Weekly Photo Challenge: Unique

Lonesome George – or so we’ve been told.

This week’s photo challenge was, well, challenging! How often is something truly unique?

If you’re pondering that question from either a scientific or intellectual viewpoint then you’re reading the wrong blog.

We were just trying to think of something clever to say about a photo and didn’t want to enter a picture of a flower or something else lame (the way we usually do). So the word “unique” was rolling around in Blonde’s brain (yes, a bit of an oxymoron) and suddenly Lonesome George, whom we met several years ago, raised his flipper for consideration.

Lonesome George was the last of the Pinta Island Giant Tortoises. He lived his life (estimated to have been about 100 years) in the Galapagos National Park and died in 2012. He was considered to be genetically unique so scientists kept him in a separate enclosure so he wouldn’t have unprotected, or any, sex with girls from genetically different families. (Don’t know if they ever considered how he may have felt about other boy tortoises but then it isn’t as if he was an interior designer tortoise or wore a boa on Casual Day.)

If you thought your parents would never think anyone was good enough for you look at the extreme end of this thinking with George. Now we don’t know if he was lonesome – he was a guy so he didn’t talk about his feelings. But in all candor any guy as unattractive as George would have needed to develop a great personality to have any luck at all with the ladies. Even though he was the greatest tortoise celebrity ever he couldn’t even get a groupie or a reality TV show.

Over-anxious scientists (not wanting to lose the last specimen of anything ever – much like Brunette’s husband) did genetic testing  and found George several genetically similar enough gals to take a run at. Now how often do scientists go out and look for morally easy tortoise girls from good families? Answer: Probably not often  but there isn’t a whole lot else to do on that island.

George wasn’t particularly interested in the girls but he did manage to unenthusiastically mate (and who among us hasn’t?) with three of them. But no babies were born of these conjugal visits. (That may be why he didn’t get a reality show come to think of it. No little Torty Boo Hoo.)

But given that Darwin is the one who came up with the theory of evolution in the Galapagos couldn’t we perhaps see George as proof of the basic tenet of natural selection?

Who would want a homely dude with no ears and a mouth sore and who thought his genes were too good for anyone else?  He wasn’t lonesome – he just got overly caught up in the whole idea of being unique.

And here we are, reinforcing it.