Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Darwin is laughing at us

We openly defy the law of natural selection as a species. Put any one of us in the wild for a few years, and other than Bear Grylls we'd all be dead, most of us in the first day or two. If we don't get eaten by wild animals, tumbled off a cliff or poisoned by snakes or berries, we'd starve or freeze to death. We hunt for a Big Mac in our climate controlled speeding vehicles moving over smooth roads of tiny rocks cemented in tar. Or if we are feeling really ambitious, one can hunt for frozen plucked, skinned and de-boned chicken in your freezer. Our shelters are so crazy elaborate they take an army to build, and half a lifetime to pay for. Gathering happens at the grocery store where food is in bottles and boxes and cans and filled with sugar and preservatives. And then we eat too much of it so we do pointless work of running in place that accomplishes nothing but that we can eat more without getting fat.

And what do we do in our climate controlled houses with machines to work for us and prepared food is a phone call or a fridge walk away? We are bored, and so sit in front of reflective boxes powered by millions of tiny electrons flowing in a controlled current to manipulate 1's and 0's to entertain us. That my friend is what we've come up with with our big impressive brains. Does that mean that we've eradicated cruelty unlike the big bad wild world surrounding us? Of course not!

Despite these observations I'm not all out advocating we go build bomb shelters and stock up for post-apocalyptic survival or am somehow dissing the very technology I'm using. I'm just saying its interesting, ironic and sometimes we take our own culture for granted. I think its good to be able to step outside of it and see its idiosyncrasies that we may appreciate it for its good qualities and learn what we can from it. I am glad we defy nature. I for one would probably be dead without it.

However if one day I need to fend for my own survival, I'll get one of my expert chicken snatching offspring to catch dinner for me.Hopefully, there will be an abundance of wild free-range chickens running around.

6 comments:

  1. Just listened to a"thinking aloud" episode (on KBYU while doing exercises) that talked about complex societies and their collapse. It seems complexity evolves in response to problems, but as it increases, the costs of the complexity start to become larger than the benefits, and collapse starts creeping in. (See the Roman Empire's slow demise.) It fit right in with your post.
    Apparently the Byzantine Empire survived collapse by becoming simpler (fewer cities, peasant militia instead of professional army, etc.), but it is rare.
    Quite interesting to comtemplate . . .
    LOVED the pictures of Max & Sohvi with some of Meg's chickens!

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  2. So true my dear friend! I often wonder about all the draw backs of living in an industrialized world. But hey you're already one-up on most of us with those cute kiddies catching chickens.

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  3. Hey! It's Rosey and Lacey with Max and Sohvi! Awesome. I was trying to get Tom to describe his dad's ipod the other day, in a way that Nephi would understand, but we couldn't figure out what ipods had to do with anything that Nephi would know. It's all magic, and all so artificial.

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  4. Yeah, I thought those were Meg's chickens too. Your kids sure are cute! And I have to say I loved Meg's comment too... ;)

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  5. I've been having lengthy discussions lately with my sisters about nutrition. They're trying to get back to unprocessed foods, which means they make their own... Well, everything. One sister even has bee hives, and they both have chickens and a goat. They both grind their wheat to make their bread, and garden and bottle all summer long. So my point is, if there is an apocalypse, I will just go mooch off of them.

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