Is Science More Than Mapping, Perhaps, Truth? (Poem by Clara B. Jones)

Is Science More Than Mapping, Perhaps, Truth?

A map propels me forward as I move across life's tarmac spending glucose going out of style. Mother-of-Pearl buttons on a Pringle sweater, kilt worn for boxing, gloves looking like bruised brains pickled in solution with noisy crowds an anodyne to thoughts perturbing nets of neurons, templates for other sports.

If neuroscience is not fiction maps are drawn at every level framing physical laws from neurons firing rhythmic as a child's sobbing but more predictable, so many factors to compute by brains old as annelids, archives of action patterns, origin of novelty, pathways constrained, limited in number—in plasticity—as Weinrich has made clear.

What is Behavior now that maps have been drawn and whole organisms are partitioned into their smallest bits as Tetrapods were rived from three to four?

Basal actions transition to questions of a higher order: What did fruit taste like in the Cretaceous?

Temperature is necessary but not sufficient for simple proofs of therian life history, Mammalogy resisting detours from tradition: No formula more powerful than life history, no method more accurate than description, no algorithm more beautiful than the rules of systematics, no elegant power laws of physiology or Mass.

Mammals as prototypes of the ideal form: Rodentia over David.

/...a role to play/ (Poem by Clara B. Jones)

/...a role to play/

I watched you sitting on the terrace of that shop on Broadway, not the street in Manhattan, but your Broadway in the mountains, not so crowded or loud as New York where one block is a mile away from any starting point.

Robust quadrueds rose in the Triassic, wide radiations writing “The Age of Mammals” across terrestrial landscapes, one dominant type destined to invade each niche.

Physics is the mother of mechanics, not beauty, atoms—not as atoms might be but what they have become in form and function accompanying Darwin from sea to island and back to water, reentering the bottleneck of chance and survival, selection not intentional but lost nonetheless by inferior types unable to survive another day without the intervention of gods, not mythic gods but humans with guilty impulses reclaiming and restoring zootics, some common like aging faces, some menacingly exotic, ecosystem engineers found in key positions as muscle articulates with bone, a leg superior to a finger, though both have a role to play.

It would be useless to wallow in sentiment over the monkey's wounds or over his fear of my tranquilizer gun pointed at his furry thigh.

The physicist weighs Mass and Velocity—Force unmatched though correlated as species coexisting may become competitors again if predators vanish.