Spurred

"... dishonesty has often been the file against which intellectual tools for truth have been sharpened."

- Robert Trivers, Folly of Fools

This resonates quite deeply with my belief that all the good things come only after bad ones. Structure arises after chaos. Emotions of love arise to combat partner desertion. Feelings of loyalty develop to prevent group disunity. I'd intended to write on this for a year on already but never really got down to it. Reading Trivers's latest book gives me much needed motivation to get stuck back in it.


In another part of his introduction, he writes:

Deception within species is expected in almost all relationships, and deception possesses special powers. It always takes the lead in life, while detection of deception plays catch up. As has been said regarding rumors, the lie is halfway around the world before the truth puts its boots on. When a new deception shows up in nature, it starts rare in a world that often lacks a proper defense. As it increases in frequency, it selects for such defenses in the victim, so that eventually its spread will be halted by the appearance and spread of countermoves, but new defenses can always be bypassed and new tricks invented.

Truth—or, at least, truth detection—has been pushed back steadily over time by the propagation of deception. It always amazes me to hear some economists say that the costs of deceptive excesses in our economy (including white-collar crime) will naturally be checked by market forces. Why should the human species be immune to the general rule that where natural selection for deception is strong, deception can be selected that extracts a substantial net cost (in survival and reproduction) every generation? Certainly there is no collective force against this deception, only the relatively slow generation and evolution of counterstrategies. These lines were written in 2006, two years before the financial collapse that resulted from such practices and beliefs. I know nothing about economics and—from evolutionary logic—could not have predicted a thing about the collapse of 2008, but I have disagreed for thirty years with an alleged science called economics that has resolutely failed to ground itself in underlying knowledge, at a cost to all of us.

While I might at times be slightly more sympathetic to the value of economics as a prescriptive tool, I think Trivers couldn't have put it better. There is no underlying theoretical basis for its science either than the outdated assumption that man is rational (assumed to be equally, and on the basis of prices), and I absolutely do not believe that market forces actually help resolve economic crises. The turn to market forces to solve economic problems is an absolute cop-out.

My First Plant - The Venus Fly Trap

Against the superstition of my parents, I got myself a venus fly trap from Takashimaya Cold Storage two days ago! (I used to own a typical female tree lizard when I was 11 years old and had to release it into the wild when my mum became pregnant with my brother because it was 'inauspicious'.) Why only now? Because I had never seen it sold anywhere else around Singapore before. This is officially the first plant I have ever owned, and as an evolution and natural design junkie this is probably THE plant to own.

Costing a silly $28.50, the venus fly trap has always been a childhood fascination for the simple fact that it is a very different kind of plant, which makes it cool. It doesn't just sit around, immobile, settling for bland water. It lures, seduces, attracts and kills, which means it has personal tastes and an appetite. Awesome.

You can read up all about it at HowStuffWorks, but in a nutshell the venus fly trap is an ode to evolution. It is native to the coast of North and South Carolina, because of the abundance of wetlands and humidity. Most plants can't survive in these areas because the soil is acidic, and minerals and other nutrients (which are necessary building blocks for plant growth) are scarce. The venus fly trap has evolved the ability to thrive by finding an alternate means of getting key nutrients such as nitrogen via living creatures like insects which also contain additional energy-laden carbohydrates.

As a result of trying to own a venus fly trap outside of its natural wild habitat, my venus fly trap is quite a baby for the care it requires. In order to mimic its natural conditions, distilled or rain water is needed as it cannot survive off tap water that is treated with unnatural chemicals. The dissolved solids in tap water - sodium, calcium, alkaline salts, sulphur, chlorine and magnesium - are detrimental to its health. My brother and I had quite a bit of fun trying to distill our own pure water, using a trick I learnt from the survival tip on how to extract drinking water from sea water (click here for another variant of this trick that can be done at home). Other simple, practical and readily available sources of pure distilled water include condensed water from air conditioners and car battery water.

The venus fly trap may survive without eating prey, but it certainly flourishes when it has nutritious food sources. So, if the venus fly trap is not located in the wild, feeding must be manually done. Good food includes flies, spiders, crickets, slugs and caterpillars within the length of 1/3 an inch (one inch being the size of an average trap). 2-3 bugs a month constitutes a healthy diet.

