Impossible Possible Worlds

But all of them except one go by nicknames in the show like Simo and Mido

dress

petticoat

petticoat

petticoat

petticoat

petticoat

petticoat

petticoat

But there are baboons who drop their babies a lot, baboons who are so nervous about mating they flee when it’s time to act, baboons who panic in the middle of a fight and rather than grabbing the rival’s probable infant to dissuade them from attacking grab a high ranking female adult who then slaps them, baboons who get petulant about being beaten in social interactions and go bounce up and down in branches until they snap, baboons who are big and strong and (repeatedly!) get in the exact right place to win a fight but then panic and vanish, bedraggled baboons, baboons with weird health problems, baboons who can’t figure out social dynamics and keep getting trod on –

Most living things (at least on the macroscopic scale) die long before they get a chance to reproduce. If you’ve ever watched a documentary about sea turtles, you probably know a lot of them get eaten while trying to crawl from the egg they hatched from to the sea; I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what the modal sea turtle’s life looks like; it lives for something like three minutes and dies on the beach it hatched on; the ones that even live long enough to feel the ocean on their flippers are a fortunate minority. That sort of pattern holds for any species that’s closer to the r-selected end; the vast majority of individuals never reproduce, the ones that manage to reproduce are a tiny minority, nature’s 1%.

On the other end of the spectrum, humans are possibly the most K-selected animal species on this planet, and until the last century or so even humans had a rate of survival to adulthood hovering somewhere not very far above 50% (though IIRC those figures are mostly for agricultural societies, hunter-gatherers may have done better cause less crowding and less close contact with animals would have meant less transmission of infectious diseases, which were the main cause of death early in life). The most K-selected animal on the planet may have for the vast majority of its existence just barely managed to get above the “odds of living long enough to reproduce are better than a coin flip” line! And then consider people who lived long lives but didn’t reproduce for one reason or another, and a lot of human societies might have been below that 50% mark. Given that, I think it’s safe to presume that in almost all animal species the individuals who manage to reproduce are a lucky minority.  That is to say, for almost all animal species, the mean number of offspring is around replacement rate, but the modal number of offspring is zero.

And this is just considering surviving long enough to reproduce, when there are often huge filters after that; for example, in a lot of animal species even within the males that manage to live to reproductive age a hugely disproportionate amount of the reproduction is done by a small minority of highly sexually/reproductively successful males. Probably a lot of species have a lot of variation in reproductive success even within the minority that manages to live to reproductive age.

Even in modern human society, where modern medicine and sanitation has given us a situation where the reproductively successful are a solid majority (what tremendous species privilege we now enjoy!), I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a significant “the average person doesn’t have average parents” effect similar to the “the average person doesn’t live in an average country” effect. The average parent may be closer to my mother (1 child), but a lot of people may have at least one parent who’s closer to my biological father (who had something like three or five kids with multiple women - the fact I don’t know the actual number offhand says a lot about my relationship to him and his family lol).

And now consider that in a species that reproduces exclusively by sexual reproduction like humans or baboons each individual is the result of a unique or nearly unique (in the case of identical twins) reshuffling of genes; each individual is an experiment. And these genes get reshuffled and interact with each other in complex ways. A tall parent and a short parent won’t necessarily have kids who are roughly half-way between their height; sometimes the kid might get all the short genes of the short parent and all the short genes of the tall parent and end up shorter than either of them. A person with sickle cell anemia is probably descended from two healthy parents who each have mild sickle cell trait.

When we turn around to go back to our car, there’s a baboon sitting in the driver’s seat. 

One of the game wardens immediately rushes at the car, waving his arms and shouting. The baboon bolts through the open window, but he takes something with him - my toddler’s sippy cup. It’s our last remaining sippy cup. You cannot buy sippy cups upcountry in Tanzania. I think I cried out, “Oh no, my baby’s cup,” or something to that effect.

The baboon runs to the edge of the parking area, sits down, and starts drinking from my son’s cup. His manner is both furtive and insolent. 

The game warden pulls out his rifle and aims it at the baboon. 

I don’t much like baboons but I don’t think the baboon should die for stealing our sippy cup. We were the ones who left the window down.

It was like something out of High Noon. The warden stares down the barrel of his rifle at the baboon. The baboon glares at the warden over the top of the sippy cup. You could cut the tension with a knife. 

Then suddenly the baboon flings down the cup, swings his butt around at us defiantly, and stalks off into the undergrowth. If he’d been a human he’d have have shouted something teenagery like, “Fine, take your crappy cup, I didn’t want it anyway.”

Old Irish lit: Dave punched Steve so that the top of his skull came out of his chin, and gore flooded the house, and he drove his fists down the street performing his battle-feats so that the corpses were so numerous there was no room for them to fall down. It was like “the fox among the hens” and “the oncoming tide” and “that time Emily had eight drinks when we all know she should stop at six”