Tuesday 25 November 2014

Lessons from nature : Blog # 199


Lessons from nature


        The other day, I happened to watch Animal Planet. It brought back fond memories of watching it as a child. This channel says beautiful stories from the wild – some intriguing, some heart breaking and some which can serve as life lessons even. Half asleep, I was watching this episode of a peculiar kind of parrot called ‘Kakapo’ in the dense forests of Newzealand. The body type of this parrot is hefty. Its wings are not designed to fly. I was wondering, what a cruel joke of nature! A fat parrot which cannot fly! Then came the explanation. These parrots have ancestors dating back to ice age. Before ice age set in,these parrots could fly. During ice age, for survival, they evolved. The need to stay alive was more than the need to fly. So nature discounted the need for weightlessness and bartered it with a body with generous layers of fat so that it could survive the cold wave.

            There was another episode on wild buffaloes and zebras. Always, the wild buffaloes follow zebras to water bodies. The reason? It is their tactic for survival. Zebras apparently need more water than the wild bulls. Hence they approach water bodies more frequently and are better aware of the dangers lurking inside those vast water bodies. They are better equipped to be alert and thus avert danger. So if zebras go in to a water body, the bulls assume that it is safe to drink water there.

            More than Nature’s immense intelligence, what amazed me is another fact. How does this kind of intelligent street smartness emerge? In both the above cases, there should have been many generations of those species which went through many experiences and from these experiences, learning occurs. But how do these lessons get handed over to further generations? One might say it is taught down the generations and thus information is passed on. But same species are spread across continents and they all act in similar ways. It is not that the experiences that they go through are exactly similar. A more interesting explanation seems to be the line of thought which says that there should be some sort of collective memory for each species. All of the living beings go back to that collective memory and tap in to that to successfully find one’s way through the labyrinth of universe. This would mean that our future generations would function based on the experiences that we go through and the collective memory that we create for them. Doesn’t that put an enormous responsibility on us, the people of today? It will be based on the way we react to the life experiences today which will show light for the generations to come as to how they should live their lives. So we better be careful!

2 comments:

  1. Very informative post. I have read all these things in history but forgot some points. Your post made me remind everything.

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