Ruminations on Fish

So I made an excursion to the science museum this week. In the room with the dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures, I saw a display that commented on the similarity of fish from 200 million years ago to fish from the present day. The display posited that the form of the fish in the Paleozoic era must have worked really well, so there was little need to evolve. Natural selection preserved their form through the eons.

Pictured: Undina gulo. Not pictured: room for improvement.

They say "don't reinvent the wheel," but isn't the wheel one of the most reinvented things in human history? Metal wheels, plastic wheels, tires, tank treads, track-balls, those little swively wheels on shopping carts...
But the fact is the basic form remains constant in all those variations: a circle. Usually a disc, occasionally a sphere.
Maybe I've been going about this all wrong. I've often criticized the similarity of alien planets to Earth. Maybe there's more to it than I thought though. Trees, fish, bugs...perhaps those are so effective that those forms recur throughout the universe. The laws of physics are constant throughout creation, after all.

Perhaps I've just fallen victim to the pitfall of the Information Age: that constant need for novelty. Everything has to be unique to hold our interest. Everything has to leave an impact.

But never-ending novelty destroys novelty. Endless uniqueness, weirdness, it all blends together. Internet memes come and go so quickly the majority of people only learn about them after they've gone out of fashion.

So let's celebrate the mundane a little more from now on, and perhaps even the cliche. The desert planet, the ice planet, the alien fish, trees, etc.

Note: the blog will continue. This is not a farewell post. I simply have come to realize I may have been a little misguided when I set out. Now thanks to fish, I'm a little wiser.

So thank you, fish.

"You're welcome."