In the absence of a brain and animal perception, the venus fly trap accomplishes its task of capturing prey through specialized leaves that are both mouth and stomach in one. The leaves forming the trap secrete a sweet nectar that attract insects in search of food. It's a very interesting process but gets a little bit scientifically technical from here on, so a copy and paste from the HowStuffWorks page will have to do:

"When an insect enters the trap, it is likely to run into one of six, short, stiff hairs on the trap's surface. These are called trigger hairs, and they serve as a primitive motion detector for the plant. If two of these hairs are brushed in close succession, or one hair is touched twice, the leaves close down upon the offending insect within half a second.

What causes the leaves to squeeze shut? Nobody knows exactly how the sequential, mechanical stimulation of the trigger hairs translates into closing the trap. The prevailing hypothesis of the day is that:

1. Cells in an inner layer of the leaf are very compressed. This creates tension in the plant tissue that holds the trap open.
2. Mechanical movement of the trigger hairs puts into motion ATP-driven changes in water pressure within these cells.
3. The cells are driven to expand by the increasing water pressure, and the trap closes as the plant tissue relaxes."

The plant is thus capable of "distinguishing" between prey and inedible debris according to whether more than one trigger hair is touched. The food selection process may not be perfect (because real food in the form of flies and spiders may be crawling all around the plant, but the fly trap may be closed shut over something useless such as a leaf or twig), but this simple strategy has allowed it to do without muscles or a brain, which are very costly organs and tissues to sustain.

The digesting process is also very remarkable. Once the trap fully closes, the leaves form an airtight seal through long hair-like projections known as cilia so that digestive fluids and insect parts are kept inside the trap and bacteria and molds cannot enter. The finger-like cilia create the awesome impression of spiny teeth that has captured the imagination of monster-plant story spinners, but they are really only used to keep the trap latched shut.

Sometimes, a trap does not close shut and as a result may suffer from a bacterial infection, rot and fall away. The venus fly trap can tolerate losing traps because it can eventually sprout new ones. However, beyond this, the venus fly trap is also capable of losing traps "strategically" through "planned obsolescence", and this is one of its most amazing characteristics to me. When a trap runs its course of about 10 to 12 closures, it loses the ability to capture anything. The leaves of a trap remain spread wide open and it then devotes all its energy to the process of photosynthesis for the remainder of its life span, usually around 2 to 3 months. This former trap thus no longer goes through the ritual of attracting insects and eating them. In a purely evolutionary sense, this is somewhat similar to how menopausal mammals contribute to their social groups. This way, if a trap is repeatedly stimulated by inedible objects either because it is incompetent or poorly located, the rest of the plant can recoup some of the energy and ATP lost on its inefficient trap and make it focus instead solely on photosynthesis.

Once the insect is firmly gripped by the trap, a process of digestion begins. The trap secretes acidic digestive juices that dissolve the soft tissues and cell membranes of the food, serve as an antiseptic to kill bacteria and enzymatically digest DNA, amino acids and other cellular molecules into small pieces that can be eventually ingested by the plant. The process continues until only the hard exoskeleton of the prey remains. Once the prey's nutrients are depleted, the plant reabsorbs the digestive fluid. This serves as a signal to reopen the trap, and the prey's remains are left behind. In natural conditions, wind and rain water helps to remove the remains but, indoors, I'll have to manually remove them for my plant.

As this is my maiden attempt, I'm not certain of my ability to keep my venus fly trap alive. But I'll give it a shot. Most plants hardly pique my interest but this high-maintenance creature certainly is a beauty!

Evolution Of Pure Things

Recently I observed a discussion on friendship. Person E said that friendship is an involuntary reflex - it just happens and you can't help it. To this, person D, a budding introduction to evolutionary psychology student, responded that evolutionary psychology will say otherwise - that friendship is not involuntary.

There is a very subtle jump that people often either make or don't make, and that is to decide if something, once reduced into quantifiable packets, can still be regarded as pure (as in that thing's original form).

Take friendship, for instance. In order to study the psychology of friendship, we have to dissect it into parts, such as self-interest, reciprocation, wants, emotional closeness, need for cooperation, love and affection, etc (See, for instance, Karen Karbo's article Friendship: The Laws of Attraction on Psychology Today). The moment it becomes split into parts in a reductionary manner, the reduction can further continue - what environmental factors or evolutionary pressures led to the rise of each of these necessary constituent parts?

At this point, I think the tricky part arises. If we can divide a seemingly pure, ideal, honest and 'good' concept like friendship into parts, does that make it 'less' pure? Some people believe it still retains its original purity (like me), while others do not think so, and many people who dislike or have an aversion to reductionist thinking, technical science or evolution generally fall into this group.

