{"id":2534,"date":"2017-03-10T13:43:31","date_gmt":"2017-03-10T19:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/?p=2534"},"modified":"2017-03-10T14:27:52","modified_gmt":"2017-03-10T20:27:52","slug":"people-sitting-in-front-of-me-the-man-with-the-sun-damaged-skin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/people-sitting-in-front-of-me-the-man-with-the-sun-damaged-skin\/","title":{"rendered":"People Sitting in Front of Me: The Man with the Sun-Damaged Skin"},"content":{"rendered":"

The train trip across the Southern Alps of New Zealand was billed as five solid hours of verdant alpine meadows dotted with high country sheep interspersed with braided rivers descending from glaciers.\u00a0 Yes, I did get occasional glimpses, but I was also challenged by the subtler beauty of heavy mist.\u00a0 When all else failed during periodic white-outs, I entertained myself by staring at the head of the man sitting in front of me. \u00a0It wasn\u2019t his baldness that captivated me.\u00a0 It was his sun-damaged skin.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

He was an elderly man, and his mottled scalp suggested a lifetime in the sun.\u00a0 I imagined him as a sheep-farmer spending unwitting hours directly beneath the ragged hole in the ozone layer.\u00a0\u00a0 His pinkish skin looked paper-thin and shiny, and salmon colored splotches were strewn across his crown.\u00a0 I could see the crusty tip of an earlobe.<\/p>\n

This panorama created an intriguing coincidence with the book that I brought along to fill our idle travel hours.\u00a0 I had wanted a seminal book that had impacted our Western world, one that I had heard about but never read.\u00a0 My three candidates were the Bible<\/em>, the works of Charles Darwin and Hitler\u2019s Mein Kampf<\/em>.\u00a0 I could always leaf through a Gideon Bible at one of our hotels, and thought it might be a bit off-putting if\u00a0I toted around a copy of Mein Kampf<\/em>, so I settled on Darwin\u2019s classics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It turns out human\u2019s general lack of body hair created enormous problems for Darwin.\u00a0 In fact, the sight of sun-damaged skin would have driven Darwin to distraction.\u00a0 The basic premise of natural selection is that evolution produces only very small incremental and beneficial changes contributing to the survival of the fittest. \u00a0Any maladaptive mutation would be ultimately weeded out, discarded on the mountainous ash heap of failed experiments.<\/p>\n

I imagined the 22 year-old Darwin standing in front of his mirror on his ship the Beagle.\u00a0 He notices the skin of his face and neck are puce and pulsating from his day under the relentless equatorial sun.\u00a0 He realizes that he forgot his pith helmet in his enthusiasm over his iconic finches, whose perfectly adapted beaks were a deft testament to natural selection.<\/p>\n

But now, as he looks at his peeling skin, he wonders, \u201cMy hairlessness is definitely working against me here.\u00a0 After all, among terrestrial mammals, I am the only one who is naked.\u00a0 What is the overriding benefit?\u201d\u00a0 As he speaks, a piece of skin flakes off and falls into the sink, leaving behind a vulnerable pink patch.<\/p>\n

Darwin knew there were\u00a0many animal oddities that did not fit neatly into his paradigm of survival of the fittest, including not only hairlessness, but also the peakcock\u2019s unwieldy tail.\u00a0 Beautiful yes, but surely these clumsy birds would be easy prey.\u00a0 In a letter to his American botanist Asa Grey, he wrote, \u201cEvery time I see a peacock\u2019s tail, it makes me sick.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike Darwin, who was curious about everything, I have taken the human body plan too much for granted.\u00a0 Apes are hairy, I am not.\u00a0 To me, that has just been a basic fact of life, but Darwin was convinced that science could explain everything, and in 1871, 12 years after he published the Origin of the Species<\/em> and 40 years after the voyage of the Beagle, he published the Descent of Man<\/em>.\u00a0 Together these two books were his version of a Theory of Everything.<\/p>\n

