There are two kinds of people who live in my house: those who are old enough to drive, but can’t find their car keys, and those who are old enough to walk, but can’t find their shoes.
And then there’s me: the only time I can’t find my car keys or shoes is when someone–presumably someone who has misplaced their own–takes my keys and shoes for themselves. So I guess that means that there are three kinds of people who live in my house. Whatever.
Here’s what I don’t understand about this scenario: why me? Not “why me?” in the sense of “woe is me–someone has stolen my shoes again”–although there is plenty of that–but “why me?” in the sense that, evolutionarily speaking, it just doesn’t make sense.
Look: I’m a throwback. Everything about me screams “recessive genes,” from my blue eyes, to my inability to roll my tongue (yep, that’s genetic), to the fact that I have an actual, honest-to-God real toenail on my little toe (all the better to climb trees and escape Sabre-tooth tigers with). And yet, even though I live in a house filled with brown-eyed, tongue-rolling, freaky little vestigial toenail-having, dominant-gene possessing humans–as dominant a tribe as any you could imagine–I’m the only one who ever seems to be able to find my shoes.
I wonder what Darwin would have to say about that? I mean, if poor little recessive me is the only one in the house who is able to hold on to a pair of shoes, then it must be a recessive trait, right? I mean, why else would I have it? And that’s when it all stops making sense.
It makes no sense at all to have a trait that actually inhibits your ability to flee from danger; logic would tell you that, over the course of a few millennia, the cave man who is stuck in the cave searching for his sandals when it’s time to go on the mammoth hunt isn’t going to get fed that night. (Same goes for the caveman who was supposed to drive everyone to the hunt, but couldn’t find the keys to his cave SUV).
And yet, these are the very people who have flourished. Why?
I’ll give you one guess: intelligent design.
That’s right: the only possible explanation is that everything you thought you knew about evolution must be wrong: Darwin was wrong, Stephen Jay Gould was wrong, your high school biology teacher was wrong. All of them. And who was right?
Ben Stein.
Only intelligent design could explain the proliferation of a group of people who have become less capable of surviving as time has passed, because only the sort of “intelligent designer” who finds it amusing to make out butts get bigger as we get older would design a creature that spends a good part of everyday looking for its shoe. Not shoes mind you, but shoe, singular. It is the loss of one shoe that is especially vexing for me, because, unlike when both shoes are lost, when only one is gone it is hard to give up looking.
“It must be here somewhere” you find yourself thinking, “because the other one is right here.” Logically, it just seems that, unless one is attached to a prosthetic foot, both shoes should always be right next to each other.
But no: I have been searching for one of Clementine’s missing shoes since 2005, even though she has long since outgrown the remaining one. Which means, I guess, that there is actually only one kind of person living in my house: those who are foolish enough to lose their shoes, and those who are foolish enough to keep looking for those shoes for the next four years.
And, as everybody knows, there is no trait more dominant than foolishness.