It's What Our Playing Children Know

Paleontologists now think that animal life first evolved on our planet 789 million years ago, although as the research continues it's likely that this oddly specific number will be supplanted. As most of us are aware, it was some time later than animals began to appear on land in the form of ancient "millipede." We currently believe that those early pioneers dragged themselves from their watery home more than 420 million years ago and there has been life on land ever since.

I like to think about the first animal to brave the land. What was it doing? Was it looking for food? Maybe. Maybe right there at the edge of the water there was, say, some particularly tasty fungi (which had already been around for some 1000 million years) or land plants (which had evolved 300 million years earlier). But why did this animal venture so close to shore in the first place? Maybe it was chased there by a predator, then, since it was already there in the shallows, something, some urge made it hunt around. Maybe there was some sort of decaying matter stuck to some rocks in the tidal zone that it followed from the water onto the land. Or, more likely, that early arthropod found itself on dry(er) land when the tide went out. The will to live then made it innovate the use of its multitude of tiny little fins to drag itself, painstakingly into a tidal pool where it bided its time, munching on land food, until the tide came back in.

Of course, there had likely been countless other animals that had, for whatever reason, come ashore, but this was the one who survived . . . And then, despite not have the lungs or legs for it, decided to try it again. I mean, this was a creature that had evolved to live out its life in the salty sea, but there was something about land that appealed to it. Maybe it was that there were no other animals out there seeking to eat it. A predator-free zone might have been just the ticket as the seas were becoming increasingly crowded with larger carnivorous beasts. Whatever the case, it came back, which was what set it apart from all the millipedes that came before it, and it brought some of its friends with it.

Evolutionary theory tells us that this isn't actually how it happened. My theoretical individual was, in reality, thousands, if not millions of generations of millipedes, but the metaphor, I think, is still worth considering. The first animals to emerge onto land may have found themselves there by some accident of fight-or-flight, or the pangs of hunger, but what made them come back, what made them press forward, what made them ultimately into the ancestors of humans (not to mention every other land species) was that once they'd escape the predators, once they'd sated their hunger, something made them fart around.

In yesterday's post, I mentioned science journalist David Toomey's new book Kingdom of Play. In it, he reminds us of Stanley Kubrick's own metaphor about ancient animals farting around: "(A) man-ape sits idly among a field of tapir bones. He has no evident purpose; he is only mildly interested in seeing what happens when bone strikes bone. He is playing. But then he discovers that when he brings a thigh bone down with enough force, it can break and shatter other bones. He has a sudden epiphany: the bone may be used as a weapon."

In the Grateful Dead's song Black Peter, Jerry Garcia sings, "I see now how everything leads up to this day." This is how we often understand evolution because looking back it all makes sense, but in reality, as it happens, the process of evolution has no sense at all. What amazes us, I think, and what makes many of us doubt evolution as a theory, is that it seems impossible that all of this (imagine me sweeping my arm to indicate the earth, mountains, sky, and all they contain) could have emerged without a plan or a guiding force with a plan. But to me, the vision of existence offered by evolution is even more amazing for it being, as Toomey points out in his book, entirely purposeless. What a wonderful, beautiful, thing to consider that all of this is the product of plants and animals farting around, which is to say playing.

Both evolution and play are, in the moment, purposeless, yet when we step back we see that they both serve as mechanisms through which life itself happens. The late great author Kurt Vonnegut asserts, "We're here on this earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." Increasingly, it seems that this might stand among the most universal of truths.

There probably never was an individual millipede that farted around the seashore, used its fins as feet, then became a role model for its friends. And it's highly unlikely that a single vaguely curious man-ape invented weaponry. But there is little doubt that the stories we tell ourselves about "progress" or "learning" are really just accidents of our perspective, looking to the past to "seeing now how everything leads up to this day." But all of this, right now, is just farting around. It's what our playing children know if we would just let them show us.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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