Catherynne M. Valente
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God Loves Mutants: On Fast Horses, Slow Monkeys, and the Volcanic Tomorrow
🕑 Added 2025-07-30 21:14:07 +0000 UTCI was reading about horses the other day.
It’s what we do, from time to time, we who in some small part never outgrow a terrifyingly single-minded love of horses, imagining infinite adventures that involve forming a deep soul-bond with black stallions and white unicorns, doodling flowing manes at gallop in every corner of every notebook with the approximate quality of a medieval novitiate who’s never actually seen one.
But I am Molly Grue now, I am older, so, specifically, I was reading about why horses get catastrophically sick far more often than other large ungulates—which they do. Horses are beautiful freaks whose guts spend most of their time trying really quite hard to get tangled up in knots, bird-bones looking for any opportunity to not hold up 800 pounds of non-flying meat anymore, and a dangerously overclocked circulatory system cannoning geysers of blood through delicate little veins all times.
And they only have four toes, whose tippy-toenails they run on at up to seventy miles an hour. We don’t often think of the whole complicated situation going on with a horse’s lower leg, that we then nail another situation to, as a kind of passive background-cycling pedicure, as a toe. But it is. The whole lower third of the leg is one single, long toe that evolved to run faster than anything whose squishy flat feet have to spread out inefficiently on the ground every time they take a step.
Prehistoric horse-esque creatures were ungulates with five toes, hanging out somewhere between a deer, a capybara, and a quasi-recognizable horse. But as they moved out of the forests and into the plains and grasslands, the ungulate Don’t Get Chomped strategy (being smaller, very agile, and quick but not so quick that you couldn’t stop yourself slamming hilariously into a tree every six or seven feet) led to Many of Us Getting Chomped. New grassland friends evolved to run very fast across long distances with no trees in the way—and no trees to hide one’s very pretty spots and flowing hair. So, slowly, over thousands of years of sunsets and winters and thunderstorms and running away from proto-wolves and almost-lions, the spatulate foot that drained off momentum and calories with every step became a hyper-efficient single monster toenail holding up one actual ton of hurtling, racing meat whose every cell thinks it’s being chased for chomping at all times.
But it seems that the equine Go Very Fast optimization tree had just about zero points left for anything else in its body to not be an insane bag of leftovers trying to kill itself.
I promise this is going somewhere. I am not optimized for speed.
For example, when a horse runs at speed, its breathing completely changes. So does yours and mine, of course, but not like this. Horses don’t take breaths when they run at all. Their legs propel them so fast, and the bulk riding on those legs is so immense, that their guts go up and down and the bouncing moves the lungs and it creates what’s called respiratory sinus arrhythmia and a perfect ratio of one breath to one stride. This is a really fantastic feature, in that it’s super calorie-efficient to not have to use energy for respiration and momentum separately, and it’s absolutely stupid, in that, to make it work, the lungs and diaphragm have to be very squishy and collapsible and the guts have to be quite loose and jostle-able, and that’s why, if you’ve spent any real time about horses, you’ve heard nightmare fuel stories about their whole insides turning into giant rat kings of knotted intestines.
Because their blood failed blood class, too. It shrieks at firehose-pressure through their systems way too fast, in and out of a heart with a panic disorder, having only straight up-and-down extremities with no stupid toes or fingers to slow it down, so the blood just pinballs around their system while those overclocked hearts desperately try to keep up. But because that go-juice moves so fast, it’s not very good at dropping off oxygen on the way, so horse bones (slowly, over thousands of years of escaping various jaws) became more like bird bones, with pockets for storing air. But that means their bones are terrible at being bones. They break all the time and when they do, it’s a much bigger problem than for us slow monkeys.
Just about the only thing horse-blood excels at is making terrifying and constant horse-erections. Those cells that hold onto the murky memory of being a little fat tailless adorable semi-fawn with sensible intestines tentatively stepping one sweet little innocent normal-toed foot out of the woods onto the plains and immediately getting t-boned by two lionosaurs, a megaleopard, and four saber-toothed hippos? Every single one fundamentally knows it can happen again at any moment, even in their cozy stables with blankies on. Kind of like how I saw Jaws when I was way too little, and I was terrified to swim for years. To swim anywhere. In the freshwater canal by my grandparent’s house. In a chlorinated swimming pool. In my bathtub. Oh, I was perfectly aware sharks couldn’t live in those kinds of water. But maybe. Somehow. My hindbrain couldn’t be reassured. And neither can a horse’s. So a horse’s hindbrain is more or less always tea-whistling: best get to fuckin’ because the wolfnado is on its way and we are all about to die.
