TINBERGEN'S FOUR WHYS
Let me anatomise your human heart,
that grips mine -- all too human -- in its power;
allow my scalpel mind a single hour;
I will expose it with my curious art.
How do its solemn chambers hold their beat?
See where strange fibres keep it to its pace,
forbid its pulses wantonly to race,
cause its perpetual cycle's new repeat.
Why does it cause this sanguine tide to flow?
Look how your life's breath journeys where it musr,
to where, awaiting in their passive trust,
are those eyes, hands and voice that I well know.
How did it come about since that first day,
when two colliding cells were interjoined,
when from that smelting, you, dear heart, were coined?
Too well you knew which part it had to play.
Why, further back in time, some great divide
ensured a heart as your inheritance?
A separation of design or chance
swept heartless creatures on another tide.
These answers give just cause for my despair:
your pulse will never quicken at my touch;
your breath sustains itself, not sighs for me;
each part rehearses you as leading player;
and future ages' paleontology
will find my lover had no heart as such.
(The Nobel Prize winner, Tinbergen, codified four approaches to research into an organ such as the heart: how it functions within the body; what its purpose is; how it developed since conception; how it came about in evolutionary terms.)
Let me anatomise your human heart,
that grips mine -- all too human -- in its power;
allow my scalpel mind a single hour;
I will expose it with my curious art.
How do its solemn chambers hold their beat?
See where strange fibres keep it to its pace,
forbid its pulses wantonly to race,
cause its perpetual cycle's new repeat.
Why does it cause this sanguine tide to flow?
Look how your life's breath journeys where it musr,
to where, awaiting in their passive trust,
are those eyes, hands and voice that I well know.
How did it come about since that first day,
when two colliding cells were interjoined,
when from that smelting, you, dear heart, were coined?
Too well you knew which part it had to play.
Why, further back in time, some great divide
ensured a heart as your inheritance?
A separation of design or chance
swept heartless creatures on another tide.
These answers give just cause for my despair:
your pulse will never quicken at my touch;
your breath sustains itself, not sighs for me;
each part rehearses you as leading player;
and future ages' paleontology
will find my lover had no heart as such.
(The Nobel Prize winner, Tinbergen, codified four approaches to research into an organ such as the heart: how it functions within the body; what its purpose is; how it developed since conception; how it came about in evolutionary terms.)
