On the Treachery of Women

On the treachery of women (from the journals of the Kirk) ‘83

In talking with Steve C. the other day I proposed what I thought was a big problem for the model of evolution as advanced through survival of the fittest. According to the model, things mutate at either slow or gargantuan rates. (Remember Stephen Gould and the Hopeful Monster Theory?). Accordingly, the mutation must be beneficial, or at least neutral, so that some differentiation takes place from the parent stock. The mutation must then be isolated, then transferable, to the next round of offspring. Finally, the mutation should render the species more capable of survival. A halfway mutation just won’t do. But these weren't my thoughts to Steve.


It seems strange to me, I said, that woman should be at the top of the evolutionary pile. Given the model, things with thicker shells, bigger teeth, and tighter muscles should force their way to the top … unless, I guess, you consider the virus or the cockroach the pinnacle creation of a self-made cosmos. Nonetheless, or unless, you think of the cosmos littered with other forms of intelligence … it seems in my mind that woman must be highest thing on the ladder – be she material quest, or breathed into life. But why something so tender? And why the beauty? I might expect Godzilla at the top … or at least something a bit more horrific. Give me a jelly–fish with tendrils that leak radon, or a rock monster that defecates atomic bombs in its wake like an octopus squeezing ink. Give me a universe of lichens with prickers like a man-of war cactus … Give me the lobster man with machine guns for arms -- Or a mouth that’s only a mouth eternally feeding itself in a cast iron loop. Give me something hard and scarred – chunked from the smelter of "eat or be eaten." But after all that clash and kill and competition, why some soft bodied target with children that are all but ripe for the eating?


I threw my idea at Steve. He saw where my thought was going but said I was wrong because I didn’t understand just how dangerous and conniving woman-thought can be. The soft body is just part of the "bait." Something like the snapping turtle tongue that waves like a worm at advancing fish. No other has her entrapment arts or can make a whole species swarm in war and whirl swords or bombs to further her protection. She has the most advanced skills at manipulating minds and matter, often through the brute service and secondary skills of man. Man does not have armored flesh or tearing talons, but given some millions of very precarious years, man has acquired these things on the side. The cosmos took a gamble – like selling below cost … and won in the long run. (But maybe not.) In as much as man does most of what he does in pursuit of the beauty of woman. Beauty, rather than monster brawn is the pinnacle advancing trait of billions and billions of years.


I must admit, I’m not convinced, at least as pertains to evolution. But it is a weird thought.


Do billions and billions billow in her breasts, beauty from the battle of the beasts?