About 80 million years ago, a couple of scrawny pigeons are kicking it on the mainland somewhere near the coast of New Zealand. As animals go, they do pretty well for themselves - flight being a great evolutionary trait in escaping predators. But they still have to land in order to eat, sleep and make little pigeons, and when they do, they have to keep a careful eye out for the wandering hungry beast.

So while they are taking this little breather on the coast, one of them spots a shadow out on the ocean. With nothing better to do, they investigate, and are astounded to discover an island with no nasty cats, ferrets, or wolves stalking them with a certain hungry gleam in their eye. No predators at all, just nuts and berries and worms for the taking, a world where all the good things in life literally grow on trees.

Just imagine.

Pretty soon they drop this antiquated notion of grabbing tiny, little snacks between flights in favor of gorging a delicious meal followed by a short waddle home. In fact this whole notion of flight becomes something 'for the birds' as they say, preferring to walk upright the way those interesting chimps do. They become much less like nervous, careful little rodents that fly, and more like Mr. and Mrs. Howell.

Evolution gets lost when things go too well for a given species. Survival always presents a list of demands that give evolution an idea of where to go next -'gotta give them eagles better eyesight, maybe stretch the necks of those horses so they can get the food on the top branches, and let's follow up on this big brain thingy in those chimps.' That's all well and good, but what to do when survival is no longer an issue, when these birds have nothing better to do than waddle, eat, and make more little birds? At that point, the biggest threat to that species is itself - competing for the same resources. Evolution is put into the embarrassing position of having to handicap a species in order to insure its survival.

Consider as a result, the Kakapo.

There are only 54 of them left in the world. A quick online search for information will result in pages and pages about how evil humankind is ruining it for everybody. Certainly the Kakapo would have been better off without us, continuing to evolve weirder and weirder mating habits, but a quick study of those mating habits make it quite clear that humankind was simply hurrying along a process that evolution had been working on, in its awkward fashion, for millions of years.

Dig this.

When the male Kakapo intends to mate, he builds what is called a 'track and bowl' system. He meticulously carves a few tracks through the forest leading up to the bowl, a shallow ditch, usually dug next to a large rock or cliff. The bowl is of a particular acoustic shape because the male will stand with his back against the rock, facing the bowl. He will then tuck his head down into his breast where he will inflate two air sacs similar to those of a frog. He then makes deep, low frequency, booming sounds that can be heard from miles away. At this point the female is expected to come running (waddling). Unfortunately, it is very difficult to locate the source of low frequency sounds, which probably explains the paths leading to the bowl. This booming can go on for hours every night for months on end, but it might not make any bit of difference. The female only becomes active once every 2-4 years, when a certain plant is bearing fruit. The male can boom all he wants, and unless the female is active, she's not at all interested. This all gets even more confused when considering the fact that he Kakapo are solitary creatures, so aside from this nuptial, they want nothing to do with each other.

All this work leads to the creation of a single egg, which these days get promptly eaten by a hungry stoat. See, the Kakapo have forgotten all about that whole food chain issue, and eyes a vicious predator much as you would a curiously designed sofa - interesting, but not really threatening.

Upon learning about this fascinatingly strange perversion of evolution, one might have cause to reflect upon the only species with even stranger mating habits. We call these mating habits 'romantic love' and the rules of attraction surrounding them make the mating habits of the Kakapo look like a fake tan in a cheap bar chirping "Nice shoes, wanna fuck?"

Soon after evolution toyed with making the chimp's brains bigger, it hit upon a great innovation that was later copied by a guy named Alan Turing. Instead of adapting via hardware -- growing a tail, making the ears bigger, it had evolved some of the chimp's brains to the point that they could adapt via software -- using language, making tools, building societies. Like Turing's trick, this innovation was wildly successful, and humanity spread across a world, there for its taking, much as the Kakapos must have back when they were still scrawny pigeons.

Evolution is pretty much done with changing our hardware, as there is nothing it can do over hundreds of generations that humans couldn't work out for themselves on a lunch break. But that doesn't mean it has thrown up its hands with us. Regardless of the vehicle (hardware, software, etc), evolution has managed to instill in humanity, a predilection for population reducing concepts such as religion, politics, and love. Given the grim spectacle of overpopulation, these tendencies, ugly as they may be, are also the hope of humanity.

Which brings us to a point. Viewing romantic love as nothing more than an evolutionary tactic designed to curb population growth may or may not be a novel idea, but either way, it's not very useful, and those hopeless romantics, those lacking the brains to say 'good enough,' callous enough to commoditize at the drop of a hat, stupid enough to bet on odds longer than the lottery, can rightfully console themselves with the simple fact that cheap darwinian kludges such as true love (and good sex), as a carrot-and-stick held by some mammilian hardware recessed deep in the wet, gray matter, would not function properly if the rewards were not real, if the carrot were not sufficiently large, if the stick wasn't...um...long enough.



Mark Twain once stated that 'The immature humorist borrows. The mature humorist steals.' While this author would never presume to be above outright theft, it has proved so common lately as to simply be bad form. The author damn well IS above that, and would like to state for the record that many of the bits about the Kakapo were inspired by, even stolen from, Last Chance To See ,written by Douglas Adams.