One of the major creationist arguments against evolution is that no one has ever “observed” evolution happen, and therefore God definitely did it. The trouble with this argument is obvious – the creationists have never actually observed nature. Nature is horrible and if a deity were to create such a system, they’d have to be sick in the head. Today I was unfortunately a partipant a very vivid example of nature at it’s most horrendous.
Our next-door neighbours have a cat, and far from being adorable, it’s actually a vicious killing machine, and regularly deposits the corpses of pigeons in our garden – or worse still, their still living, half-mangled corpses. Earlier today I looked out of the window and saw a distressed, half-dead pigeon.
So we did what we thought was the most responsible thing – call the RSPCA. If anyone can fix a wounded animal, and cure it of it’s ailments, it’s probably going to be them. And this is when the most horrifying thing happened. The RSPCA turned up and decided that the best course of action was to put the pigeon out of it’s misery. So the man took the pigeon out to the van and killed it right there and then in front of our house. Or so I’m told anyway – I couldn’t bear to watch.
Of course, there was probably no other option – it’s probably pretty difficult to make pigeon-size wheelchairs, and helping all pigeons is probably uneconomic – the RSPCA man wasn’t just the death panel, but the executioner too. But it was still quite upsetting, because as the person who first discovered the pigeon’s plight and triggered the RSPCA being alerted and therefore hastening the pigeons death… did I kill it by proxy? Do I have blood on my hands?
It’s been a rollercoaster of emotions – I think I must feel like the general who orders troops into battle knowing they weren’t coming back alive. Or perhaps more precisely, the general who orders the doctors to treat a patient only for the doctor to instead go on a killing spree.
And I bet the RSPCA man wasn’t terribly happy either. I bet he grew up loving animals, finding them fascinating, enjoying trips to the zoo, and then training to be a vet because of his love of animals and wanting to help them… only to then find out he’ll spend most of his career murdering them.
I’m just glad I didn’t give the pigeon a name, or something that would make the story even more loaded with emotion. In fact, re-read this blog-post but imagine the pigeon’s name was Dale. Dale the pigeon.
There’s a big debate at the moment about allowing scientists to create hybrid animal/human embryos – the apparent implication being that if we allow it, we’ll eventually become infested with soulless half-man-half-monkey chimeras, sort of a race of Wayne Rooneys and George Bushes (which is a horrifying thought), who opponents fear will overthrow us and force regular humans into servitude, in a Planet of the Apes style scenario.
Fortunately, this isn’t the case – they only want to use the embryos for research, and to help cure diseases and that sort of thing, and they’ll have to destroy them all after two weeks, as legally they can’t keep them any longer, so there’s no chance of monsters. Yet.
I think humanity is going to have a problem though, when the scientists are successful in using these hybrids to cure all diseases – they’ll have nothing to do. So I think we should head off the challenge of thousands of scientists queuing up to cash their giros now, by empowering them to create and breed full human/animal hybrids.
Sure, you could complain that it’s “not naturalâ€, but neither is wearing clothes, using technology or going on Trisha to resolve personal family problems, in most species at least. Besides, isn’t turning the future into something akin to the X-Men a cool idea? Think about it – people will have ‘powers’. Well, sort of.
Super-humans, fused with elephant DNA whilst in the womb would grow up to have enormous brains, and would presumably never forget anything. Taking the black and white striped pattern from zebra DNA will enable humans to evade any predators – simply by standing in a crowd of zebras.
Customising the human genome for specific jobs could be useful too – give our soldiers the anal scent glands of skunks, and they’d be a formidable fighting force – no one would want to go near them.
Teachers have always tried to control kids by claiming to have eyes in the backs of their heads- geneticists could have the power to make this a literal reality by giving them bulging frog-like eyes that can see in multiple directions. And who would complain if we had teaching chimeras that improve discipline in schools? I mean, as long as nobody was stupid enough to name the chimera Muhammad.
If scientists could engineer some real life centaurs too, we’d be the best in the world at athletics – and our footwear industry would double in size with twice the number of feet to cater for.
From a purely creative point of view, this is the only way we’re going to keep humans interesting. We’ve beaten evolution – we’ve invented technology that helps people survive and reproduce much quicker than natural selection can weed out the weak. Artificially designing improvements to our genetic make-up using our own intelligence is the only way we’re going to improve – if we’re not careful, if we stay the way we are for a few million years, other animals might evolve and usurp our position as top of the food chain! Consider this a warning.
Yeah, I quite likegoing to zoos. Katy and I decided to “up the ante” today (whatever that means) and take a trip to a Safari Park, where we’d actually get dangerously close the animals.
One thing I worried about before going, aside from potentially being eaten by lions, was the car insurance implications. I mean, do the park pay for any damage the monkeys make? Or do I have to swap insurance details with the monkey, then ring my insurer and try and explain to them how a primate smashed in the bonnet?
Unlike most worries, this was not baseless: a monkey did actually jump on to the car, and wouldn’t go away. So I ended up driving along with a monkey on the roof to try and knock it off.
After the drive though bit, where we came up-close with a rhino, a bear, a lion – all of the scary animals basically, you can park your car and look around a more traditional Zoo-like area. Unlike zoos though, the animals don’t tend to be behind fences, and you can get right up close to them. Here are some photos to prove this point, in case you, er, don’t believe me:
Lots of Wallabies at feeding time.
A lemur? Something like that.
Me, scared of a peacock.
Hello, new Facebook profile picture.
The best bit though was undoubtedly an aviary, where you can just walk in and be surrounded by birds. Whilst this doesn’t sound too spectacular, you could buy nectar in little cups, so that when you walk into the main area, half a million birds swarm around you and land on you, fighting over the food. Here’s a short video (and I do mean short- it’s only 26 seconds, unlike the eight minute epics I’ve been producing lately):
In retrospect, instead of saying “Hello” to the bird at the end, I should have said “So, do you come here often?” to maximise the gag. I guess this is why proper film makers write scripts.
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