I think that is entirely valid, because how you see this issue is dependent on how you see the world, how you want to lead your life, what is important to you, and whether beauty, perfection or purity can be allowed to fall apart whilst still retaining its original Form.

On the other hand, I tend to (rationally) stand on the side of reductionism because firstly that's the only way concepts and constructs can be studied in a scientifically meaningful manner, and secondly because I also strongly believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Each isolated element that comes from a bigger, more general concept, is certainly 'cheap'. But when everything comes together, such as a perfect combination of cheap and fluid elements like self-interest, the need for empathy, emotional bonding and cooperation (amongst many other factors), something as wonderful as friendship can arise.

(I stand on the reductionist side cautiously though, because I do know that studying big concepts wholistically, rather than broken down, also has immense value, particularly in art. This beauty element can very rarely be captured by science.)

So, going back at the original discussion between E and D, I chimed in by disagreeing with D, stating that evolutionary psychology doesn't actually say that friendship is not involuntary. The knee-jerk reaction from D, possibly coming from a perspective that says that 'things which are reducible are no longer pure', retorted by saying that evolutionary psychology asserts that friendship evolves under specific conditions, so therefore it is a non-altruistic choice. To which I replied, "I think the argument is more nuanced - it evolves under specific conditions to become an instinct, which is why friendship is indeed an involuntary reflex."

This goes for many other things that people often regard as pure and altruistic human behaviour, such as love, kindness and altruism. To think that these emotions arise out of a vacuum tells us very little about our place in the natural order of things, and such beliefs also do not account for why different people have these emotional capacities in varying degrees, or how come sometimes we demonstrate them and sometimes we don't. I certainly gain much less from "he's very unhelpful because he's a bad person" than "he's very unhelpful because he tends to shy away emotionally from people and does not trust that people will reciprocate." Evolutionary thinking will then provide the necessary precedent for why reciprocation is an important factor that gives rise to helpfulness and other prosocial behaviours.

Once these elements are in place, we have adapted possibly to serve some important need that the environment calls/called for. The adaptation becomes an instinct, which is why we feel as if friendship is involuntary and can't be helped. And indeed, it can't. When we feel drawn to people, the constituent parts that academics, researchers and scholars ponder about and tinker around with do not matter anymore - we hardly even think about them (which is the beauty of an instinct). Evolutionary pressures from constituent parts drove the stable formation of friendship psychology in humans, and then we experience it whether we know why or not, and the more we do not question it, the more efficiently it'll work. If A has the tendency to question/calculate his friendship with B, A probably isn't really friends with B.

On a slightly separate but relevant note, this TED talk by Dennis Dutton covers quite nicely how the appreciation of beauty is hardwired in our psychology, and clues to this exist in a universal appreciation of beauty across diverse cultures.

Geek Crack

As recommended by my evolutionary psychology professor,

1. You Can't See Me
2. Hypothesis 1 (Creationism)
3. No Bugs On Me
4. David Buss Message
5. Hypothesis 2 (Spiritualism)
6. The Planter's Dilemma
7. Hypothesis 3 (Social Constructivism)
8. She's Ovulating
9. Short-Term Mating Dance
10. Parental Investment
11. The Evolution of Gayness
12. Olivia Judson Message
13. Hypothesis 4 (Biological Determinism)
14. Twin Studies
15. GOCASE
16. Wannabe G's
17. Hypothesis 5 (Evolutionism)
18. David Sloan Wilson Message
19. Fame in the Brain

http://bababrinkman.bandcamp.com/track/you-cant-see-me

Pretty much in the mould of Big Bang Theory-esque entertainment.

What Good Is Half A Wing?

I've read arguments against evolution saying that it is hard to imagine an incremental development of species over time. Arguments as such often culminate into "what good is half a wing" kind of statements. The criticism is intuitive: it is hard to imagine, if wings developed over time from skin to a flap of hide to a full-blown wing, little by little, what good half a wing or one-eighth of a wing would be.

The basic counterargument sounds somewhat silly only because it is an answer addressed to an almost inane question. One can imagine that perhaps half a wing enabled its user to jump higher or float when descending down tall heights, aiding it some way or other in survival. However, what is more important that needs to be addressed is the nature of the assumption that half a wing is useless, because what makes one so sure right now that the standard wing model we see is a full wing? Thousands of years later the wing might develop into something else that enables much more advanced aerial navigation perhaps, and maybe then 'intelligent' but pompous life forms might be wondering what on earth these creatures could have done with 'half a wing', which is what we have today.

