This book should be available in an edition for Christians. It would then be called WTF,God?! (yeah, rather disrespectful I agree). But all you do is This book should be available in an edition for Christians. It would then be called WTF,God?! (yeah, rather disrespectful I agree). But all you do is replace the word Evolution with the word God.
So, this book would be full of funny stuff like
These are supposed to be dolphins? God, have you ever actually seen a dolphin?
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Look, God, everyone has trouble staying motivated sometimes. Take a walk or have a snack when that happens…Don’t force yourself to make turtles when your heart obviously isn’t in it.
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God had not had enough coffee when He made the Surinam horned frog.
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Why so gloomy, babirusa? Is it because God gave you some weird extra tusks that are ugly, useless, too brittle to fight with, and may eventually grow so long that they curve around and fatally puncture your skull? Could that be it?
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Because the anti-evolutionists believe that every species was created by God individually, and did not evolve from any other species. You know, Genesis and all that :
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
The implications of this have been rarely teased out. The Bible literalists like to say that God created the
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and the
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But they shuffle their feet and look down at their hands when you mention the tapeworm. But it goes further. God also created the rats which spread the bubonic plague and killed around 45% of the population of Europe in the years 1346–53. But also He spent some time creating Xenopsylla cheopis - the flea which infected the rats. And before all that, He also mulled things over and created the Yersinia pestis bacterium which is the actual disease itself. I mean, without Yersinia pestis the fleas were just hitch-hikers and the rats were just stowaways.
And He created all the other diseases too, which I shan’t list – I’m sure you have your favourites. River blindness, syphilis, malaria, whatever.
So this thing cuts both ways. Yeah, evolution does look pretty silly when you think about that saiga antelope
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huh?
or the star nosed mole
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wha the??
– but if this indicates that Darwin was barking up the wrong sea cucumber and Genesis is right after all, then I do find it kind of worrying that we’re all in the hands of Someone who thought the Goliath spider was a good idea
Over this summer I have become a friend to insects. It has been a long hot one in England, and I have been sitting in the garden reading, as one does, Over this summer I have become a friend to insects. It has been a long hot one in England, and I have been sitting in the garden reading, as one does, and it has been far too hot to jump up and buffet each stray bug which lands upon one’s torso, so that laziness has inspired tolerance and an acknowledgement that these flying and jumping things will buzz off to wherever their schedule takes them if you just sit still and do nothing. Noticing their remarkable, careless, rapturous variety I was inspired become conversant with their names while they made their brief visit , so that I could pay them the courtesy of addressing them properly – “Aha, avast there, Mr Donacia Vulgaris “, “Oho, guten abend Mein herr Astata Boops, is this not a fine day!“ and so forth; hence I got this book. But although a very pretty volume stuffed with almost a trillion photos I must say that it has proved a complete dud in this respect. The very first time I put it to the test, today, was when a saucy bold fly zoomed onto the very page of my R K Narayan novel and regarded me with a multi-refracted ironical stare – “Hey bro”, he seemed to say, “life’s for living, that’s my philosophy.” Then he left – kavoom – just like that. He was of a sturdy build, with firm black stripes, legs somewhat akimbo, and I guessed a strongly satirical point of view. I thumbed through the section on flies – nothing. He wasn’t there. I was sorry, I had liked the cut of his jib.
So there are two serious problems about this book.
1. THE LEG THING
As I rambled through the gaudy, lurid photographs of this pungent volume I was annoyed that certain favourite creatures were simply omitted. Then I came across a terse section on p5 which I had overlooked called WHAT IS AN INSECT? Which has a picture of a fly (THIS IS AN INSECT) and pictures of woodlice and a spider (THESE ARE NOT INSECTS). Apparently those guys have the wrong number of legs and body sections. I mean, come on already. Us non-entomologists do not go about counting the legs and the body sections, to us idiots they’re all insects. But no, a goodly portion of the interesting creepy-crawlies in my garden are OUT of this book because they don’t measure up, too many legs or not enough body sections. I thought this was typical scientific arrogance and a fine example of how scientists and the rest of us don’t talk the same language. Entomologist comes from a Greek word meaning SEXIST LEG-COUNTER.
2. LEPIDOPTERISM
About 55% of the whole of this book is pix of butterflies and moths. Yeah, that’s right, the supermodels of the insect world. This is a poor show. I had thought that scientists would have risen above the looksism which blights so many aspects of our cultural life, but it seems not. The young, sexy, show-offy insects get the royal treatment, as in human life. What’s on the cover? Oh, only a drop dead gorgeous peacock butterfly. What kind of signal does this send out to the wart biters or atlantoraphidia maculicollises of this world?
So what with the leg thing and the huge butterfly bias, I have to say that this guide to British insects might be part of the problem instead of the solution.
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"They never even returned my CV and headshots."...more
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