Member-only story
Revisiting Eden
Not quite the story you think you know
The sun rose over a perfect garden: lush, fruitful, populated by a wide variety of plants and animals and fungi. Two primates woke from their slumber, stretched their limbs, and rose to perform their morning ablutions down by the river.
“I’ve been thinking,” the male said, half to himself and half to his female companion, “that this whole setup seems somewhat implausible.”
The female turned to the male, a quizzical expression on her face.
“Funnily enough, that’s just what I’ve been thinking too,” she said.
They completed their morning toilet and strolled off to collect berries from a convenient nearby bush.
“I mean,” the male continued, emboldened by his companion’s encouragement, “I don’t really understand how we can exist. Here we are, surrounded by dangerous predators, and we don’t have any defensive capabilities. It’s astonishing we haven’t been devoured by one of the lions, tigers, leopards, panthers, pythons, bears, or wolves that live all around us. They’re happy enough to chase and rip into deer, springbok, rabbits, dik-dik, those odd feathery clucking things that are always getting underfoot, and pretty much any other edible living creature. But when we appear they just nod politely and step aside. It’s as if basic evolutionary mechanisms…
