No, I'm not talking about my youngest child. I'm referring to a recent article I read regarding useless remnants in the anatomy of animals and humans in the course of evolution. Things like pelvis and thigh bones in whales and wings on flightless birds are interesting. Even the unnecessary sex organs on dandelions (apparently they reproduce by cloning themselves) are food for thought.
But what is really fascinating are the extra things that humans are carting around: extra molars (wisdom teeth), a tail bone, male breast tissue and nipples, and the appendix!
The human appendix is a small pouch attached to the large intestine where it joins the small intestine and does not directly assist digestion. Biologists believe it is a vestigial organ left behind from a plant-eating ancestor. Interestingly, it has been noted by paleontologist Alfred Sherwood Romer in his text The Vertebrate Body (1949) that the major importance of the appendix "would appear to be financial support of the surgical profession," referring to, of course, the large number of appendectomies performed annually. In 2000, in fact, there were nearly 300,000 appendectomies performed in the United States!
Well, I still have mine, as well as my tailbone. I put my nipples to the test with my four babies and they seemed to do the job satisfactorily. Lastly, my wisdom teeth burst forth in 1975, screamed for attention, and were dealt with accordingly. Nowhere in the article did I read of the current necessity for pinkie toes or earlobes. The extra pounds are killing me!
What do all of these have in common? They are all a type of hole. Those on the left are "Puka" (pooka) shells. Commonly found on the beaches of Hawaii, they are actually the remains of sea snail shells. Ground and tossed by the sand and waves they are polished and smooth; radiating a warm luster. The hole ("puka" in Hawaiian) is a naturally worn area on the top of the shell.
I discovered something important about myself recently. Sitting with this pile of puka shells in front of me, endeavoring to sort shells into incremental sizes, I had embarked on a project that could possibly take more than one day. This was not good. I realized right there and then that although I love a crafty project, I seldom have the patience for it to last beyond a 6 or 8 hour span.
So, replicas of the Sistine Chapel ceiling (7 years to paint. 10 years to restore) as well as an attempt to carve anything bigger than a chop (see July 22 entry) are out of the question. Once started they would end up in the black hole of discarded projects; never to be finished and/or admired. Don't worry, I did assemble all of these wonderful shells into a rustic necklace in under 5 hours. Too bad I'm going to disassemble them due to the fact that they didn't meet my stringent standards of aesthetics (it turned out ugly). Does re-assembling them into a different necklace just add ticks of time on the already-started project clock? I hope not or I will chuck them down the nearest rabbit hole and despondently eat a bucket of donought holes.
Did you know that five different people have patents to the "Puzzle with Pieces Rotatable in Groups"? Hmmm. It seems that everything can stand for a little improvement.
Did you also know that there are 43,252,003,274, 489,856,000 different ways to position the sides (without taking it apart)? To put this into perspective, if every permutation of a 57 millimeter Rubik's Cube were lined up end to end, it would stretch out approximately 261 light years.
Despite the vast number of positions, all Cubes can be solved in twenty-five or fewer moves! It is said to be the world's best-selling toy, with over 300,000,000 Rubik's Cubes being sold worldwide to date.
Let's see... I paid about $10 for mine. Um, let's say that we average the price, since it was first sold in 1980 by Ideal Toy company, to, say $7, this would equal gross sales of $2,100,000,000. This is over 2 Trillion Dollars!
And I can solve it in 2 minutes. Yes, I'm a genius. And a superhero. I wish I was an inventor too.
What makes us human? Its not walking on two legs. Birds can do it. Its not being able to figure out complex tasks. Dolphins and monkeys can do that.
What makes us humans is the ability to have our hearts broken. To know a numbing pain that eats away all the joy we used to feel. To have memories and experiences trigger a gut-wrenching pain that we project will last well into the future.
What also makes us human is the ability to take these same experiences and let them mold us. They shape the way we stand; shoulders square with purpose, or bent over and beaten. They affect how we see the world; a lonely desolate island, or a delightful and exciting wonderland. And they also provide us with the opportunity to change; ourselves, our surroundings, our choices and our future.
"The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind." Frank Lloyd Wright
It's true. You may "marvel" all you want. I'm a super-hero. Yesterday alone I scooped up my entire neighborhood's collection of dog poo as it handily lay all within the confines of my back yard.
Today I defied all obstacles on the road as I skillfully drove all the way to work within the speed limit. As other maniacal drivers tried to thwart my law obedience by whizzing, cutting, and tail-gaiting, I maintained my calm collective to arrive safely and legally.
Tomorrow I might even attempt to throw caution to the wind and conduct only one transaction at the drive-through bank teller.
You can't stop me.
Americans consume about 400 gallons of oil a year per citizen for agriculture, a close second to our vehicular use. Getting the crop from seed to harvest takes only one-fifth the total oil used for our food. The lion's share is consumed during the trip from the farm to your plate. Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles.
A quick way to improve food-related fuel economy would be if every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.
This information was extracted from the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.
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No, I'm not talking about my youngest child. I'm referring to a recent article I read regarding useless remnants in the anatomy of animals and humans in the course of evolution. Things like pelvis and thigh bones in whales and wings on flightless birds are interesting. Even the unnecessary sex organs on dandelions (apparently they reproduce by cloning themselves) are food for thought. 
