The Evolutionist's Prayer

written by Matt Celeskey and Ray Troll
illustrations from Ray Troll's The Way We Were: The Path of Human Evolution"

 

Let us give thanks for the lives lived before us: for they have led to us here today.
Though the paths they have travelled are varied and tangled, they bind each to all, winding back through the ages

Converging upon some long distant point, unwitnessed, unknown but for our shared inheritance:
When chemical junction in some fertile ooze multiplied, and went forth.

From that ancient rudimentary rhythm, a Dance of Life found shape and step.
Whether its beginning was inspired or random, we cannot yet say, but we strive to know

Seeking the truth that lay buried in rock, and coded within the fiber of all beings:
Scuff-marks and footprints that trace the Dance back, to its first steps.

Out of the ooze came the most ancient ones,
the Archaea, which begat two great houses:
the prolific Bacteria,
and the complex Eukarya.
After many generations many Eukarya did assemble
And from that meeting three families grew:
the sun-loving Plants,
the recycling Fungi,
and the unrooted Animals.
In those early waters the Animals cast their seed:
growing into jellies and sponges, siphons and worms.
They remained soft and small for many years.
They thrived in the age we call Ediacara.

 

When at the dawn of the Cambrian age
animal life exploded
into trilobites and
brachiopods and crustaceans,
and countless other forms
Including a small slip of a creature
with an oddly stiffened back
which is called Pikaia, the first Chordate,
our oldest named mother.

 

The spawn of Pikaia
begat sons and daughters of many kinds,
this became the great house called Fish
and many were the families that grew and thrived there:
enigmatic Conodonts,
armored Placoderms,
spiny-finned Acanthodians,
all manner of toothy Sharks,
and Fishes invested with bone.
They filled the seas in a Devonian Dance,
and one day made their way to the shore.

 

For some of those fish bore thick-muscled lobefins.
Of these, the ones called Eusthenepteron
of the great family Sarcopterygia
begat the mighty clan of Pandericthys
who begat the eight-toed Acanthostegans
founding the great Tetrapod dynasty.

 

And when Acanthostega begat Ichthyostega
the fish discovered their first footing on land
and their fins were firm and were now called legs,
though they returned to the water to breed.
Of their descendants some forsook the water,
coupling on the dry earth, with fluids internal:
and these were the first Amniotes.
Some of these egg-layers grew strong and scaly,
the great house of Reptiles, who thrived in the dry lands
Others had a strange hole in their head,
and porous skin, which one day would sprout hair:
These were the first Synapsids.

 

The first of this line were the sail-backed Pelycosaurs,
who begat the strong-jawed Therapsids,
Who thrived until the lands of the world collided,
and the seas boiled, and the Great Dance of Life
Stumbled and faltered at the close of that Permian age...
But slowly, through the time called Triassic,
it regained its footing and Danced anew.

 

Then the last Therapsids begat the first furred mammals
That dwelled in the shadow of great Dinosaurs
Through Jurassic and Cretaceous ages
for millions of years, until the day of the great streaking star
of Chicxulub, that did level the playing field.

 

And after the immense Dinosaurs had passed,
the long-hidden Mammals arose
and grew into an emptied world.
Multiplying within the Eocene forests,
then rushing onto the Miocene plains,
came rhinos and elephants,
horses and antelope,
cats and sloths and rodents all
fittingly adapted for the changing Earth.

 

One group of mammals, the Primate clan,
took to the trees, gained grasping hands, and keen sight.
Ages later some returned to the plains,
walking upright, and peering
out onto the world
They were the Hominids, our closest family:
large-toothed Paranthropus,
flat-faced Kenyanthropus,
and Australopithecus

 

until one day a creature called Man came to be,
and in the early times there were six kinds:
the tool-making Homo habilis, who begat
the fire-wielding Homo erectus, who begat
the tiny Homo florensis,
and the archaic Heidelberg man,
father of Homo neanderthalensis,
and the last lonely twig on a once-fruitful branch,
Homo sapiens, our selves.

For we are the heirs of this long wayward process, from the waters of the ocean, from forest to plain
Survivors much changed from the paths we once travelled, entwined with all Life in an unending chain of being.

Though the nature of our fate may seem uncertain and the great parade of life a meandering stream we shall not despair

Let us descended from the great house of Fish raise up our fins in joyful supplication
To the waters that begat us, to all of our partners in slime—

To unraveling the mystery of life! 

 

 

© Copyright 2004 Ray Troll & Matt Celeskey, all rights reserved.

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