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!
Very informative post. I have read all these things in history but forgot some points. Your post made me remind everything.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the kind words, Anusia :)
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