Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You by Dan Riskin Ph.d. Read Free Book Online Page A

female come together and perform ritualized movements, crawling over one another and rubbing their bodies against one another in very specific ways. Being amphibians, like frogs are, male salamanders don’t have penises, so during mating he glues a ball of sperm to the ground. As they move together, the female slides her body over the sperm ball and draws it up into her body.
    If a male red-cheeked salamander comes across a male and female in the middle of a dance, he will sometimes push them apart. Other times, though, he will sneak in between them and then continue the dance as though he were the female. The original male presumably doesn’t realize there’s been a swap, so the dance continues until he deposits his sperm packet. Then the false female turns around and bites him, causing him to run away. 23
    To me, sneaker males embody envy even better than thieving predators do. When smaller males within a species bump heads with larger males, little guys usually end up holding the short end of the stick. Whether or not he’s literally envious is a question that might someday be answered by clever experiments, but since this happens in so many kinds of animals, we can never possibly know for all of them. Whether or not it’s envy, those smaller males seem motivated to make the most of what they’ve got to get their genes passed into the next generation. In nature, the game’s not necessarily over for a male who gets sand kicked in his face.
    Now, this is exactly the kind of moment when we’re tempted to look at these animals and say something about what they can teach us. We may want to point to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as nerds who came out ahead in the game of life, but that’s a dangerous, slippery slope. Let’s say you look at alternative mating strategies in male animals and then say something to a teenage boy like “Listen, even if you’re not on the football team, you’ll eventually meet a woman who loves you for who you are, who sees your sweetness, your intelligence, or your sense of humor.” That’s a lovely thing to say, but that’s not what’s happening out there. You’re not asking the teenager to intercept a female on her way to a date with the football player and force her to copulate with him.You wouldn’t tell that male teenager to sneak into a couple’s bed while they’ve having sex and take the role of the female so that the football player will ejaculate in the wrong place. You can’t pretend nature’s an instruction manual. It’s fine to take inspiration from nature, but you still have to have common sense. Humans should abide by morals, and nature is not a place of morality. The fact that something happens in nature can never be used to justify it in human behavior, no matter how harmless it might seem to do so.

    When my first real girlfriend and I broke up in high school, she sent me a note (this was before text messages) that said “Tell me, Dan. Is ignorance really bliss?” To this day I still have no idea what she was talking about (maybe that was her point), but for some reason, that concept has haunted me ever since. If ignorance is bliss, then could gaining knowledge make you sadder? If you spend your life seeking new information, is it possible that some joy might be lost?
    As a parent, I’m starting to think so.
    Learning about the natural world has made my life richer than it would otherwise be, but I know that learning about evolution has also peeled away some fairy tales that might have made things a little easier. I imagine that a certain bliss might have come from the belief that my great-aunt Claire could look down from heaven on the birth of Sam and smile along with me at the family resemblance. It might also have been helpful to believe in those tense moments before Sam’s first breath that some benign natural force was looking after him. But the time I’ve spent learning about science has led me not to believe those stories.
    In those instances, maybe