Time lapse radio

Do you sometimes find that your mind has tuned in to something you heard decades ago?

I was standing in the kitchen, mind blank, blinking in the morning sun, scraping uneaten food from last night's cat's supper dish when, loud and clear through some forgotten twist in the aether came a radio broadcast I'd hastily forgotten after hearing it sometime in the early sixties.

I can place it in time so precisely because the memory brings back the location and situation in which I heard it - the office where I worked for the bulk of my RAF service. I've not been back since 1963. And they wouldn't have let me in if I had.

Anyway, back to the point, or thereabouts. On the long night shifts, nothing to do, no-one to talk to, I'd tune the radio receiver around the AM frequencies, looking desperately for something to listen to. Do you remember the time when radio stations closed down at night?

A reliable source of speech was some subset of Voice of America that broadcast propaganda for the Jehovah Witnesses. It would make me laugh. Still would, if I could find it on the dial. But America lost its Voice over here some years back.

There was this guy ranting on against Darwinism. Specifically, of course, against the Theory of Evolution. And, to refute it, he went on a long dia-trip about the way that woodpeckers couldn't have evolved their heads as a result of hitting them against trees because they'd have brained themselves and not bred anything at all. This was the essence of his logic, anyway. I may be paraphrasing but I'm not distorting.

Do you know - I couldn't for the life of me come up with a good answer at the time. I suppose hooting with laughter and howling with hilarity isn't conducive to good dialectics.

So, back to the present. There I was, standing in the kitchen.... oh, no. I've already said that bit.

But the point is, all these years later, the perfect answer popped into my head. It's completely unimportant, of course. And I'll never be able to tell the guy on the radio. Even if I could locate him he's probably shuffled off to his Kingdom in the Sky.

It's this: When the woodpecker was busy evolving from whatever grub-eating dinosaur preceded it, so were the trees themselves. And any bark was very, very soft. So the woodpecker and the tree evolved together.

Isn't symbiosis clever?

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