I was looking at the weird search combinations that led people to my website (and some of them are pretty bizarre) when I ran across this webpage: poeticgeek.net, where the main poster is another blogging Gord. On the page, I found an interesting post by said Gord, attributing its contents to his friend Erik:

Y’know how humans are always doing weird and wacky things. Everyone always says how screwed up humans are, and that there must be something “wrong” with since we don�t act like normal animals.

Well a recent article that I read shows that it’s not humans that are screwed up, it’s not even mammals that are screwed up. I think like in general just seems to mess around with brains and cause all sorts of weird behavior.

It’s my theory that we actually want to believe we’re screwed up and animals are normal because it helps us separate ourselves from them. If our behavior is insane it’s because we so damn smart and evolved. Whereas primitive animals are all just nice and normal.

The fact is, I belive most of the weird, expecially sexual, behaviors are a result of ancient genetic throwbacks that sometimes rear their ugly heads like some Lovecraftian beast of ancient horror from beyond.

What’s the article he’s referring to? You can see it here. It’s about necrophiliac rape… the first case of it being performed by one male mallard duck on another.

Incidentally, I think Gord’s right… that the weirdness of animal behaviour and the weirdness of human behaviour are of a piece. It’s the weirdness of being earthling, that meaning it’s the kind of deviations from the norm (within what I’ll hastily and not very thoughtfully just calle “the system of life”) that can be observed in all complex creatures on the planet, because they emerged from a common evolutionary context and, inthe distant past, the same generative root.