February 12: Darwin Day

Happy Darwin Day!  In celebration of the illustrious and storied birth of Charles "The Turtle Watcher" Darwin, we jumped off our roof without parachutes and then licked a couple of light sockets.  That's a lie.  Although, given the existence of the Darwin Awards, surely someone, somewhere has done that.

In celebration of Darwin Day, we did a couple things.  We both read several Darwin Awards stories and shook our heads in disbelief and superiority.  I know Darwin Awards are linked twice in this very short blog entry, but I would highly recommend clicking both.  Mostly because I'm being controlling of you blog reading experience today.

We made it a fairly low key holiday.  Partly because there really aren't non-life-threatening ways to celebrate Darwin Day, since we're honoring that whole "survival of the fittest" precept.  And partly because it was a Wednesday.  And, honestly...

Who can compete with that beard?

We did celebrate in a deeply meaningful, important and philosophical way though.  We spent the afternoon contemplating the nature of survival of the fittest in regards to humanity.  From an evolutionary standpoint, things that used to matter really don't.  Think about it - why do giraffes have long necks according to evolutionary theory?  Because over time, only the tallest of them could reach food to survive and therefore reproduce.  But for humans, not even abject stupidity prevents reproduction consistently.  There is no particular physical characteristic that is 'bred out' or 'bred in' to the human population the way things used to be with animals.  It is a weird time to live - there is an abundance of food and high tech medical care that puts people who might have been removed from the gene pool back into it.

So really there are few ways to demonstrate evolutionary superiority.  We decided, therefore, to celebrate the concept of survival of the fittest under a looser, sociological interpretation.  You know - social Darwinism.  So how then, did we celebrate?  Well.  You know how Valentine's Day fell on a Friday this year?  And how Justin and I live in Houston?  And how Houston is the 4th largest city in the country and how restaurants go utterly batshit crazy on Valentine's Day?

Yeah, we knew that too.

So, in honor of BOTH Valentine's Day and Darwin Day, we had a lovely romantic dinner at the Cheesecake Factory on a perfectly calm Wednesday evening.  Also, we had fried macaroni and cheese.  OM.  NOM.  NOM.

Darwin Day was neat - we had a lot of fun talking about both actual and social Darwinism over the course of the evening.  It was a more in depth and intellectual conversation than we normally have.  Don't get me wrong - we're smarty-pantses - but sometimes it's nice to space out to Maury Povich and wonder who the father is.