Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Have you ever gone to your car and discovered a parking ticket on the windshield? Relax. Here’s something much, much worse.
What do rattlesnakes do when they have the urge to punch someone?
I’m pretty sure the loser was slinking away at the end.
I’m sure you were all looking forward to it. He left an answer to my criticisms of his failed predictions
of evolution. He does not disappoint. It’s stupid.
We cannot defeat this density of inanity, but I will count it as a victory if he learns about these strange things called “paragraphs”.
Peter Watts has this short short story about a brain interface technology that allows people to merge their consciousness with other organisms — and in this one, “Colony Creature”, someone experiences what it is like to be an octopus, and is horrified by it.
“Those arms.” His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “Those fucking crawly arms. You know, that thing they call the brain— it’s nothing, really. Ring of neurons around the esophagus, basically just a router. Most of the nervous system’s in the arms, and those arms… every one of them is awake…”
It’s a good story, and I’m not knocking it. I think it’s also important to recognize that the experience of being a non-human organism is probably fundamentally different than being a human.
Imagine all the poor transhumanists who were born in the 19th century. They would have been fantasizing about all the rapid transformations in their society, and blithely extrapolating forward. Why, in a few years, we’ll all have steam boilers surgically implanted in our bellies, and our diet will include a daily lump of coal! Canals will be dug everywhere, and you’ll be able to commute to work in your very own personal battleship! There will be ubiquitous telegraphy, and we’ll have tin hats that you can plug into cords hanging from the ceiling in your local coffeeshop, and get Morse code tapped directly onto your skull!
Alas, they didn’t have a Ray Kurzweil or Aubrey deGray to con them with absurd exaggerations.
There deserves to be a special place in hell for smug, smarmy “pro-lifers”.
Dear @pzmyers I’ve read some of your reactions to pro-life claims on embryology. You seem to confuse biological claims with philosophical ones sir.
Oh, please, don’t “dear” and “sir” me. Have you ever noticed how some people like to paper over their stupidity with the most superficial expressions of politeness, as if it makes their argument respectable? Give me blunt honesty any day.
I also don’t need random goons on the internet telling me I have to make some distinction between science (usually, in this context, preceded by an unvoiced “mere”) and philosophy. Biology is a subset of philosophy. I get enough of that crap from real scientists.
Also, you don’t get to dignify your religious prejudices with the label “philosophy”.
Now I’m seeing exploding plants everywhere.
The Tully Monster has been an enigma for half a century. Now it’s been reconstructed on the basis of analysis of 1200 specimens.
That thing is weird. It’s been extinct since the Carboniferous, though, so we’re not going to be catching any nowadays, unfortunately. Note the eyes on stalks; the tubby body; the long ‘snout’ terminating in a toothy jawed mouth. People have been grappling with its taxonomic identity for decades, and it’s been labeled as various kinds of worms, or a mollusc, or an odd relic of some Cambrian phylum.
