In newyorkerhumor, God requests $50,000—and not a penny less—to aid in the creation of “a new bipedal, mostly hairless, fairly bad-smelling mammal.”
Capable of both linguistic communication and salsa dancing, this life-form will represent a bold departure from the trilobites, raptors, and weird dragonflies with two-foot wingspans that have populated the globe in past millennia.
What will set this new organism apart? For starters, it will be physically deficient in virtually every way. Too slow to outrun most predators and too weak to defeat the rest, it will also lack the bodily insulation that keeps other large animals from freezing to death.
You may be wondering how this new creature could be expected to survive at all. Good question. As a counterbalance to the myriad corporeal shortcomings this species will have, I plan to use your grant money to develop a sophisticated computational head organ called a “brain.” But not just any brain! It won’t be your average, walnut-sized, regulate-breathing-and-pooping-and-that’s-it deal.
But these mammals won’t spend all their time trying to have as much sex as possible before dying—just most of it. In their spare moments, their brains will allow them to perform a brand new cognitive function that I call “thinking about stuff,” which, in rare cases, will lead to the dazzling breakthrough of “coming up with stuff.
Of course, no project is without risk. While the brain will afford these new organisms the sublime pleasures of, say, reading “Gravity’s Rainbow” and lying about having understood “Gravity’s Rainbow,” there are many potential pitfalls. Anxiety, depression, and insecurity could overwhelm the brain at any moment. Picture this: two of these mammals encounter each other in the woods. One introduces itself, only to have the other gently remind it that they’ve already met before.
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