Category: Evolution, Medical & Chemistry

Ediacaran

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Life in the Ediacaran by John Sibbick

Ediacaran

The Victorians couldn’t have known, of course,
The abundance of life in the lifeless rocks –
The explosion before the trilobytes,
With multicellular building blocks.
The fossils are rare, but they are there,
In Charnia and Kimberella.
What were they ?  We don’t quite know –
Foundation in the stony cellar.
Dickinsonia, Cyclomedusa,
You flourished, then you died away.
The Boring Billion birthed you all –
Our great ancestral stray.

Yet still the Paleozoic begins,
Long after the glories of Avalon.
That makes no sense, not now we know
What the Cambrian was built upon.
Dismissed as children’s stories,
We have had to wait a long long time –
Yet the Pre- was not so pre at all,
Its oceans teemed with some strange slime…
The end of the Cryogenian, that’s the border,
That’s when things got big –
Spriggina and Aspidella are waiting –
All we have to do is dig…

Hidden Eyes

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Sunglasses by Ramesh Ram

Hidden Eyes

English sheepdogs, Highlands cattle,
Marbled corneas in snakes,
Stalk-eyed snails with pop-up headlights,
Caterpillar eyespot fakes.
Staring cameras tend to rattle,
Black-walled, with a glossy sheen –
So mask them, yet still feed them light,
With eyes that see yet can’t be seen.
So wear a pair of shades ?  Sure, that’ll
Make all nature look so cool…
If only ancient life had bred right,
We’d now be inscrutable !
Vision is a constant battle,
How to let the photons in ?
Yet we all see the infrared light
Not through eyes, but through our skin.

Terror-Soar

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Quetzelcaotlus by Chase Stone

Terror-Soar

Quetzelcoatlus, how did you fly ?
By gliding on thermals ?  Rarely flapping ?
How did you launch your bulk to the sky ?
And your massive head not handicapping ?
Could you be becalmed ?  Or even be-galed ?
If the breeze were too strong, could it blow you over ?
For every take-off, how many failed ?
Were you more a hopper than cloud-top rover ?

Quetzelcoatlus, how did you fly ?
When the zephyrs tugged you, how did you cruise them ?
No point to ask evolution why –
For you only grow wings if you need to use them.
Could you be grounded ?  Or just never land ?
Soaring the oceans, wind in your hair ?
Did you make runways along the strand ?
The answers, alas, are up in the air…

By ‘wind in your hair’, I’m referring to their proposed feathers.

And since there are five of them shown above, should the painting be called Quatzelcoatli ? No. No it shouldn’t, as I’ve discussed here.

Suffering Souls

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Photo by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels.com

Suffering Souls

Surgeons, pilots, firefighters,
Barristers, and presidents –
These pseudo-psychopaths,
From the boardrooms to the regiments,
Who find calmness in the chaos
And detachment in the fear,
Who are able to exert control
And keep their focus clear.
They switch off their empathy
When steady at the lever,
To stop them dithering with love,
Or panicking with fever.
We need them in the frontlines,
With their special kind of brain –
But most of all, we need to help them
Switch back on again.

I always find psychopaths in movies incredibly boring, but this poem was greatly inspired by the fascinating Vsauce2 video on the subject.

Stubborn & Rebellious

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The Stoning of Achan by Gustave Doré

Stubborn & Rebellious

            In reply to Deuteronomy 21:18-21

I’ve always hated that verse –
To take a disobedient, wayward son,
A glutton and drunkard, and maybe something worse –
And to drag him to the elders, and call on ev’ryone
To muster at the gate of the town
To take up stones, and put him down.

But I recently heard a theory
That asks what parents would willing follow ?
After all, it costs them so dearly,
And any sense of piety must leave them hollow.
How extreme must their son appal
For such a code to be needed at all ?

Surely this was only spoken
To deal with the psychopaths among them ?,
The ones who threatened until they were broken,
The monsters and parasites dressed as young men.
How else could they protect their town
When a rabid dog was skulking around ?

But even setting the problem of evil aside,
Is this the best defence ?
Why must the Lord make the parents decide
When enough is enough ?  It beggars all sense –
It’s just too cruel for anyone
To have to denounce their troubled son.

But honestly, I have my doubts,
That this is what is meant by it at all –
And if it is, it needs to spell it out,
Just why they’re thrust against the wall,
To stop the zealots stoning ev’ry child
By judging surliness as ‘running wild’.

Thank goodness we ignore such spite,
And wonder why we keep such books around.
For there’s a psychopath, alright,
But he’s not the frightened kid upon the ground –
Rather, he’s the one with crazy eyes
Who gladly casts the first stone from the skies.

