Humans don't like gray areas. We like things black or white. We like categories. We like dichotomies.

We like correct and incorrect, wild and domestic, mine and yours, us and them, good and evil.

And we like nothing more than keeping those two things separate.

Our minds appear to have a hard time dealing with spectrums. We don't like gray areas, but we have an even

harder time dealing with duality. I said we like things black or white, and we don't like gray,

but draw your attention now to the fact that we positively can't stand it when something is both black and white at the same

time. Duality stumps us. Try it. Try imagining an object that is not gray but is both black and

white. Unless your brain is different from mine in some profound way, your imagination

will fail you here. And perhaps, you think that it is the literal impossibility of something

being both black and white that is stifling your imagination. Let me open your mind to the possibility that you and I are tripping on a smaller stumbling

block, an obstacle less insurmountable than impossibility, that of duality.

If you want to experience the profound sensation of your brain struggling to deal with things that are black

and white. Read up on wave particle duality, or look into Schrodinger's cat, and read into its potential

real-world applicability. These spooky parts of quantum physics confound human intuitions, and it's not necessarily

because they are mistaken or inaccurate or otherwise untrue.

It's because your brain isn't equipped to deal with things that are different from themselves.

And so today, armed with this insufficient equipment,

we are going to look at just such a thing,

a single species that is two things at once.

Today we are going to talk about a villain of our fairy tales, a hero of the human story.

Man's enemy, man's best friend.

The wolf?

...