First someone would have to find the clue. Under all that dirt in the desert, is one little piece of technology. But that little piece is far from where anyone comes. Nobody comes there, but it wasn't planned to be this way. It's just that nobody happened to set up any residence near the area in the two million years since they went away.
And now, it's far from any inhabited areas in Nevada or California. If anyone found it, and could reverse engineer it, there would surely be at least five or six reasonable scientists who debated that it was a human made object. The creation scientists would use this as an argument for intelligent design, its structure right on the line between organic and inorganic.
That's because the material used to build it closely resembles the behavior and biology of slime moulds. This was because the people who had invented it based it on slime moulds. They lived in a world, much as we do, surrounded by ingenious mechanisms proceeding through history blind to anything but eating fighting reproducing and dying. They were as blind to the world they lived as was the history that had produced them.
But those people were not blind. They saw far clearer than we have, and they saw it a lot sooner.
The reason for this was, in principle, the same reason that the slime mould achieved such novelty. They called it history, we called it evolution.
Their history is mostly the same as ours. Right up until a group of hominids, south coast of Africa, started spending more time in water than their neighbors. They were the victims of psychological warfare. Over a few millenia, their neighbors were producing an ever greater number of individuals who could contort their faces in ways that frightened the hominids living near the beach. These guys were superior swimmers.
Whenever these face contorters would spring out of the forest, screaming and making the scariest of faces, these guys would swim out far enough and wait for their attackers to leave.
Sometimes the face guys would attack at night. Many of the water guys were sleeping, and thus easily killed. But the ones who weren't sleeping and the ones who woke up fast enough fought back. And since it was dark they couldn't see the frightening faces of their enemies. The face guys, being used to their advantage, would be unprepared and were easily killed by the water guys. When morning came around and the water guys would see the dead enemy, they realized that fighting at night was the way to win.
This meant that the individuals who could stay up later, or sleep only in small naps and be ready to wake up faster had a greater chance of reproducing.
So, these two groups reached a little balance for awhile, the face guys became trickier in attacking the water guys, and the water guys became more nocturnal, better fishers, and better swimmers.
But, as the face guys became better at chasing the water guys into deeper and deeper waters, the water guys started dealing with the predators on their other side, mostly sharks and, sometimes, killer whales.
More and more they were sandwiched into shallow waters. They became fatter and fatter in comparison to their freaky faced neighbors. Their females got used to giving birth in the ocean.
They water guys also became stronger, as spending most of their time in the water required more muscle.
This process continued until they lived almost exclusively in the water. Their enemies had gotten much smarter, and much better at articulating their facial muscles. They lived farther from their water dwelling neighbors, now, moving into the grasslands and out of the forest.
No comments:
Post a Comment