Spectator competition winners: Noël Coward on evolution

In Competition No. 3338 you were invited to submit an essay on the topic of evolution in the style of the writer of your choice.

In a top-notch entry, Basil Ransome-Davies’s twist on Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’, Janine Beacham’s Edgar Allan Poe and Russell Chamberlain’s imagining of Kipling’s final Just So story, How Every Creature Got All Its Characteristics, earn honourable mentions:

I have pondered in times numerous, as via fossils, skull to humerus,
how our ancestors developed through six million years or more –
and agreed with the solution, as per Darwin, evolution;
thus, the change from apelike primates to bipedal I’ll explore.
’Tis a tale of Homo sapiens, and all that came before – ages past the dinosaur.

As does Nicholas Stone’s W.S. Gilbert:

I am the very model of a modern Homo sapiens
Which is to say one shaped by many others’ quite unhappy ends
Who didn’t make it through and didn’t pass along their chromosomes
To wander down the ages with a knapsack as a roamer roams;

But the prizes are awarded to the winners below, who each pocket £30.

Ben Darwin was a naturalist,
Blew God to smithereens
When, looking though his denim trews,
He found some mutant genes!

Said Ben, ‘In time, we slowly change,
Though Churchmen get the jitters:
Our body’s engineers adapt –
The survival of the fitters!

‘It’s why my finches have new beaks,
Why a turkey has a wattle:
You cannot bottle out of genes –
The genie’s out the bottle!’

Said Nell, ‘It’s natural to select:
What cost not changing shape?’
Said Ben, ‘An ’ap’orth, if you please,
Each time that we go ape!’

Bill Greenwell/Thomas Hood