Matthew Ridley

Resisting evolution

issue 01 October 2011

There lived a happy Coelacanth
In dim, primordial seas;
He ate and mated, hunted, slept,
Completely at his ease.
Dame Nature urged: ‘Evolve!’
He said: ‘Excuse me, Ma’am,
You get on with making Darwin,
I’m staying as I am.’






Horace Shipp’s little hymn to the ‘living fossil’ fish-with-legs — thought long extinct then astonishingly discovered in a South African fish market in the 1930s — gets the evolutionary process upside down, of course. Evolution is not something that a fish, or a dame, wills; it just happens. Nonetheless, the poem captures the curiosity of the fact that, while some lineages change dramatically over time, others do not.

Set the sat-nav on your time machine to the Carboniferous, 300 million years ago, and you would land in an alien world. No grass, no flowers, no birds or mammals, no frogs or snakes, no ants or flies.

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