Derivatives
Even though superheros will always capture the human imagination, the third and most recent Spiderman movie did not receive rave reviews. Still, it wasn’t nearly as overlooked as the 1999 film Mystery Men—which some fans believe is the most underrated comic book movie of all time. The appeal lies in its playfulness with the genre. A poor man’s Fantastic Four, the nearly ten-year-old film is full of bold exuberance derived from and dedicated to the more amazing characters that have come before. As one of the leaders of the little group poised to save Champion City, the Shoveller (played by William H. Macy uniformed in miner’s hard hat and steel-toed work boots), remarks: “We’re not your classic heroes. We’re the other guys.”
As comic descendants of previous action-oriented movies, the Mystery Men characters share obvious traits with their predecessors. But just as a parasitic creature is a much simpler version of its free-living counterpart, these characters’ superpowers have devolved as well. Throwing cutlery (Blue Raja), yelling (Mr. Furious), and hurling a flying bowling ball embedded with her Dad’s skull (The Bowler) for example, are some of the unusual and more tasteful powers. Only Invisible Boy (who can become invisible only when no one is looking) seems to be legitimately “super.”
The idea of the derivative nature of human beings in general is a special interest of researcher Neil Shubin. While the “derived from” qualities of movie characters are often readily apparent, the mystery of where the human form came from is Shubin’s realm of investigation. His new book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body (2008) is a quirky and fascinating read. It reveals humankind as a strangely contorted assemblage of bits and pieces cobbled together by the forces of evolution. Ours is a history, it seems to Shubin, that is remarkable not so much in its “created” specialness, but in its amazing homage to all forms of life that have come before.
A University of Chicago paleontologist and professor of anatomy, Shubin hopes to take the mystery out of man. While he is not “Dawkins-bold” in running down the “made in the image of God” challenge to the evolutionary worldview (in fact, there is refreshingly no mention of religious arguments in his book), Shubin clearly and methodically lays out the evidence of human relationship to the rest of life on earth. Our anatomical and genetic understanding of life, he believes, has finally been compiled in such volume that there is little doubt that the human body has come about through evolutionary forces.
Charting the course of our bodily form beginning with fish, the oldest vertebrates, Shubin begins with his own explorations and fossil finds. His paleontological focus has been the time period called the Devonian, approximately 360 million years ago when limbed vertebrates first made the move from sea to land. His team’s major find in 2004, later named Tiktaalik, appears to be one of the missing links within this water-to-land evolution.
From that beginning Shubin dissects human form and function to reveal not only our inner fish, but also our relationship to the very first single-celled life on earth. This is not, however, the predictable evolutionary tale of “We were this, then this, then this” told as if viewing morphing images of bacteria to worm to fish to lizard to man. What we have here is simply a close look at the human body in which we can find all the attributes within us now of those creatures that appear prior to us in the fossil record.
Just as one sees resemblances to cousins and past ancestors in a family photo album, Shubin here lays out the family characteristics—the cellular systems, the odd nerve tracks, the homologies of bones and organs—that are indicative of our derivative nature. We are the product of our ancestors; their bodies have become our body.
Because we are one of the most recent additions to the planet’s album of life, it is no surprise that we have been “tinkered” together out of previous evolutionary solutions to the challenges of existence.
In plain language, Shubin offers a clever way to think about all this. “I can share with you one true law that all of us can agree upon. This law is so profound that most of us take it completely for granted. Yet it is the starting point for almost everything we do in paleontology, developmental biology, and genetics. This biological ‘law of everything’ is that every living thing on this planet had parents.”
Understanding the simple genetics of this generational link, Shubin continues, allows one to know “how descent with modification works.”
Oddball features of mammals and humans (from bacteria-like mitochondria in our cells, to hiccups, and even testicles on the outside of the body) are parallels of body construction. These are “key to unlocking biological history,” Shubin insists, “because descent with modification can leave a signature, which we can detect.” Hiccups, for example, are the holdover of our inner tadpole.
According to Shubin’s eloquent description of our “jerry-rigged” breathing system, the quick inhalation followed by the glottal snap of a typical hiccup is the nerve track reflex of a tadpole using its gills and protecting its lungs. (Listen closely to a tadpole and one can hear the hic-ing.)
As other recent books have discussed (see “Everything Old Is New Again”), the conservation of similar attributes, structures and genetic systems across the living world is plainly seen. To the evolutionist this all is indicative and a sort of proof of natural selection theory. Your Inner Fish is a celebration of this conservation theme: all life is derived from previous forms. Shubin concludes that we are “seeing the truths of our history in ever-increasing precision.”
Still, one wonders if that is all it takes to make us human. Are human awareness, conscience and even consciousness itself simply a lucky mix, a repackaging of something that our biological ancestors somehow had in part? We remain mystery men; indeed we are composed of a variety of biological parts no more different than any other creature, but somehow intriguingly different if only because we alone seem to have the capacity to ponder the question in the first place.
Like the Invisible Boy in the movie, who became invisible only when no one looked, we may be staring too hard in one direction for an answer and not seeing the obvious that is right in front of us. There is more to a human than bones, and nerve, and flesh. A fresh look, rather than the derivative view offered by so many, may be what is needed. It is the inner man, the other guy, not the fish, that seeks the answers.