Helena Iara suffered badly from hiccups a couple of nights ago, and though she is much more patient with them than Rita and I are, she isn't able to sleep as she hics and hics. At least I could sit with her and pass the time until she got over the hiccups.
Now, whether this story is true of not, I'm not sure: at least it gave a good narrative as I spoke with her. Supposedly, the hiccup is an evolutionary remnant, sort of like the appendix, which continues in our genetic structure because it doesn't cause ay major problems, just the occasional inconvenience. Fish do something similar to the hiccup as they pass water through their gills, which suggests that the reaction might be a kind of holdover.
Helena Iara didn't seem as interested as I talked about the Beagle and Darwin's voyage to the Galápagos, the finches and everything else we learn in hight school about the origins of the science of evolutionary biology. But maybe that's just because the hiccups had begun to pass and she dozed off...
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