If you can still believe in naive teleology after you read this essay by Stephen Jay Gould , try reading it again. And the panda’s thumb, I’m afraid, is the tip of a vertiginous iceberg.
Look, not to experience emotional distress, you have to be willing not to experience emotional exaltation. No suffering means no vertiginous peaks of shared joy.
Michael Masiello’s answer to What is Ludwig van Beethoven’s greatest work and why?
his heights are so vertiginous that one gets a nosebleed thinking about them
- a : characterized by or suffering from vertigo or dizziness; b : inclined to frequent and often pointless change : inconstant
- causing or tending to cause dizziness the vertiginous heights
- marked by turning : rotary the vertiginous motion of the earth
“Vertiginous,” from the Latin vertiginosus, is the adjective form of “vertigo,” which in Latin means a turning or whirling action. Both words descend from the Latin verb vertere, meaning “to turn.” (“Vertiginous” and “vertigo” are just two of an almost dizzying array of “vertere” offspring, from “adverse” to “vortex.”) The “dizzying” sense of “vertiginous” is often used figuratively, as in “vertiginous medical discoveries may drastically change life in the 21st century.”