05 November 2006

Who Needs LSD?

I had an interesting experience this week. I was recovering from a stomach flu, and couldn't sleep, so I was watching old Sherlock Holmes movies on Google Video, and ended up staying awake all night (not a common occurance, I like to sleep). Around 5:00, I started thinking about what would have happened if we had evolved from something other than chimpanzees. Somehow I got the idea of evolving from gazelles, and I figured that if we had, math would be completely different.

If we had evolved from gazelles, we would learn calculus before arithmetic. Think I'm crazy? I don't blame you, but read on. The reason we needed the ability to do simple math is so that we could tell that if three lions go into a cave and two come out, it's not a good idea to go in. Only as a last resort did we calculate how fast we have to run to escape from the lions.

Gazelles, on the other hand, do these sorts of calculations all the time, when they need to figure out if they're fast enough to be able to afford to stot. They don't need to know how many lions there are so much as how fast they are.

This is why I'll never try drugs. I don't need them.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

what if we had evolved from potatoes?