Changes...

The only true constant in our life is change, everything else is transitory. It is strange to think of something that is evolving can be a constant, most think it is the things that do not change that are a true constant, but the truth is, there is nothing in life that does not change. Everything is subject to change, no matter what it is it will change. Time is that vehicle to change and we must learn to adapt and evolve with that change and even out refusal to adapt to it will bring about an unsolicited change within us or within the environment we live. Those who cannot adapt or refuse to accept change are those who perish. Change is the natural order of things and history is evidence to the fact that the lack of ability to change brings on extinction or being obsolete.

Change can be precipitated in several ways, either naturally by time based on seasonal, climatic and social changes or ushered in by man due to ideologies or a break through in science. Through out history man has brought on change in a not so subtle ways, mainly through the disruption of natural events or by an invention that changes the way we would normally live and work.

Look at transportation, mans first means of transport was to walk, to get him from point A to point B he had to depend on himself. Now man has not always been a biped, he had to learn to change to walk upright, but as time progressed he learned to domesticate animals to serve that purpose, this too is attributed to man. He no longer had to depend on his own mobility to travel and could go further distances which enabled him to expand and populate farther reaches. He no longer had to depend on himself to plow a field or harvest a crop, along with domestication of animals man learned to expand his thoughts and invent peripheral tools to assist him in his labors and lighten this burden and increase his yields. Change, inevitable in life. As man progressed through time and as the world's population increased and distances grew man saw the need to change again in order to adapt. Soon other inventions were set to mind. Man had learned chemistry and metallurgy and how to forge iron, how to create alloys and in that what he had learned transportation that did not require a beast of burden to transport him or his goods was born. And from those first attempts many other forms of transportation was developed to satisfy the growing population and their needs. Man learned to adapt to these changes and from them profit from it. This is the type of change that did not cause extinction, but rather created an obsolete way we used to do things. The beast of burden did not go extinct as he was never actually meant to be put to the use that man changed him for, they went back to what they had done before domestication in many cases or were used for other needs to satisfy man.

Now not to say that man with his changes has not bought on extinction of a species, the recent and most dramatic is the passenger pigeon and the dodo bird. Man in his short sightedness did wipe out these species and in a very short period of time and has also come close in the past to wiping out other species with the purpose of creating change within a people. The bison or buffalo was one of the more historic events in history where man purposely and systematically set out to completely decimate a species in order to make a change in both indigenous people and the expanding settlers. Cattlemen did the same with the wolf in order to make a change in the natural order. Fortunately he found that bringing on these changes caused a serious impact on the environment as well as caused over population of other breeds that were kept in check by the predation of the wolves. That caused over grazing and eventually starvation even down to the cattle he was trying to protect. As for the decimation of the passenger pigeon and the dodo bird, I have yet to read or learn what impact that has made, but the fact that it was precipitated by man for no other reason than to hunt them down to extinction has yet to make sense to me.

Does natural order cause extinction? When left alone to evolve, I don't think it does. People argue the point that dinosaurs are extinct, but are they? They had millions of years to evolve and there are also walking dinosaurs from the past still walking and swimming today. Birds are evolutions of the dinosaur, the equine species we know today ancestors have been found in fossil remains, the cealocanth still swims the depths of the ocean. Lizards, turtles, snakes, frogs, cattle, all evolved and adapted. The most famous of all with the littlest change is the cockroach. This insect with his ability to survive by adapting to his environment is proof beyond doubt that if left to the natural order man can adapt. These changes are not abrupt and survivability is high when we learn to accept these changes and evolve with them.

There is a reason that I have posted this, not for the one you may think, but yet to convince myself that change is inevitable in life and it is up to me to learn to adapt to that change and learn from it to survive. To leave one way of life behind me and embark on another that is totally different than the one I was born in. To realize that with this change is my chance to gain from it something I do not have now. I may be a dinosaur now, but soon I believe I will be soaring among the clouds.

Later...