Skewed
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2
Statistical
studies from places like Brandeis University, Drexel University,
Northeastern University, the University of Western Australia, and
the University of New Mexico (among many others) have hinted that
individuals with uneven eyes, bent noses, and crooked smiles are
also more likely to have a tilted existence. The more unsymmetrical,
the more open someone is to depression, bipolar disease, and schizophrenia.
The Picasso people are more likely to have trouble conceiving children
and may have shorter life spans.
All this makes a good argument that our collective culture will
eventually snowball into a planet of beautiful freaks. It’s
possible that we’ll someday filter out the physiologically
unbalanced, and become the eugenic culture envisioned by such forward
thinking schmucks as Hitler.
But we won’t.
What marks us a progressive species is that we, on some level, have
always been able to appreciate a twist—a deviation from the
standard that makes our society doubletake at our own perspectives.
Like it or not, the physiological manifestation of our species reflects
our diversity as a collective culture. Deviation from the ideal
of beauty may come with other psychological and biological skews,
but these aren’t dead ends. Only a manic depressive could
have produced Mozart’s symphonies. Sometimes it takes a schizophrenic
to paint in a way you’ve never seen before. In fact some of
the best painters in history were folks with a lazy eye--a condition
that forced them to see with no depth perception, but allowed them
to see the perfect way to paint the three dimensional world on a
two dimensional canvas.
There is no need to be the best model of our species. The truth
is that there is no such thing. Our abnormalities are what mark
us as individuals. It keeps our society full of different faces
and varying perspectives. It allows us to have different tastes
and preferences. And in many ways, it keeps us all on a fairly even
playing field. It’s part of what allows us to give evolution
the finger,... |
