This might help, buy whiskey. It affords some relief to such problems. ( a function in direct ratio to consumption)

OR YOU could call Nancy @ 1-202-225-0100, DEMAND IMPEACHMENT. (vent)

I've never found whiskey helps, and I resent the fact people suggest it does. I am a seething mass of resentment.

However, I do find urging the impeachment of malefactors is useful.

I think you're avoiding a fundamental point here. Since its a scientific fact that evolution is just a theory (cf. Kansas Board of Education), all of your complaints are really the result of intelligent design. And the number one thing you list, mortality, is actually the Intelligent Designer's ultimate solution to all your problems. Remember, when you die and they lay you to rest, you want to go to the place that's the best.

All of your other points except one are subservient to this. Women with the proper waist/hip ratio, consciousness of consciousness, physical pain, the various physical and emotional enforcers and bacon are just the Intelligent Designer's way of speeding you on to your just reward.

As for shoulder hair, that's just the Intelligent Designer's little joke.

Let me know if you figure out a way back to the primordial ooze. I don't think you notice too much when you are ooze.

Nah. I like evolution for being the perfect excuse for the way things are and the perfect explanation why they couldn't be any different.

Very funny, and brave. I resent evolution because it makes me feel superior to Neanderthals, and that's not very nice. It makes me not like the person I've become.
I also find vodka superior to whiskey.

I likes the women with the "correct" waist/hip ratio.

Hey, without the shoulder hair humanity would have never driven the shoulder gnomes that troubled early man to extinction!

Have you ever met a shoulder gnome? Exactly! See, the hair works.

I resent the fact that the more you learn, the less happy you become, and the more troubling that sleep becomes. Not only do you spend your waking life unhappy (ala Micheal Albert's explanation of Chomsky appreciation), but also your non-waking life.

Is that evolution? Egads, but the medicine tastes like sh*t.

I resent the fact that the more you learn, the less happy you become, and the more troubling that sleep becomes.

I have to disagree. My experience was that I could feel something was wrong, but I truly had no idea what it was. I don't think there's any way of NOT knowing things are wrong, even if just subconsciously.

But learning what was happening has actually made my day to day existence far happier...although I wouldn't have believed it if you'd told me beforehand.

While waiting for Saletan to explain to us just why that waist/hip ratio is correct, you might be willing to entertain this partial defense of evolution by Stephen Jay Gould, titled "The Guano Ring":

http://books.google.com/books?id=AuF7kim5UC0C&pg=PA46&dq=guano+circle+gould&sig=hgJtUHGOO1UA9c4VkJQJaNjEEJY

...although I wouldn't have believed it if you'd told me beforehand.

We're all different. Still, happiness is not what I've come to expect from the learning process, except in the very short interim when the "aha" fires a dose into the spooge center -- both learning and happiness being just sliding points on parallel continuum.

I think of it as an addiction to a lifestyle of intentional depression. I won't be happier for long just because I learned something new or novel, but the colors of my unhappiness and depression will be varied, so at least there's that.

The colors, man...the groovy colors.

Try believing in God and heaven, a place where one is perfect and blissful with no worries at all about shoulder hair or mortality. I guess this suggestion is quaint and obsolete, kind of like justice in America.

Thanks for the laugh, something which I do not hold against evolution.

I resent A Tiny Revolution for making me aware that my leaders are likely to demonstrate my mortality without even really asking me.

But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool;
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop. O, I could prophesy,
But that the earthy and cold hand of death
Lies on my tongue: no, Percy, thou art dust
And food for--

. . .

For worms, brave Percy...

Try believing in God and heaven, a place where one is perfect and blissful with no worries at all about shoulder hair or mortality.

This is what I love; the graceful ease with which one convinces oneself that because it makes one happy to believe this pleasant fairy tale, it therefore has to be true! I thought everyone above, say, age ten had learned that there are some things that just are the way they are, and the only thing to do is accept it and move on.

Jonathan, aren't you Jewish? You should have no fear of bacon if that is the case, no? Now CHINESE people have more to fear than Bacon...

Jonathan, aren't you Jewish?

Despite what you'd think, I'm actually not. Part of my family is, but I don't count (unless I'm applying for Israeli citizenship or being killed by Hitler).

In any case, I don't eat bacon these days because I've come to believe eating animals is bad for you physically and morally, but I have fond memories of the filthy swine.

But it isn't evolution, or even the Intelligent Designer, that made you want women of a certain waist/hip ratio; it's Society, Officer Krupke!

A fire-mist and a planet,
A crystal and a cell,
A jelly-fish and a saurian,
And caves where the cave-men dwell;
Then a sense of law and beauty
And a face turned from the clod, --
Some call it Evolution,
And others call it God.

--"Each In His Own Tongue", William Herbert Carruth, 1859-1924

Yeah, FAT lot of good being a vegetarian did for Hitler.

I think evolution is getting a bad rap here. Only the bad news is being reported.

For example: no matter what else happens, it is absolutely certain that George Bush and Dick Cheney are going to die. The logic that guarantees this requires that I also die as well. I, for one, on behalf of humanity, am willing to accept this trade-off.

Bush sure,but that Cheney fella looks to have done some sort of deal with the devil, or rather deal with himself to escape that sort of fate...

If you were born a psychopath you would not care about other creatures' mortality.

I agree with the bacon thing, by the way. You know that fancy Italian bacon-like meat? My girlfriend's daughter made a stuffing with bread toasted in olive oil, with nuts, turkey bits, that bacon-like stuff, goat cheese and cherries. It was great. I'm planning on getting off the couch today. Then I will ponder my mortality.

Bob:

I am just basically saying that compassion comes from WITHIN first. Vegetarianism is a lifestyle choice, nothing to do with becoming better morally. If you choose to eat vegetarian because it is more compassionate, you are already more compassionate in the first place to have thought of it.

you will meet a dark and handsome stranger who will be a grateful steer in disguise, and the steer will say, "because of your kindness, i too have evolved to read chomsky; i hate you"

"no, anti-sciutto"

You know that fancy Italian bacon-like meat?

Don't think prosciutto would hold up. How about pancetta, or better yet guiancale.

The evolution of revolution

"My father, the last generalist, who has always instructed me that one should attempt, hopelessly, to know everything, never once tells me , point blank, why trying to know left him so fiercely alone and lost."
_Prisoner's_Dilemma_
Richard Powers

To quote one wonderful byproduct of evolution, "So long as men die, liberty will never perish."

Hitler ate sausage, so can we retire that trope?

Kip W,

Thanks for clearing that up.

My point still stands: compassion comes from WITHIN first. Any action undertaken to demonstrate it, which vegetarianism is one such, is still much a question of individual choice.

There is a half-joking Chinese saying that "Meat and wine bypass the intestine, but the Buddha resides in the heart." I rest my case.

It's not clear what items 5 or 6 have to do with evolution.

Also, though I've never been a vegetarian, I used to believe it was a moral/ethical position to which one should aspire. Now I believe it's deeply problematic, based on a number of faulty assumptions about ethics, morality, politics, and agriculture.

It's not clear what items 5 or 6 have to do with evolution.

Also, though I've never been a vegetarian, I used to believe it was a moral/ethical position to which one should aspire. Now I believe it's deeply problematic, based on a number of faulty assumptions about ethics, morality, politics, and agriculture.