Evolution’s Contrarian Capacity for Creativity
One of my favorite pastimes while traveling is watching birds. Not rare birds, mind you, but common ones: local variations on universal themes of sparrow and chickadee, crow and mockingbird.
I enjoy them in the way that other people appreciate new food or architecture or customs, and it can be a strange habit to explain. Yet there’s something powerfully fascinating about how familiar essences take on slightly unfamiliar forms; an insight, even, into the miraculous essence of life, a force capable of resisting the universe’s otherwise inevitable tendency to come to
