dragonslayer (CA)

 I ONCE READ SOMEWHERE, the singular fact that fish appeared on earth at least 495 million years before the first human beings.

Now if one pauses for just a moment and ponders the implications of this staggering statement, perhaps one of the first things to spring to mind is that it would seem that fish had been given a hugely unfair head start on the road of evolution and that as a natural consequence of this, they have to be way ahead of us as a separate species.

One need not look very far for supporting evidence.

From my own limited vantage point, looking no further than my own coterie of miscreant fishing buddies, the average fish is like an Einstein compared to most of them. For example, it has always amazed me that a salmon, possessing the brain the size of a chick pea, can accurately navigate thousands of miles from open sea to its natal river without a glitch while one of my unnamed friends, for example, a grown man armed with post-graduate studies and the head the size of a pumpkin, gets lost going to the corner store for supplies.

With regards to basic survival skills and behavior consistent with self-preservation, fish definitely seem to have the upper hand. The bottom line is that we have all seen people destroy their neighborhoods, pollute their waterways, and generally act in a manner inconsistent with sustainability. We are so smart we have caught ourselves in a "progress" trap, a harbinger to the ends of all once great civilizations. While more can be said on this suffice to say that I have never seen a fish destroy a stream or ocean, deplete it of all resources, or wage wars against their neighbors.

Unlike men, fish are always acutely aware of the slightest changes in the ebb and flow of their environment and of how fragile the balance between life and death is in the wild. Their single motivating principles are food, shelter, and ultimately procreation to ensure the survival of the species. There is no mental or physical preoccupation (we presume) with sports, the arts, culture, or the pursuit of higher intellectual learning. Fish don't seem to waste time deliberating over notions of truth, justice, or the existence of God. Fish life boils down to the basic nuts and bolts of survival. Period.

Although it could be argued that man is the ultimate evolutionary model, and perhaps is, in many other respects, man has lost certain basic survival skills that had once been elementary to his day to day survival. Somewhere along the line from monkey to man, and probably most markedly in the last two thousand years with the rise of the modern city-state, we have lost these finely honed instincts and have thus denied our true natures. Modern man has lost his physical connection to the natural world, in large part, because the modern world has denied man's true archetypal nature, which is to be a hunter and gatherer, as our people have done over the last ten thousand years.

Although the basic ingredients of our lives are different, the struggle of survival, when viewed through a certain lens, is essentially the same. While humans are admittedly a much more complex organism on a social and intellectual level, our lives don't hold the same singleminded sense of purpose and reason for our existence. Modern consciousness is clutterd with the banalities of daily life and we constantly worry about our mortgages, health, taxes, job security, and generally how we are going to avoid major crisis in our "balanced" lives. Survival amounts to leading a normal life within societal norms and within the parameters precribed by the law and not going insane in the process.

In certain respects men and fish have much more in common that one might nevertheless suspect. We both rise to the challenge of opportunity when provoked, generally opt for the path of least resistence, obsess about sex, and require about three meals a day to keep the system operational. Curiously enough, beyond the multitude of behavioral similarities, there is also sufficient paleontological evidence that would seem to indicate that fish are the precursors of all land mammals, reptiles, and amphibians.

Now for those amongst you who thought that Lucy was at the top of your family tree, think a little further back and you may realize that you have more in common with your pet goldfish.

In the late Devonian period, four hundred million years ago, there existed a class of lobe-finned fishes known as Crossoptygerians and these fish, given the developement of certain characteristics, were the first creatures to drag themselves out of the water and onto the primal muck where they slithered around for centuries. Our first ancestors.

After all water is the fundamental reality of earth, the origin of all life without which nothing would exist. There is in fact good reason to believe that all of life on earth began from a single cell organism in the sea - these cells later multiplied giving rise to invertebrates, which later developed into hard shelled organisms, leading to the eventual rise of protovertebrates, in turn laying the evolutionary matrix for fishes which later radiated into amphibian life, and then much later, to mammal and to man. In a geneological nutshell, that is, covering a period of roughly 500 million years.

Seeing our evolutionary history mapped out lke this certainly puts mankind into perspective and puts a new spin on the metaphysical questions of who we are and where we come from. What is to be gleaned from all this? Probably not much except that we should take note of the following: we are them. Their future is our future and it would be presumptuos to believe otherwise.

As for myself, I've now entered another fantasy world of armchair angling, fishing for creatures - Helicoprion, Gorgonichthys, Marsdenichthys, Onychodus - that haven't existed for the last four million years. It is a hot and humid place, where man is more prey than predator, and with any luck I might just hook into a long lost relative.