Evolution

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It's Friiiiday! The chill has finally caught up with the reddening trees. The past two days were colder than ever and there didn't seem to be heat in the house. I had to pad around in my black cotton pants, a t-shirt and my hoodie, instead of my usual semi-dressed state. I hope the landlord didn't decide to turn off the heat in a stroke of genius to reduce utilities.

Sometimes people do the most redundant things subconsciously. We are such imperfectly inefficient creatures. I wonder how anyone can think homo sapiens are the elite of the earth's creatures. It was raining hard yesterday when I walked to C.town Bagels to meet Johnny for lunch. I clung on to Johnny's flimsy aluminium silver umbrella as the wind tore at it. I switched between hands to give the hand holding the umbrella and thus exposed to the deadly chill some respite. Two Asian girls were walking towards me. They were chattering away rapidly in what in my mind translated as Korean or Japanese. I couldn't understand what they were saying. Not exactly. But it's amazing how universal the distress call of a damsel can be -- the increase in verbel velocity, the frantic flick of her hand across the chic brown leather bag and her brows furrowed towards it. The act of backhanding the raindrops from her bag was so earnest yet so futile.

We're a race surviving on our intelligence. The brain singularly consumes more energy than any other part of the body. It uses up a significant portion of the energy we gather each day. (Maybe the next revolution of dieting is to stimulate brain growth!) We're born defenseless and stay defenseless for a long period of time. We have no natural weapon besides a sometimes sharp wit. We built our empires on knowledge. Yet, there it was, that hint of inefficiency. As a race, our evolutionary path should be selection of the more intelligent. Either that, or start growing claws and bigger teeth. Or at least longer and faster limbs.

Somehow, it appears that our own intelligence is hindering that evolution. University degree holders marry later and have fewer fertile years; well-educated career women do not have as much time to nurture their offspring. On the other hand, a stay-at-home mum has more time to take care of the kids, making them less likely to be screwed up; Intelligent people who are more likely to succeed spend a lot of energy being successful but it does not mean they will procreate more than less intelligent people; The hoi polloi will cry foul at what they construe as social engineering but shouldn't our goal as a race be to ensure its continuation? As we stay stagnant or even regress with our cries for equality (for who?), could other more single-tracked and efficient species one day overcome us? Fortunately, not within my age but that's really just trying to exonerate myself from my duties as a human being. So does that make me more amenable to procreation? No sir-ee!