In a Chicken's Eye!

I am midway through Richard Dawkins' excellent book entitled The Ancestor's Tale.    The author is a biologist and ethologist and a pretty good writer to boot.   The story, full of rich and entertaining smaller tales of the evolution of pretty much all animals, traces the roots of our evolution and sketches the places in geologic time where different species joined our ancestral chain.  Since we are human and we care about ourselves, the book focuses on what conspired to randomly make us as we look today rather than an elephant or a mosquito.  Regardless, the tale reinforces both the beauty of natural selection and its unimpeded march through time.

I never much had a doubt that we evolved from a some other forms of life.  When visiting the Seneca Park Zoo in northwestern Rochester as a kid, I was stunned at how similar my hands and face looked when compared to the chimpanzee or the orangutan staring back at me.   I felt sad, and still do, that we imprison these wonderful animals in cages and wish that we'd send them back to wherever they came from.  But, the simple fact that we are cousins from a common ancestor so many years ago, was never a doubt in my mind.  We are surprisingly genetically similar not only to monkeys but to ears of corn.  I guess it makes one feel a bit humble that the number of genes in both are about 30,000.  Seems we'd be much more genetically complicated but the fact is we're not.

For some strange reason, I also knew that birds and dinosaurs were somehow related.  It wasn't because I was at the forefront evolutionary biology as a 10 year old, I was just curious and observant.  Like all kids my age, I loved dinosaurs and liked to study them.   Even the science in the 1970s was collapsing to the conclusion that there was a tie between dinosaurs and our modern feathered friends but I didn't need to be told that.  A good friend who lived a few houses over from where I did in our neighborhood, kept chickens.  He had a lot of room in his backyard and he built a coop and surrounded it with a fence and there every sort of chicken you could imagine clucked and wandered around.   Most of us don't get that close to chickens, or any bird for that matter so we rarely take the time to study them up close.  But, if you do look at a chicken for a while, the first thing that does come to mind is where have I seen this before?

The eyes of chickens prove my point.  If care is taken, one does not want to stare too closely at a chicken within range of its beak as, more likely than not, the chicken, seeing movement, will peck at your eye.  But, from a safe distance, the eyes tell the story.   Musing at the bobbing head and dipping beak of your bird, you can't help thinking of that dinosaur eye you saw staring back at you in those books you read as a kid.  From the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex to the Rhode Island Red, in a rather complicated and twisted genetic and evolutionary path, the remnants of the age of dinosaurs can be discovered in a farmer's barnyard.  The truth of the world around us is indeed stranger than fiction.