Jim Conrad with his round head
ROUND HEAD & EAR INFECTION

I told a friend, a nurse, that the unusually intense and unrelenting heat seems to have caused my ears to get infected early this year -- sweaty ear holes, I guessed. Usually they wait for the rainy season. My friend said she wasn't surprised because of my round head, highlighted above. In my 71 years no one has mentioned to me that my head is unusually round, especially for a tall person. My grandpa Conrad had a real Charlie Brown head. I've been in parts of northern Europe with lots of tall, round-headed people.

My friend explained that in round heads the Eustachian tubes -- narrow passageways between the middle ear and the pharynx, providing equalization of pressure on each side of the eardrum -- don't have enough room between jawbones and other bones, so they get clogged and infected. The tubes drain better in longer heads. I love it when things like earaches in the night can be explained so simply and obviously.

When my round head got to thinking on the matter, I remembered that, from Nature's perspective, our human species is a work in progress, with many design flaws not yet corrected. Hip and knee joints give out early, vestigial appendixes get infected and burst, teeth impact and rot in too-small mouths, backbones crunch when we move big rocks, eyes, hair, hearing, tasting, smelling all give way in old age...

The situation can be explained by the fact that Nature concerns Herself with evolving SPECIES to higher levels, but cares little about the comfort and dignity of individual beings. We biological organisms are supposed to produce babies in a world dangerous and chaotic enough to ensure that in the long run more strong, smart and lucky people survive to pass along genes to offspring than weak, dumb, unlucky ones, and so evolution progresses.

However, we humans aren't totally enslaved to the principles of classical Darwinian evolution. Whenever any thinking being, by thinking things out and exercising self discipline, overrides his or her gene-encoded urges and predispositions -- as by walking away from a sweet, high-calorie slice of raisin pie our genes predispose us to eat -- the process of Earthly evolution "changes gears." Evolution continues in the same direction as ever, but now -- assuming that this more sustainable behavior involving self discipline is passed on to others -- it's mentality evolving, not organic species.

Individual organisms are to their evolving species as individual ideas are to evolving mentality.

When my round head thinks about it, at this moment in human evolution the potentials before us are staggering and profoundly interesting and exciting. However, precisely because human mentality is just beginning to blossom, the whole process is fragile, and vulnerable to things going wrong -- as with the first flower of spring, when late frosts still are possible.

For example, in the realm of emerging human mentality, what can be sadder than when large numbers of people start thinking it's OK to discredit scientific facts for political or economic reasons, or just to raise hell?