Straight hair and butterflies

The image of the Filipina now with long straight black hair is increasingly becoming the trend. I am personally envious of women who have natural curls. Hair is apparently a source of periodic discontent among the female kind. Once in a university dorm, going into the common floor bathroom, I saw on one side of the mirrored wall, straight-haired women curling their hair and on the other side, curled-hair women flattening theirs out. I am a bore when it comes to hair fashion trends and know nothing about them except that it usually helps me regain my cool after an upsetting moment when I buy hair clips that I never use.

But somehow these hair trends caught my attention recently as I was thinking about how in evolution, creatures change their appearance to attract potential mates or to prevent attacks from predators, increasing their chances of reproduction. You see, in evolutionary terms, this is the game to be won for each species – to survive – and the measure of survival is continuity through offspring. I make no claims that women straighten out their hair to attract mates as I know no study systematically linking the two although I would suspect the manufacturers of the products involved in this process have done some related studies. But you may find it fascinating as I do, that these close mutual responses of one creature to another’s demands and vice versa, called co-evolution, are like a dance, a tango, if you may, delicately refined by the times and environment as the temperament of Buenos Aires starting in the very late 1800s necessitated the rhythm, passion and fire of the now eternal tango.

One of the better-known examples of co-evolutionary dance is that between some Latin American birds and the flowers they woo. One of the more gripping moves in the tango dance is when the legs of the dancers hug their partners. When this move is performed, the image of the dancing couple is elevated to a sculpture, with each curve in the body contoured with elegance to match the bend of the partner’s, raw with passion and life but sublime in appearance, knowing it took deep time to muster such grace. The same is true with creatures known to have co-evolved. For example, some hummingbirds in Latin America (how wonderful that it is also where tango was born), have developed either long bills or sickle-shaped bills to be perfect for the long or sharply curved flowers from which they harvest nectar, which they also pollinate thus providing service to the flower. While writing this, I have a violin-strung image concurrently running in my head of passionate tango meets in the streets of Buenos Aires and of millions of hummingbirds and nectared-blossoms in that same country doing their own natural tango. Makes me feel connected to some ancient rhythm to which all of nature’s creatures dance, catching it in the distinct lifetimes we burst into if we listen well enough. In that sense, no "thank you’s" are necessary as responding to the environment and to another creature is the natural order of things. This also makes me think of co-evolutionary behavior in anthropology where people’s cultural behaviors are shaped by their physical environment. The Rabari desert people of India have learned to live patiently in and with the desert, rendering time which seems like eternity in the desert, as "tensile as chewing gum" as Robyn Davidson wrote in her book Desert Places (Penguin Group, NY 1996). There, you succumb to the vast distances which seem unreachable when you look at the horizons rendered nebulous by the heat and sandstorms. Davidson noted that these nomads, the last of their kind in India, have learned an adaptive behavior so necessary to survive the desert such as a kind of humor that bursts at the faintest call and some kind of pathological sharing of everything, considered a high virtue in more "sophisticated" environments but simply, necessary for survival in the desert.

Mimicry is another form of co-evolution and was first described by naturalist and explorer Henry Bates in 1852. The best-known example of this is seen in some kinds of butterflies like the monarch that develop some toxin that their main bird predators find horribly unpleasant or even harmful. This obviously will teach those birds a lesson to avoid these butterflies that look a certain way, particularly in color patterns. As a result, some other kinds of butterflies, such as the viceroy, that do not really contain these toxins, have imitated the same color markings of the ones that do have toxins and so "fool" the birds that avoid the butterflies with the real toxins. Pretty smart and neat huh? But this strategy will not be successful for all eternity as in the Darwinian sense, the predator birds, by trial-and-error, with eventually learn to distinguish the toxic butterflies from those who are not and another brilliant survival strategy may be invented by these fluttering wonders. So mimicry is not a comprehensive, permanent insurance of safety in nature.

I find this co-evolutionary concept deeply fascinating as it emphasizes the importance, not to mention, stark evidence, of grace in living together amid uniqueness and diversity in Nature. I personally resonate with things and places that breed diversity and foil attempts by industry to dissolve such uniqueness. I find utterly tasteless attempts to transform every street corner of every city into a fast-food maze or every empty space on the planet into a shopping mall. I admire technology and get totally engaged in the science of it and I give credit to industry where it is due but drawing from natural and human history and observations fortunately frames that admiration and credit within a sane perspective. Do we really believe that natural life on Earth took 4.5 billion years and human civilization which stretches back 35,000 to 40,000 years, evolved just to bring us to this point where our main collective activity as Homo sapiens in this wonderful Earth, is to look the same, eat and shop? If you do so, if you cannot draw from the lessons of 4.5 billion years or at least 3,000 years of recorded human history, then as Goethe said, you are "living from hand to mouth," from point A to point B. Period.

Do you really want this one shot at being alive to be that dull a ride?

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