures came about, and how did these structures become an advantage?”
Look at dogs that have really short legs. That’s a genetic condition called achondroplasia. Ask somebody who breeds these dogs “What’s the function?” and they’ll say, “These little buggers got like that chasing foxes.” What? So tall dogs couldn’t fit down holes and they became extinct? No. What happened was a random freak gene made a tiny dog and hunters saw that and said, “Wait, if we get some more of these freaks together we could breed some great hunting dogs.” The tiny dog was a random freak. Like the hammerhead. Like the swordfish. Darwin is great and everything, and giraffes are very happy they can reach those hard-to-get-to leaves, but let’s not ignore the sheer randomness that makes animals look so fucking weird. Sometimes they come in handy and sometimes they’re just a genetic fuck-up.
FRANKLIN COSTA
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