You Eat Your Own Farts

We're over 300 posts. Whooo.

Movies I still want to see before the summer ends: Army of Darkness, Baseketball, Donnie Darko, and The Deer Hunter.

So I got to thinking about evolution today. Don't worry, dear Kubas, I wasn't plotting some liberal rant about the death of curiosity and the evils of willful ignorance; no, I was pondering how evolution's extremely gradual nature was to blame for a host of modern day human problems.

Our bodies are designed for short, brutal, active lives in the woods, eating pine needles and the occasional strangled chimp. For the vast majority of human history, life consisted of being born in a field, raised by wolves, running around the woods all day, mating once at 14, and dying from eating poison berries or gum infection at age 19. Now, in this cushy age of marshmallows and pedicures, our caveman (or cavewoman) genes are betraying us. Pregnant teens are chastised and shunned, when all they're doing is having young at what is scientifically their most fertile time. All of our health problems arise from our innability to stop eating vast amounts of salt and sugar and fat and meat, all because our bodies interpret these things as rarities to be devoured in excess, just in case we are forced to live off of bark and fingernails for the next few weeks. Virtually everyone I know is either dreading or still recovering from the trauma of having their wisdom teeth dug out of their head, all because for our ancestors, those extra four teeth late in life made the difference between dying of starvation and being able to crush acorns into an edible powder with their molars for a few more months.

There is a bright side to all this, however. If all those godless scientists and I are right, and assuming the human condition remains much the same as it is now for the next few million years (That's a safe bet, right? Right.), we should evolve ourselves right out of this mess. Someday, future humans will eat 24,000 calories a day, sit on space-couches all day long, and look and feel great while doing it. And what a day that will be...