Do dogs like trousers?

                Imagine a dog. Any kind of dog you like, but it has to be a really good one. I don't want you to be sitting there imagining some kind of low quality, pitiable dog without any sense of right and wrong. It just wouldn't be very nice for you to be put through that. If the dog is sitting down then grand, he or she is comfortable and possibly well behaved to boot. Unless it's sitting on something unpleasant in which case I would call into question why you have placed your mental canine in that kind of situation. If the dog is not sitting down then I suppose the previous couple of sentences bear little relevance to your life and you're free to disregard them.

                There, I'm glad that's out of the way. We are free to get down to the business at hand now. We need not feel captivated or restricted by a lack of imagined dogs in this instance because we have taken steps to do away with such unpleasant, unnatural and crude shackles. You may not have even been aware that such shackles existed but you can now feel reassured in the knowledge that they definitely do not exist any longer, for now at least.

                The lack of shackles can be misconstrued as freedom, but we shouldn't be fooled into thinking we have very much of that. We're bound by our own inadequacies as a species for one thing, needing to pour liquids into ourselves, gorge on mountains of food, sleep for a third of the time we have available, suck in vast quantities of air for a small component of it and exercise ( becoming out of breath as we do so and needing to suck in even greater volumes of air) to stop  the food and liquid that we need from preventing us to move around and exercise in the first place. Also, there are health and beauty concerns to running about a bit, but I mostly enjoy the mobility thing because it sounds more tautological that way.

                These bindings are less unnatural than the dog situation but I'd still like to be rid of them. It's essentially impossible because we've evolved in such a way that these things are vital and going a few days without them will lead to our service being discontinued indefinitely and any unaffected parts being sold for scrap, buried or burned.

                Evolution isn't clever. It's not dumb but it certainly isn't an intelligent process. It blindly stabs around with its mutation stick, clobbering genes in all directions into infinitesimally different shapes then lets the victim get on with its life as best it can. Sometimes the change will be a great success, well reviewed by The Spectator and given a 6 month slot in the west end. Other times it will do less admirably and wind up rotting in a ditch just outside of Birmingham.

                The little changes give certain examples of a species an advantage. They're more adept at eating berries, seeing prey in the dark or designing comfortable yet affordable cottages in the Derby area.  They then have the means to not die horribly and even propagate their own genetic wonders for some new mutation to tinker with and ruin, like some kind of savage using a brandy glass to serve sherry. In other words, they are more fit for the task at hand, namely the task of survival. Survival of the fittest. It's an easy concept but one which seems to elude people as it's treated like a radically complicated theory just because it takes millions of years to see any effect from it. By that logic we should be confused by coastal erosion or internet petitions about how some people in a country very far away are treating other people in a different country slightly further away, over a difference of opinion which couldn't be culturally further away from us if it tried (and if I was a culture, I would certainly distance myself from the kind of people who think that it's a good idea to invent a seven day week and then declare that they should work for 5 of them and only have 2 off).

                You can't make a pair of shorts evolve into trousers, nor can you make a cat evolve into a pie. One requires tailoring and the other baking, with moral issues possibly making themselves known if the cat is not your own and the shorts are being worn by someone at the time. You can however take a moment out to appreciate the gigantic sample of random changes which must have occurred to allow any of your biological faculties to be suitable for the environment in which you live, let alone idealised for it. You're an incredibly complicated series of squishy and hard bits which pump out and suck in goo in order to keep you trundling about, unfathomably interrelated and interdependent, all of which came about by chance at some point down the line and all of which is easily rendered useless by an improperly applied screwdriver.