50-48 #29: ONTOGENY RECAPITULATES PHYLOGENY

(Originally published 4/20/08)

50-48 #29: ONTOGENY RECAPITULATES PHYLOGENY, OR, FIFTEEN THINGS I KNOW FOR CERTAIN

Here's some things I know for certain:

1) Any pope with a German accent is inexorably creepy to historians of the twentieth century.
2) f(x)wx + g(y)wy = h1(x) + h2(y).
3) Marriage isn't for everyone.
4) Hootie is a bad parent.
5) My baby takes the morning train.
6) She seems to have an invisible touch.
7) My narrative thread is breaking down.

Jeez, Louise! Even simple lists are slippery slopes for the addled and those without championships. It has been a sometimes maddening, sometimes gloriously fulfilling journey since lo those many years ago I watched our indoor track-and-field team hoist the national championship trophy. But even though time machines do exist, we cannot return to those glory days. It is up to us, as fans, to bring them back. We are the answer to the chicken-and-egg riddle. Success starts and stops with our unerring devotion. Our diligence removed Hootie and Heath. Our diligence provided The Hill with Jeff Long and Coach Petrino. Our diligence can do more, if only we remain hyper-aware of the pending dangers lurking around every corner. And danger is always afoot.

What is that you say? You want an example? How's about this: Yesterday, with the score tied 4-4 in the bottom of the tenth inning, the Diamond Hogs' Bret Eibner hit a two-out popup to the opposing shortstop. Meanwhile, Fayetteville High's own Ben Tschepikow began running from first base, and by the time the Tennessee Volunteer shortstop dropped the relatively routine ball (blinded, most probably, by the prisoner-orange his mother was wearing in the stands, or perhaps the dark memories of his probably-criminal past), Tschepikow had scored to win the game. Diligence, motherfuckers, diligence.

8) And speaking of diligence, here's something else I know for certain:

Despite the Victorian braggadocio of biologist of Ernst Haeckel, ontogeny DOES NOT recapitulate phylogeny. I know, I know. It came as a shock to me, too. Under Haeckel's embryological parallelism, every stage in the individual development of specific organisms serves as a representation of one of the previous forms that appeared at one time or another in its evolutionary history. But here in the cold light of the 21st century, we've tossed off the idea. Biologists today will tell you that though, sure, we were at one time tadpoles and fish or lizards or birds or monkeys, the embryonic development of human zygotes does not mimic the various evolutionary stages of the great sapiens journey from the primordial ooze to the information superhighway. "That might sound convenient," they will say, "but convenient doesn't make it true. That's what you get for trusting Germans. Whether it's science or religion, Germanness is a de facto state of creepyocity." [That's G = (df)c.]

And, of course, sports too has its version of ontogeny recapitulates phyogeny. Luther Halsey Gulick, Jr., was one of the principal leaders of the YMCA movement. He was an advocate of the "strenuous life" who argued for what he called "muscular Christianity": Spiritual life, he argued, rests on the equal development of the mind and the body. Gulick was a leader in the Boy Scouts movement (yes, they still hated homos back then), and, along with his wife, he cofounded the American Campfire Girls (ironically, a venerable bastion of female "experimentation").

In the 1890s, Gulick teamed with the psychologist G. Stanley Hall to develop an evolutionary theory of play. Humans, they argued, had developed an impulse to play during evolution. Everyone mimicked the broader stages of human evolution in every phase of their lives. In early childhood, play activities were kicking and squirming for infants—running and throwing when the child got a bit older. These actions corresponded to the play of our primal ancestors. Between ages 7-12, the track, field, and tag games of children corresponded to the hunting instinct and individualistic actions acquired during the pre-savage stage of human development. Then, older boys develop complex group games like baseball, basketball, and football, which essentially act as a combination of that earlier hunting instinct and a new instinct of cooperation, corresponding to the savage development where natives hunted in groups and subordinated their will to the leadership of a chief. And so, they argued, each person is recapitulating the history of humanity through sports, and thus organized sports is essential to proper physical, moral, and neural growth. Since team sports required teamwork, self-sacrifice, obedience to a leader, and loyalty, they were an unparalleled opportunity for human development—for shaping our own amero-christian evolution. "These qualities appear to me," said Gulick, "to be a great pulse of beginning altruism, of self-sacrifice, of that capacity upon which Christianity is based."

All of this is to say that our own evolution as Razorbacks need not recapitulate our past evolutionary progression. We have broken the bonds of biogenetic law and we have effectively pissed on the graves of Gulick and Hall. There is no reason to believe that we will see the seeds of our infancy in the development of a brighter future. The basketball team has lost many seniors and will be gaining many better players in their place. The football team has lost the greatest cancer ever to infect human sportdom, parallel only to AIDS in South Africa or gun-rape in Darfur—Hootie and his dirty bitch wife—and we have gained Coach Petrino in his place. We recapitulate nothing. We are born anew.

And the newness of our birth is being demonstrated daily on the practice fields outside of Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium, as Coach Petrino is working the ever-living shit out of our players in an effort to sweat the remaining Hootie right out of them. Next Saturday, April 26, the results of that work will be on display in the aforementioned Razorback Stadium. I write today hoping to convince all of you to attend. Nebraska settled for the inordinately inept Bo Pelini as their new head coach, and they have sold out their stadium for the team's Spring Game. Similar schools have done the same. We don't need to fill every seat, but we need to fill the entire lower level. We need massive attendance, because massive attendance will be a towering middle finger to the wags at Disneysport who still abide by the outdated ontogeny/phylogeny paradigm in sports. So attend, goddamnit, attend! I will be watching from Razorzone and will have a full report next week.

Oh, and before I go, here's a few other things I know for certain:

9) Italians have the potential to shoot laser beams from their eyes.
10) ab2x4 + bx3 + cx2 + dx + ad2 = 0
11) 300-lb Little Rock bull dykes still haunt your dreams, even after you have moved to south Louisiana.
12) Mary is buggin.

13) 50-48
14) Fuck Texas
15) WPS