Platypus and Others

Do y’all know about a platypus? Do you know what it looks like? It looks like a duck mated with an otter. They have a bill, they have webbed feet, and a warm-blooded furry body. Females lay eggs and the males have a poisonous spike on their back leg. What happened in nature to create this creature? I’ll tell you what happened – LIFE happened. And so goes it with all our other strange creatures, take a narwhale for instance; the unicorn of the sea. Why would a whale need to grow a tusk, a ten-foot tusk, which is actually a tooth. Primarily grown by males but up to 15% of females grow them too. Oh, I’m just getting started. Let’s take an octopus, everybody knows about them right? Did you know they have nine brains? One central brain and eight more in each arm. What kind of alien species is that? Mammals that lay eggs, amphibians that can regenerate entire body parts, a deep-sea glass sponge that can live an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 years, a clam called the ocean quahog can live over 500 years. Monkeys with red faces, monkeys with no noses and chimpanzees that share 98% of our DNA. On and on and on. And that’s not even touching the insect world. But what’s my point? My point is; there is life on this planet that are adaptatively, head scratching unique but still all part of the circle of life on this small blue planet we call Earth. Humans, in my opinion, also are unique and quite well at thriving. But we humans are a simply complicated species.

As humans, we don’t have thick skin to protect us, we don’t have thick hair or waterproof hair to protect us, we don’t have claws or big fangs, we don’t have poisonous barbs or 3 inches of blubber or able to regrow appendages. But we do have a really big brain. But along with that similar brain in our entire species, we have evolved to the topography of long-ago ancestors. We adapted; we evolved. Yes, we live permanently on six of the seven continents, only Antarctica being the one place so extreme it prevents permanent settlement. In hot climates, our eyes, hair and our skin pigment darken to protect us from UV radiation. In colder climates, lighter skin allows deeper penetration to UVB rays, enabling the body to produce necessary vitamin D. But even that being said there are those like the Inuit who maintain their darker skin in colder climates with a diet rich in vitamin D and fatty fish. My point again? Is that we are a strange species really no different than a platypus or a narwhale. We have adapted and evolved in order for our species to survive and thrive. But it comes at a great cost. With our big brains, we are often seemingly not very smart. We mistreat each other due to skin color, our topography and the “thinking” of that really big brain. We think about religion, culture, and unfortunately about power and conquest. Most species to some degree battle within their own. For in nature, it’s survival of the fittest. We, humans, take that to an extreme.

In our species we are very different and yet we are all the same. We all have a brain, red blood (unless your Spock – Just Kidding), but with all our genetic diversity for the most part we all look like a human, an estimated Homo Sapiens species 300 to 400 thousand years old. We weren’t the only hominoid on this planet. We came from somewhere just as a platypus and a narwhale did. We don’t bat an eye about the strangeness of those creatures any longer because although unique we understand their existence. Why do we not do that with each other? We are all strangely unique, different in so many ways and yet still all just human beings. Why can we accept the platypus, the narwhale, the octopus, a sabretooth tiger, a Neanderthal but we can’t accept each other. We create art, science, poetry, great leaps in technology, but we also create wars, separation and destruction. We look at ancient civilizations and wonder and awe at their architecture and their knowledge of the universe 1000’s of years ago but we still can’t figure out who we are as a total species. With our big brains we come to conclusions of how these ancient civilizations lived and then were no more, like the Mayan, or the nomadic hunter gatherers that built Gobekli Tepe 11 to 12 thousand years ago. We are the new humans that are destroying this planet with global warming, with wars and bombs, chemicals that poison and kill. A platypus sure isn’t doing that no matter how potent their barb is. The Narwhale is taking over the oceans and poisoning it so others die. We should really take another look maybe at the animal kingdom and realize that just because we have a big brain we are all in this together. A human being is no better or worse than that strange ol platypus. Unique and wondrously made. Let’s make it count.