MEDIUM RARE

How many cells does it take to keep the blood flowing in your body? Do you own more cells than there are stars in the wide blue yonder? Samuel Alibrando, a naturalist who lives in Parañaque, will tell you what you didn’t think you needed to know. If you have heard his 100-second notes on the classical music station, DZFE, Monday to Friday between 10 and 10:30 a.m., you’ll understand why he’s a hundred percent against the theory of evolution. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Alibrando: “The parent came first. No pregnancy, no species.” Without mentioning God or religion, Sam attributes the wonders and marvels in nature to, what else but, Nature. Privately, he’s a Christian who believes in the power of “positive morality,” which I take to be the contextual opposite of passive morality. If you believe that right cannot be wrong, you must teach others that wrong cannot be right. Or something like that. When I heard Sam’s American-sounding voice on Tiffany Leung’s FM radio station telling me that leaves never ever overlap or cover other leaves on the same plant, I ran out of the house to check our duhat tree. Not only the duhat tree but also the sampaguita vine, the mango tree, the flowering bougainvillea; their leaves were of different shades of green, shape, size, pattern and design – and not a single leaf on the same plant or tree covered or overlapped another. From that day of his broadcast, “Nature is always talking,” I was hooked. He has taped 1,000 of those mini-ear openers, each brief episode a tribute to the “massive coordination and interaction between species and substances” in nature. Samuel Alibrando of Fresno, Calif., has been a resident of our islands for more than a dozen years. He doesn’t consider himself a naturalist, just a curious observer and collector of trivia.  Taking note of the “vast, orderly interaction (that is) better than any government or technology,” he asks you to “swat the bug on your arm, but can you make a bug, as simple as it looks?” Nature is “nothing less or more than a (highly sophisticated) technology beyond the science of man.” That’s Alibrando using words to let Nature do the talking.