I LOVED that piece of witty and sane writing! Always be prepared to turn sour grapes into vinegar, spoiled fruit into jam, and know that women read every damned word of a gardening book. May our glasses always be half full.
Specialization in the genes is common in eusociality but overspecialization baked into the DNA locks pandas to bamboo forests and koalas to eucalyptus trees. Homo sapiens evolved for tropical rainforess and savannah grasslands, but adapted to everyhing upto the Arctic (stubby limbs and stocky trunk for better heat retention). And greater blood volume and lung capacity for the Tibetan plateau and the Andes.
But most of the specialization in humans is culturally powered by language to transmit complex concepts, writing to pass it on through multiple generations, and enough brainpower to acquire the skills in a small fraction of a lifetime.
Important features allowing the acquisition of individual specialization in humans include the inheritance from brachiation by our primate ancestors: three axes of shoulder joint motion, prehensile hand, binocular vision, stereoscopic vision and bipedalism on the savannahs freeing the upper extremities from locomotion. Stereoscopic vision brought handling of small objects to fashion tools and weapons, and a sufficiently long opposable thumb for a strong pinch to securely hold those objects.
I hadn't considered that you can rent a backhoe.
ReplyDeleteYou can rent just about anything.
DeleteOne uses friends with land and backhoes... Just sayin...
ReplyDeleteAh yes. Don't poke the old men. They will hurt you.
ReplyDeleteI live on a small private pond. I’m of a kind to try fish farming in retirement
ReplyDeleteWell, at least I have a retirement workout program now. Heaving bales of money to buy a loaf of bread.
ReplyDeleteJust feed the pigs, that's what Henry Bowman and his friend would do.
ReplyDeleteI love this as an answer to Solzhenitsyn's Lament, and I hope all such "agents" are this stupid.
ReplyDeleteI LOVED that piece of witty and sane writing! Always be prepared to turn sour grapes into vinegar, spoiled fruit into jam, and know that women read every damned word of a gardening book. May our glasses always be half full.
ReplyDeleteSpecialization in the genes is common in eusociality but overspecialization baked into the DNA locks pandas to bamboo forests and koalas to eucalyptus trees. Homo sapiens evolved for tropical rainforess and savannah grasslands, but adapted to everyhing upto the Arctic (stubby limbs and stocky trunk for better heat retention). And greater blood volume and lung capacity for the Tibetan plateau and the Andes.
ReplyDeleteBut most of the specialization in humans is culturally powered by language to transmit complex concepts, writing to pass it on through multiple generations, and enough brainpower to acquire the skills in a small fraction of a lifetime.
Important features allowing the acquisition of individual specialization in humans include the inheritance from brachiation by our primate ancestors: three axes of shoulder joint motion, prehensile hand, binocular vision, stereoscopic vision and bipedalism on the savannahs freeing the upper extremities from locomotion. Stereoscopic vision brought handling of small objects to fashion tools and weapons, and a sufficiently long opposable thumb for a strong pinch to securely hold those objects.
2nd panel of that common meme circulating should read,
ReplyDelete"...one Bolshevik" vice "Cossack." Cossacks are different stripe.