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Evolution is Slow Mark Bilbrey

In high school, we get the sense that evolution results in perfect balance, perfect creations in a perfect ecosystem: bird beaks the size and shape of flower pistils, frog skin the color of mottled leaves, tree-necked tree-eaters. But ask even a highly successful speciesask the crowhow perfect a being he is, how perfectly adapted. Well enough to raise his luckiest hatchlings to sexual maturity, though it requires every effort and every trick and every member of his family to do it. Evolution is slow. But change isnt, and by the time a species has adapted to one way of life, it better be able to survive another. It better be able to improvise a new use for that beak or that neck or that squawky voice. If the story of the dog is like the story of humans or anything else, its because, though were all out of place, struggling with or against our world, the dog is more out of place, more off-balance, more willing (or perhaps just more able) to lose itself for the sake of fitting into a niche than the rest of us. Among dogs the struggle is exaggeratedly physical and visible, as if the entire species lived only in a circus performance played out over hundreds of years. Few species have such pliable DNA (or else theyve been spared the elasticity-test of their genetic possibilities). Dogs, in only a few generations, can morph into whatever their environment calls for, would, for the sake of their symbiotic bond with humans, look or act like creatures almost wholly unlike themselves, fighting constantly

their own instincts and bodies, like those show-horses trained with tacks in their hooves; that is, with pain in their gait but food in their trough. We command them: speak. But even after their skeletons have stretched and deformed and shrunken into costume-bodies that could not survive without an airconditioned living room, enriched wet food, and a monthly drug regimen, a dogs tongue can crush bone against the roof of its mouth long after its teeth have rotted out. That kernel of ancient and immutable self will not give upwill not trade a meal for a word. So the dog must live with people, and with that jaw and that mouth and those teeth and that throat, and bark madly its stillborn language.