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anna

10 Reasons to Doubt Evolution

by anna at 06:33 PM on September 21, 2005

This lengthy excerpt from my book appears strictly for the edification of Chris. I hope he is still out there, and that he can answer some of my head-scratcher questions.

1) While I realize that those mutations that lead to species differentiation occur at the molecular level, they must manifest themselves in some outward trait. For instance, one monkey must have been born with a propensity to walk upright rather than swing from vines. Another might have been born without a tail or with one that was markedly shortened. As the theory goes, these two hooked up in adulthood, produced more humanoid offspring and somehow got isolated from the regular monkeys. And the rest is history.

Okay so far so good. But let’s take a closer peek at these traits, along with our highly-vaunted opposable thumbs and immense craniums. These humanoids weren’t born into a human environment; rather, they were born in the wild and wooly jungles of Africa. In the jungle, being terrestrial can get you killed in a hurry by a variety of voracious predators---particularly if you’re of a tender age. And both the stubby tail and a penchant for walking upright would land you smack dab in the middle of the danger zone---hardly an evolutionary edge. (See the sorry fate of ground-based monkeys, the nearly extinct great Apes.)

The opposable thumb and big brain would be evolutionarily neutral at best in that hostile environment. The thumb might help you manipulate objects better, but it would also make you stand out like a sore thumb. Parents and peers alike are liable to taunt, torture or kill you for being a freak of nature. As for the largish brain, we all know that high-pressure situations like being chased by a pack of hyenas call for snap decisions, not agonized reasoning. He who hesitates is lost.

Lastly, people are noticeably less hirsute that other species. Before folks figured out how to fashion pelts into garments, how did they survive those frigid Ice Age winters? How could they shake off the cold long enough to fuck?

2) Once the monkey-people had been isolated and inbred long enough to become a distinct species from their hairier forebears, what would be their first instinct? Figure out a way to breach the divide to wipe out the lowly monkeys. Why? The same reason a dog licks its balls---because it can. Also, monkey meat can be quite tasty when prepared properly. There are restaurants in Nepal where the tables have a hole cut in the middle. This is where the waiter straps a feisty live monkey. He then slices off the top of its head as Hannibal Lechter did to one of his hapless victims in Silence of the Lambs. Dig in, everybody!

So why do garden-variety monkeys abound to this day? Why haven’t they evolved at all since that time so many millennia ago?

3) I’ve been camping in the winter. We had all the top-flight backpacking gear and still survival was difficult for even a few days. And there aren’t nearly as many threatening species roaming about as there were 50,000 years ago---plus it was a lot chillier then. It just seems exceedingly unlikely that a population of people could have possibly sustained itself at the necessary birth-replacement level of 2 per female, under such harsh and forbidding conditions. Mankind almost certainly needed some form of divine intervention to have eked out an existence, and you don’t need to buy into creationist hokum to believe that either.

He’d have stood the same chances of survival as frail, guileless Michael Jackson would have had he been convicted of child molestation and sent to prison. (Then again, stranger things have happened. Consider that O.J. Simpson walked despite 5 billion-to-one odds that blood spilt all over the crime scene belonged to anybody but him.)

4) You’d think that killing your own offspring would be an unfavorable behavior from an evolutionary standpoint, for obvious reasons---and that goes on all the time in the animal kingdom. And yet Man takes it one step further by aborting fetuses by the millions every year---and He’s been doing it for untold generations, especially if the fetus was female---no harm, no foul.

You also might think that as the most highly evolved species, we’d have a keen, communistic sense of what is good in furtherance of said species. How then to explain genocide, from 1994’s bloodbath in Rwanda to Pol Pot’s massacre as depicted in that downer of a movie The Killing Field? In little over a year 400,000 Rwandan tribesmen were slaughtered as the West sat by twiddling its thumbs. Likewise when Mr. Pot butchered 1,000,000 of his countrymen: “You’re a bad man, Mr. Pot. Please stop wiping out all the Cambodians.” Sure, there is the occasional interspecies killing but nothing on such a grand scale. No other animal kills with such sweaty, unbridled abandon. And yet we remain the most populous higher animal around.

5) The existence of such preposterous creatures as hedgehogs, goats, anteaters and sloth. Mother Nature is a notoriously humorless bitch. Without a sense of humor, there is simply no way She’d have created these beasts. (The same might be said of 80s “hair bands.”)

6) The AIDS. It is well-accepted that this killer disease originated from men having wild banshee sex with the green monkeys indigenous to eastern Africa. If we really share so much DNA (99% by some eggheads’ estimates) with monkeys, don’t you think some hard-up villagers would have cavorted with their forebears long before the late 70s, when AIDS arrived in force? After all, as the saying goes, it’s all pink on the inside.

