The Heroic Mudskipper

If you have ever seen the mudskipper fish of Japan in action you have precisely in your mind the moment evolution means when life crawled from the waters and walked upon the earth.  This fish flaps his fin-cum arms in straining circles out of shallow water to flop about in the mud in a concentrated effort of forward motion.  Then he sucks at the air with the same effort of a man unwilling to die of emphysema.   All-in-all he seems so silly and labored that you want to tell him to just go back where he came from ("back to Bulgaria" as Rick in Casablanca would say). And if you are not there at first, all you need to see is the mudskipper's ridiculous mating "dance" (literally a flop) where he launches himself into the air in a "jump" as though he was stuck on the heavy gravity of Jupiter, in the desperate hope that some female might see him rise above the mire and actually be attracted.  Perhaps this somehow explains the behavior of certain males on the disco floor.

Although the mudskipper illustrates almost perfectly how life could have come upon land (many might prefer the frog for this purpose which is practically performing pirouettes compared with the mudskipper), it seems to cry out to me for a wholly different interpretation of evolution.  It would seem that there is nothing so incredibly "willful" as this effort except that everywhere you turn you find such incredible efforts in nature.  Take, just for one, the Gob waterfall climbing fish, which swims up stream from the salt water environment to the fresh into the pounding tumultuous serf of high Hawaiian waterfalls where he quite deliberately begins to climb the face where no man would dare.  In an effort that makes salmon look like light-weights, the Gob sucks his way up hundreds of feet of water-pounded rock, where many are thrown back to their deaths, just to reach the calm of the upper pools (which seem hardly different, save lonelier, than where he began).  This is the very definition of "will power".  In the face of this incredible determination how can one begin to believe it is the chance by-product brought about by the arbitrary event of a random mutation?  It is insulting to suggest that these heroic efforts are pure blind driven genes as though the boys that hit the beaches of Normandy knew no better what they risked, sacrificed and cared for then do dumb fish that flop in the sun.

No, I prefer to think that the biologist Lamarck had it right before Darwin; that it is in the striving that genetic changes are born.  It is in the will that they have their origin.  This instead makes beauty, courage, and poetry of Life rather than dumb luck.  And it is in truth closer to the real life we know.  But more importantly, it honors choice.  It says that life rewards those who try and tells each of us what we know to be true in our hearts; that the sons and daughters inherit from the mothers and fathers the world they strive to create, not only in their bank accounts, but more importantly in their blood.  Someday the scientists will know this as well as the poets do.