I was just upstairs reading Ryan a few books before his afternoon "rest time". We can't call it "nap" anymore because 5 year-olds don't nap, at least according to our resident 5 year old. Anyway, I always give him a choice of books, and today I jokingly asked if he wanted to read "Your Inner Fish", a college level book about human evolution written by Neil Shubin, instead of the latest "Power Ranger" cartoon book.
"Wait. Inner Fish?" he asked. "Do I have a fish inside me? I thought they were all in the tank."
"No, you don't have a real fish inside you," I answered. "But since we evolved from fish 400 million years ago we all have little bits that come from those fish."
"Dad," he said in a condescending tone. "I have skin, not scales."
"I know, but you do have some bits left over from the process of evolving from those fish."
He looked at me, clearly not getting it. I had to try a different tactic. "You know how you have that LEGO set where you can make two different motorcycles OR a car from the same parts?"
"Yeah."
"Well, we built the motorcycles first and each cycle looks pretty cool. But if you take those pieces apart and built the car, you have a car that isn't exactly like one of those motorcycles, but you can still tell that some of the pieces came from the motorcycles."
"Oh," he said, apparently getting it. "But that's because they did come from the motorcycles. I took them apart myself."
"Right. And that is the same thing that happened with us and fish. Evolution sort of took the fish parts and made us."
"You mean if we look at us, we can see fish parts inside?"
"Kinda."
And then he said my favorite thing of all time, "I totally want to read this book now."
So I grabbed it off the dresser and we fell onto the bed, one of us eager to impart the beauty of evolutionary biology to my son, and the other of us totally ready to find out whether he could breathe underwater.
We just basically flipped through the book looking at the pictures, and it all started well when we got to the first image of what we science geeks like to call "homologous limb structures", but what dads need to call "same arm bones". There were 4 pictures, each one showing the front limb of an early transitional tetrapod (translation: fish with arms).
Image similar to the one in the book. This one also includesTulerpeton, which is not found in the book.
"Which of these looks most like our arm?" I asked Ryan.
He pointed to the Acanthostega image which did, indeed, look most like our arm.
Then I asked him, "Which of these do you think we are more closely related to?"
"This one," he said, pointing again to the Acanthostega.
Cool! He seems to get it, but anyone can make a guess, so I ask him the next, more important question. "Why?"
Again with the condescention. "Cuz it has those little bones which look like my fingers and the other pictures don't." If he were a few years older he would have thrown in a "Duh, dad!", for good measure.
"Good!" I am fairly excited at this point because this kid seems to be getting something that my high school and college students sometimes fail to grasp.
On to the next pictures. These are just of a cladogram ("Evolutionary Family Tree") which shows relationships between humans, dogs, fish, and jellyfish, and a few other animals. He asks what it is and I tell him that it just shows that we are all related and that he has animals like a jellyfish in his really distant family tree.
"Older than Nonnie and Papa?" he asks
"WAY older than Nonnie and Papa."
"Older than the Dinosaurs?"
"Yep. They dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, and these Jellyfish were around about 500 million years ago or so.
"Nope," he says with total confidence. "Dinosaurs went extinct 65 hundred ten hundred thousand years ago," - We are still working on his large numbers - "You are wrong."
"You are wrong," I say with the confidence that a masters degree and 11 years teaching the subject will give you. "65 million years ago."
"Whatever dad."
Really? Whatever dad? When did he become a 13 year old?
Anyway, the next set of pictures we flipped to showed one of the more interesting bits (at least to a 5 year old) of our "inner fish".
"Hey!" he shouts as I initially flipped past this picture. "You missed one."
I flipped back a page and, sure enough, he was right. I missed one.
"Those are testicles," he says, pointing at the picture. Then, smiling and grabbing at his groin, "I have testicles."
The were two sets of pictures on this page. One set was of a dissected shark showing the location of the testes, way up in the body cavity near where an armpit would be. The testicles Ryan noticed were on a line drawing which showed how during development, the human testes form up in the armpit area and gradually descend into the pelvis.
"Why does that little man have testicles in his armpit?" he asked.
"Because we all have testicles in our armpits when we are developing."
"So I peed out of my ARMPIT?"
"No. Back then you had an umbilical cord so you didn't pee out of anything. Besides, testicles don't have anything to do with peeing." Whoops. I realized my error a fraction of a second too late.
"What are they for then?" asks the five year old innocently.
Tactfully, I changed the subject. "Can you IMAGINE having to pee out of your armpit? Wouldn't that be WIERD?"
He laughed. "Totally wierd!" Then he proceeded to pretend he was peeing out of his armpit for the next few minutes.
"A snail poops on its head!" I said naking sure the subject stayed changed, "and an abalone has 5 butts!"
"I want 5 butts!" he shouted and proceeded to pretend to pee out his armpit and make as many farting noises as a 5 butted abalone.
Evolutionary biology might fascinate his dad and hold Ryan's interest for a little while, but pee and fart jokes are still a 5 year olds favorite things.
