There Lived a Stubborn Coelacanth

There lived a happy Coelacanth
In dim, primordial seas;
He ate and mated, hunted, slept,
Completely at his ease.
Dame Nature urged: ‘Evolve!’
He said: ‘Excuse me, Ma’am,
You get on with making Darwin,
I’m staying as I am.’

Horace Shipp’s little hymn to the ‘living fossil’ fish-with-legs — thought long extinct then astonishingly discovered in a South African fish market in the 1930s — gets the evolutionary process upside down, of course. Evolution is not something that a fish, or a dame, wills; it just happens. Nonetheless, the poem captures thecuriosity of the fact that, while some lineages change dramatically over time, others do not.