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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 4, 2007
Paddlefish
Of all those branches of philosophy -- metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and stuff like that -- I think my favourite is aesthetics. Like most people not yet frontally lobotomized, I was born that way; and the interests that tease me today as a seedy old man of fifty-four, correspond well with the interests I can remember from such ages as three, four, and five. The analytical abilities have, almost inevitably, become a little more sophisticated. But in this finite world, something's lost when something's gained, and it is hard now to reconstruct the overwhelming aesthetic thrill when I first took in the waxpaper cone, in which a dime's worth of salted french fries were arranged; or the dusk-sky purple of a certain plum. Or the wiggle of the letter “g,” whenas I was learning to read.What is beautiful, and why is it beautiful? What does it mean? Beauty is a means to knowledge (notice the pun); to knowledge often deeper than can be phrased. Yet the effort to phrase it in poetry and art -- to show what we've seen, and hold it -- provides a kind of research. Philosophy tries to build on this, to tie the insights together. Philosophy has several branches, but on one tree. The good, the true, and the beautiful can be distinguished, and to some degree isolated in the foreground. Yet in the background they coalesce. We speak of the beauty of a moral act, and everyone knows what that means, including those who deny that they know. We speak of “truth to nature” in a drawing, and say that a song is “good.” Each virtue points towards a convergence, where “the fire and the rose are one.” The question of how to live can never be reduced to law and politics. There is also, to be urgently considered, the question of beauty. Our “machine for living” cannot be very efficient, if it is ugly, and especially if it excludes the possibility of moral, ethical, and aesthetic beauty. A civic life in which the need for beauty cannot be discussed -- not merely as a decoration somewhere, but from every angle in every street -- is a sordid civic life. And I often feel today that we are living in a kind of high-tech gutter. Now, a twist. We all know -- from our comprehensive palaeontological studies -- that land animals are a new thing under the sun, having appeared on earth only about 360 million years ago. Fish “evolved” -- their fins evolved into arms, legs, fingers, and toes; and things like wrists, that cause evolutionary biologists big headaches. Add a further list of parallel developments (gills into lungs, etc.) and presto, land animals. Enter the paddlefish ("Polyodon spathula"), that has cartilage for skeleton, and looks like some kind of shark, but is meek and mild. He is strictly freshwater, and lives by syphoning zooplankton. And he is of impeccable pedigree, from the fossil record: far older than the dinosaurs. Despite having, as we have recently discovered, a complete “second phase” genetic tool-kit for growing limbs, and thus walking out of the water, he has neglected to do so for give-or-take 400 million years. Indeed, he single-handedly makes a mess of the received evolutionary order, but we'll leave that for today. Instead I want to focus on his spoonbill, or, "rostrum." Ichthyologists -- intuitive teleologists to a man -- first guessed its purpose was to dig in the mud for vegetation. But since the paddlefish turned out not to eat vegetation (just freshwater zooplankton) they had to think again. And so, murdering to dissect, they tried removing the spoonbill to see what would happen. Nothing happened. Paddlefish without spoonbills go about their business just as before. No detectable disadvantage in feeding or anything else. The current speculation is that the spoonbill offers a kind of foresail to smooth the forward glide, lifting the paddlefish's head slightly as it is raking in the zooplankton. The spoonbill has also been shown to be wired with electrosensory receptors that should, in theory, give its owner a heads-up on the weak electrical fields that indicate a lot of zooplankton about. But again, it makes no difference if you eliminate that spoonbill. So what is it doing on the snout of a paddlefish? The only hint I am able to give, is that it is very beautiful. And that from a divine point of view, or from a paddlefish point of view, it is not something to be sawn off. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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