If you’ve read my theory about Creative Evolution then you’ll know I have some crazy ideas about our evolutionary lineage. However, it’s a theory that’s not strictly endorsed by my brain, and so I have some other ideas about where we should go with our further evolution as a species, and where we’ve gone wrong so far.
Gills: If we really climbed out of the primordial soup eons ago, that means that at some point we were fish swimming around underwater. I don’t have a problem with that; I love to swim. But then we evolved, and kept evolving, and at some point ditched the breathing underwater thing. I don’t quite understand this. If evolution is based on survival of the fittest, then surely gills would’ve given us quite the advantage. Maybe now you’re thinking, well, gee, we haven’t grown wings either; same difference. No, it’s not. For one, we never grew wings and then shrugged them off, deciding perhaps to go in a different direction. And secondly, man was never meant to fly, and I’ll cite gravity as proof of that. We totally should’ve kept the gills. How often have you wished you could breathe underwater. It’d make fishing easier, that’s for sure. And it’s not like we could only have lungs or gills; many species out there have both. There’s a species of fish called snakeheads that have a unique gill/lung combination. They’re a fish, and have gills, but have these sacks that it can store air in (it will surface and absorb oxygen into them) and can breathe the oxygen when needed later. It can even use this stored air to survive out of water for a few days. This fish can travel over land to other lakes or ponds and live to swim another day. Now I think that’s just hella useful. Why couldn’t we have developed something like that? As far as breathing organs go, this fish has us beat when it comes to survival of the fittest.
Opposable Thumbs: These are great. Super. Fantastic. Wish I had more. Hmm…not a bad idea. I used to think, back when I was young and stupid…well, more stupid…that thumbs were what separated us from the monkeys. Thumbs were what made us better than the monkeys. Thumbs are why we’re humans and they’re monkeys. But as I’ve come to learn, monkeys, and in fact many other primates, already have opposable thumbs. Great. So now what? Well, we’ve gotta go one better. I think we need two opposable thumbs per hand. One on each side of the hand, for a total of four. Can you imagine the possibilities? I think those stupid monkeys have gotten a little uppity with their opposable digits. Ever watch them? Peeling bananas and speaking sign language. And oh how they lord it over us with their tails. Actually…
Tails: If you want to get technical, humans have never developed tails during our evolutionary lineage (unless you count the vestigial tail), since we supposedly evolved from apes, which aren’t as such endowed. So it’s not like we’ve lost anything special. But we sure as hell could gain something totally awesome by having one. Now, it’s only natural that there’s probably a huge group of people with a fetish for tails, and they no doubt completely agree with me, but this isn’t about gaining a following (and besides, I really don’t want to think about that anyway). Monkeys use their tails primarily for balance (and for swinging from trees), whereas humans evolved the vestibular apparatus, which is a compact dohickey in the inner ear canal. Since our balance is all figured out, had we tails, they’d be free to be used in an unimaginable number of ways. They’d be like third appendages. Hell, whiles we’re adding tails, why not stick a hand on the end of it? A hand with two opposable thumbs! You’d never have that spot on your back you couldn’t scratch.
Menstruation: Seriously? Was there not a better way to figure this out? Ok, most animals do go through something similar, such as the estrous cycle (look it up), but human females have it way worse. Why is that? It certainly shouldn’t be necessary. The mood changes, the hormone imbalances, the cramping. I can’t help but think that humans got the short end of the stick on this one. And in all our eons of evolution I think we could’ve come up with something a little more convenient.
More to come…
The Chris Effect 