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Yes, that sounds okay.

I don't park there anymore for several reasons which I will not go into because most of them are silly. I park in random neighborhoods much closer to campus now. No more bad times with that, hopefully.

As I went to lunch today I ran into a couple of old friends from high school. Then I ran into another one. And another one. And two more. And another one. It was okay. But mainly I was happy to run into the first one. He told me about how his life had been for the past couple of years and about all the mistakes he had made. Mine paled in comparison, but he had bounced back quite well. He had changed a lot since I'd last seen him in high school, and for the better. So that was nice. We ended up sitting on a bench and talking about philosophy, society, humanity, the past, the future, science, religion, and many other things I had never talked to him about before. It was very nice. One of the things we talked about was how we--as people--were intelligent to a fault. We are so smart we're stupid. Because we are self-aware, we struggle daily to assign ourselves a purpose in life and in the greater time frame of mankind. This leads to depression and suicide because we cannot accept the fact that we, like the rest of the animals, have no purpose here. We just are.

Then we talked about how we had become great survivors because of our advancements in science and medicine. He talked to me for a while about the bubonic plague and the potentially catastrophic event that could have been had humans been a little less intelligent. It reminded me of a conversation I'd had with a geologist before. When I was working at the Paleontology Lab the main professor talked to me about how we had completely ruined natural selection as far as humans were concerned. Not only had we eliminated any potential predators via technology, our advances in medicine had ruined everything forever as well. "Ugly people," he said. "Can get plastic surgery to look better. Then they get married and have kids, passing on their genes." That's true, I thought. "Nobody wants to mate with an ugly person." He added. "Illnesses that don't affect us now would kill people before. Baldness, crooked teeth, asthma, and physical impairments would've stopped those people from mating and passing on those bad genes before, but we've managed to 'correct' those things through force--not by fixing the source of the problems." He took a drink from his thermos. "So do you see how we've destroyed natural selection? Everybody survives, now."

I thought about what he said for a while. I brought it up to a few people who agreed. Reluctantly, though. Admitting certain truths is hard for people. It is especially hard to admit that you have a flaw that should have stopped you from being a potential mate. It's a little bit depressing, I guess. "He's right, you know. Advances in antibiotics and dentistry especially have helped people who would've been allowed to die off from major flaws to become potential mates and pass on their genes." Said my orthodontist. Then he put on my braces.

Comments

shwangshwang said…
yeah consider how people who wear glasses would have been essentially crippled in the wild. also how the fuck did cavepeople and hut people deal with wisdom teeth?
September 11, 2008 at 12:03 PM
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