Fin to Feet

      Long ago, when I was still in college, sleeping through my Biology class, my instructor was actually rude enough to talk so loudly that his voice filtered past my subconscious, trudged through my conscious, and woke me up.
      I glared at him and was about to ask him to hold it down when I realized what he had just said: that humans are supposed to have descended from fish. (Descended, by the way, means to pass from a higher place to a lower place, which I guess means he thought that going from fin to feet wasn’t our brightest move.)
      Of course, that’s only one of the many theories concerning our origin. Other theories include Divine creation, spontaneous generation, microbiologic chemistry, alien seeding, and the much-praised cabbage patch.
      (A side note: In 1971, Franklin Kilping, a British scientist and accordion player, theorized that actually fish are descended from humans. Unfortunately, while trying to date a salmon, he drowned and never developed his theory fully.)
      I personally find it difficult to believe that we came from fish despite how some people kiss. Look at it this way -- no, that way -- ha, ha, I fooled you; I meant, this way: What normal, self-respecting fish would want to be human? With our wars, local sales tax, violence, county sales tax, crime, state income tax, politicians, federal income tax and poverty (caused by taxes), we humans have serious doubts about wanting to be humans.
      If a fish did decide to be human, it must have been a tuna. Tunas are long-finned radicals, or that’s how they’ve always struck me. I, of course, hit back; it’s a matter of honor.)
      For instance, let's consider Charlie the Tuna of television commercial fame. Is it just me or does anyone else wonder about his deep-seated suicide wish? I mean, he wants to be caught in a net, die painfully without water, have his small bones steamed until they’re soft and viciously ripped out, and then have his pitiful bleached remains cruelly packed into a tiny metal can. Want a tuna melt now?
      Or this strange fish could have been a shark, I suppose, since you could look at lawyers and seemingly see proof of their ancestry.
      But as far as I understand it (which, I admit, isn't far, more like the distance from Tulsa to Oklahoma City as opposed to New York to London), the theory says that fish developed legs on land. I see a problem with that immediately: How did the fish get on land in the first place?
      They couldn't swim on land; that's a difficult thing to do. They couldn't walk; they didn't have legs yet. And frankly, the thought that fish used their little fins to crawl out on land, build cities, open charge accounts and throw rocks at people with different beliefs is hard to swallow.
      And then the theory goes on to say that these fish eventually became ape-like creatures from which would arise the apes and us. (This theory is a great comfort to the apes since they like to point out that we didn't descend from them as is popularly thought but from a distant ancestor. In other words, it's not their fault. They find humans uncouth and mean-spirited, particularly in Congress, and they won’t even talk to us. Just go to a zoo and try. They won't say a word.) So not only does this poor fish have to develop legs, it has to develop arms and hands and then at least one thumb to use the TV remote.
      I, personally, don't think man descended from fish. If he had, he would want to eat algae, snails and seaweed. I don't like seaweed; do you? Well, you're strange, but 99.9 percent of the rest of the world do not crave seaweed. So I think that settles that.
      I do like bananas, but as it turns out, apes can take bananas or leave them. It's not their favorite food. Some of them do have a passion for termites or ants -- a fact which doesn't lend itself to support any theory unless the scientists decide that we and the apes descended from aardvarks. Which I might have the nose for.

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