The Dolphin and the Shark
Once upon a time, a bottlenose dolphin and a sand tiger shark encountered one another in the shallow waters of the western Atlantic coast.
“Hello,” said the dolphin. “Lovely weather, isn’t it?”
“Yes indeed,” replied the shark. “Splendid.”
“Makes a man’s fancy turn to romance.”
“Indeed! Say, did you know that in order to mate I must severely bite the pectoral fins of my partner, in order to secure a grip?”
“I did not know that, and will inform my friends the next time we form a temporary coalition whose goal is to follow a female around and hem her in until she is ready to mate with us.”
“All very unpleasant, but of course it does lead to children, those little joyful bundles.”
“Of course. Except for those that belong to others of my kind. Those I will sometimes kill for fun.”
“Really? My own children devour one another in the mother’s womb until only two remain, one in each uterine horn.”
“Freak,” said the dolphin.
“Sicko,” said the shark.
They then swam their separate ways because neither had anything to gain from engaging in violence beyond severe injuries that very likely would have killed them both.
Moral: Nature tends to be grosser than you’d expect, but also less exciting.
The Tyrannosaurus’s Argument
Many, many years ago, during the Maastrichtian stage of the Cretaceous period, a Didelphodon was nosing about the forests of what would one day be Montana when it chanced upon a large clearing with a heap of rotting vegetation within it.
“Oh, a nest,” it said. “This will surely contain eggs, which I will consume as it matches my ecological role as a somewhat fox-like predator.”
“No, you won’t,” said the Tyrannosaurus that was returning to its nest, some twelve feet behind it. “Instead, I am going to consume you.”
“Wait, wait, wait, back up a bit,” squeaked the mammal. “That is clearly not what is supposed to happen here! You are a scavenging creature, and eating me would violate your natural place in the order of things.”
“You are talking nonsense,” said the Tyrannosaurus.
“Of course I’m not,” said the Didelphodon. “Your arms are tiny and incapable of gripping prey. You’re a scavenger if I’ve ever seen one!”
“My arms are not a highly-developed part of my predation strategy,” said the Tyrannosaurus, “but that is because they are extraneous. There are many entirely anachronistic predator ground-hunting birds I could use as examples who manage just fine hunting without the use of gripping arms. And this is granting you an unnecessary token in presuming their uselessness: they are quite powerful for their size, with strong gripping capability within their admittedly limited range.”
“Then what of your bulk?” pressed the mammal. “If you move above a trot you’ll fall over and turn into a pancake under your own mass! Catching prey is an impossibility!”
“Much of what I hunt moves not much faster, if that,” responded the Tyrannosaurus.
“Well, your jaws are clearly made to crack bones,” said the Didelphodon. “Marrow extraction is a prime goal for any carrion-eater.”
“Come off it,” said the Tyrannosaurus. “A bone-smashing bite matches my predation strategy perfectly: I charge full-bore into something, mash my teeth as deep as they’ll go, then drag them out and wait for them to bleed to death. Furthermore, my teeth would make shoddy molars: they can penetrate and smash, but they are poor crushers and chewers.”
“Surely your immensely powerful sense of smell makes you a dab hand at locating all those smelly carcasses, which you can easily secure with your powerful size?”
“You need more than a good nose to be an obligate or ‘pure’ scavenger; you also need a highly efficient means of locomotion. Almost all anachronistically-modern obligate vertebrate scavengers of the land are large birds which can drift on thermals at little to no energy cost, which also affords them easy and rapid access to corpses. I am forty feet long and must travel on foot, which makes waiting for corpses to make themselves known to me a much less economical action,” said the Tyrannosaurus, who was clearly losing patience. “Come now, be sensible. Almost no predator passes up carrion, but ones that settle for nothing-but are both extremely rare and physiologically distinct in a manner that I am not.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait a second,” said the Didelphodon, “even if you are an active predator – for the sake of the argument mind you not that I’m conceding anything – shouldn’t you not waste your stomach space on me? I am relatively nutrient-poor and bony.”
“This is true,” said the Tyrannosaurus. “However, you are endangering my young, and given that I’m spending much of my time guarding them, NOT eating you would be a senseless waste in and of itself.”
The Didelphodon was prepared to debate this point, but it was then that the Tyrannosaurus ate it.
Moral: Nobody likes pedants.
The Sickle-Cell Child.
Far, far away, there lived a child, and that child suffered from headaches and bloody urine. For these deficiencies it was mocked by its peers, and it sought solace in the advice of its parent.
“Parent,” said the child, “why am I different, and why do the other children taunt me for this?”
“My child,” said the parent, “your physiological discomforts are the result of the heterozygous sickle-cell trait, meaning that you carry a single gene for sickle-cell anemia, which causes many of your red blood cells to be deformed into a collapsed ‘sickle’ shape. Your peers mock you because human social groups often become tighter-knit when they have a designated ‘other’ to contrast themselves against.”
“None of this is comforting to me in the slightest, parent,” said the child.
“Don’t worry,” said the parent. “There is an advantage in this. Trust me.”
The child was dubious, but it did trust its parent. And so it came to be that one day a major outbreak of malaria swept through the child’s home, killing a substantial portion of its peers but sparing the child due to the inhospitable nature of its ‘sickled’ blood cells for the malarial virus. The child was filled with despair and depression, but persevered, grew up, and had four children. As its mate was also a heterozygous carrier of the sickle-cell trait, one of their children was born without it, two were born with it, and the last inherited two copies of the sickle-cell trait and thus died early in life from sickle-cell anemia, all as statistics would predict.
Moral: Life is profoundly and innately unfair.
The Man Who Knew About Wolves
One night, a man went to a nightclub with some other men, who were his social acquaintances.
“Look over there,” said one of them. “There are some women. Let us attempt to flirt with them as a prelude to obtaining mutual sexual gratification.”
“No, said the largest man present. “They would not be interested in you. Women prefer alpha males: aggressive, physically-impressive, and dynamic.”
“You are generalizing a canine social habit into a biologically-ordained behavioural process of the human species,” said the first man. “Furthermore, the alpha-beta social complex of wolves, from which you have derived your theory, is in fact an anthropogenically-induced behavior caused by fragmented wolf packs composed of strangers being raised and studied in captivity. Naturally-occurring packs consist of a breeding pair and their offspring, and in these the theorem of a dominant ‘alpha male’ whose aggressive assertiveness leads to rulership of the pack is provably false.”
The largest man present, who was inebriated, took this monologue as an insult and punched the first man, who suffered a minor concussion. He was subdued by the club’s security staff and charged for assault and battery, which caused him some difficulties in securing a financially-rewarded career.
Moral: No, really, NOBODY likes pedants. And if you understand social relationships so well, you should be able to avoid getting punched in the face.