A little more than an hour’s drive south of Columbia, Missouri, just a few miles off US-54 and inside Lake of the Ozarks State Park, there's an incredible number of underground caves that were slowly carved into the Karst terrain. Missouri is actually believed to have more caves than any other state in the union.
The vast deposits of limestone that formed here hundreds of millions of years ago, indicating that central Missouri was once beneath a shallow, tropical sea, are what made these caves possible. Over an immense period of time, groundwater and streams and rivers began to dissolve and carve out paths through the exposed limestone; Rock Bridge Park is a perfect example just ten minutes off the University of Missouri – Columbia campus.
Well, in 1989, a man working with the Missouri Fisheries and Wildlife Service discovered something in one of these caves that rendered scientists and creationists equally dumbfounded.
Now known as the Ozark cavefish, it is eyeless – completely blind – and so devoid of pigment that it’s nearly translucent. It’s believed that at some point within the last few million years these fish were in a stream or creek that had carved its way into bedrock, forming extensive networks of caves and sinkholes.
The current led schools of fish into the darkness of a cave, and they never found their way out. A few of the stronger fish survived and reproduced, but many of the fish died out quickly. There was no light; nothing to guide them, no way to see their prey or their predators.
Over time, these fish underwent speciation. Their body chemistry changed, pigment disappeared, and having no use for their eyes, subsequent generations evolved with thick tissue covering their orbital sockets. They were dramatically different in every way from the fish that had entered the cave so many years before.
What I'm getting at, if it’s not somewhat obvious by this point, is that as creatures on the same earth as these cavefish, we’re essentially in the same boat (or cave). We are not immune. And although as luck would have it we happen to be the most evolved, the laws still apply to us in every single way.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a French naturalist who lived and learned and wrote a few decades before Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace would. He was a brilliant man.
So brilliant that one of his laws, developed from extensive reading, observation, and experimentation is still legitimate today, accepted by contemporary scientists. Lamarck wrote:
In every animal which has not passed the limit of its development, a more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ, and gives it a power proportional to the length of time it has been so used; while the permanent disuse of any organ imperceptibly weakens and deteriorates it, and progressively diminishes its functional capacity, until finally it disappears.
We are in a cave of our own creation. And we are all endowed with things that, unless we make use of and strengthen, will eventually deteriorate until they are no longer functional or until they simply don't exist.
Dismiss this as the rant of a loon because, after all, you’re quite correct to assume that even if you did absolutely nothing for the rest of your life except watch TV, eat, sleep, shit, and fuck you could probably produce a fairly normal offspring: two arms, two legs, all that shit. This is true. And in the context of earth history our lives are equivalent to the click of a camera’s shutter, opening and closing, capturing just one slice of a second. It took millions of years for the normal fish that swam into the cave to become a new species. But light and normalcy vanished the second that stream disappeared into the earth.
The title at the top of this page reads THE RUMINATION. If that word is unfamiliar or if you don’t quite get the double entendre, you should probably click the BACK button until you get back to your MySpace or Xanga page. If you are familiar with the word, then ruminate on it for a few minutes.
Discourse has stood still for too long. We’re living in a place we don’t know a lot about, and some people are actually okay with that. We live in a place of vast misunderstanding and immense apathy. Just as there is so much around us that is important, there is just as much, probably more, that is absurd or hilarious or beautiful. And for this we should rejoice. It will be our job at the Rumination to bring you a healthy mix of the sick and the depraved, the hilarious and the outlandish, the reprehensible and the laughable. Do with it as you will.
Alex Busko
The vast deposits of limestone that formed here hundreds of millions of years ago, indicating that central Missouri was once beneath a shallow, tropical sea, are what made these caves possible. Over an immense period of time, groundwater and streams and rivers began to dissolve and carve out paths through the exposed limestone; Rock Bridge Park is a perfect example just ten minutes off the University of Missouri – Columbia campus.
Well, in 1989, a man working with the Missouri Fisheries and Wildlife Service discovered something in one of these caves that rendered scientists and creationists equally dumbfounded.
Now known as the Ozark cavefish, it is eyeless – completely blind – and so devoid of pigment that it’s nearly translucent. It’s believed that at some point within the last few million years these fish were in a stream or creek that had carved its way into bedrock, forming extensive networks of caves and sinkholes.
The current led schools of fish into the darkness of a cave, and they never found their way out. A few of the stronger fish survived and reproduced, but many of the fish died out quickly. There was no light; nothing to guide them, no way to see their prey or their predators.
Over time, these fish underwent speciation. Their body chemistry changed, pigment disappeared, and having no use for their eyes, subsequent generations evolved with thick tissue covering their orbital sockets. They were dramatically different in every way from the fish that had entered the cave so many years before.
What I'm getting at, if it’s not somewhat obvious by this point, is that as creatures on the same earth as these cavefish, we’re essentially in the same boat (or cave). We are not immune. And although as luck would have it we happen to be the most evolved, the laws still apply to us in every single way.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a French naturalist who lived and learned and wrote a few decades before Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace would. He was a brilliant man.
So brilliant that one of his laws, developed from extensive reading, observation, and experimentation is still legitimate today, accepted by contemporary scientists. Lamarck wrote:
In every animal which has not passed the limit of its development, a more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ, and gives it a power proportional to the length of time it has been so used; while the permanent disuse of any organ imperceptibly weakens and deteriorates it, and progressively diminishes its functional capacity, until finally it disappears.
We are in a cave of our own creation. And we are all endowed with things that, unless we make use of and strengthen, will eventually deteriorate until they are no longer functional or until they simply don't exist.
Dismiss this as the rant of a loon because, after all, you’re quite correct to assume that even if you did absolutely nothing for the rest of your life except watch TV, eat, sleep, shit, and fuck you could probably produce a fairly normal offspring: two arms, two legs, all that shit. This is true. And in the context of earth history our lives are equivalent to the click of a camera’s shutter, opening and closing, capturing just one slice of a second. It took millions of years for the normal fish that swam into the cave to become a new species. But light and normalcy vanished the second that stream disappeared into the earth.
The title at the top of this page reads THE RUMINATION. If that word is unfamiliar or if you don’t quite get the double entendre, you should probably click the BACK button until you get back to your MySpace or Xanga page. If you are familiar with the word, then ruminate on it for a few minutes.
Discourse has stood still for too long. We’re living in a place we don’t know a lot about, and some people are actually okay with that. We live in a place of vast misunderstanding and immense apathy. Just as there is so much around us that is important, there is just as much, probably more, that is absurd or hilarious or beautiful. And for this we should rejoice. It will be our job at the Rumination to bring you a healthy mix of the sick and the depraved, the hilarious and the outlandish, the reprehensible and the laughable. Do with it as you will.
Alex Busko
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