“Creation is here and now. So near is man to the creative pageant,
so much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment,
that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment,
a solitary note heard in a symphony thundering through time.”
Henry Beston 1928 – from The Outermost House
Behold the Creative Pageant
Four hundred million years before the dawn of human civilization, earth’s first explorers ventured from the sea to begin the incredible air-breathing experiment. For the first time in four billion years, living voices graced the earth’s atmosphere. The symphony of creation resounded with the cadences of dazzling biological innovations. The surface of the planet blossomed with code-based creatures of stunning structural and functional complexity. The first mammals appeared about 200 million years prior to the first cave dwelling echoes of human language. Mammals of every shape and size flourished and proliferated in every niche of the globe after the great asteroid extinction event—about 65 million years before the founding of the Library at Alexandria.
Only a handful of the thousands the air-breathing mammalian species that ever existed have completed the evolutionary round-trip from the watery womb, to the world of land and sky, then back. About fifty million years before the invention of the printing press, in seemingly retrograde Darwinian fashion, the ancestors of the cetaceans, the Linnaean taxonomic grouping that includes all species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises, perplexingly reversed course and boldly returned to their ancestral home. It was a journey on an epoch scale, spanning tens of millions of years.
Although today’s hydro-dynamically sculpted whales are able to cruise the oceans with elegant efficiency, the lineage of these giants is more closely related to the camel and the hippo and their anatomies retain vestiges of their four-legged forebears.
Was this homecoming just a statistical blip in the scheme of things or was there some enigmatic environmental factor that dictated this action to ensure the survivability of the species? Perhaps in the distant past an ancestor grazing next to a riverbank decided to enter the water to escape a drought. Maybe they simply discovered an epicurean preference for a meal of sushi. A fascinating consequence of their irrevocable action is that today’s descendants must perpetually return to the water’s surface every fifteen minutes of their waking lives in order the breath the oxygen of life. They must have achieved an enormous selective advantage to justify having to endure a plight akin to the emphysema patient forever tethered to the oxygen cylinder.
Evolution continued upon its merry course, and the limbs so useful on land transitioned into various forms of fins and flukes better suited to propulsion in the water. The fin of the humpback whale is the largest pectoral appendage in the animal kingdom. Its remarkable proportions inspired the biologists to name the humpback species, in the lingua franca of the Linnaean classification system, Megaptera Novaeangliae, the giant-winged New Englander.
On land, creatures of this immensity would be mired in a gravitational well. Their act of repatriation, back to their pelagic origins, was a master stroke since their massive bodies could literally defy gravity. The synergies of buoyancy and a bountiful food supply enabled an evolutionary positive feedback loop of burgeoning body size and a bigger skull that could accommodate an ever-expanding brain.
What’s happening beneath the ocean’s surface? Humankind is conditioned to view the culture of the sea from our own limited ‘fishing for primitive creatures’ perspective. The big-brained Megapterans, however, have behaviors similar to their sapient terrestrial counterparts: children to raise, food to catch, songs to sing …
Beneath our boats transpires a whale family domestic scene; the universal responsibilities of parents teaching the lessons of survival and the fun of playing the games that the calf enjoys. They frolic together, then suddenly the urge to explore, to experience novel forces like the gravity of one’s own weight, the deceleration and acceleration through the ether, the thrill of the wind and the chill of evaporative cooling on the skin. Finally there is the jarring jolt of the impact.
The sensations of the world above, the colorful lights, the dazzling brightness, perhaps the unique visual snapshot of a nearby craft, like a kaleidoscopic cetacean amusement park ride that is all encompassing—and the titan soars to the surface.