I read almost a whole book about evolution, and now I am an expert. Unless otherwise stated, these facts come from Why Evolution is True, by Jerry A. Coyne.

WARNING: IF YOU ARE READING THIS, AND YOU HAPPEN TO BE MY SISTER, STOP RIGHT NOW, LITTLE MISSY! YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE TO GET A SNEAK PREVIEW OF THIS THRILLING INFORMATION AND YOU BLEW IT! DON’T EVEN TRY TO LOOK NOW! IT’S OVER, BABY, AND YOU SHALL REMAIN IGNORANT FOREVER!!!!!!!!

In 2006, only 40% of Americans judged the following statement to be true: Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals. 39% said it was false. 21% didn’t know. Here is a more recent Gallup Poll: http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx Fascinating!

Continents move apart at approximately the same rate your fingernails grow! That’s 2-4 inches per year! Scratchy!

Over the first 80% of the history of life, all species of were soft-bodied! Squishy! That matches right up with me; Over 80% of all species I’ve dated have been soft-bodied also! More cushion = more pushin’, right?!

We can estimate that we have fossil evidence of only 0.1% – 1% of all species! Oooh, rocky! Not much of a sample! Think of all the species that are gone forever, never to be discovered! Adinaloraptasorous Grande, we hardly knew ye!

The length of a day increases about two seconds every 100,000 years because the earth’s rotation is gradually slowed by friction produced by tides! That’s like daylight savings seconds every 100,000 years, and who doesn’t need extra daylight? Thanks, tides!

Corals have annual rings. These are not like college rings, or special yearly underwater ring tones that only coral (and some very sensitive oysters) can hear, but a ring in their bodies that mark every year, like trees. Corals also have daily rings inside of them, that mark every day! It’s like a coral diary, which is a great title for a sexy romance novel! By counting up the rings and using fancy science tools and calculations, we can figure how many hours in a day there were when different corals lived! That’s probably important information to someone!

There’s a fossil marsupial that was a 10 foot kangaroo with a flat face, huge claws and only one toe on each foot! Man, I’d hate to meet that guy in a dark alley! He’d hop up, banging into the dumpsters, and stand over you, gnashing his terrible teeth while you pissed yourself, and just when the sun was blotted out by his immense stature, and you prepared to evolve into total nonlivinghood, his vicious little five foot, flat-faced joey would pop out the pouch and stab his huge toe-claw right in your eye! Damn! Fossil kangaroos are assholes! Really, pretty much any time you’re dealing with joeys, tragedy is likely to ensue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUVZsu36SW4

Except for Joey Tribiani. It’s always a good time with this guy.  One time Joey said, “It’s like a cow’s opinion. It doesn’t matter. You know, it’s moo!” Think about it…true on so many levels!

Stay tuned! More about cows to come! Oh boy!

This is not to say, necessarily, that all marsupials are bad; even if they were, anthropologists like myself don’t judge other species on value terms like that. My professional opinion is that marsupials are weird. Take, for example, their hoo-hoos. Marsupial males have a double pronged penis. This makes them popular with the ladies -it’s not the size of the penis, gentlemen – it’s the quantity! It’s also necessary equipment; marsupial females have three vaginas. Here’s a helpful illustration from the British documentary Inside Nature’s Giants. 

Disappointed? Expecting koala porn? Get a grip on yourself! (heh, heh!) This is science, you perv!

Whales have vestigial pelvises (pelvi?) and hind legs, since they evolved from land mammals, probably from a species of artiodactyls, which are mammals that have an even number of toes, like camels or pigs! Look at me using words like vestigial, pelvi, and artiodactyls! I can also say phylogeny and Gondwana! 

Are you bored yet? I’m just getting started!

So, whales descended from a land mammal like a cow. Creationists think that theory is ridiculous, because at some points in their evolution, they would have been like a “mer-cow”, a species that was poorly adapted to land or water. Behold this sexy specimen:

 Eureka! The missing link, discovered by GE!