7) The fact that the industrialized world has all but eliminated threats to its populace, from dreaded diseases to wildlife to indoor smoking. Meanwhile the Third World continues to be ravaged by all those perils and more. Where is population burgeoning? The Third World. Where are human numbers dwindling overall? The industrialized world. This apparent paradox runs diametrically counter to Darwin’s cockamamie theories. As does the aforementioned fact that one population just one rung below us on the evolutionary ladder teeters on the brink of extinction. If they are so smart, why haven’t they been able to adopt to changing circumstances and duck predation? As the great Sam Kinnison once asked, why don’t they GO WHERE THE FOOD IS?

8) Mankind is devolving. Behold how all the great masters of art died centuries ago, never to be reincarnated. Who alive today can paint with the depth and nuance of a Monet or Renoir? Would you compare Jackson Pollack splashing gallons of house paint on an outlandishly large canvass to Monet’s Water Lilies? How about Andrew Wyatt’s ubiquitous painting of a dog lying on a bed? Does it measure up to Michelangelo’s work on the Sistine Chapel? Who composed catchier tunes, Bach or 50 Cent? In literature, is the drivel churned out by Stephen King or John Grisham on a par with the revered works of Tolstoy, Sartre or Hemingway? For that matter, is it even on a par with Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg? I don’t think so! And I’m sorry but Two and a Half Men might be the least tiresome comedy TV has to offer, but it doesn’t compare with even Shakespeare’s most middling of plays. And with the proliferation of “reality TV” shows, they’ve gone so far as to remove all elements of creativity from our most pervasive medium.

Hence the decline in movie-going, book-buying, TV viewership and CD sales. When the product is consistently mediocre, people learn to stay away in droves. Yes, you might say we’ve evolved to the point where we all realize it is necessary to entertain ourselves.

For all our breathtaking advances in technology, we are devolving with each passing generation. Tom Brokaw’s jaunty proclamation that persons born in the 20s and 30s (like him) comprised The Greatest Generation notwithstanding, our evolutionary tree died when it was a nascent sapling. We build 110 story skyscrapers and massive 747 airplanes. What do we do with them? Why, fly the planes into the buildings so as to destroy then planes, skyscrapers and everyone therein, that’s what. Very clever indeed.

Before long we’ll be back up in the trees, swinging with the monkeys and avidly eating our own shit.

9) It is axiomatic to Darwinian dogma that genetic diversity is good for a given species. Yet, in practice on the ground, it doesn’t seem to work out very well. See how Americans have bristled at the mass stampede of Mexicans and South Americans bringing their sexist behavior, lax cultural mores and annoying mariachi music with them. Witness the difficulty a Spanish-speaking person has ordering a pastrami on rye from a Korean deli owner in America. Behold the maddening fast-food word “fo-hee-to-gaw.” More homogenous populations like Swedes and Japanese seem happier and prove just as productive.

10) You’re reading this.

comments (9)

sorry, chris is not available at the moment. he is busy discovering the cure for a new and devastating disease, Electronic Dysentery. don't worry, anna, he should have an antidote for you shortly. we all know how intelligent and compassionate you really are and hate to see you afflicted like this. hope you're feeling better soon.

by not chris at September 21, 2005 8:08 PM


Hey Anna,

Don't you know that them Spacemen came down and mixed up the DNA for Humans.

It's the only thing that makes sense.

Either that or The Flying Spaghetti Monster touched the monkeys with his noodly appendage.

by Long Time Lurker at September 21, 2005 8:59 PM


Yeah, I'm, like, smart or something. Consider that among the attendees at Bill Clinton's Global Initiative to Fix Everything Right Now While Receiving Oral were Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, looking thoughtful.

by anna at September 22, 2005 7:45 AM


#11: Guys like Minister Farakhan continue to Exist.
#12: White Liberals who believe his theory on Katrina and are so angry about it and in their White Blue Collar Righteousness(we can relate because we grew up lower class), start bashing all things Middle Class and Above, because they Admire it but can't attain it due to dumbness and fucking pregnancy in their teens, continue to Exist.

by lockheed at September 22, 2005 11:01 AM


I'll admit that I hadn't thought about that, but damned if ain't on the money.

George Bush doesn't care about black people. He's drinking again, you know.

by anna at September 22, 2005 6:08 PM


Thanks for trying to enlighten me Anna, but my mind is already full of the Truth, as I have been blessed by His noodly appendage. Why cite 10 reasons to doubt evolution when only one is required? FSM is all the reason I need. We all know that evolution is a hoax, put in place to test the faith of those who don't realize or believe that the universe and all life was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster (http://www.venganza.org/).

by chris at September 29, 2005 6:16 PM


A mountain, trees and a midget. Really, what else is there? And if the trees fall down the mountain and crush said midget, does FSM really care that much?

by anna at September 30, 2005 7:43 AM


Oh anna,

don't you know that the FSM cares about all of his children even if they doubt his existance.

I noticed a couple of months ago that Bush was looking a little ragged, but I ws hoping it was late nights with Laura and Condi.

by Long Time Lurker at September 30, 2005 2:07 PM


you mean a threesome? saucy.

by anna at October 1, 2005 1:26 PM