Listen / Read
Christians love evolution. They just can’t talk about it enough on Thought for the Day. They like name-dropping Darwin and lots of clever sounding scientific words, and they love to make it absolutely clear that the theory of evolution simply confirms their belief in a divine evolver. That’s what they’ve been saying all along, we just weren’t paying attention, apparently. And I must not have been paying attention in GCSE biology either, because I always thought Neanderthals went extinct. Apparently not. Canon Winkett says they had successors.
Firstly though, she said that:
“research published this week reveals them to be closer to us humans than we previously thought”
No, it doesn’t. We’ve known for a few years now that we share 99.5 to 99.9 percent of our DNA with Neanderthals. But the title of the article on the BBC website is Neanderthals ‘distinct from us’. There was some speculation that interbreeding between Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens might have left traces of the Neanderthal genome in our genetic make-up, but these new results repudiate that. As for their speech, scientists have known for some time that Neanderthals could speak, just not how well.
Secondly :
“the roots of some of our modern struggles are made visible by digging around the lives of our Neanderthal forebears and their hunter-gatherer successors“
Oh dear. So, to clarify, Neanderthals were not our forebears. Homo sapiens did not descend from Homo neanderthalensis, but rather the two species shared a common ancestor some 500,000 years ago. And although Homo sapiens thrived and spread across the earth, Homo neanderthalensis became extinct 30,000 years ago and so had no successors.
Yes, Christians just love evolution. They don’t get it, bless ‘em, but they love it.
And now on to food. It’s amusing when something you said in the pub once is echoed by scientists and scholars. I distinctly remember supping my pint and stuffing my face with pork scratchings (this was before I turned vegetarian) whilst arguing that we eat too much these days, considering we sit on our arses in front of a computer all day. We used to be hard at work from dawn till dusk, chasing our food over hill and down dale, but now it’s delivered to us in hermetically sealed packets to keep the reconstituted freshness in. We don’t have to move a muscle, everything’s automated. Even our fucking chairs have wheels on them. We just don’t burn off enough energy to justify the food we eat. Three meals a day is ridiculous. Stop stressing out about getting down the gym and just stop eating so much.
Of course, that’s the problem. We have this biological imperative to eat, and to eat the wrong foods. We have also developed a disturbing obsession with food, because people who realised they could make lots of money out of it have spent decades bombarding us with all manner of propaganda replete with delicious looking foodstuffs to get our stomachs rumbling and our wallets emptied. And when so many people were doing it that the competition got stiff, Marks & Sparks decided to make us stiff by turning food into a subliminal orgy of lewd moistness.
And now all you ever hear people talking about is food. You Put the telly on, and there’s some cunt cooking food. When that cunt is done cooking food, s/he starts telling some other cunt, who thinks they know how to cook food, how to cook food. And you can’t escape it. Everyone watches 15 hours of food related programming a week, and they start asking you how your meal is, even though they’re eating the exact same meal. It’s fucking food. It tastes like food. They ask you if you notice anything different. What? Have you poisoned it? Did you marinade it in your own spunk? What? What do you want from me? It’s fucking food, I need it to survive. If it tastes nice and isn’t going to give me a heart attack before the age of 30, then it’s just fine. What do you want from me? Yum fucking yum!
Cunts. Is there a cunt gene? If not I blame Dervla Kirwin.