Things don’t always go the way you plan. In fact, sometimes planning is the least significant component in your life. Surely if you were some god-like creature designing frogs over the millenia, you’d work in leaping and landing as a sort of coupled unit — figuring that the conclusion is at least as necessary as the initiation (after all, it’s a sort of safety issue, no?). A recent study of an ancient-lineage frog species (family Leiopelmatidae) reveals that it isn’t quite that simple:

“Unlike their more graceful cousins, the primitive frogs kept their back legs straight out after they jumped. So they don’t land on their feet. Instead, they do an ungainly belly flop, and then struggle to get to their feet and jump again.”

So it seems that there is more to it, then. If I think about it more, I can imagine that perhaps the neuro-muscular necessities are not linearly action-based… perhaps even that the ability (vision, musculature, nerve endings) to land is layered atop the ability to leap (think, more powerful legs that can push are likely to be able to cushion an impact); and/or that the ability to leap has a distinct survival advantage over the ability to land (on its own) and would be selected for, and assembled in that evolution-type way, prior to any landing gear.

Interesting in its own right; but it brings to mind a personal experience which I am now forced to re-evaluate:

Several years ago, on my first ski trip, Iryna took control and began to instruct me, for our first trip down the mountain. On our way to the lift, we covered balance, shuffling, and even how to ascend the hill with that sideways ski-crawl. Being a relative neophyte, I absorbed and didn’t think much beyond what she was teaching.

It wasn’t until we were coming close to the top of the mountain– while still on the lift — that I realized I didn’t really know how to ‘stop’. That is, I had no clue how to brake, decelerate, prevent forward motion, etc. I mentioned this to Iryna, and she tried to describe how it was done, but I was lost, and the top was approaching too fast. Sadly, when we got there, I was gently pushed into a sliding carom-shot into the poor child in front of me (he wasn’t proficient either, but that’s no reason to send a 200+ pound bearded man on a collision-course with him). I clipped him from behind, vainly trying to throw myself sideways but only succeeding in nailing him in the back of the legs and sending us into a tangled knot, directly in the path of skiers exiting the lift.

The awkward manifestation isn’t quite the point, however. Rather, I think now that Iryna was unwittingly (or not so unwittingly– she’s a very clever girl) recapitulating ontogeny by arming me with mobility before any type of deceleration, and much like the above-mentioned frogs I chose a type of belly-flop as my only recourse to stopping.

(Via Scientific American.)