1slave

 This video is old-AF, but this small part I am about to type up is so MOTHERFUDGING relevant.  Just read this please.

Dan(at :26):  "How many Creationists do we have in the room?  Probably none.  I think we are all Darwinian.  And yet, many Darwinians are anxious, a little uneasy - would like to see some limits on just how far Darwinism goes.  

     It's alright, you know, spiderwebs?  Sure, they are a product of evolution.  The World Wide Web?  Not so sure.  Beaver dams, yes.  Hoover Dam, no.  

     What do you think it is that prevents the products of ingenuity from being themselves, fruits of the tree of life, and hence in some sense, obeying evolutionary rules? 

     And yet, people are interestingly resistant to the idea of applying evolutionary thinking to thinking - to our thinking     And so I'm going to talk a little bit about that, keeping in mind that we have a lot on the program here.

     So, you're out in the woods, or you're out in the pasture and you see this ant crawling up this blade of grass.  It climbs up to the top and falls, and it climbs and it falls, it climbs up and falls, trying to to stay at the very top of the blade of grass.

     You ask yourself, "What is this ant doing?  What is his climbing in aid of?  What goals is this ant trying to achieve by climbing this blade of grass?  What's in it for the ant?

     And the answer is:  NOTHING!  There is nothing in it for the ant.  

     Well then, why is it doing this?  Is it just a fluke?

     Yeah, it's just a fluke.  It's a lancet fluke(audience laughter at 2:15), it's a little brain worm,  It's a parasitic brain worm that has to get in the stomach of a sheep or cow in order to continue it's life cycle.  

     Salmon swim upstream to get to their spawning grounds and lancet flukes commandeer a passing ant, crawl into its brain, and drive it up a blade of grass like an all-terrain vehicle.

     So there's nothing in it for the ant.  The ant's brain has been hijacked by a parasite that infects the brain, inducing suicidal behavior.  

    Pretty scary.

     Well, does anything like that happen with human beings?  

     This is all on behalf of a cause other than one's own genetic fitness, of course.  

     Well, it may already have occurred to you that Islam means "surrender," or "submission of self-interest to the will of Allah."  Hmm, well it's ideas  - not worms - that hijack our brains.  

     Now, am I saying that a sizeable majority of the world's population has had their brain hijacked by parasitic ideas?

     No, it's worse than that.  

     Most people have!  (Audience laughter!)

     There are a lot of ideas to die for.  Freedom, if you're from New Hampshire.(laughter)  Justice.  Truth.  Communism(many people have laid down their lives for Communism and many have laid down their lives for CAPITALISM.  And many for Catholicism.  And many for Islam. 

     These are just a few of the ideas that are to die for.  

     They're infectious.  

     Yesterday, Amory Lovins spoke about "infectious repititis."  It was a term of abuse, in effect.  This is unthinking engineering.  

     Well, most of the cultural spread that goes on is not brilliant, new,  out-of-the-box thinking, it's INFECTIOUS REPITITIS.  

     We might as well try and have a theory of what's going on when that happens so that we can understand the conditions of infection.  

     Hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others.  

     I myself am a philosopher, and one our occupational hazards is that people ask us what the meaning if life is."

     Ok, I'm at only 5:08 on this Ted Talk.  I hope what you just read helps kill the parasite in your brain, Charlie and Raquel(and Chasity, my old girlfriend who I recently reconnected with, look, great read).

Victor Vera