Nature Videos

[white_raven23]

So over the weekend I bought the Planet Earth Series. I already owned the Blue Planet series. So I had me a nature marathon.

 

Whee.

 

Now, if anyone else has done this, you know what I mean when I say animal behavior repeats. How much damn footage of various species of marine creature did we watch all swarming around masses of sardines or herring? You've got dolphins, sea lions, water birds, tuna....all different species all able to engage in the same behavior of rounding massess of small fish into "bait balls" that are plundered down to the last morsel.

 

It was neat the first time. By DVD 3 of the Blue Planet series....it was getting pretty damn old (by DVD 4 you just want to beat your head against the screen).

 

The planet earth series wasn not that different. Despite there being different animal species, a lot of behavior depends more on what the animals ate (herbivorous, omnivorus, or carnivorous) and the relative challenges presented by their environment.

 

So anyway....the point.

 

Last night as I was falling to sleep I was thinking about how human behavior at it's core was really no different from animal behavior. That thought drifted to "if there were a god" thoughts. Such as...in nature does a worship relationship exist?

 

Not really. Most animals do not maintain relationships with their own progeny, let alone have a worship relationship of any kind. My mind drifted to the animals more "like us"....dolphins, chimpanzees, elephants....animals that maintained a certain level of family tie. Even in those cases, relationships were strongly matriarchal in nature, males tended more to go off and do their own thing, which implies somewhat that if a god did exist, it would likely be female.

 

Just as I started to drift off to sleep...it came to me. An animal relationship built around a primitive sort of worship. It's not birds, fish or reptile....heck it's not even mammals.

 

It's bugs.

 

Bees, ants and termites to be more precise.

 

Gee....how....evolved. Religion has more in common at it's base with a corner of the insect world than it even does with most of the mammalian species on the planet.

 

No wonder the religious turn their nose up at science! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! We were instantly created "special" and we have a "special" relationship with a "special" being! Shit, at least ants, bees, and termites can see, smell, and touch their "god" (the queen).

 

So the next time you see a haughty evangelist high on the smell of his own piss and self importance on tv, just picture him sitting in a pile of wood rot with sawdust clinging to his lips while he gazes adoringly at the ass end of a bloated writhing egg sac.