I hear crocodiles open their mouths in digital increments. What has been done to them by the zoo is defunctionalization: they have been neutered, not in their reproductive functions but in their ability to meaningfully impact on an environment. Their expansionist bud obeys the will of their takers while their assimilationist bud is trimmed off. They marginally obey the commands of the remaining tissues when a chicken or rodent is proffered to them, but none of their decisions will have any impact on a living ecosystem. They are no longer the designated agents of natural selection, nor are they acted upon by it. They are creatures robbed of Purpose.

We would walk in the woods, once I understood the fundamentals of evolutionary theory, and speculate on the adaptive roles of various phenotypes we saw. Why would this tree possess thin bark that scaled and peeled off, while another one displayed a robust tough skin almost an inch thick? Then we would erroneously attempt to reverse-engineer the theory from the ecosystemic end: every organism, and every trait of each organism, must have a selective purpose honed through evolutionary forces. We believed that merely the age-old force of natural selection was sufficient to give everything we saw a meaning. Nothing, we wished to believe, had been left to chance. Not a single yellow swatch on the striped abdomen of the yellowjacket. Not a single wavelength in the banjo sounds of tree frogs.

I could walk in the forest without any fear, because I was impervious to poison ivy. Until I said something mean about my friend's Kermit the Frog doll and was punished with susceptibility to poison ivy. I got off easy because I thought he was going to make me shrink, and just getting poison ivy was a relief after that. To this day I don't know if that kid could have made me shrink or not. I've spent years trying to get over my fear that I will shrink away to nothing.