a new year

At this cusp in time when the old year fades into the new, one is oft to slip into wistful reflection. Many of my acquaintances and friends are getting engaged or married or having children and moving on with their "adult" lives while I seem to float about like a wisp of cloud not willing to settle. I am envious of those who have found the other half of their heart and who have settled into white picket fences but yet there is a part of me that throws arms wide out into the wind to be carried away by the whispers of lands unknown. I follow the piper. I choose the mountain.

This past year I fell in love with Paris and experienced the beauty of India. Ever since I was in grade school, I have dreamed of those two places. It was everything and more. And then on a day trip to Brugges I saw a field of daffodils. There are perfect moments in my travels that can't be captured exactly on camera but I remember every detail in the picture the mind takes and carry it throughout life... like the splash of flower pots in a dusty hutong alley in Beijing, the blue sky reflected in a still puddle in Tibet, the indigo sunrise silhouetting the trees in the plains of Kenya, riding a bus in the vast vast desert of Mongolia with a little girl asleep on my lap... And the daffodils.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such jocund company: I
gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And when my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

~William Wordsworth


Bruges, April 2009

What if...

What if girls stopped caring about their physical appearance?

Maybe then the sides will switch and it'll be the boys who get all gussied up to attract our attention.

Sex and mind games

"It is fortunate that the law of equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen."

~Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

This quote brings up interesting thoughts and could be taken many ways. We have to keep in mind that Darwin did live in the Victorian times, and history has always favored the thoughts of men. We're not called mankind for nothing. If you think about the history of the human race, it's very much men oriented. Women for many centuries were thought to be insipid, simpering ornamentation on a man's arm. But yet, if you look at nature and the effects of natural selection on evolution, especially in mammals, it's the females who usually 'shape' the evolution of males. They do this by selecting for the better trait or the better genes in their mates to pass down to their offsprings. This results in the exaggeration of those traits that have evolved after specific selection over many generations (i.e. the peacock's tail, lion's mane, antlers). Interestingly enough, research done have shown that females pick these traits not because it tickles their fancy, as pretty as that tail might be. But these exaggerated and seemingly useless traits that the males are burdened with could actually be the advertisement that they themselves carry the desired traits that are more fit for survival regardless of the burdensome advertisement. Not to bore anyone with the bio talk, the underlying point is that the genes carried by the male who caught the girl's fancy is actually more desirable and more hardy in survival.

So where does this put human gender evolution? Darwin assumes human females have selected for human males based on mental traits. This is sort of a contradiction to the hunter role that males traditionally take on. So in a way, according to Darwin, human intelligence has evolved due to male's conniving ability to convince females of their fitness rather than having natural selection naturally carry out it's role in selecting for the best adaptability to the environment. Darwin was seeing it as unfortunate that man have not evolved through sexual selection to possess the differential 'beauty' of peacocks since genetically, 'smart' men will have smart if not smarter daughters.