"A message parrot," Dr. Barlow said. "Based on the Congo African Grey. We've been training it especially for this trip. It can read airmen's uniforms and gondola markings, just like a proper Service lizard."
"Training it, ma'am?" Deryn frowned. "But I thought this Constantinople business came up all of a sudden."
"Indeed, things are moving more quickly than expected." Dr. Barlow lay one hand on the mysterious box. "But some of us have been planning this mission for years."
Deryn gave the box another wary glance, then turned to watch the parrot. It flapped through the ropes and guidelines, straight into the open windows of the bridge.
"That's brilliant, ma'am. It's like a flying message lizard!" (Westerfield, 160)
"They have many of the same life threads," Dr. Barlow said. "In fact, some of us believe that birds share ancestors with the ancient lizards..."
Here, Deryn just noticed Dr. Barlow use a parrot to send a message to the captain, just like how their military uses message lizards to transmit messages. She questions the parrot being used as a messenger and learns that the parrot was trained to essentially be like a message lizard, but with the capabilities of flight. Part of the reason that it was able to be trained to be like that is due to the connection that birds share with lizards from long ago.
It would be interesting to develop traits in animals and even in ourselves that have been lost due to the way inheritance works. We could have the dexterity to swing from vine to vine in the jungles, or even have the ability to make flying squirrels. Zoos would probably be a lot more interesting if they could train animals to regain their lost characteristics. Lizards could start imitating speech, or start flying. Ostriches could have necks as long as giraffes. The number of possibilities would be endless, and it would definitely make going to a zoo more interesting and varied.
The passage makes a point that even different species of animals can have much in common and even share ancestry, despite their looks or behavioral differences. Westerfield makes this point very explicitly; he uses an example of a parrot compared to that of a lizard and notes that birds like parrots and lizards once had a common ancestor way back in ancient times. The parrot being able to do the same duties as that of a message lizard does support the idea that the two are related way back in the past. The idea of a parrot even remotely related to that of a lizard makes us, the readers, reflect upon the objects, the animals, and the people we see every day and wonder if possibly they could also be related to each other as well in some way. For example, nobody would think that chocolate, one of life’s greatest delights for some people with a sweet tooth, is related to a seed. Being able to connect animals to long-lost traits is an advantage in promoting new usages. The Leviathan for example, serves both as an airplane for travel as well as a fighter for war.
The depiction of a future where animals can learn to adopt more favorable traits would seem to indicate that actually our society in the present day would face some sort of challenge that would force animals to adopt more favorable traits in order to survive as part of the Darwinist theory. Global warming and the Earth trying to adapt itself to the new climate changes would probably be the catalyst for such a change. On the other hand, it could just be that our present society is just developing at a much rapid rate than we think it’s developing, and that we can train ourselves and other animals to adopt favorable behavioral patterns.
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