THIS
VIEW OF LIFE
The
Reversal of Hallucigenia Scientists have recently
uncovered the impressive pedigree of a lowly, misunderstood creature by
Stephen Jay Gould You can generate a lot of mischief just by strolling.
When God asked Satan what he'd been doing, the foremost of the fallen angels responded:
" . . . going to and fro in the earth and . . . walking up and down in it
(Job 1:7). But you can also do a lot of good. Aristotle preferred to teach while
ambling along the covered walk, or peripatos, of his Lyceum in Athens.
His followers were therefore called peripatetics. In Greek, a patos is
a path, and peri means "about." The name for Aristotle's philosophical
school therefore reflects the master's favorite activity. The same
etymology lies behind my all-time favorite technical name for an animal--the
genus Peripatus. I just love the sound, especially when pronounced by my
Scottish friends who really know how to roll their r's. I can hardly ever
bring myself to write about the animal without expressing delight in its name.
The only reference in my book Wonderful Life speaks of the "genus
with the lovely name Peripatus." Peripatus is an
elongated invertebrate with many pairs of stout, fleshy legs--hence the chosen
name for this obligate walker. The Reverend Lansdown Guilding--quite a name
itself, especially given the old stereotype of English clergymen as amateur natural
historians--discovered and designated Peripatus in 1826. He falsely
placed his new creature into the mollusk phylum (with clams, snails, and squids)
because he mistook the antennae of Peripatus for the tentacles of a slug.
Since true mollusks don't have legs, Guilding named his new beast for a supposed
peculiarity. Peripatus is the most prominent member of a small
group known as Onychophora. Modern onychophorans are terrestrial invertebrates
of the Southern Hemisphere (with limited extension into a few regions of the Northern
Hemisphere tropics)--hence little known, and never observed in natural settings
by residents of northern temperate zones. About eighty species of
living onychophorans have been described. They live exclusively in moist habitats,
usually amid wet leaves or rotting wood. Most species are one to three inches
in length, although the size champion from Trinidad, appropriately named Macroperipatus,
reaches half a foot. They resemble caterpillars in outward appearance (although
not in close evolutionary relationship). They are elongated, soft bodied, and
unsegmented (the ringlike "annulations" on antennae, legs, and sometimes
on the trunk are superficial and do not indicate the presence of segments, or
true divisions of the body). The onychophoran head bears three paired appendages:
antennae, jaws, and just adjacent to the jaws, the so-called slime papillae. Onychophorans
are carnivores and can shoot a sticky substance from these papillae, thus ensnaring
their prey or their enemies. Behind the head, and all along the body, onychophorans
carry fourteen to forty-three pairs (depending on the species) of simple walking
legs, called lobopods. The legs terminate in a claw with several spines--the
source of their name, for Onychophora means "talon bearer."
The Onychophora present the primary case for a classical dilemma in taxonomy:
how do we classify small groups of odd anatomy. (Oddness, remember, is largely
a function of rarity. If the world contained a million species of onychophorans
and only fifty of beetles, we would consider the insects as bizarre.) The chief
fault and foible of classical taxonomy lies in its passion for clean order--an
imposition bound to distort a messy world of continuity and complexity. A small
group of distinctive anatomy sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb, and taxonomists
yearn to heal the conceptual challenge by enforcing an alliance with something
more familiar. Two related traditions have generally been followed in this attempt,
both misleading and restrictive: the shoehorn ("cram 'em in") and the
straightening rod ("push 'em between"). The shoehorn works
by cramming odd groups into large and well-established categories, usually by
forced and fanciful comparison of one or two features with characteristic forms
of the larger group. For example, the Onychophora have sometimes been allied with
the Uniramia, the dominant arthropod group that includes insects and myriapods
(millipedes and centipedes), because both have single-branched legs (never mind
that arthropod legs are truly segmented and that onychophoran lobopods are constructed
on an entirely different pattern). The straightening rod tries to
push a jutting thumb of oddness back into a linear array by designating the small
and peculiar group as intermediary between two large and conventional categories.
The Onychophora owe whatever small recognition they possess to this strategy--for
they have most commonly been interpreted as living relicts of the evolutionary
transition between two great phyla: the Annelida (segmented worms, including leeches
and the common garden earthworm) and the Arthropoda (about 80 percent of animal
species, including insects, spiders, and crustaceans). In this argument, Peripatus
is a superworm for its legs and a diddly fly for building these legs without true
segments. A third possibility obviously exists and
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