Additionally, to think that something is inconceivable simply because one 'can't imagine it' is simply bad science. Biological and physiological organs and functions do not exist for aesthetic reasons, and if anything it is the job of the scientist to 'imagine' what good that adapted object has/had that made it suited to survival at one time or other. Scientific progress hinges on this.

Self-Serving Bias

It is a concretely-established psychological 'fact' that we tend to commit the self-serving bias: when we do something good, we tend to believe that it is dispositional - it is our personality, character and skill that resulted in the good we did, and if we do something bad, we tend to attribute it to the situation - we were unlucky, or the situation was simply not in our favour.

Research has generally shown that this bias exists because of three main reasons. It could be motivational, as people create causal justifications that preserve their self-esteem and make themselves feel better. It could be a form of impression management, as engaging in self-serving biasness leads others to think more favourably of us. Yet another reason looks at the cognitive - the basic mechanism of memory may be geared such that people recall how their dispositions lead to success and how their situational environments lead to failure more easily than vice versa.

In exercising my penchant for evolutionary and adaptive thinking, none of these explanations are sufficiently satisfactory, as they merely brush the surface about how the psychology plays out but do not consider how and why it has come to exist. Why on earth do we indulge in the simple act of self-praise, with the reverse implication of committing the fundamental attribution error on others when they fail (i.e. we think they are dispositionally to blame for their failures)?

In brief, the idea simply is that the self-serving bias allows those who engage in it to have access to future opportunities at proving their worth. By attributing your successes to yourself instead of, say, luck, others are more likely to count on you in future because they are more willing to rely on you to do what you just successfully did. You will then be less likely challenged, as competitors will be discouraged to take you on. This increases your power and leverage over that particular task which incrementally adds to your worth on the whole, which has always been important to survival regardless of whether we're hunter-gatherers or people living in a modern world. As we all (should) know, power is the means to access to mates which is the means to gene-propagation. The self-serving bias in times of failure also proves to be a very useful tool to mitigate loss of power. In attributing your failure to being unlucky - the circumstances were simply not good, your professor disliked you and denied you your A - you will dampen the perception of your incompetence, thereby increasing your chance at opportunities to prove your worth again in future.

The clincher is this - this hardly has to play out consciously at all. The self-serving bias appears not to be a learned tendency which, in my opinion, discredits the motivational and impression management explanations as causal reasons for its existence. The fact that very young children start engaging in the self-serving bias the moment they can make coherent decisions and justifications shows that we could very well be instinctively wired with this survival tool at our disposal and the more unconscious we are of our usage of this tool, the better we are at 'deceiving' ourselves and convincing others to give us yet another shot. This points to an innate design of human nature that has evolved over a long time, such that those endowed with the tendency to use the self-serving bias prevail over those who don't or are simply not equipped.

Admittedly, these thoughts spun through my head while I was finally getting my lazy ass out to run. Even though the distance was solid, I stopped and walked three times which is really poor running form compared to myself in the past, and - there you guessed it - I was drowning in self-serving thoughts as to why I couldn't sustain my pacing. A little self-awareness goes a long way.

Of Lizards, Ghosts And Darwin

Sometimes, when I'm a hungry ghost, I stumble around my living room in the dark at night because I'm too lazy to turn on the lights and fumble around for food - perhaps a cereal box, or potato chips or any other random grub I can get my hands on. And sometimes, in the process of my doing so, I inadvertently grab house lizards as well.

It usually just feels like a thick rubber band on my cereal box at first. But then the rubber band starts to 'spin' violently, as if someone had rolled it up and suddenly stretched it so that it unravels in its rubber-bandy kinda way.

Anyone who has tried to catch a house lizard will tell you it is actually darn hard to catch one under normal circumstances. But I have ironically managed to grab hold of lizards on more occasions than one by not even trying, which is just stupid and often very irritating. Sometimes, even though I don't make a sound, I react like a girl in my head and drop whatever else I was holding along with the lizard in surprise at the desperately flailing rubbery creature.

But anyway that was all just a digression. What I really wanted to say is that interestingly, house lizards don't seem to shed their tails anymore. They've always been known to drop their tails in the face of danger so as to throw potential predators off with the decoy tail while they make their hasty getaways. However, that never seems to happen anymore. Whenever I attempt to catch house lizards, or when I do grab them by accident, all they do is squirm and run, ditto tail-ditching.

