I thought I'd share with you a comment from a reader in the chatbox to the left (I'll re-post it here, to keep it with the subject):



While posting anonymously, the reader's IP number (24.167.214.49) resolved to a cable ISP (Roadrunner) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It can never be entirely clear if the reader was being serious or simply pulling my leg. The problem is, that there is a surprisingly strong movement in the US trying to teach children ideas like these. Most peple born outside of the US and after about 1200 a.d. (like me) have a hard time even to determine the seriousness of such barely intelligible blurbs. While there is evidence that in the middle ages up until the time of enlightenment, people really considered such ideas and pondered human origins in terms of "good" and "bad" and in terms of what people long dead had written in an ancient language in old collections of tales. However, outside of the US, modern reasoning replaced obscure mysticism a few hundred years ago.
My personal pet hypothesis is that just as the rain forest protected hunter-gatherer societies from modern societies, the US public education system protects religious fundamentalists from basic scientific knowledge.

I'd be interested in the mechanism with which our rebellious mind alters our genes to make us less "perfect" in each generation. And I wonder: if it's our "rebelliousness" that makes us more and more "imperfect" why did the pious people in the middle ages only get to live 30 years and we get to be rebellious for over 70? It seems not only is our creator less than intelligent, he also seems to be losing (against whom, I wonder?). Are pious people more healthy than the impious ones? One would assume so! However, no statistical evidence could be found so far. A simple coelenterath, for example, Hydra, consists of far more than 80% water and not only heals, but if you cut it in two, then you get two new Hydras (hence the name). So hydra is even more of a miracle than we are! And there are plenty more animals that are way more miraculous than we are. While I don't think there's a crown to creation, if there is one, it's defenitely not Homo sapiens! "Originally". Just about when was that? Before or after the Neanderthals?