On dark, cold, damp mornings like this, I often see an opossum waddling across our road, backlit by a street lamp. Native to tropical regions of Central and South America, this immigrant marsupial is not well equipped for the cold season of North America's Temperate Zone. Nevertheless, it has thrived due to its hardy nature, its high reproductive rate and its willingness to eat anything, from dog food to rotten apples to carrion.
We humans are also immigrants from the Tropics. Designed to dissipate heat, we are not naturally equipped to survive in cold weather. Our success in colonizing the colder regions of planet Earth is solely a reflection of our large, complex brain, endowing us with both a sense of adventure and the intellectual capacity to adapt to varied environments by utilizing fire, clothing and shelters (not to mention international transport and air conditioning). Unlike the opossum, however, we often sense our tropical roots and many of us, 80,000 years after dispersing from Africa, are still troubled by the cold, dark season of winter.
Many humans, convinced of our natural superiority and godliness, are likely offended by the implications of this post; indeed, religious persons might consider it to be downright blasphemous. But all of Earth's creatures, from corals to humans, molded by evolution and natural selection, are designed to propagate our genes. In the case of opossums and humans, this has included the capacity to leave our homeland and colonize more hostile regions of the globe.
