This goose that sits on her eggs in front of my office reminds me of me. But the really good thing is that I can carry my egg inside myself and am not forced to sit on it motionlessly for hours. I’m also quite happy that I have just one instead of the five or six the goose is expecting.
I like that goose sitting on his future babies. And I like you too Clarissa sitting nowhere, hahaha!. Cheers
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I will have to try very hard not to sit on the baby once it’s born. I have destroyed about 25 pairs of expensive eye-glasses in my life by sitting on them.
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Like you, I’m also glad that I’m a human being and not a duck but that has got nothing to do with evolution.
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I was trying to say that humans are a more evolved life form. 🙂 🙂
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“More” evolved doesn’t have anything to do with it. We’re differently evolved – ducks just evolved to do different stuff. At least the duck doesn’t have to carry her young around inside her for 9 months. 😛
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We eat them or they eat us? We are totally more evolved. Poor things can’t even read! Let alone blog. 🙂 🙂
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The dust mites that live in your bed eat you – doesn’t mean they’re more evolved than you. 😛 It just means they’ve taken a certain evolutionary path. In terms of how much we’ve evolved, though, the ducks may very well have made more changes than us. In fact, a greater number of adaptations signify a less successful species, because it implies they haven’t carved their evolutionary niche yet.. You can argue we’re BETTER evolved than ducks, but by what measure? We’re more intelligent, sure, but that’s just because we evolved to solve problems. A duck doesn’t need to solve as many or as complex problems, so it’s not as intelligent. The only reason it’s not as smart is because it doesn’t need to be, and it fulfills its evolutionary role as well as we do ours; so it’s just as sucessful as a species. And let’s face it, that duck’s probably have a better time with her life than 90% of the human race. 😛
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“The dust mites that live in your bed eat you – doesn’t mean they’re more evolved than you.”
– No, I’m still here, while the goose I cooked for Christmas isn’t.
” You can argue we’re BETTER evolved than ducks, but by what measure”
– We read books and write article on literary criticism.
” And let’s face it, that duck’s probably have a better time with her life than 90% of the human race.”
– That’s not true because such concepts are alien to it. The duck doesn’t live reflectively.
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Ignore this if you don’t want to read nitpicking at your jokes, but evolution has nothing to do with making things “better” except in the sense of “better able to exploit the resources available in the relevant environment in order to beget offspring who also successfully reproduce”. It is not a drive towards increased complexity except in the sense that an ecosystem with lots of simple creatures in it can begin to contain more complex creatures who consume the simpler ones to acquire the bigger amounts of energy required to sustain the added complexity. We’re definitely more complex than ducks, and we’re extremely successful as far as apex predators go, but all this has nothing to do with us being “more” evolved. The tree of life as I’ve seen it in most biology textbooks is little more than a way to flatter the species reading them 😉
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“The tree of life as I’ve seen it in most biology textbooks is little more than a way to flatter the species reading them ”
– There is only one species reading it, as far as I’m aware. And that, by definition, makes human beings superior to everything else. It is self-evident to me that in case of human beings, evolution was much more successful than in any other case. Every other creature on the planet exists only as long as humans deem it necessary to allow it to live. The duck in the photo only has a chance to lay its nest and sit there quietly because the administration of the university imposes draconian measures (including expulsion) to protect the ducks.
“Ignore this if you don’t want to read nitpicking at your jokes, but evolution has nothing to do with making things “better””
– And then people wonder why nobody in this country wants to study evolution. If this is how it’s taught, what is the point of studying it? When science slides towards sophistry, it loses much of its authority. Something like this started happening in lit crit at some point when people began to insist that you cannot pass a value judgment on works of art and say that one is better than another. Such critics insisted that graffiti that disfigures half of New York has the same artistic value as the works of Cervantes.
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Yes, but on the other hand, wouldn’t it be even better to have a few days of frenzied mating, and then just crawl up on land, lay a clutch of eggs on a beach, and then swim away without having to worry about them again?
I’m just saying: evolution should have stopped at reptiles.
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“Yes, but on the other hand, wouldn’t it be even better to have a few days of frenzied mating, and then just crawl up on land, lay a clutch of eggs on a beach, and then swim away without having to worry about them again?’
– No, not really. 🙂 I kind of look forward to the part that will take place after my egg hatches because the actual process of hatching it is not that much fun. 🙂
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So you’ll be able to see cute little geese soon from a window, to make spending time in the office even more pleasant. 🙂
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I don’t have tenure yet. This means I don’t deserve a window.
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[…] buildings on campus a difficult endeavor, especially during the mating and brooding season. They make their nests right in front of buildings and attack anybody who approaches. People have been bitten by the geese, the disabled […]
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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