Thoughtless for the Day

"Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them." - Germaine Greer

Happy 201st birthday, Charles Darwin.

For the last several years, my Darwin Day posts have focused on punishing the ignorant, but this year is going to be different. This year I won't be spotlighting either of the two places on Earth where Evolution is not widely accepted: Fundamentalist Islamic countries and the Charlie Daniels Outhouse ("Home of the Extra Chromosome"). Shit Luther, I'm not even going to mention that Charlie recently posted another one of anti-Science rants. And I certainly am not going to bring up the fact that although Charlie doesn't archive his readers' comments, I do. For that reason, I definitely won't go into the two people who attempted to succinctly explain the facts of Evolution to the Skoal-chewing amoebae of the Outhouse, or that when one of these two posters mentioned that the last Pope was a firm believer in Evolution, it elicited the following response:

"The day that the pope speaks for Christianity is the day I hope I'm out of here.....You know as much about Christianity and as you do evolution, or you would know that the Whore of Revelations comes out of Rome and the next pope [sic] could very well be the anti-christ [sic].....In other words because someone calls themselves " christian" does not make it so....God Bless" - Plowboy

You heard it here first! A biblical scholar who goes by the handle of "Plowboy" has announced that next Pope could possibly be the Antichrist. By the way, Plowboy, it's the Book of Revelation - singular - not Revelations.

No, there will be no mockery of inbred dick-freckles like the aforementioned Plowboy today! Instead, we're going to take at look at one of the interesting ethical dilemmas that have arisen from our understanding of Evolution: cloning Neanderthals.

There's a fascinating piece in this month's Archaeology Magazine (which i read for the articles and not the centerfold) by son of Zorro, Zach Zorich, which asks the question: Now that we have decoded the Neanderthal genome would it be ethical for us to clone Neanderthals?

The pro-cloning side argues that since Homo sapiens were most likely the cause of the extinction of Neanderthals, we have a moral obligation to bring them back. And since Neanderthals had relatively large brains and were capable of speech (the FOXP2 gene was found in the Neanderthals' genetic sequence), it's quite possible that they could be eventually be integrated into society.

"Modern humans, he says, are as different from Homo sapiens who lived in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago, as Neolithic people would have been from Neanderthals." - John Hawks, Paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin

"I think there would be no question that if you cloned a Neanderthal, that individual would be recognized as having human rights under the Constitution and international treaties," - Lori Andrews, professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

The anti-cloning argument is, of course, that just because you can do something, that doesn't necessarily mean that you should. Despite a wealth of recent scientific discoveries which demonstrate that Neanderthals were not the brutish louts they had previously been depicted as, the word Neanderthal still remains a pejorative. Charlie Daniels' fellow corporate mascots, the Geico cavemen, understood this. If you think that Gays, African-Americans, Muslims, and Gay African-American Muslims face a lot of prejudice, just imagine what life would hold for a bunch of reconstituted Neanderthals. Now imagine what it would be like to be hated by someone who thinks that you never existed.

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Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The eminent philosopher Joe Jack Talcum used to own a copy of a nineteenth century "dream book". Basically, if you had a dream about - let's say - a horse, you would look up "horse" in the book, and next to the word "horse" would be some advice like "Now would be a good time to check in on a sick relative". Oddly, if you looked up "cheese" the book informed you that nothing good could ever come from a dream about cheese. Even more oddly, a recent study found that eating different varieties of cheese can help you choose your dreams.

For centuries our ancestors thought that dreams were visions or veiled prophecies which, if properly interpreted, could reveal the future. In the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud hit upon that idea that our dreams were trying to tell us something ourselves: that our dreams were a window into the sub-conscience. This was of little comfort to those people who regularly dreamed of hot-dogs and donuts.

Today, we know that both of those theories are wrong (OK, most of us know those theories are wrong. This guy is still a holdout...and his website says nothing about cheese!). The current understanding is that dreams are evolution's way of allowing us to test our reactions to different scenarios and to learn from those imaginary reactions. This seems to make a great deal of sense, since many mammals dream, and I have yet to meet a cat who needed the gift of prophecy or a dog who had unresolved issues with its mother.

If you need further convincing, think about nightmares for a moment. When our ancestors roamed the plains of Africa, tens of thousands of years ago, having the occasion nightmare in which one was chased by lion might turn out to be useful if, during the dream, the hunted escaped by climbing up a tree and remembered that strategy latter. This might also explain why small children still have nightmares in which they're being chased by monsters.

In a way, our dreams are like the appendix, something that once had a useful function, but that, over time, has become obsolete, at best, and downright dangerous, at worst (my wife's nightmares have caused her to pop me in the face approximately a dozen times. Or, at least she says it's her dreams that are making her do this). While it's nice that our dreams are still trying to teach us things, there really is only one survival tactic that's useful for modern humans: Have plenty of cash on hand. And that's why RATYHL is proud to introduce Dream Money:

Dream Money works on a similar principle to "Joss paper",(or "ghost" or "hell" money, as it's more commonly known) - a representation of real money which is burned as an offering to the dead in some Asian cultures - only Dream Money a lot more "Sciencey".

The first thing that you need to do is print out several copies of the bill above and either burn them in your fireplace or stack them next to your bedside - they make excellent bookmarks, by the way (I keep plenty of Dream Dollars of these around the house, just in case I eat the wrong kind of cheese). Then, before you go to sleep, just remind yourself that, at least in your dreams, you have plenty of pocket cash. This way, if you should find yourself having a nightmare in which some crazed, deformed mutant is chasing you with an axe, all you have to do is whip out a wad of dream cash and settle on the exact amount needed for Mr. Mutant to curtail his murderous activities. Or you could use your dream money to purchase a "dream Uzi" and deal with the issue in a more direct manner. It's that simple.

OK, since I've gone and done something really swell for humanity by inventing a currency you can use in your sleep, I'd like all of you who try Dream Money to write in and let me know how it works (or doesn't work). You see, I'm hoping to finally achieve my lifelong dream of winning the Ig-Noble Prize for Economics.

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Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 8:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)