Birds of a Feather
A duck paced me this morning. I saw Winged Migration a few weeks ago, and was reminded of the film as I watched the streamlined shape of the bird fly beside my car. Migratory birds can fly more than 2000 miles twice a year in the course of their seasonal migrations. Winged Migration follows a number of flocks of birds along their migration patterns, utilizing ultra-light aircraft to pace the birds and get some of the most amazing footage of birds in flight you will ever see.
I glance down at the speedometer. I'm doing 35MPH. This duck is keeping up with me. I've got Henry Ford's inventive genuis and a hundred years of mechanical inovation wrapped around me in order to achieve this sort of speed. A duck has a pair of wings and water-repellent feathers.
When Baloo snacked on my arm this morning, my reaction wasn't to bite him back, but to find a brick -- to find a tool.
Our self-awareness, our ability to see ourselves separate from our environment and to be imagine different configurations of that environment to our advantage, is what moved us to the top of the food chain. But where do we go from here? Sharks are the top of their chain and have been for millions of years. They haven't refined themselves because there hasn't been any reason to do so -- no creature threatens their position.
Who threatens us? Ourselves. Which is probably why we spend so much energy and creative effort coming up with more efficient ways of killing each other. Nice built-in self-destruct mechanism.
Body modification is just the next iteration of Darwinian evolutionary extrapolation. The next generation wants to be better, faster, stronger than the last, and isn't content to just pass along these traits to their children. They want to be more evolved NOW.
We understand tools, and, as our tools become more sophisticated, we will be able to more readily mimic those traits of animals which we still admire. Sure, I have a car which allows me to go faster than a duck, but I have to stay on the roads. My son may be able to grow his own wings and follow the children of this duck more directly. The distinction between the route we take and the course the duck flies may disappear in our lifetimes.
In the meantime, we have Winged Migration. See it. A duck's eye view is something wonderful.