The Biology of Night

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Photo by Vlad Bagacian on Pexels.com

The Biology of Night

Do you feel the cold nip ?,
Do you feel the dark creep ?,
Do you feel your chest grip,
And lungs rasp, and heart leap ?
Whatever else is in this dark,
You think,
It’s not alone out here –
For it must share this lonely park
With both you and your fear.
You hear that ?  Hark…
Don’t blink,
Don’t make the blood rush through your ear.
Ba-dump, ba-dump,
Your throat a lump,
Your calm but an veneer.
Now all your senses are abuzz,
To ev’ry twitch and sigh –
You only feel alive because
You’re too afraid to die.

Do you bite your numb lips ?,
Do you count each heart thump ?,
Do your prickled fingertips
Clench fast each time your teeth jump ?
Whatever else is in your mind,
You think,
It’s not alone in there –
For it must stalk your misaligned
And overactive lair.
Don’t look behind,
Just blink,
Before your nerves fly ev’rywhere.
Ba-dump, ba-dump,
Your tremors pump,
Your heart recites a prayer.
And yet, be thankful when it does,
For this, at least, is real –
You only feel afraid because
You’re still alive to feel.

Pyrophiles

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The 3rd Element – Fire by John Rowe

Pyrophiles

Some plants only germinate through fire,
Waiting out the years
Until the tragedy appears.
They need the forest hotter, tinder dryer,
Even dropping oil
To make a tarpit of the soil.
But there hasn’t been a fire through here, I’m told,
In fifty years of cold –
I guess these trees are all the same-years-old.

Their life-cycle needs the flames be fanned,
They need to taste the char
Before they’ll shoot a single spar.
They need apocalypse to sweep the land
To birth their phoenix seeds,
To grow within the ash of weeds.
And there are even beetles who must birth
Within the hell-scorched earth,
(Though salamanders don’t, for what it’s worth).

Flore Pleno

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Photo by Cristhian Cabra on Pexels.com

Flore Pleno

Double roses are showy but barren,
Turning stamens into yet more petals,
Living the bachelor life.
Even if they still make pollen,
Bees can’t push through all those petals,
Leaving them with no midwife.
Yet these are the roses in bouquets,
To symbolise our multilayered love
Of loud and overdressed grooms.
But dog roses are where bees graze –
They’re wide-open with stamens full of love
And hips full of future blooms.

If you can hear this, you are dying…

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Breathe v2 by Kuurin

If you can hear this, you are dying…

The day will come
When my breaths are laboured,
When I actu’ly hear myself each rasp.
Till the lungs strike dumb,
And my voice goes wayward,
Rattling-out in a final gasp.
As if to say
“Ah Life, you took my breath away…”

And when I pant, I wolf in oxygen,
Corroding me within,
And breezing down my three-score-ten.
And when I yawn, I practice when I die,
By choking with a grin.
But better not to stifle such a cry –
For sooner to inspire and gulp down life
Than just expire in one long sigh.

So ev’ry breath is one breath less,
And yet how many do I get ?
I couldn’t even start to guess,
But far-too-lots to be a threat.
It’s twenty-thousand breaths-a-day,
But who on Earth is keeping score ?
I’ve wasted sev’ral just to say
I still possess a lifetime’s more.

Neural Plasticity

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Neural Plasticity

It’s a terrible thing to admit,
But I have been pondering of late
On the role of microplastics
In our fractious trans-debate.
It feels like a conspiracy I’m giving into, true,
So I could be spouting nonsense and I haven’t got a clue,
And I’m willing to be argued-out with science where it’s due,
And trust me, I don’t wish for this to foster any hate.

It’s a terrible thing to admit,
But what if, what if, there’s something in it ?
Perhaps, just like the plastic, we need to take more care
Before we bin it ?
I rather notice a lack of historical examples, see,
And how it often coincides the oncoming on pubity,
And elsewhere how it’s messing with our minds, developmentally –
I don’t know, man, I don’t know…but think on it a minute…

It’s a terrible thing to admit,
To call our trans-friends as somehow disabled –
No, that’s not right…but affected by stimuli ?
Is that a less-pejorative label ?
And if true, it means our efforts to keep the planet greener
Will prevent the contaminants from changing our demeanour –
The next generation will be less-confused and leaner –
Unless, though…unless I’ve just fallen for a fable…

It’s a terrible thing to admit,
And yes, I hear the words I say,
And yes, people are beautiful,
However we came to be that way.
And yet…and yet…if it’s all true, then oughtn’t we to know,
To better understand it and just how our bodies go ?
For we’re all of us reacting to this world in which we grow,
And for the foreseeable, the plastics are here to stay.