“Do you know why kittens have big ears?” He said, gently scratching behind her ears and careful to avoid the tick gently slurping. 

“It's so they can hear well.” I said. “Everyone knows that. They hunt at night and having sensitive hearing is a big advantage. 

“And you'd agree that it's an evolutionary trait that allowed for this to happen?” 

“Of course,” I said not knowing where this was leading. 

“It's really for the ticks.” He said. “They have big ears to feed the ticks. They have been this way for thousands of our years, gently living in this glen. The cats provide the perfect host for the ticks, who repay them by bringing the chipmunks in for them to feast upon. 

“They worked to create this environment eons ago by planting this forest and allowing it to develop as it is. They're still somewhat early in the process that will ultimately take place in millions of our years.” 

I chuckled. “But they're just bugs, dude.” 

“Because you don't see them as I do,” he replied. “To you, it's just a tiny bug on this cat's ear but inside it's brain is a complex strand of DNA that will, over time, direct the eventual evolution of an intellect that is vastly superior to ours. It's superior because they can correctly interpret time.” 

“What does that mean?” 

“They comprehend time in a different matter then ourselves. Rather then seeing it tick by moment by moment on a small scale their evolved intellect absorbs it in a grander scale, where a single tick of the clock actually lasts a million of our revolutions around the sun.” 

“I know the universe is moving fast but to imply that a second is a thousand years is a bit off.” I said. 

“Maybe I should explain it another way. It's the scale of things that can happen in a second. It's possible, for example, for there to be a huge explosion on Jupiter causing it to turn into a second sun. Now, when that explosion happens, it's so big that it's going to take us several years for us to even figure out what's going on and then almost forty or fifty years before it settles down to a regular orbit. But in astronomical time, that would be an event that would take place literally in a second.”