Wednesday, June 07, 2006

here's something to think about


"You are a champion of champions,
genetically speaking, because you are

the product of an inconceivably
complex web of ancestors, spiraling back

for billions of years into the primordial
ooze, not a single individual of

which ever failed to grow to maturity
and beget viable offspring while

most other creatures around them,
including many of their brothers,

sisters, and cousins, faded away and
the majority eventually disappeared

forever into extinction. If your ancestors
hadn't been such top performers

that they were 100 percent successful
in procreation, your ancestral lines

of descent would be broken
and you could not exist."


--Guy Murchie, *The Seven Mysteries of Life*


1 comment:

David said...

But alas, we clever little people have worked hard with our civilization to undo all of evolution’s work. Beginning with the confluence of agriculture and the weakness we call compassion, those that Darwin’s rules saw as unfit lived-on. Then we threw another wrench into the grand order by coupling for love, arranging marriages, and creating social classes. It had all been working so well…