Super Powers
At some point in all of our lives I think its fair to assume everyone wished for one sort of super power or another. The classic one that has found its way into many dreams is the ability to fly like Superman. Many super powers are hard to imitate or pretend in any credible manner. Spider-Man’s ability to eject web string from his wrists has been reasonably imitated by various toy and costume makers. It was probably someone like Ronco that did that rather than a big established player like Mattel and you only got a few squirts out of it I imagine, but it was a cool momentary sight gag for Halloween. It’s pretty hard to shrink yourself like Atom Man. Being Flame was possible, but probably too dangerous for anyone to commercialize fully. Invisibility and shape-shifting are simply too hard to imitate in any convincing way without video gimmickry. You can fake super-strength with props, but things like mind control or telekinesis are mostly left to attitude and a super-serious facial expression. Nevertheless, every kid sooner or later dresses up as a superhero and imagines what it must be like to have a super power of some sort.
A lot of fun has been had at the expense of superheroes when they allow their powers to accidentally interfere with their everyday lives. Things like using toilet paper have an endless array of super power warnings imbedded in them. The classic comic book superheroes always did a good job of hiding their special talents in ways that stretch credulity. We all knew that Clark Kent had to look buff and less like the nerd they played him out to be. The Hulk was able to look like Bruce Banner right up until he got a little peeved, and then the combination of turning green and bulking up twenty sizes and ripping off his shirt and pants gave him away. Strangely enough, he really only shredded his pant legs…he managed to more or less keep his slim-hipped girth and keep his midsection prudently covered.
Superheroes are, by definition, mutants of one form or another. Superman was an exile from the planet Krypton, so not an evolutionary mutant, but a human variant that happened to be the product of an advanced civilization of another world. His mutation is relative to the norms of mere mortals of Earthly origin. We have probably all speculated about what a Superman and Lois Lane hook-up would be like and DC Comics finally answered that with the embodiment of Jon Kent (aka Superboy) who was their proper mutant offspring. Since Superman was introduced in 1938 and described in a way that makes him seem about 30ish, that must mean he was “born” to Lara and Jor-El in about 1908. Since Superboy Jon Kent was introduced to the readership in 2015 (let’s call him 15 years old at the time), that means Superman conceived him at the age of about 92. That itself is appropriate for a super-human.
Spider-Man was a mutation of Marvel genius Stan Lee, when in 1962 he morphed from a normal Peter Parker adolescent into the mutant Spider-Man via the bite of a radioactive spider. I am no true student of superheroes, but the Superman/Spider-Man dichotomy seems to represent the most prevalent mutational histories spectrum. They were either born that way (here, there or wherever) or got into some secret sauce that made them that way. The only real mutants are therefore logically their offspring.
I have always been the solitary person who seemed to like the movie Waterworld with Kevin Costner. Costner is a controversial star who draws the love/hate judgement all too quickly, but whether people love him or hate him, they all seem to pretty much hate Waterworld…except me. I am simply not a fantasy buff at the movies, but I am very much an aficionado of the end-of-the-world-survival genre, and I consider Waterworld to be a great post-apocalyptic film. The script came from an original screenplay written in 1986, which put it squarely ahead of its time and prescient about the possible impact of global warming or some such man-made environmental boo-boo. I’m not sure that thirty-five years ago many people were truly worried about the melting of the polar ice caps and the incumbent flooding of the known world. One of the things I like most about Waterworld is that Kevin Costner’s “Mariner” role is that of a true mutant. Unlike his post-apocalyptic Postman that undergoes a socialization mutation, the Mariner is, indeed, himself a mutant. His mutation is most notable in his behind-the-ears gills and his webbed toes. Those are both Darwinian adaptations that make the Mariner more water-friendly by allowing him the flexibility to breath underwater and swim more rapidly.
Yesterday, Thomas and I were in the spa after a long day of riding the Ortega Highway to the coast and then traipsing back down along the ocean to come back home. It’s not that the day was grueling, but rather that it always feels nice to end the day with a soak in the hot tub. Since I set the temperature at 90 degrees for it to be both refreshing and yet still soothing, we could stay in longer than is normal for a hot tub session. After about an hour in the tub (we talk about life at great length in there), we learned that nephew Will and his fiancé Ashley were arriving with swimsuits, ready for a soak. So we stayed in longer than we had expected to enjoy their company. After a bit of time they realized that their hands were starting to prune up, as happens to us all in the hot tub after a while. It was then that Will asked if we knew what that pruning process was all about. My reaction has always been that its nature’s way of telling us that we have been in the water long enough and that our skin is starting to show the effects of overexposure to the water and has absorbed too much of the stuff by that point. What he told me was that there is now a scientific theory that implies that this mild form of hypotonic vasoconstriction (the shrinking of the sub-cutaneous blood vessels) has an evolutionary function. In other words, it is postulated that this wrinkling of the hands serves a specific purpose for humans. It improves our grip under water. Some think this is related to giving humans a better ability to work with their hands in the water to extract aquatic-borne vegetation or even sea life.
I think this is the first step in our becoming our own version of the Mariner and that the universe is preparing us for extended stay and work in the water. The next stage will be to see toe webbing and then eventually back-of-the-ear gill flaps. The natural world seems to be telling us something. Our super power may well be in our ability to adapt to the new world our wayward ways are taking us. Maybe there will be a Waterworld in our future and those of us who have practiced by staying too long in the spa or pool will be benefited by virtue to being better able to hold onto our new lives.