Am I seeing evolution in the process? Are house lizards learning that the threat from which it used to evade by losing the tail is no longer there? Are birds and other predators that eat house lizards being replaced as threats by humans, who really don't bother with house lizards anymore? Is the energy deficiency from losing a tail outweighing the benefits gained from doing so?

Anyway, I can also see how a term like 'hungry ghost' can come about to describe people foraging in the dark for food. You're really just wandering rather aimlessly save for the ultimate goal, or even mere hope, of finding something to munch on, with a serious lack of visual capability.

I should really just go to sleep.



Audio Candy:
Anberlin - Glass To The Arson

Rise And Fall

I'm celebrating my reunion dinner today, a full week in advance from the actual day because tradition, once again, doesn't hold up to conveniences. My yearly reunion dinners are celebrated together with my extended family on my dad's side so it's a huge group. On the actual day, we'd be fighting the crowds and higher prices, in addition to being much busier doing Chinese New Year preparations closer to the day, so everyone figured that they'd be better off just coming together on an alternate day instead. Why not?

I've nothing against having my reunion dinner away from the actual date, my weak belief in this whole festival notwithstanding, but on an academic note I think this again shows that, somewhere between the adages that change is the only constant and that modernity has no room for tradition, we seem to have a natural social programming to gravitate away from saturated or expired practices; 'saturated' and 'expired' only so defined by the people of the age they own.

No one can say for sure that traditional Catholic axioms are absolute truths, that making it back on the actual day religiously for reunion dinner every year is the best way to preserve the family, that refraining from the television makes one a better person. But neither can anyone say for a fact that such thoughts or practices are outdated. Human nature doesn't provide the intelligence to discern whether moving in a certain direction ultimately leads to a demise for our species. For now, living in an information and internet technology-intense era just redefines what the masses believe should be the right way to live.

There is hardly a right or wrong here when the majority intends to ostracise and ultimately condemn and eliminate minority or dying practices. At the very basis of social human behaviour, people will instinctively frown upon acts that do not go with the flow. Even more deep-seated than that, when one considers Gestalt psychology, people naturally group even black squares and blue circles according to what makes it look most convenient to describe. When practices are perceived as obstacles, then people will evolve by changing those practices or ditching them. We are innately wired to deny those we perceive as deviant and as we move along the chain reaction from the mind to society at large, sometimes it really comes as no surprise when age-old practices are compromised to make way for convenience and efficiency, often euphemised with a seemingly innocent "why not?" by unknowing revolutionists while blasted as a blasphemous indecency by the generation we are leaving behind.




With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

- Charles Darwin

Audio Candy:
I See Stars - Save The Cheerleader

This was the bored-during-econs random doodle.


And this I just did earlier today, to kickstart a summer of pencil drawings and hard-line sketches. Too bad that's the largest size I can manage to upload on blogger.

Sorry to all tank junkies out there (read: Richard. Hahar), but I have no idea what tank model this is. It's an old lighter that doesn't work anymore actually.

Rachel had these to say of my presence in school today:
1) You came all the way to school just to gym?
2) Draw that (the tank) for what?

It kinda sums up what I get from alotta people anyway. School gym's free, it's actually a lot better than most other gyms, and you get to meet people you know there. And it's location is pretty convenient - both in terms of being not too far and it being situated in town.

I don't think I need a reason to draw other than personal passion and interest, as much as people don't need a practical reason to bake, or shop, or read, or pursue any other seemingly pointless activity.

The results are coming in little by little:

Creative Thinking: B-
BGS: B+
Political Science: B+

Political science is the best result so far. It's somewhat miraculous I think, though I have no idea what the breakdown is yet due to technical problems, because I've always been doing shittily for my quizzes, often can't grasp the concept of the readings as easily as others can (though I guess I got a hang of it towards the end), and messed up the mid terms with that 4/10 result. I felt it was quite downhill like the way it was for me last term with sociology, which I eventually got a C+ for.

But I did have faith in my term paper - Is Democracy a Universal Value? - and felt confident of sorts after the finals. So maybe it was because of those. I really thought political science was gonna be a goner.

I guess maybe I deserved the B+ grade for BGS the way I treated the final paper (my 45min stunt). But I had much higher hopes for this one.