Darwin felt that sexual selection could explain the animal oddities that were driving him crazy.\u00a0 It was all about mate choice, wrote Darwin in the Descent of Man<\/em>.\u00a0 At some point in our distant past, men and women simply found nudity more attractive than hairiness.\u00a0 He wrote, \u201cthe view which seems to me the most probable is that man, or rather primarily women, became divested of hair for ornamental purposes.\u201d\u00a0 Sexual selection was his justification for the concept of beauty.<\/p>\n

Darwin\u2019s theory met with a cool reception.\u00a0 In his Victorian age men were reluctant to admit the possibility that inferior women were driving evolution through their mate choice.\u00a0 The second obstacle was that the theory assumed that animals, such as the peacock, had an aesthetic sense. \u00a0The prevailing logic of the primacy of man demanded that a sense of beauty be limited to civilized fair-skinned humans with dominion over their savage brethren and the rest of the animal kingdom.<\/p>\n

His colleague Alfred Russel Wallace proposed an alternative view, essentially a theory of intelligent design.\u00a0 He wrote, \u201cThe naked and sensitive skin, by necessitating clothing and houses, would lead to more rapid development of man\u2019s inventive and constructive faculties and by leading to a more refined feeling of personal modesty may have influenced to a personal extent his moral natures.\u201d\u00a0 Wallace believed that some higher power had turned the negative of sun-sensitive skin into a\u00a0positive force for humans’ iconic\u00a0sense of morality.<\/p>\n

The controversy surrounding human hairlessness has persisted. \u00a0Several different survival advantages have been proposed. \u00a0For example, as humans moved from the cool forests to the open savannahs, head-to-toe hair would have been oppressively hot.\u00a0 Humans were also evolving into hunters and hair could have slowed them down as they chased after game.\u00a0 Another theory proposes that naked\u00a0humans could easily demonstrate they were not plagued with ticks, louses or other parasites undermining their fitness as a mate.\u00a0 This theory has even spawned genetic research to determine when lice diverged into separate populations of head and pubic lice, an indirect estimate of when humans went hairless.<\/p>\n

As I sat on the train I decided to put my faith in Darwin and ponder the ornamental aesthetics of the head in front of me.\u00a0 I narrowed my eyes to focus on a small patch of the man’s scalp and\u00a0I realized that I might have seen this same salmon\/pink color combination and splotchy amoebic pattern on designer dresses.\u00a0 The sun briefly glinted, adding a moment of shimmer to the overall effect.\u00a0 I reimagined my dress with a bit of reflective material sewn in.\u00a0 Stunning.\u00a0 Yes out of context, this sun-damaged skin did have an aesthetic appeal.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A momentary gap in the mist shattered\u00a0my dreams of red carpet glamour. \u00a0As the man\u00a0turned to look\u00a0out the window, \u00a0I got a full frontal of his pocked face adorned with dangling scabs.\u00a0 His enlarged nose had the consistency of a puffy and cracked souffl\u00e9.\u00a0 I found it impossible to believe that this ravaged skin would fit into Darwin\u2019s concept of aesthetic ornamentation.\u00a0 I only hoped that my man had abandoned mate selection years ago and was heading home to the weather-beaten face of a\u00a0loyal wife.<\/p>\n

I closed my eyes and now imagined Darwin as an older man, perhaps 62, the age when the Descent of Man<\/em> was finally published.\u00a0 I saw him again standing in front of the mirror, his hand skimming\u00a0over his bald head and tracing his corrugated face.\u00a0 He is reminded that an elderly man must refresh his ornaments if he wants to satisfy a lusty libido.\u00a0 Darwin smiles as he straightens his tuxedo and reaches for his gold-tipped cane, confident that these symbols of wealth and respect will more than compensate for the unblemished face of his remote youth.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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The train trip across the Southern Alps of New Zealand was billed as five solid hours of verdant alpine meadows dotted with high country sheep interspersed with braided rivers descending from glaciers.\u00a0 Yes, I did get occasional glimpses, but I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-people-sitting-in-front-of-me"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVc8-ES","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2534"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2544,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2534\/revisions\/2544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}