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Unnatural Selection - an extract.
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Unnatural Selection - an extract. |
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Grinch Member Elite
since 2005-12-31
Posts 2929Whoville |
David Hansberry sat in his study with his head in his hands, a picture of incredulous resignation. He’d spent three days carefully checking and re-checking all the evidence collated over the last ten years but there could be no doubt, Darwin, Dawkins and Gould were all wrong. In fact it went even further than that, the whole edifice of current evolutionary theory was clearly and undeniably false based on the evidence before him and even natural selection itself, the holy grail of evolutionary theory, was proved to be anything but natural. Most scientists, when their life’s work unexpectedly uncovers a previously unknown scientific fact, would be dancing for joy but David Hansberry was anything but happy. He was an evolutionary biologist, and a fairly famous one at that. After several books and two highly acclaimed television documentaries promoting evolutionary theory as clear scientific fact he had been dubbed by the media “Darwin’s Piranha” . The Guardian newspaper first coined the term, saying that he had a voracious appetite for tearing strips from creationist goldfish using evolutionary facts and an unparalleled wit far sharper and keener than any teeth. At this point however, as the truth of his discovery lay before him, David felt no urge to dance for joy. While his life's work clearly proved the myth of creationism, at least in the biblical sense, it also systematically removed any remnants of teeth that evolutionary theory may have possessed. He was no longer a piranha chasing goldfish, now he was just another fish staring inanely out of a glass bowl that once contained and described his entire world, the difference was that for the first time he could clearly see the ominous cat outside, waiting patiently, licking its lips. Eventually David Hansberry collected together the papers and notebooks, the pieces of a scientific jigsaw that he knew had to remain hidden, then, one by one, he fed them into the flames of the open fire. As he destroyed the evidence of his discovery David Hansberry planned his future and found solace in the fact that the length of a human life was miniscule in the face of the geological timescales he was used to dealing with. With luck he would be long dead and turned to dust before the inevitable happened, life, and death come to that, might even be bearable if he just kept that one thought at the forefront of his mind. He would move away from the city, he had enough money, being famous had its perks after all, a small place in the country, Devon or Cornwall perhaps. He would disappear and the truth would disappear with him, and that, he hoped, would be an end to it - but somehow knew it wouldn‘t be. Five hundred and forty million years ago a three metre long Anomalocaris swam leisurely along the boundary of a small lagoon on the lookout for unwary trilobites that would make an easy and much need meal. The Anomalocaris was well built for hunting prey in the warm sea off the coast of what would be modern day Alaska. The highly flexible flaps down each side of its body beat the water in rhythmic ripples propelling the creature through the water with graceful ease as it searched for food using the compound eyes projecting from stalks from it’s armoured head. The gracefulness masking the potential for devastatingly fast bursts of speed once a food source was spotted. The closest animal alive today resembling Anomalocaris would be a shrimp - in fact the name Anomalocaris literally means “strange shrimp”. The obvious difference between the two if placed side by side, apart from size, would be the two hooked arms with viciously sharp spines that protruded half a metre ahead of the disc like mouth. The mouth itself was oval shaped, the inner edges of which were adorned with serrated overlapping discs that continued all the way to the gullet and made light work if both flesh and shell. The tactic used by Anomalocaris when hunting was simple, once it spotted a possible target, normally a lone adolescent trilobite, the Anomalocaris accelerated at lightening speed and grasped its target like a giant sea bound praying mantis in its curved arms. Once closed around the prey the arms continued to curl, crushing and pushing the unfortunate victim into the shell shredding maw. The macabre hunting scene had been the same way for the Anomalocaris almost everyday of its seven year life, as it had been the same for every other Anomalocaris going back for over two thousand years. Only today was different, today would be both an end and a beginning for this Anomalocaris along with fifty percent of its species. The hunt went exactly to script, the foot long trilobite struggled slightly before being crushed towards the Anomalocaris’s mouth and ground by the plates as they propelled the meal towards the waiting stomach. As the final piece disappeared into it’s mouth the Anomalocaris felt a strange tingling along its entire body followed by excruciating pain in three distinct points along its flanks. Without any further warning the shell split at those points and six jointed legs suddenly appeared thrashing the water seemingly of their own accord. At the same time the gill covers on the Anomalocaris’s neck and thorax fused leaving only two small holes, the Anomalocaris almost immediately began to drown. A reflex response to oxygen depleted water forced the animal to the surface, an evolutionary survival instinct, as it breached the surface the gills would capture enough oxygen to stave off drowning. The breaching technique wasn’t ideal, the gills, perfect for leaching the available oxygen from sea water weren’t very efficient out of the water - normally. On this occasion as it breached the surface the Anomalocaris found it could breath the air through the two holes that were now the remnants of its gills. As it slipped below the surface the ability to breath immediately ceased, its world had been turned upside down and as it lay on the surface treading water with its new legs it saw the shore of the lagoon and exhausted made its way towards it. The Anomalocaris lay in the shallows for an hour before dragging itself ashore, for that hour it was still a sea creature, after its new legs carried it, unsteadily at first, onto the beach it would fully have become a land dweller, one of the first but soon all along the beach it was joined by more of its kind, more of this new kind of Anomalocaris, this new species. |
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fractal007 Senior Member
since 2000-06-01
Posts 1958 |
Interesting speculative piece. Life's short. Think hard! |
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