Let’s talk about a more complex life form. We know that certain ants farm aphids. The ants have learned that aphids produce a sweet food that the ants can use. Somehow, the ants have learned to protect the aphids from other predators. The somehow is easy enough to imagine. Those ants who “discovered” and began eating the sweet sugar from the aphids were able to survive. Ants who ate the aphids lost this resource and were out competed by other ants who protected the aphids. A simple case of selective pressure that seems somehow intelligent but it is not intelligent (by that I mean it was not a planned strategy by any one particular ant). It’s just that you had a whole bunch of ants over millions of years with a lot of variable genetically programmed behaviors, and only the ones with the behavior of protecting the aphids survived.

I am going to be talking about how mankind has purposefully planned and selectively bred animals for his own benefit, but first let’s talk some more about these ants. Have the ants done this? Can we view the ants to be like us as farmers who keep and protect cattle and other animals so that they are now so evolved as to be helpless – that left alone they would be butchered and extinct in no time, like sheep? Of course not. Ants have not selected the aphids who have produced the most sugar. They have not selectively picked out certain aphids for breeding and they do not kill those who have less desirable traits. It is a static system which will remain static, ants and aphids evolving slowly if at all with little reason to change. If the ants had intelligence they would have the ability to select the best aphid traits and thus improve their resource base even though the ants have no tools or fingers or whatever. All they would have to do is isolate, kill, or protect selectively. But they do not.

Mankind however has intelligence and is able to cause other species to evolve, some of whom have evolved so much that they are indeed a new species and some which would certainly go extinct if they were neglected by us. To me this is a more intense form of Darwinian natural selection. Instead of being selected by survival pressures, they are selected by other traits desired by other species. This is still in my view, natural selection.

I make no distinction between natural and artificial selection in that although artificial selection is somehow viewed as unnatural, it is, in fact, natural. So called artificial selection is however, a fundamentally more complex extrapolation of natural selection. Now here is where we begin to move this discussion from normal everyday earthly concepts to an expanded concept of a universal natural philosophy. You might even say it gets crazy.

In this sense if I were to discover that we have become sentient and intelligent beings because some other beings have selected us and even genetically manipulated us, I would not be offended in the least. I would not be angry to discover that we were meddled with. I would merely view this as part of our evolution in as natural a sense as ever. If life affects life and causes it to be changed and to evolve into something different it is still evolution and natural selection.

There are those who believe that extraterrestrial beings have “uplifted” us from our simian ancestors. As far back as the Pliocene or even the Miocene, a civilization from another planet has genetically and continually manipulated our ancestors so that eventually modern humans emerged and they are still manipulating us genetically. I don’t know if this is true, and frankly I would not care if it was or not. My ego would not be offended to learn that we are not the first intelligence beings or that we did not do it all ourselves. The reason why I would not be offended is because if this intervention was true, it would be to me natural selection anyway. Life begets life. Life changes and alters other life.

It seems to me that the discovery that we are not alone and in fact that life abounds in the universe will come very soon and is almost a certain fact already. And this leads me to imagine life beginning on isolated planets in a lot of places, evolving in each one via Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and eventually leaving their planets of origin to continue the evolution of life, only this time in the Universe as a whole. A grand escalation leading to something as large as the universe itself and what could it be? Could it be that the universe itself is somehow evolving to become self aware?

While we are at it why not pretend also that we survive death, that our bodies are merely a way for our “souls” to experience the material world? If this is so, are the souls of the extraterrestrials also the same as ours? Or are there different “species” of souls with different capabilities in the realm of the “souls”. Ya, I know, some pretty heady stuff there. You can take this a lot further but it gets really messy and in the end it’s all speculation.

But I guess the point is that I believe that life will continue to evolve, however it will happen that evolution will become bigger than just on mere isolated planets as various space faring civilizations get out and about. We need to begin to become unified in this world and join the other worlds out there in that great quest for the self awareness of the Universe, whatever that means.

And so today I ran at the indoor track. I ran 6 laps for a warm up, then began my 44 lap 10 km time trial. My pace was 6:40 per kilometer so I ran it in 1:06:36. In all I did 11.36 (50 laps) km today. Then I walked a few extra laps for a cool down. Did my stretches and some push ups after. Then I went to the pool where something new happened. After only a few minutes of just bobbing around a small area in my left calf muscle began contracting uncontrollably over an area about the size of a dollar coin, causing me a considerable amount of incapacitating pain. No sooner did that settle down a bit when my right calf muscle just below the knee did the same thing over a much larger area (an area about the size of my hand) and the pain was ten times worse. I had to get out of the water for that one. It feels like the muscles were contracting uncontrollably and unrelentingly. It’s like the muscles said “Oh hey, were contracting permanently now and yes we know that we are being ripped and torn apart but we don’t care because we’re not relaxing, so piss off.”

Well, this has never happened to me before ever; it is something completely new to me. I have no idea why this happened. I had to get out as I’ve said, and get into the hot tub to try to relax it out. It’s still pretty sore right now but the worst seems to be over. Perhaps it was due to my hot muscles being submerged in cold water, I don’t know for sure. The hot tub helped a lot.

