Woman Made Man Dumb: Damn Her!

I started reading Leonard Shlain’s Sex, Time and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution.  I’m still early in the book, but it’s enlightening, shocking, and world-view changing from the start.  If it can keep the momentum it’ll be one of the books I place in the “influential pile” in my personal library.

The catcher for me was the story of our evolution as Homo Sapiens Sapiens.  Apparently our brain (as a species) hit a growth spurt 150,000 years ago, tripling the size in just a few thousand years.  Well, our brain would have continued to develop past the size that it is today, but the human pelvis was too small to allow a brain larger than ours during the birthing process.  The human pelvis is smaller, proportionally, than that of other animals because we stand erect, and a small pelvis keeps our bowels from falling out.  Other animals don’t have this gravitational problem.  Other animals also don’t have as hard of a time birthing as humans do, so the standing erect thing didn’t mesh well with brain enlarging – we made it work though. 

In Shlain’s theory, there’s an African Eve in our story.  About 150,000 years ago when we were evolving our big-ass brain, humans suffered an enormous amount of deaths at childbirth.  The new baby’s ballooning heads couldn’t fit through the birth canal of women and this caused the near-extinction of the human race.  But one large-pelvised woman came to the rescue of humanity.  She gave birth to many children that spawned many more children – the ancestors of the entire current human population.  Support for this idea: The genes of a human born in Austria and a human born in South Africa are more similar than the average chimpanzee’s genes compared to his neighbor in the next clan.  This is a sign that all six billion humans today are the progeny of a singular ancestor from just a few thousand years ago, our African Eve (from around the Kenya area). 

I think it’s neat that we aren’t smarter today because of women.  It’s their fault.  I think I’ll go tell the wife.  I think she ruined the entirety of human existence.  We probably wouldn’t have war today if she’d have done better in the past.  She needs to know this.  -antiwasp

Filed under: Evolution, Recommendations, Relationships, Technology

God and PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint, or just PowerPoint, according to the Bible is the language of moral imperative created by God and bestowed upon the people of America from the mountain of Microsoft.  PowerPoint endows the people of America, the Chosen Ones, with the ability to communicate divine ideas.  Legend testifies that God, himself, intelligently designed the program from his personal laptop in just eight days.  He then ripped himself into two separate, but unequal, parts becoming both his own son and his own father at the same time ( . . . somehow???).  During the split he talked to himself often, and he also delivered the PowerPoint program directly to Dennis Austin and Thomas Rudkin.  Austin and Rudkin received instructions from the lesser half of the God, who was standing behind a burning bush.  The lesser-burning-bush God gave the two men instructions to sell the product to Bill Gates for a huge profit.  God rested on the ninth day, was crucified, and then nothing else happened.

Today, PowerPoint is recognized as the divine language to both East and West Coast Americans.  Legend of how text, graphics, movies, charts, and animations came to be differs from one group to another.  Factions clash violently over the differences today, but one thing is certain . . . Slides can only be interpreted and created by the pre-destined.  Only those who study and know the true power of PowerPoint will enter though the eye of the needle, which sounds kind of painful.  -antiwasp

Filed under: Religion, Technology

All Alone: No Aliens Here

Frank Drake came up with an equation to estimate how many planets in our galaxy (Milky Way Galaxy) had the conditions to support life if it were to spontaneuously occur there.  His conclusion was that there are 153 other planets in our galaxy that can sustain life, but the nearest one is 2000 light years away (Andromeda, the next nearest galaxy is 2 million light years away).  We started sending out radio signals about 40-50 years ago, so they should reach the nearest planet capable of sustaining life in about 1950 years.  I hope by then something has developed that can hear it. 

It’s highly unlikely that extraterrestrials have ever visited Earth.  Nobody knows we’re here.  (If someone in Andromeda has really good eyes and they are looking at us right now they see a bunch of Homo Erectus guys walking around from 2 million years ago.)  I don’t think we’re anywhere near developing a rocket that can travel at the speed of light, and even if we did we can’t live for 2000 years to make it to the next planet, and even if we could even nuclear power wouldn’t last long enough to get us there. 

We’re all alone, and we always will be.  -antiwasp

Filed under: Religion, Technology