Happy Birthday!

German naturalist

Peter Simon Pallas

was born 9/22/1741
(d.Sept 8, 1811)

In 1778 he discovered the Amphioxus (or lancelet), the cephalochordate Branchiostoma. Although not on the main line that leads to us, anatomically the most primitive member of our phylum, the Chordata (vertebrates start a little farther along on.) It was once thought to be the mother of all vertebrates.

          It's a long way from amphioxus
          It's a long way to us,
          It's a long way from amphioxus
          To the meanest human cuss.
          Well, it's good-bye to fins and gill slits
          And it's welcome lungs and hair,
          It's a long, long way from amphioxus
          But we all came from there.
  
                  "It's a Long Way from Amphioxus," Anon., Tune: "It's a Long Way to Tipperary"
                  Other, anonymous folk claim written by Philip H. Pope of Cold Spring Harbor 
                  in 1921

The song was found - appearing apparently by spontaneous generation - on a bulletin board at Woods Hole or at MBL, Massachusetts, in the early 1920's. The most esteemed Sam Hinton learned it from Mr. Sewell H. Hopkins of the Zoology Department In 1934, when Sam was a freshman zoology major at Texas A & M. Mr. Hopkins didn't sing it, but declaimed it as a poem, with quite vivid histrionics. "Amphioxus" was taught to nearly all USian marine biologists for decades as gospel may now be pleasurably discovered on Sam Hinton's The Song of Men; Smith/Folkways.

Technically Amphioxus is not now considered the mother of all vertebrates. Joe Felsenstein says: It is the most distantly related of all chordates. This still proves true, using molecular data, by the way. Chordates are the ones that have a notochord, but vertebrates have a bit more -- they are all chordates except hagfishes and the amphioxus. The name of the group that includes the amphioxi is the Cephalochordates. The scientific (generic) name of the amphioxus is Branchiostoma. Amphioxus and lancelet are in effect "common" names of no official status.

Then there is the sticky question of "mother of all." The ancestor of all chordates may have looked a lot like an amphioxus, and it retains many of those features.   But technically it has evolved away from that ancestor for as long as you and I. So people get irritable about calling it "primitive," though for gross anatomical features I don't think that this is unfair.

Joe has solved the worldwide enigma of whether the song came from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) or the lesser-known Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) that is next door. Since WHOI didn't exist until 1930, it must be the MBL.

Some (says Sam Hinton) have tried to credit it to Prof. Walter Garstang (1868-1949) of the U.K., but I understand he disavowed it, and it does not appear in his book of collected poems entitled Larval Forms. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962 [3rd printing]}. In his day Amphioxus (now Branchiostoma) was often cited as proving the theory of recapitulation, and Garstang was the first scientist to try to repudiate that theory. One of his last communications was to the effect that Amphioxus most nearly represented a paedomorphic neotenous larva of a Cyclostome. So I guess he didn't write the song!


"Happy" editor's note: As simple and straightforward as the above, at first reading, may seem; at second reading there seems some potential that we have completely misunderstood and wildly misrepresented the reasoned and genuinely expert information kindly provided the Happy Foundation by Messrs. Hinton and Felsenstein. We can only abashedly apologize and assume full credit for all errors.

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