Our deepest thanks to Daft Old Duffer, who continues to shares his musings with us for yet another year. Ed
It’s the natural beauty of our world I’m talking about – not that gorgeous bird/hunk you fancy.
Take flowers and butterflies for instance. Why all that colour and pattern? What purpose does it serve? They are, after all, only beautiful to us. Not to the insects and birds that use them to live, feed, hide, hunt among.
They see something entirely different, and I don’t suppose beauty has much to do with it as far as they are concerned. We don’t regard our lamb chops or King Edwards as beautiful, don’t spend time admiring their loveliness. We just eat them.
And birds
If seagulls and magpies can manage perfectly well with black and white, why birds of paradise? Isn’t that just a wasteful use of resources?
What’s wrong with a couple of shades of grey? That way we wouldn’t have to spend time and energy developing such complex eyes.
What about tigers? We know perfectly well they want to eat us yet we would all love to stroke them, make pets of them, keep them in our homes
Indeed quite a few idiots do just that.
And mountains
They have several ways to deal us a horrible death – suffocation, freezing, falling – or just by breaking one of our leg bones and leaving us to it. Yet sight of a mountain brings almost automatic sighs of pleasure, “How wonderful,” we murmer “where’s my camera?”
While a whole horde of maniacs can’t wait, just as with flesh chewing carnivores, to get up close and personal.
Beauty covers the whole range – from being a complete waste of time and energy at one end to luring us into outright peril at the other. And we simply don’t need it.
So what’s it all about? Natural selection can’t be the author.
I think I know
Whoever, Whatever created our world and all that’s in it took a final look and thought to Him or Herself, “Well, it’s alright as far as it goes. But it all looks a bit dull, to be blunt. Think I’ll add a touch of something. Just to brighten it up a bit.”
Thank You, God.
The Seasons greetings to all those who bothered to read my nonsense through the year. Good cheer to those who bothered to respond, whether favourably or otherwise, and a special thanks to those who recognised what a fool I am and took the time to glance down from the dizzy heights of their own superior intellect to tell me about it.
I’ll try to do better next year.
Image: DB Duo Photography, rajkumar1220 and Clicksy under CC BY 2.0
