Myopic fog, doomsday and banana slugs

The Kingdom Animalia may never surpass Disney’s paradisiacal Animal Kingdom on the lists of young and spoiled adventurers, but it is a magnificent place, full of mix-ups and oddities even stranger than what you might find in a Disney World custodial closet. Unless, of course, what you find in said closet is a banana slug.

While I do intend to make a point, it might be fitting to talk about the penises of these uncannily penis-shaped slugs. Banana slugs are hermaphrodites, so they have the good fortune of simultaneously giving and receiving penetration.This seems evolutionarily adaptive for the slug, a relatively unintelligent species without gender norms, but there is occasionally a slight snafu.

That is, unfortunately, that each slug occasionally bites off the other’s penis in an apparent fit of sexual frustration with a cannibalistic twist. One actual theory is that this is done to make detaching easier, but I seriously doubt that makes up for its maladaptive nature; chewed off penises don’t reproduce very well. 

What else can the Kingdom Animalia present us with that Disney-esque imagination ideally wouldn’t call to mind? Well, giraffes birth standing up, dropping their fragile young five feet from the birth canal to the unforgiving ground; sloths don’t seem to understand food digestion, which can take up to a potentially lethal month; and pandas don’t seem to understand mating, meaning you would be hard pressed to seduce the stoic beast. They’ve also been known to poop 40 times a day. Biology is as weird as it is diverse as it is smelly.

But these species with slightly maladaptive traits couldn’t hold a candle (especially not the banana slug) to what is arguably the most maladapted species of all: homo sapiens. We have pinky toes; we have appendices; we have wisdom teeth; we have a nearly ineradicable sense of selfishness, seasoned with a pinch of myopia, which renders us apathetic to the harsh realities of climate change, unsustainable population growth, resource depletion and mass extinction.

But really, have you ever seen pictures of banana slugs mating? They look so silly. 

The egocentric hierarchy of human interest isn’t surprising; it’s usually some variation of the following: 1. Individual, 2. Family, 3. Tribe, 4. Rest of population, 5. Other stuff. The biologist E.O. Wilson dubbed this misinformed selfishness “myopic fog,” which may have been adaptive until just the last few millennia. The human brain evolved when homo sapiens existed in small, illiterate, hunter-gatherer groups. Life was so short, dangerous and precarious that a biological and neural emphasis was placed on the individual, the near-future and early reproduction. This means that you had the majority of two million years to take selfies, but that now is not the time.  

The astounding (and ironic) part of our egocentrism is that humans are able to comprehend how maladaptive selfishness is; our intellect grants us insight into how evolution might prune the human species off the earth before such pruning has occurring. Mother nature is a wicked gardener.  

Given this intellectual advantage, will homo sapiens be able to reassess the efficacy of their neural circuitry and eliminate potentially suicidal impulses, namely selfish myopia? Proponents of the juggernaut theory say no -- intelligence extinguishes itself, and a sense of environmental duty will come only too late to save the human-inhabitable world from predominantly climate change and overcrowding-induced deterioration. But if intelligence partnered with selfishness is the corrupting source, then maybe intelligence partnered with altruistic reevaluation is the solution.

That, or a one-way ticket to Disney’s Animal Kingdom to ride out the end in luxury. Or just be glad we don’t bite off each other’s genitalia.