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ARCHIVE - A collection today

Archive: Wed Jan 30 14:03:40 2008
Title: A collection today
Mood: depressed
Music: The Ghost of You-My Chemical Romance
I've got a few notable links today and I'm just going to bundle them rather than making separate posts...

First up is an excellent paper out of the University of Chicago titled Fish out of Water detailing just a few of the very unintelligently designed aspects of humans and tracing their origins back to our evolutionary origins as fish and amphibians.

In many ways, we humans are the fish equivalent of a hot-rod Beetle. Take the body plan of a fish, dress it up to be a mammal, then tweak and twist that mammal until it walks on two legs, talks, thinks, and has superfine control of its fingers and you have a recipe for problems. We can dress up a fish only so much without paying a price. In a perfectly designed world - one with no history - we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.

Its a very well written and thought provoking paper and it only hilights more of the problems with the rediculous notion that we are "intelligently designed".

And some of the same people who support "intelligent design" are the ones who are opposing deploying to emergency responders a cheap drug that counters heroin overdoses.

Here we get another case of "it will only encourage them" arguments. I don't think heroin users are "victims", but if there's a cheap way to save lives and possibly help them turn their lives around its just vindictive to not use it. And when you read the excuses they give to not use it you realize that the real reason is just the typical fringe-right vindictive "make them pay" mentality.

To try to end on an up note: Speaking of vendictive mentality here's a great comic by Big Fat Whale about the rediculous "abstinence only" teaching philosophy for sex.

I'm afraid I can't tell you how Hannibal crossed the Alps. If I did, you crazy kids are likely to conquer the prom with elephants.

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