Obviously they, and cheetahs, who are similarly A Mess, have pervasive anxiety. Which is why young, untrained, unaltered, and sometimes none of the above, just regular horses, often behave like they’re stuck in a constant Squid Game of Kill, Run, Fuckrun, Killfuck, Run Again Maybe or Scream Forever.
And we used all that to get them to pull semi-trucks, I guess.
Now, I’m not trying to do a CatGPT summary of my horse-related reading here. Rather, I am, but only so you’re up to speed, so to speak, with my train of thought as I hid from the summer heat in the fan-hushed shadows reading about the madness of being a horse.
When we talk about evolution, we tend to yada yada the process to get to whatever other point we’re trying to make. There were slow squat horses with toes, conditions changed, yada, yada, yada, horses got one toe and the Most Amazing Toenail Ever. I did it, too. It’s just easier, because evolution takes so long, and we’re almost always referencing it in relation to something else, so why bother talking about whatever series of genetic follies came between Littletoes Lionsnack and Secretariat. Who has the time?
But when we do that, we give the impression, and get the impression, even subconsciously, that evolution is a story with a pre-determined endgoal, which we’re living in now. Even if we know it’s not true, even if we are the very specific kind of people who will correct others instantly when they start talking about evolution as though it starts with a capital E and has intent. Has a destination in mind. Was always aiming for horses and can now, at long last, rest.
It’s very hard to fight that instinct toward ascribing narrative agency to natural processes, particularly for those of us who have left or never entered the structures of religion. We’re still the same creatures whose brains intensely crave patterns and meaning, not only patterns and meaning, but constantly evolving, constantly new patterns and fresh meanings, crave them so intensely there is no possible way to count how many religions, folkloric systems, myth cycles, rituals, spiritual movements, schisms, pantheons, theocracies, and splinter sects this world has borne.
What I see in the story of the horse is a narrative, too. Of course it is. I am a slow monkey. Narrative is what I do, the way a horse runs. One breath, one story. There is a place for God in it, if you want there to be.
Because what’s crazy, beautiful, fascinating to me, what genuinely strikes awe in my heart, is not that horses evolved such a jumbled-up chaotic mess that almost accidentally proved to be perfectly spectacular at one specific thing. It’s the part of the conversation that almost always goes unsaid, assumed to be understood: evolution requires mutation to exist within the group to begin with.
It’s such a basic thing. The fittest cannot survive if something new does not arise to prove it’s more fit than the old way.
Let’s do rabbits this time.
Prehistoric rabbits, as far as we can tell, came up in Mongolia, which, fiftyish million years ago, was full of humid, dense forests teeming with Eminently Chompable fuzzy critters, (some of which eventually decided: nah, fuck toes), mostly brown and grey, probably striped or mottled to hide from predators, with a rapid reproductive cycle and monster-truck hind legs—and even this sentence is almost impossible to construct without language that implies intent and purpose. As these animals spread out, they encountered new environments with new pressures and new Chompers, yada, yada, yada, eventually we have whole regions full of harsh winters and brown rabbits who excel at hiding in the forest turned into white rabbits who excel at hiding in the snow.
When we talk about this, we usually say something like rabbits evolved to survive in their new environment. But that’s all wrong. It makes it sound like it all happened at the same time. Even the beginning of the thing paints a picture that strongly implies rabbits just fucking appeared out of a Mongolian hat 55 million years ago. They didn’t, there were all kinds of rabbit-adjacent beasties screwing and Chomping and, well, probably very little else. It’s very hard to casually construct a way to talk about changes in a huge population that took millions of years without making it sound like it was a sensible, instant response to immediate surroundings, like a great lot of brown rabbits turned to each other and said: get out the winter gear, lads, earth tones are so last era. Like all the brown rabbits who made it to the cold bits turned white because of the snow.
But brown rabbits don’t turn white because of the snow. They don’t turn white at all. What they do is Get Chomped, regularly, with relish, by diresnowleopards and direwolves and direpolarbears (which are just normal modern polar bears) and direpeople. For generations. Then, eventually, a brown rabbit will have a white kit. One did, obviously. More than one. Not because that was the logical thing for Mr. and Mrs. DNA to try out, given the circumstances, but because any large enough set of consistently combining and recombining genes will produce mutations. Broken chromosomes. Extra, or too few. Incomplete dominance. epigenetic factors and plain old background environmental radiation mucking with the amino acid chains to leave a hanging chad where the melanin-producing sequence was supposed to go.
And it’s not like as soon as Lil Blendy Bunny turned up in Snowburrow, all the other rabbits saw the light and/or succumbed to peer pressure. They just kept dying, and the rabbit that could hide didn’t, so she had way more babies than the rest of her mom group. Nor was white the only available adaptation option. There were probably others popping up all the time, and the great tragedy of that is, yes, more dead bunnies, but also that no camera existed to show us the one purple rabbit who looked glorious while getting immediately devoured by a bear. Mutation has to be happening all the time for there to be enough variation for any given trait to have a chance to prove more or less suited to survival.