The only thing I did differently today was that instead of drinking water, I drank orange Powerade. As you know, this has sodium and potassium salts in it as well as sugars. I usually drink only water for such a short indoor run. I only drink Powerade during my outside runs. I drank a total of 500 mL.

The part I played today in the world is that of the runner who was initially highly perturbed by a spasm incident, but quickly decided to totally ignore it and just carry on.

I am reminded of a conversation I had a long time ago with some people who were interested in running and exercise as a means to an end. I told them creating mini goals is good. But forget about losing 60 pounds. Just focus on losing one pound this week only. Then never gain it back. But they seemed to be only focused on the end result. They wanted to lose x pounds by such and such a date. I told them to forget about that and to focus on making lifestyle changes. Just do it for the rest of your life and not for some arbitrary period of time. Some of them said they were too old. I asked them, “OK, so how old will you be next year if you do nothing?” The reply was of course a year older. Then I asked “OK, so how old will you be if you do something?” The point is that no matter what your choices are, you will be a year older. It is better to make the right choice now so that when you are a year older you can look back and say I am better than I was last year, even if I haven’t reached my ultimate goal. It’s better than wishing you had done something and better than feeling awful about missing out on a whole year’s progress. Some say they feel it is too late for them and they don’t have much time left. I just ask, “how much time do you think you have left?” No matter what they reply I just say that they have the entire rest of their lives.

I suffer set backs all the time and probably so does everyone else. I have not reached my ultimate goal and I probably never will reach it. But that is not the point. The point is to make it a forever thing. Everything else will follow.

Just as you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink, you can lead people to the well of critical thought, but you can’t make them think…and while we are at it, you can show people the best path to take to improve their lives, but you can’t make them run it. People will find excuses for damn near everything I have found. And it’s never their fault.

All the world is indeed a stage and all the men and women on it merely players. The question is: How will you perform your role? (Thanks to Shakespeare for the poetry).

Anyway, today’s 11 km run was going mighty fine until I yet again was attacked by a stupid owner’s dog. I was just coming out of the wildlife sanctuary when I saw a truck pull up at the end of the trail (still about 4 km from home along country roads). The stupid owner jumped out of his truck and let his two dogs out, one of which immediately attacked me and bit me in the leg, tearing my pants (which now have a 6 inch rip in them) but fortunately not enough to break the skin. It was one of those stupid ugly little poodles owned by an even stupider older male person.

I have been “charged” by dogs countless times and so when I saw that poodle bear down on me barking like crazy I thought it would be just another show of all bark and no bite but this time I was wrong. Startled, I cried out I angrily and said to the owner, “Ouch! Control your frikken dogs, man!” “@*#&$^ *&^^”, I added angrily. (That was not really taking the lord’s name in vain as at that moment I sincerely wanted this person and his dogs to roast in hell for all eternity. It was sort of a prayer, you see). In truth, I don’t really want this to happen, but that’s what knee jerk anger can do. So the guy bows his head, looks away from me, totally ignoring me and the obvious rip in my running pants, and he makes a wide berth around past me and onto the trail. The guy seemed to be very terrified, he was certainly acting like the frightened little twit he was. I had to get out of there immediately because I would have been very tempted to punch his lights out. Rather, I knew I was very angry and that I took the best course of action by leaving as quickly as he did and calming down a bit.

I kept running. I had some really nasty fantasy thoughts of how to deal with aggressive dogs permanently by carrying certain illegal weapons with me. Of course, this is sheer nonsense and I knew it. The problem I had was that I had no plan, except crazy stupid ones which I would never seriously consider using. What was I going to do, tackle the guy? Yell at him some more? Slash his tires? Make his dog apologize? I began carrying pepper spray with me but I’ve never used it, preferring not to use force except as a last resort, which in my case would not happen until a dog draws blood. In this case I had no time to use it, the incident was over before I could even react.

But now I do have a plan. And it is a reasonable one. If this ever happens again, I will have the phone number of the local dog control officer in my cell phone and I will call the officer. I will detain the offending owner as best as I can or follow the stupid bastard home or take photographs of his license plate number and dogs and I will charge him and go to court to make sure he doesn’t get away with it. But my plan involves stopping running until I can get a hold of the local dog control officer who has had many problems in this area in the past.

I’m just fed up with being attacked by dogs on public property. My plan involves no violence and gives total control over to lawful officers of the peace. I think it is a reasonable plan and I hope you all agree that I should have a right to run on or in public properties and public roads without being bitten by dogs or having my clothes torn by their teeth. Yes I felt a lot of anger and was very upset, but by now having a reasonable plan in effect I won’t be caught off guard again, and I can stay reasonably civilized. And oh yes, one last thing: I have actually drawn my pepper spray can many times in the past as soon as I’ve seen a dog bearing down on me but I have never used it because always at the last minute the dog proves it was just a fake charge. Somehow I can tell the dog won’t hurt me. But I am losing patience and if I ever see one of those poodles charge me again, not only will he get sprayed if he gets within three feet of me, but I’m going to make the owner pay for the can. And if I accidentally spray the owner as well, it not my fault. Hmm, I think I’m still angry.