Natural Selection

[retepsnikrep]

We emerged from the primeval ooze about 300,000,000 years ago.

The inception was a very dodgy business, especially if you picture a scum covered pond with Lex Barker bobbing up. No. If you imagine what you find on top of home made jam after 2 days in the cupboard, with the paper top and rubber band still on, then you get an idea how easy it can happen, and what we used to look like. It’s a long way from grey mould to Arnie, but nobody’s stared at it and watched the process, even the Queen Mum’s not 300,000,000

Remember the grey bits on the jam....that’s what your Dad and Mum looked like.

Dad and Mum some generations removed of course and what I want to tell you is how many.

I don’t want to confuse you with the great Whodunnit question, suffice it to say that everything there ever was, or is, wants to make more of the same, horse chestnut tree, frog, slug, water cress, or person.

So the grey bits wanted to make more grey bits, naturally, and they did. In our particular branch of the family tree, the grey bits turned gradually into winkles, the rest was easy and allowing some time for the courting and obtaining the permission of the father winkle and a gestation period varying between about 10 seconds and a year, according to what creature we were at the time, and a sexual maturity time from 20 seconds to twenty years we can, by making a guess arrive at 30,000,000 generations of living creatures before you could tell magnolia from peach emulsion in Homebase/Wallmart.

30,000,000 acts of sexual intercourse, successful. Conception, successful, and birth, successful. If one grey fluff hadn’t fancied another, or your particular relative winkle had been eaten by a winklepicker octopus, then you wouldn’t have had a cordless drill.

Some of those acts of procreation must have been pretty hit and miss, and the new arrival was pretty vulnerable. Picture the new sprog washed about in the shallows, or falling out of the rain forest canopy. Escaped the predator by the skin of its shell or scales or hide or fur not once but millions of times.

Lucky to be here........you bet.

Incidentally, the one thing that Natural Selection was definitely not looking for......impotence.

Regards Peter :-6

[spot]

Backward child...

Actually, if you have a calculator and you're technically familiar with the generative act of the slightly superior winkle and its many descentants, you could work out how many minutes the combined task of procreation took. That'd be a cool number.