Some Of Us Are Devolving

I was walking my mom’s dog through the park near her house one morning. The two of us were heading down the path, minding our own business when a stranger walked up.

He proceeded to ask me if I believed in evolution, then before I could actually respond he started ranting about how someone (I never actually got who this person was supposed to be) had looked at two lizard fossils and they were exactly the same. And something, something, evolution is a fraud! I don’t actually know all of what he said, not only was he shouting, his words were semi-incoherent. He just wasn’t enunciating, it was like he had a mouthful of marbles that he was shouting around.

Now, I actually majored in evolutionary biology in college, but I wasn’t wearing anything indicating that and I have no idea what set the guy off. As far as I knew, I’d never met him before in my life.

But my mom’s dog has a profound dislike of strange men, especially ones who are shouting, so at this point, she went into a frenzy of barking at him with her hackles up. Mom’s dog has never actually attacked anyone, and she wasn’t a large dog, but as aggressive as she was behaving, this guy decided that she might. And to be fair, she might have- I make it a point to never assume that a dog won’t attack.

The upside was that he ran off, presumably to harass more random strangers.

As the dog and I were leaving the park, I saw the guy again, getting into his car. He saw me, shouted something about lizards, and drove off.