And we don’t think about any of that most of the time. We just say they turned white. Or the white butterflies in Industrial London “turned” black because of the smog. No, they did not. But somehow, a black butterfly was born among all the other combinations of things a butterfly could be, and that one fucking crushed it.
For awhile.
Until it didn’t.
See, this is why I’ve never understood the religious objection to evolution. Instead of rejecting the simple idea that “things change over time,” this is always where the devout should see the hand of God at work. That first white rabbit recombining its parents DNA, parents that chose each other out of all the other bunnies, without enough sentience to ever understand attraction as a concept, or plan for much of anything at all, yet each carried the recessive genes, or maybe just unstable genes with the potential for unusual expression, and producing the future.
Of course, some mutations are catastrophic dead-ends, or just slightly less workable. And some occur, but the X-Man of butterflies or rabbits or horses got Chomped as a helpless baby, or maybe just couldn’t find butterfly-rabbit-horse love in this world. Mutations are blessings and curses, and until they get tossed onto the testing floor onto the ecosystem, it’s rarely clear which is which in the long-run. Yeah, the white rabbits do wonderfully in the winter, but in the summer, when the tundra blooms, they stick out a hell of a lot more to predators.
If we’re talking stoats instead of rabbits, the story I love best begins to come into focus. Given this problem of seasonal fashion, over time, just because so many of them are mixing genes, a baby stoat is born that sheds its fur and grows a different color for each season. Astonishing adaptation, almost a superpower. But then—a couple of million years later, that same superstoat’s halfway stage, as the dark spots are coming in at the end of winter, is so striking to some slow monkeys that they make ermine a symbol of the highest royalty. Which endangered the entire species, because everyone wants to look like a king.
Blessings and curses.
Even wilder than that, sometimes mutation has nothing to do with the parents particularly, just with living within range of a star whose light is radioactive enough to get really loose when it parties with DNA and RNA. Just plain unremarkable (except it is, it is beyond remarkable) sunlight is lightly mutagenic. UV radiation. Aside from poking us in the helix the whole drive here, it causes all kinds of variegation in plants. Variegation in plants can produce all kinds of changes in animals that Chomp them. We learn in kindergarten that flamingoes aren’t pink, they’re white, but they eat a combination of algae, and tiny shrimp that feed on that algae, that contains so much red pigment they turn pink and are famous for a trait they don’t even possess. It’s not even particularly advantageous, just beautiful. Sometimes nature does select for beauty. Sometimes for pain. Sometimes just for tomorrow.
It’s all such a beautiful system, the way it interlocks and teaches itself. (There’s that language of intent again.) Even horses with storms for blood running so fast on single massive toes that they carry an entirely separate species into agriculture, technology, conquest—and ultimately into space as that other species works to replace literal horsepower with something more efficient and controllable. A lot of early human history turned on whether or not people were born in a part of the world that had, or did not have, horses and other domesticable animals.
Without the sheer strength and speed of horses, which comes from their incredibly fucked-up oversized bindle of free-floating organs, bird bones, power toenails, and internal screaming, I don’t think humans get as far, as fast, as we have. We’re slow, our bodies are dumb and maladapted in their own ways, because mutations are common, but the whole system doesn’t mutate at once. You get new fur, or new ears maybe, and that gets passed down or doesn’t, but it all has to come from the original species blueprint, a brown rabbit doesn’t give birth to a white cat. That’s how we get so many different ways for a living body to be totally insane on this planet, except for whatever it’s unreasonably good at.
We’re unreasonably good at fine motor control, endurance, and, though you wouldn’t know it sometimes, communication. Okay at long-term planning. But our feet are worse than horses’, our reproduction is a violent clownshow, and every part of us cannot fucking wait to get cancer.
So, if horses hadn’t been fast bags of unstable guts balanced on mutant toenails with constantly breaking bones, failing lungs, tentacle-intestines, and priapism, would we have been quite as motivated to replace them? Would we be less far along than we are?
I’ll raise you another fact: in 1816, Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia, and its ash coated the planet in a temporary nuclear winter. It was called the Year Without a Summer, and it did what it says on the tin. Many, many things changed because of the ripples caused by one cheeky volcano, not the least of which was the invention of the genre I hold so dear—science fiction, because it was too cold and awful that summer in Switzerland for Mary Shelley and her husband’s dirtbag friends to play outside. It was so cold for so long, crops failed all over the world, and starving horses, with their digestive systems designed by the Joker, died in the street everywhere, and the need for something that wouldn’t give up if the seasons broke drastically propelled forward research into what would become the horseless carriage. Then the internal combustion engine. And things began to mutate very quickly from there.
