Similarities

Because I teach writing and usually leave the topic choices wide open for my students, I end up reading lots of odd material. An evening of grading papers has me wading through arguments about advertising, child care, drinking age, deaf ear implants, etc. (You'd think that would give me lots to think about, but usually I get numb.)

But I ran across a paragraph in an article on gene selection that struck me. So, I logged onto Google to share:

• Our major competitors for just about everything in life are
  other people, so we are fine-tuned by evolution to be highly
  sensitive to the minute differences among us. All people might
  look pretty much the same to a space alien or a mosquito - or
  an evolutionary biologist - but not to a coach trying to build a
  winning sports team or to someone looking for a mate.

Meanings can run many ways and, of course, this is taken out of context in some respects, but I thought about how closely we examine ourselves in martial arts, how narrowly we watch our sparring partners, and how, though we are NOT competing against others, we use them to reflect off of anyway.