Perception and Fertility

Jillian Searle, who was vacationing on the island of Phuket in Thailand when the tsunami hit, received a visit from the Midwife, who administered a severe test of Searle's cognitive abilities. As the wave flooded the resort in which Searle and her family were vacationing, she became certain she had to choose to hold on to one of her sons and to deliberately let go of the other one. "I knew I had to let go of one of them and I just thought I'd better let go of the one that's the oldest," she said.

In my role as an armchair expert in stochastic familial hydrodynamics, I decided that Searle should have let go of her two-year-old and held on to her five-year-old, perhaps reasoning that the five-year-old had a better chance of surviving with his mom's help than did the two-year-old. Now notice the danger to which Mrs. Searle and her sons were subject and the uncertainty of their future, both of which environmental features Socrates brings to light in his role as the Voice of the Midwife in the Theaetetus. In this case, the Midwife of natural selection spared the perception of the neediness of the toddler as being decisive, where she might have dealt less kindly with a perception of the superior chances of the kindergartner as being the decisive consideration. You see, in the event, the two-year-old boy and his mother survived the tsunami--and so did the five-year-old boy. His perception of something (a door) attached to a large, relatively sturdy object (a hotel) as something that might keep him from being swept away also survived the attentions of the Midwife.