Perspective

I was thinking I'd been having a pretty trying couple of days, wrapped up in a pretty trying couple of weeks, and so on and so forth, which has had an effect on regular sleep.

Then I read about this critter, a leech which feeds off the blood vessels inside the rectums of hippopotami. Leaving aside all of the grossness of how you have to travel to get to your feeding site and everything going on around you, there's the cosmic unfairness that you are genetically programmed to do this. You don't get to say, "Well, maybe I'll be a hippo knee leech," or, "You know, crocodiles have blood too and I bet a fellow could get a good tan riding on one of their backs."

Nope, your DNA has rolled snake-eyes on you from the start and you show up designed to swim around until, um, opportunity presents itself, at which point your instincts kick in and you go where no man has gone before or wanted to. I wonder about what kind of worldview such a creature would have, if it were gifted with the ability to reflect upon its condition -- although I suspect that a mass leech suicide might be the actual result of that enhancement,

But if you were one of these things and you could think, which would be worse? A universe with a deity that had designed you for exactly the role you played? Or one in which natural selection winnowed out the less successful related species around you until you were the only one remaining, and in which traveling up the wrong end of alimentary canal of a giant artiodactyl ungulate was the best you could hope for. If you were the winner in the Darwinian Derby of your particular biome, what in the heck did the losers do?

I think I'll rest easy tonight.