The Story of a Cat!!

Couple of weeks ago, my neighbour got a new cat!!...pretty much mundane I thought at first!!:-). I could see the cat darting around the yard whole day and effortlessly scaling fences as if they never even existed!!..just being a cat and doing what cats do best I reckoned!!.

One evening, while I was reading on the porch outside, I espied the cat neck up to its antics!. I just closed my book and keenly started observing my new feline neighbour!....I remember back during those days when I was a kid, cats were considered a pest!!....with unerring accuracy and an infallible sense of purpose, they would some how contrive to steal the most succulent piece of fish or that scrumptious nugget of chicken which I had deemed to be mine and mine only!! :-).....

While watching my four-legged friend, I recollected a few facts that I had read about cats some time back. I remember reading that cats have around 240 bones on an average!, thereby ensuring more skeletal muscle connectivity!. Also most of their ribs are floating ribs and hence imparting greater mobility (when it comes to making a getaway!!). Their clavicle(collar) bone is not fixed like ours, instead it runs deep into the shoulder muscles!!. This explains why a cat is so supple and able to scale fences like there was no tomorrow!! :-).....and to crown it all, cats have the perfect vestibular-cochlear system (hearing /balancing)!!...the perfectly aligned semicircular canals in the inner year , always ensures that my feline friend lands upright on all four!!!.

At this point I paused and started thinking, so much thought did our creator put into this seemingly insignificant(or may be not!!) creature!!. So flawless and superlative the design that years of human machinations notwithstanding, my four legged friend has always landed on all four!!. Trained in scientific rationale and being a self proclaimed neo-darwinist, these very words coming from me ought to be blasphemous!!!....but I don't know, in the grand scheme of things, even something so humble as a cat begs the thought in me...maybe, just maybe, there is more to this than what meets the eye!!!..

Charles Darwin was so right....after proposing insurmountable data and evidence to bolster his theory of natural selection, he chose to conclude his monumental work (On the origin of species..) with the following lines..."There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the creator into a few forms or into one; ......from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved"!!