Genetics And Personal Safety

Are you accident-prone?

Try this simple test. Stretch your arms out. Make a fist with each hand and bring them quickly together. If your head got in the way, you are accident-prone. No, don't try it again, stop it. We are going to discuss safety. I said stop it! Look at figure 1.

Figure 1 is a specimen of Modern Man. Norma found it in our yard. She took a picture of it. She made it carry out a little bag of garbage. There is an old banana in there, some bones, paper --organic things-- in a plastic bag. Plastics are organic polymers derived from oil. Oil comes from geologically compressed zooplankton and algae. If anything was to cause something to fall off of (or out of) the bag or out of the Modern Man in figure 1, a close examination would reveal this:

Of course, you'll need a really good microscope with lots of brass knobs like mine:

And what does this tell us? Man shares 40% to 70% of genetic code with the banana --the same old flaccid banana that fell --accidentally?-- young and yellow off a tree and got shipped here to obscurity, forgotten behind Tupperware (with which we share 55% of  DNA). It could not have happened on purpose. Paper? More organic matter, more DNA --born to be scribbled on or pressed into currency of uncertain fungibility. Bones? I won't even get into that. Point is, none of these relatives of Man could have intended to end up the way they did, in the garbage. Nor could primordial plankton and algae calculate their participation in the ubiquity of automobiles.

This brings us to thoroughfares.  Our specimen of Modern Man must cross a lane to throw garbage in a can. This is asking for trouble. Lanes, freeways, doesn't matter --they are all roads. We have seen what happens to skunks when they try to cross roads. Modern Man shares 99% of DNA with Mephitidae and that constitutes certainty in all rational disciplines. If skunks can't reliably cross roads, free from accident, neither can Man. Barring genetic engineering away from accident-proneness, there is only one solution. We must redesign our environment so that everything --workplaces, residences, churches, tallow works, skyscrapers, farms, markets, missile silos and liquor stores-- everything we need in life, is on one side of the road --all roads, all over the world.

I can't imagine what would be on the other side of the road then, can you?