The owl is the bird of wisdom. The lark the bird of song. Their images and the myths associated with them convey this. The owl moves slowly after dark, surveying, as it were, all that has happened during the day. Hence the famous comment of the German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel, that the owl of Minerva flies only after dusk. Wisdom always comes in train, after the owl has surveyed what has happened when the sun was in the sky. The lark, on the other hand, is the first to wake, catching as it always does the first light. It is eager not only to catch the worm, but to soar into the sky with its song. “Sing... like a lark who is learning to pray,” sang Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. The lark urges people to rouse themselves, to be happy and carefree; not for it the ponderous process of gathering knowledge and wisdom. It leaves that to the owl.

It was inevitable that these associations of the feathered world would be projected onto that of homo sapiens. Thus those who rise early and function better in the mornings are known as larks; and those who work better after sunset are called owls: the early bird and the night bird. (It needs to be pondered how and why human beings draw parallels from the animal world to classify and describe themselves. Recall the famous distinction between the hedgehog and the fox to distinguish between thinkers who know one big truth — the hedgehog, and those who run after many truths — the fox.) Human beings were happy with the simple division of the world between larks and owls. The early risers woke up in the morning bright and bushy-tailed, when their opposites were like bears with sore heads. At night, while some slept, the night birds burnt the midnight oil. This innocence has now been broken by science. Scientists have discovered that whether a man is a lark or an owl is actually genetically determined. It will be possible now to know through a simple test a human being’s predilections, that is, if he is an early bird or a night bird.

The implications of this are profound. Science since the 16th century has always worked to make its discoveries useful. Thus, when a man loves to wake up and when a man likes to go to sleep can be discovered to make that man more useful, or more productive. Night birds for night work since larks can make hay while the sun shines. Larks are not only up early, they also sing and are carefree. Owls are not quite like that. Will it soon be possible, then, to find out that some human beings are genetically programmed to have fun, while some others are to work hard and gather knowledge? If larks and owls are genetically determined, what happened before the arrival of electricity when most of the work had to be done when the sun was up? Was everyone a lark then? It would be quite a lark to think that the importance of the owl has a close link with the arrival of electricity.