day in the field January 3, 2007
As we left the Field Museum today, I asked the girls to name one thing they learned:
Bassie: That if two different animals have a baby together , then their baby can’t have babies. Like a butterfly and a mouse would have a buttermouse, but it couldn’t have a baby. (I set her straight on the “buttermouse” thing).
Dina: If something has short legs then it can’t run away from the animal that wants to eat it, so it gets eaten before it can get married and have babies, so the guys with the long legs only have babies, so all of the guys start to have long legs (hmmm…yeah, that’s a pretty good handle on natural selection for a 3 year old).
My work is done here.
forget for a 3 year old, that’s better than most anyone [who's not a PhD in evolutionary biology]. it’s amazing how many people think natural selection is driven by “survival of the fittest” and forget that it’s not just survival but procreation… survival only matters if it leads to more procreation.
i would press her about her short-legged, asthmatic father… haha
Which leads me to my fascination with the fact that big muscles, quick reaction time, and strong jaws (?) no longer seem to be as evolutionarily advantageous as they were, say, pre-Industrial Revolution. I mean, I assume “street-smarts” were also always high on the list as well, but now, most procreatively desirable women tend to want a man with a lot of money, which *could* be a basketball star, but will most likely be a little nerdy Jewish guy who went to MIT.
A disturbing exception that proves my rule, and reveals once again my unabashed voyeuristic delight in celebrity news (thank you for indulging me, Matt) is Britney and K-Fed. He’s got (as far as I can see) no desirable genetic material there, and SHE’S the one financially supporting him, but brings nothing else, except possible a tendency toward sexual attractiveness during those fertile 14th-21st years of age, yet they manage to do their part to repopulate the world with more like them. Perhaps her lack of mothering skills is nature’s way of attempting to right this evolutionary wrong. Oh, how terrible of me. Hey, look, I’m just making a scientific observation.