Thursday, January 27, 2005
There is nothing magical about the dodo. What we call “dodos” were carbon-based gene-replication machines. Once pigs and rats were introduced to Mauritius, the competition was too great and they could not reproduce quickly enough for those particular genes to survive. By 1681 at the latest, none remained. Any loss is not of those dodos that were alive in the seventeenth century, they would all be dead now anyway. We miss the potential dodos, those that would have lived. But we lose potential animals all the time, with every unfertilised ovum. Do not be sad for them; they had no species-consciousness, they did not know they were the last. We no longer have the pleasing curl of the dodo’s beak, and that's a bit sad for us. But we have other things, and really, we can live without this particular flightless bird. Anyway, that’s how I feel about the Aztecs.
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