The Dodo Bird’s Verdict
Until lions have their historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter-African proverb
The Dodo is the most famous dead bird ever .It is arguably the most well-known bird in the world. If you stop expectantly after saying “It’s dead as a …”,somebody could easily help you out with,”as a Dodo” in most of the English –speaking world. Indeed , there could hardly be a more unanimous point of agreement amongst all humans, than the fact that the Dodo is Dead and couldn’t be deader. How it got that way is a fascinating story, full of hubris, hamartia and pathos and with surprising twists in the tale.
There are , pardon me ,WERE ,three species of Dodo, living on three islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, off the eastern coast of Africa. They had all the ingredients of happiness-no worries and lots of time. They had absolutely no natural enemies, so, they had long lost the ability to fly, and their wings had degenerated to flaps the size of a human hand, with only three or four feathers in them. For this same reason ,they nested on open ground ,and they probably hatched their eggs wherever they happened to lay them. .They laid their eggs one at a time to avoid counting and accounting for them, and hatching them(it) was a leisurely process lasting 2 months .En fin, they had enough fatal flaws for a gross of tragedies.
The first one happened in the early 16 century when the toughest, meanest
budmaashes of Europe were trying to find a way to get to India (as though we didn’t have enough of our own) for trade(at least that’s what they said ,but we all know what they actually did), and cracked the fact that an ocean lay beyond the Cape of Good Hope(a good or bad name depending on whether you are from Europe or Asia).Thereafter, the stretch between the Cape and the Indian peninsula was a highway of high- profile trade( we would call it colonization,pacification,evangelization,domination)between Europe and the Indies. The Dodo , flightless and placid found itself slap in the middle of the meanest and toughest neighborhood on the planet.
In 1507, the Portuguese, on their way to India, found the (then unnamed) Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean—three of them a few hundred miles apart, all east and north of Madagascar.
It wasn't until 1598, when a Dutch sea captain Cornelius van Neck bumped into them, that the islands received their names—names which changed several times through the centuries as the Dutch, French, and English changed them: every time they had a war over them. They are now known as Rodriguez, Réunion, and Mauritius.
The major feature of these islands was , you guessed it, a species of large flightless birds. Van Neck and his men named them dod-aarsen, which means , you guessed it again, stupid asses. They were , to all accounts stupid, ugly, bad-tasting birds though they aren’t around now to give their side of the story. Another Dutch word for them was walghvogel, disgusting bird. But on a ship three months out on a return from Goa to Lisbon, well, you ate it ;while calling it all the vile names in your language. It was said, that even prolonged boiling did not improve it’s flavour.
. The Dutch, French, and Portuguese sailors who stopped at the Mascarenes to replenish stores found that besides looking stupid, dodos were stupid. Initially they walked right up to them and hit them on the head with clubs. Then they found that the birds phlegmatically consented to being herded to the place of their execution and didn’t even need to be hunted and carried back. If they had been around now, we’d probably be saying ,as dumb as a Dodo, instead.
With the colonists came cats and dogs and hogs, and the rapacious, cunning rat. What dodos the hungry sailors left were chased down by dogs in the open, killed by cats as they sat on their nests, while their eggs were stolen and eaten by the rats. The hogs ate everything at ground level, which was as high as the Dodo could forage, so they starved. The Dodo’s end played out with all the inevitability of Oedepus Rex.
The last Mauritian dodo was seen in 1681, less than a hundred years after man first saw them. The last white dodo walked off the history books around 1720. The species of Rodriguez and Réunion, last of the genus as well as the species , may have lasted until 1790. Nobody knows. What is left of the Didine birds? A few ships' logs, some accounts left by travelers and colonists. A stuffed one in an English Museum was burned, in 1750. By then there were probably no more dodos, but nobody had realized that yet .We know what they looked like, because captive birds were (perhaps because of their placidity) subjects of many Dutch and Indian painters .The best likeness is said to be of an Indian miniature, of two birds kept as pets in Surat.
These were the pitiful corporeal remains of a Genus. But there was good stuff in the Dodo and it fought back from the ghost. It laid the foundations for it’s immortality by simply becoming the symbol of extinction and , well, stupidity .If you look up Dodo in the dictionary you’ll find it defined as1. an extinct bird 2. somebody thoughtless and old –fashioned. That’s how it survived the centuries until an English mathematician and parson ,Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wrote a story for his niece, in the early 20th century .
The story consisted of flights of pure whimsy; which many recognized as thinly disguised mathematical and logical concepts, of great depth and complexity .It became an enduring classic-
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.One of the most lovable characters in the book is ,Yes,THE DODO;which makes a triumphant return after being so nearly forgotten that some even thought Dodgson had invented it (actually he did invent another beast, the Snark).You can see it in the illustration, standing coy and modest, fourth from left amongst a lot of other birds some of which are only nearing extinction ;but nobody talks about them ;the Dodo licked them without even trying.
'What I was going to say,' said
the Dodo in an offended tone, 'was,
that the best thing to get us dry would
be a Caucus-race.'
'What IS a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she
wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY
ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
'Why,' said the Dodo, 'the best way to
explain it is to do it.' (And, as
you might like to try the thing
yourself, some winter day, I will tell
you how the Dodo managed it.)
First it marked
out a race-course, in a sort of circle, ('the exact
shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and
then all the party were placed
along the course, here and there. There
was no 'One, two, three, and
away,' but they began running when they
liked, and left off when
they liked, so that it was not easy to
know when the race was over.
However, when they had been running half
an hour or so, and were
quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out 'The race is
over!' and
they all crowded round it, panting, and
asking, 'But who has won?'
This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of
thought, and it sat for a long time with
one finger pressed upon its
forehead (the position in which you
usually see Shakespeare, in the
pictures of him), while the rest waited
in silence. At last the Dodo said,
'EVERYBODY
has won, and all must have prizes.'
This is
known as the Dodo Bird’s Verdict and is a sort of ground rule or short hand for
anything arbitrary, unknowable and random .It is also a phrase that captures a
phenomenon central to medical practice.
Doctors like to think, that they
make the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current and best evidence;
in the care of individual patients .This may sound
straight-forward but is anything but that (as any Doctor will agree ,but only
after a few drinks). The dodo bird’s pronouncement has become a metaphor for
the current state of medical-outcome research, which struggles with the
undoubted fact, that clinical trials resemble the Dodo’s “caucus- race”.
It summarises in one phrase, a raging controversy regarding the
privileging
of specific approaches for specific disorders,
based on demonstrated efficacy
in randomized clinical trials—the so-called
empirically validated treatments. It is the classic argument, for a common
factors perspective—namely, because all approaches appear equal in
effectiveness ,there must be pan-theoretical factors in operation that
overshadow any perceived (or presumed) differences between approaches to a
particular illness.
The Dodo still lives and has come a long way, nobody can doubt that it
is much more famous, and perhaps smarter than when it went extinct. This is
more than can be said for Bartholomew Dias ,Vasco da Gama and other gentlemen
who snacked off the Dodo en route to the Indies.
'