Horse bodies being ridiculous got us, by a lot of sideroads, to the moon.
That’s a miracle if I ever heard one.
But it’s not a miracle. Probably not, anyway. It’s mutation, chaos, ripples, a system that involves, by definition, much Chomping and Being Chomped. Much blood. Much death. Much of the opposite of survival, and there is no moral value in being or not being the fittest, just chance.
Part of me does want to see intent in this, agency, a gently inexorable arc toward the Right Configuration. That humans evolved on a world where willow trees also evolved, whose bark fixes our headaches. Where poppies evolved, whose seeds can take all pain away, but at a cost. Where mushrooms evolved that can heal our sadness and make us taste colors. The way that mutation mostly requires connection to occur, and when it doesn’t, it still requires one creature connecting with another for it to keep going. I want to see something more in how lovely that is. How it all fits. How it feels elegant.
But then you have to remember the horse choking on its dancing intestines while trying to outrun its own panicboner on four massive toenails. Elegant doesn’t come into the thing.
The rest of me? Thinks it’s so much more beautiful if it’s just a goddamned mess. Everything we’ve ever known is so unlikely, and took so long, and is still evolving, still mutating. New mutations are occurring all the time, right now, babies born of all species with some tiny thing tweaked, a blessing, a curse, neither, both. How astonishingly precious and gorgeous, that all this can be, careening through the vacuum of space faster than horse-blood, faster than a volcano’s gasp.
It’s the mutants that make the future. That make tomorrow. Not all of them, and they suffer for it, whether they’ve got the golden ticket to NoChompTown or not. The one willow tree left out of all the willow games because its bark smelled funny. The magical color-changing stoat none of the other stoats trusted because how can you trust someone who changes their skin all the time?
I am anthropomorphizing. Of course I am. At least the willow trees. Even animals tend to distrust those who look or smell or behave differently from the pack. And we slow monkeys are worse about that than any brown bunny or white butterfly could dream on their worst day.
So when you are suffering because you are different, because some combination of your genes or your environment made a variation in you, advantageous or disadvantageous or not particularly either, just Bruce turning up pink today and all the other not-pink flamingoes getting in their feelings about it, and the other slow monkeys are doing what slow monkeys have always done better than anything, which is to be mean as hell most of the time, just think about horses and how weird their feet are. Unicorns were always real—they just have four horns, and they wear them on their toes. That’s you, too, a unicorn nobody ever noticed being a fucking unicorn because it didn’t look like what they expected.
The unexpected is the only divinity I know. The only fate. Mutation. Change. Chance. You. Me. Blessings. Curses. Tomorrow.
It seems to me that if there is even the barest whisper of intent moving through this heart-beggaring majesty of a world, the mutants are what that world loves best. What it chooses to push the system as a whole just a little farther, a little faster, a little easier, a little kinder, in the snow where we can hide, on the plains where we can run. There is no possible way to stop mutation, to stop change, to arrive at an achieved destiny where no variation occurs again. They will try, but those who do are consistently unhappy, because they fail and fail again. One of these things is always, always not like the others, and that one is how you go from a dinosaur to Mary Shelley, from Mary Shelley to the moon, and from the moon to whatever comes next.
On horseback.
Comments
Molly McEnerney
Of course, rhinoceroses are also odd-toed ungulates, and they are unicorns, although some species have more than one horn, and some ancient species had no horns. Human love for horses and awe of rhinoceroses and other mysterious beasts, such as narwhals, intertwine and recombine in story and art until we get the glorious era of the unicorn posters of the late 70s and early 80s. Even if that poster-model form of unicorn is terrible at even existing at all, it still has the power to guide human cultural development in many traceable and untraceable ways.
Vladimir Barash
Love it :) The elegance thing reminds me of complex systems science, which I studied a bit. Complex systems science tries to understands why these kinds of elegances arise in essentially random systems like evolution -- and sometimes succeeds with math! But the overall lessons of that science are that a) there is a lot we don't understand and b) underlying it all is randomness. Just as you say, the causal logic of Make Evolution Do X absolutely doesn't work with complex systems. You can get them to tweak their behavior, but in no direct, causal ways -- and, if you try to do the direct causal thing, it often comes out horrible. Getting rivers to flow backwards, etc. And, as a social scientist, I am keenly aware that the same law applies to social systems. They are ridiculously random things that somehow have evolved into order and constitutions and the Arab Spring, and forcing human society to do a thing in a direct causal way... well, we all know how that turns out.
