Living la vida loca??

Well finally back "blogging" after this last crazy month which saw the birth of my first child, a beautiful baby girl. And what a better catalyst for keeping the writing of critical thinking. During that month news have come and gone as they always do. One that called my attention, however, was the "confession" Ricky Martin made about his sexual preference. I mean, what's with that? Should that even be a topic of discussion? A headline? Should we even care? Should I write about it?

Giving the World we are living, I think I should. But think about it, why did Ricky have to deliverate for so long about letting everybody know that he likes guys instead of girls? Would he also have to deliverate for so many years telling us he prefers to eat apples rather than oranges? Or that he enjoys more by looking at an orchid instead of a peony? I use Ricky deliberatly here because it's a case most of us are familiar with, but it applies to any homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, asexual or any other label you want to use.

Preference for the same sex is widely common among the wild, figures are said to go as high as 40% (evolution 101 podcast). If this is the case, homosexuality must play an important role in evolution, whatever that is (think of a natural birth control). It doesn't surprise me then that the Pope along with the vast majority of religious leaders and followers, consider homosexuality as a sin and even as an illness, giving that most religious people are creationists themselves and really don't pay attention to evidence.

But whether homosexuality is relevant to evolution or not (most likely it is), it still blows my mind that so many people don't know that one is born with an already given sexual preference, meaning is not something you choose as you develop. So why should we care more about it than about the food one likes or dislikes? How worst or better does that make that particular person? I am glad an artist with such a big projection as Ricky Martin finally opened up, on the other hand, it astonishes me how hard that road had to be and how people keep talking about the topic.

I really hope I can do my job by teaching my daughter how irrelevant it is for me to know whether she will like boys or girls and rather focusing on being happy even if she prefers the oranges over the apples, so she doesn't have to sweat and waste energy the way Ricky did but instead brings the partner(s) she chooses to be part of her life to share valuable moments with her family. That would mean that at least in my family, which is the only one I can protect, we won't have to make this a topic of extraordinary importance because it really is not, or should at least not be, so if you see your male dog pumping another male dog, think about oranges!!!

Worth focusing your eyes!

Well well, seem like the more you think about it the more you find topics for a blog. Anyway, I went last weekend with my pregnant wife to see this movie called "Earth" (Planettaamme Maa for the Finnish readers), taken from the BBC Wolrdwide and Green Light Media production series of the same name that has had a great success especially in the U.S. through the Discovery Channel and now presented to the World by Disneynature in the form of a movie/documentary. Following track of different species around the World during the lapse of 4 years.

We had been planning to go and see this movie for a while and we finally made it, just in time as apparently they are not showing it here in Finland anymore. Anyway, it was worth every single second i spent on that theater, seriously, if you missed it, you definitely have to rent it or something!

I usually don't cry when I see movies, not that I am not a sensitive person but you know, someone has to

be the tough guy....näh not really, I just think by having studied acting doesn't help me and my credibility with

movies that much...but the thing is, I couldn't help it with this one, if you don't give a shit about nature, which I really doubt, then just watch it for the sake of the photography, i

t is just astonishing!! My favorite one, and it was really hard to pick one particular tak

e, was of a great white shark jumping it's way out of the ocean with a

pray on its mouth

and in a very slow motion, what a shot of this incredible creature!!

It all starts with a female polar bear and her two little cubs, you cannot help but feel touched by the incredible beauty of this animal, most likely doomed to a near extinction unless something really dramatic happens soon!! The movie takes you then all the way through desserts, rain forests, tundra, sabana and oceans to the south pole, and after a couple of no less dramatically beautiful southern light takes, all the way back to the beautiful white nordic characters.

The way the series has been condensed into one movie is a piece of art itself, the narration is extraordinary and as I said before, the photography of the movie is definitely worth the Oscar of the decade, plus the sequence and the

way it was all organized is equally marvelous. It's a real eye-opener to realize how easily we humans go through life, compared with how much struggle different species have to experience in order to survive. Of course getting to this point has taken a lot of effort within the evolution cycle, which we never realize.

We want to believe that we have the edge, as evolution has given us the advantage of more complex brains that allow us to create and use different and extremely complex tools that have made hunting and finishing only spare time activities instead of survival necessities.

But I think our problem is our arrogance as we believe so blindly that we are the best adapted for survival, therefore, why to care about the rest of the organisms? Well we are actually not. Mammals haven't really been here for that long, just about 200 million years, and of that, humans have been around for about 2.5 million years, that is a ridiculously small amount of time compared with the 4.6 billion years of the Earth, and we are by far in the group of the most fragile ones. So being a big multicellular and complex organism doesn't actually give us any particular edge, as a matter of fact, bacteria will probably be still here long after we are gone as it has been here l

ong before we came.

My point is, we are just instruments, experiments of evolution, just a transitional specie, we are not here to stay forever, nor is any of the other species, we will all have to evolve or die, just as natural selection dictates while, so far, colonizing other planets still seems as science fiction, and even if we do, we are still bounded by staying within our solar system due to the restrictions that the loooong distances in the universe and the laws of physics represent.

In about 50 million years, our planet will be extremely harsh for multicellular organisms to exist, and in about 5 billion years, our sun will make it absolutely inhabitable making

it look more like Venus, and that is of course, without considering the fact that we will crash with Andromeda in about 2 billion years. So then again, in geological times, we really don't have to much time.

Now I don't mean you shouldn't care about life, on the contrary, realizing this has helped me understand how fortunate we really are right now and how much beauty we still find in almost every single corner of our planet. Whether or not life itself has a particular purpose (most likely it doesn't) it has gone through so much struggle to get to where it is right now, and just for the sake of that I think we should learn to respect it and to assume the evolutional role that has been given to us, and as long as the Earth supports life, what right do we have to screw it up?

As I will become a father soon, I want my daughter to understand this and to think twice before smashing a spider with her foot. To realize all the time-investment, trial and error and huge struggle of adaptation that has resulted in the beautiful complexity of that particular organism so that she can think which rights does she posses to decide whether or not that small wonder of nature should live or not. To respect life for what it has been, what it is and what it will be for as long as this planet allows it.

That is my moral side towards nature, using my brain, respecting what has taken so much effort and endless combinations and errors to be created, instead of taking the approach of fearing of a powerful and arbitrary magician that created everything within a blink of an eye. I'm sure we all have smashed a spider at some point, even those who believe in an absolute creator, yet we are all here, without any particular punishment, so basing my morality in that assumption doesn't really give me strong arguments. It took me a lot of effort to understand it, but I am glad I did and can really use this small period of geological time that was given to me by a mere combination of almost improbable probabilities called life. And so I think this movie is a tribute to that extraordinary quest, definitely worth checking it out!