B- for creative thinking is totally bullshit. If I made it big some day with my creative ability, that'd be the best present to jack Goh Ban Eng with. I don't need a crappy creative thinking class to tell me that someone supposedly important thinks I'm not creative enough. I suppose there's quite a bit of irony in it though, the way we were preaching about creativity only being acceptable within the context of the situation with our group presentation, when we weren't being creative within the criteria set by her.

Make no mistake, this is not another mediocre-grade complaint. I don't have to get over the mediocrity because I'm not bothered by it to begin with. As Farhan put it perfectly, "why is everyone complaining about their freaking grades? ZOMG. If you're dumb, suck it up! Do better next time."

My surfing foray found this snippet of interesting news that the diet of a pregnant mother can determine the gender of the unborn child. Briefly, the higher the energy level of the intake (i.e. the better the diet), the more likely the child will be a boy. What fascinated me was the evolutionary interpretation of the results. This, the scientists say, is in line with the theory of evolution as a 'natural mechanism' for gender selection because, "for most species, the number of offspring a male can father exceeds the number of offspring a female can give birth to. But this is so only if conditions are favorable - poor quality male specimens may fail to breed at all, whereas females reproduce more consistently."

This means that if times are good, resources are plentiful and conditions are favourable, it would evolutionarily be wiser to invest in the production of a son because he would, along the way, produce more children than a daughter would, in line with aiding the survival of his species. If times are bad, males are of less use than females along the same logic of thought.

And if this is true, we're fucking it up because females in developed societies are increasingly consuming poorer diets (it's bad not because there are more females born, but because it tips the natural balance), and this is evidential and consistent with "a very gradual shift in favour of girls over the last four decades in the sex ratio of newborns, according to the researchers."

Always remember that you're unique, just like everyone else.

Audio Candy:
I Am Ghost - Lover's Requiem

Our Evolution Halt

With savages, the weak in body and mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands who, from a weak constitution, would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilised society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but, excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered in the manner previously indicated more tender and more widely diffused. Nor can we check our sympathy, even without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature ... We must, therefore, bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind.

- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Second edition, pp. 133-134, 1887.


I've always had the profound belief that humans will never be able to evolve. The above as stated by Charles Darwin is one agency by which humans are eradicating the means to undergo some raw basis of natural selection.

Another thought takes root from the fact that we owe our lives to technology. Compared to any other living beings, humans alter the environment so much more such that our need to evolve on the grounds of adaptation to natural conditions is compromised. While other animals evolve to suit the harsh changes of their surroundings, humans have the intellect to manipulate habitats.

Our propensity to mess nature up has reverberated in so many ways and are coming back to haunt us, most noticeably in the form of global warming - it's as if Nature herself is recoiling from the accumulated cheap shots to deliver a sucker punch. Through our minds, we bear the brainchild of technology that is so conflicting with nature that we are distancing ourselves as sentient members of a beautiful ecosystem. In cushioning the weak and, in turn, allowing the weak to propagate as mentioned elegantly by Darwin, we are further contributing to our intrinsic deterioration as creatures of nature. It's no surprise then if we are dealt with an inherent blow in the form of us permanently afflicting our very own natural means of survival as a species when we lose the ability to adapt, evolve and survive.

No matter how I look at it, when we are placed side by side with the cockroaches, cheetahs, marlins and ferns of the world, we are lagging far behind. Simply thinking of the many varieties of cat species sends a shiver of excitement down my spine because it is just like running through a catalogue of prototypes designed to maximise killer abilities for the sake of survival - lions for their strength, cheetahs for their speed. Their bone structures are detail-perfect and their senses are sharpened. And the lowly cockroach is an evolutionary genius. A cockroach can survive decapitation for a very long period (up to weeks) until it dies of hunger. Cockroaches are among the hardiest insects on the planet, some species capable of remaining active for a month without food, or being able to survive on limited resources like glue from the back of postage stamps. Some can go without air for 45 minutes or slow down their heart rate. It has been popularly suggested that cockroaches will 'inherit the earth' if humanity destroys itself in a nuclear war, and cockroaches do indeed have a much higher radiation resistance than vertebrates, with the lethal dose perhaps 6 to 15 times that for humans. Cockroaches have practically been conceived, formatted and devised purely to rough it out and survive no matter what. Stripped of the safety net of technology, we are in a relegation zone battle to avoid joining the ranks of the dodos.

If one day nature throws a trump card that our technology can't catch up with, then I suppose our extinction is quite imminent.




The Religious Right aren't, and Scientific Creationism isn't.

Audio Candy:
Firehouse - Love Of A Lifetime