On the Origin of Deciduous Trees by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Cottonwoods in the Struggle For Leaves

As I walked a beagle to lunch today, I had an epiphany. It begins with the fact that it is Fall, and as a result trees are everywhere shedding their leaves. These leaves quite often fall on the sidewalk.

Now let me ask you a question. As you are walking down a clean, empty sidewalk and you happen to notice a single leaf fall onto the sidewalk ahead of you, do you:

A) Examine the leaf in wonder as you walk past it?
B) Ignore the leaf completely?

Or

C) Curse the weather & seasons for conspiring to litter?

The answer is, of course, none of the above. Because what you do (at least if you’re male) is you step on the leaf! Don’t try to deny this guys, you know it’s true. If a leaf falls on the sidewalk five feet in front of you, without even thinking about it, you manage to shift your stride ever so slightly so that your foot will come down exactly on the leaf and you’ll hear that satisfying CRUNCH. (By the way, surveys have demonstrated this: a full 93% of men admit to going out of their way to crunch leaves. Interestingly enough, the study also found that 7% of men lie about whether they go out of their way to step on leaves.)

Anyway, I happened to notice today en route to lunch that there was a section of sidewalk that was about 2/3s empty, but 1/3 covered by leaves. This is due to the wind that had blown the leaves into a leaf-drift on the left-hand side of the sidewalk. So, 1/3 of the sidewalk was covered with leaves and 2/3s was clear.

Naturally, the vast majority of people were walking on the 1/3 side covered in leaves, and only stepped out of the leaves in order to pass others. Statistically, this validates my point that people enjoy crunching leaves.

At first, I didn’t make the connection, but now that I’ve had some time to think about it I realize that this actually proves Darwinism correct. You see, I live in Colorado Springs, and I’ve seen pictures of the Springs back in the 1870s when it was founded. There are no trees anywhere. It’s prairie all over the place. Even pictures going up into the mountains (Ute Pass) show no trees on the hills.

Now, there are trees everywhere. Why are the trees here now? Because they were planted. But people could have planted any number of different kinds of trees. We have blue spruce, pine, and other trees littering the mountainsides all over Colorado. So why is it that the vast majority of trees that were planted in the city are deciduous trees?

Because people like to crunch leaves in the Fall. It’s that simple. Nature has selected for deciduous trees so that humans (at least male humans) are able to crunch leaves during Fall. This gives pleasure to the humans, and ensures that they will plant new deciduous trees when old ones die. The result of this symbiotic relationship causes selection pressures to choose for deciduous trees. The result is that in just over 100 years since the founding of Colorado Springs, we have gone from prairie having no trees to twelve billion leaves in my backyard that I have to clear out.

Need we any more proof that Darwinism is true than this simple observation?