Friday, August 27, 2010

Monkey Poop and Evolution

When meeting new people who are from different countries and are learning English, I like to ask them off-the-wall questions to relax them and take their mind off their language struggles. A few weeks ago I was talking to a girl from Costa Rica and the conversation went something like this.

“Costa Rica is a lot different from South Florida, I’ll bet you have a lot of different types of trees, plants and animals. Did you have any monkeys running around your neighborhood where you grew up?”

“In the rain forest there are lots of monkeys,” she replied giving me a puzzled look.

“What do the monkeys do?” I asked curiously.

“They throw poop at you!” she said with a smile.

“Excuse me, did you say poop?”

“Yes, poop” she mimicked pointing to her butt then pretending to throw imaginary poop.

“Gee, I really didn’t expect you to say that. I really saw this conversation going in a different direction,” I laughed hysterically.

We spend the next several minutes laughing, discussing monkeys and some of the other finer things about Costa Rica. But our monkey conversation stuck with me.

Later that evening I began to contemplate the monkey’s behavior and I started thinking about all the scientists who believe in the theory of natural selection and how we evolved from apes.

I don’t have the foggiest idea why monkeys would throw poop but I can imagine they might exhibit that behavior when they feel threatened or territorial. I don’t know about you, but when I feel that way, the last thing I think about doing is defecating and throwing my poop at someone. It’s just not a natural instinct for me. And I’m pretty confident that none of my relatives would do that either. Okay, maybe I can envision one person, but that’s all.

So, I came up with my own theory. I believe Darwin must have taken a trip to Costa Rica and one day while he was walking through the rain forest, he got hit in the head by monkey poop which left him traumatized and greatly affected his judgment thereafter. The experience caused him to have strange dreams and soon he believed the monkey to be his great great great great great great grandfather.

Later in life Darwin’s trauma began to fade and he started to come to his senses about natural selection when he said “To suppose the eye with all its inimitable different contrivances for adjusting true focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

Or more simply put. “Monkey see, monkey do. Human see monkey do, human not do. Therefore the natural selection theory is a bunch of monkey poop.”

Random Observation #3


Have you ever wondered why some tires wear out faster than others? At first I thought it might be the extreme Floridian heat that melted some of the weaker spots in my tire. Then I thought the no-see-ums could be the culprit. Although I’ve never seen them, I’ve seen what they can do to flesh.

Luckily before curiosity got the best of me, I discovered the colorful tire-eating bug that explained the mystery.