For the past five or six weeks I’ve been spelunking into an area of biology I thought I grasped in the same superficial, cursory way. The way one might call themselves an ‘oceanographer’ because they had once seen the ocean from the artificially groomed sand of a beachfront resort.
In my field, we call those who draw conclusions without cultural experience ‘armchair anthropologists.’ Speculators from great distance with little more than their opinions.
While I’m afraid many of those who publish ideas in journals and ruminate on the printed page for centuries beyond their own individual demise are guilty of these practices, most Americans seem to be, too.
So deeper into upper division biology I sauntered, my last biology course - the required prerequisite - in the previous millennium.
Biology of vertebrates, in 1999 included a field trip to the local zoo. I arrived with an empty notebook and left with heat exhaustion, and in-between I recall visiting giraffes and polar bears and penguins, none of whom seemed suited to the semi-arid climate of Colorado. They were all neutral contributors to my notebook - miserable in their own justifiably angsty ways - it was the gorillas that gave me pause.
Gorillas live in groupings of many females and one male, often referred to as ‘harems,’ a fact I adeptly recall 25 years later, and in this grouping the male was ill and quarantined. He sat in his glassed-in cage, rightfully angry about so many things, occasionally chucking broken cardboard boxes at the glass in his disgruntlement. The females wandered on a local hillside outdoors in the temperate weather. Some huddled together grooming, a few sat and stared into space, and one carried a rock.
She caught my eye.
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