Photographer: Chris Gordaneer                Prop Build: Kira Shaimanova (props to prop build! Way to go, Kira!)

So how to debate this seemingly insurmountable evolutionary conundrum? With the hippopotamous, silly! Hippos are cool, or – dare I say it -hip! They’re mammals, yes, but they’re total water wallerers, too! They spend most of their time submerged, and their ears eyes and noses are on the top of their heads to facilitate that habit. When they do go under water, they can close all of those orifices up tightly. No swimmers’ ear for hippos! (I’m not sure if they are prone to swimmers’ anus or not.) They mate in the water and their babies are born and suckle under it. Hippo babies swim before they walk. When they come ashore, their skin secretes a protective red fluid that serves as a sunscreen or antibiotic, so it looks like they sweat blood – even better than stigmata, right?! Hippos get up to 3 1/2 tons and 12 feet long, but they can outrun a human, and have ivory tusks that can bite a small boat in half! George Washington’s wooden teeth were really hippo tusk, which is more valuable than elephant tusk, because they don’t yellow! There I go again, debunking the myths that keep you awake at night wondering! That’s what I do! (Additional hippo facts from http://didyouknow.org/animals/hippo/. You don’t have to click on it, cuz I already culled the best parts! You’re welcome!)

So…hippos are mercows! Yay! 

OK, I just have a few more things I really want to tell, but I can’t stand doing the exclamation points anymore. So here goes:

One of the biggest proofs of evolution are the examples of poor design in species, the idea being that if an all-knowing Creator intelligently designed everything from scratch, everything would be designed better. In humans, these include things like the appendix, wisdom teeth and the muscles that move the ears, all of which are useless, or that the testes are formed inside the abdomen, and then migrate through the abdomen wall into the scrotum, leading to hernias. In women, there is a small gap between the ovary and the Fallopian tube that the egg has to “jump” to implant in the uterus. If the egg pulls a Knievel and falls short, the result is an abdominal pregnancy, which is almost always fatal to the child. There are more things, stuff about pie holes and poo holes, prostates and pelvi, but my favorite example is the flatfish.

Hell, I just like to say “flatfish.” Try it! Fun!

Flatfish are fish that are flat -duh!-  like flounder, sole, halibut or turbot. Here’s a real pretty one:  So, flatfish start out just like any other fish, swimming upright, with eyes on two sides of their head. In order to escape predators, they lie flat on the sea bed, but then they get sand and sea schmutz in one eye. A month after birth, one eye begins to move, to migrate across the skull to meet the other one on one side of the body. Whether both eyes end up on the right side of the head or the left is dependent on the species. The skull changes its shape to help the wayward eye. Finally the flatfish tips onto its blindside, so both eyes are now on top. It becomes a camouflaged bottom-feeding predator, and forever after swims on its side.

Oh hell, no! Tell me that’s not worth reading this whole, randomly selected excellent evolutionary example post! Flatfish are awesome and kind of gnarly! Their eyes move! Damn!

I want to reiterate that just because I believe in evolution, and find much of it thrilling, I am basically against it, on the grounds that much of it repulses me. Like cockroaches. Or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00509MQxRB8 (Check out the comments!)

Once one species evolve, everybody starts doing it, and that’s the problem.

You don’t have to watch this whole thing – it’s 9 minutes- but again, do check out the comments. Shocking, right? I guess that just proves another of my theories; humans are really slow to evolve. We see evidence of that all the time. Palintologists will find an abundance of terrifically unevolved pundits and politicians in the future, I’m sure.

http://secularuh.org/?p=529

Check out her site: www.zinasaunders.com

OOPS! I thought I was done, but I’m not! This just in! http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-10-06-US-Congressman-Creationism/id-ab207e656e9e4692a80296a63a78c8a6

Thanks to Chi Toh for reading my mind!

Here’s a little extra:

http://animal.discovery.com/tv/a-list/creature-countdowns/animal-transformers/transformers.html

http://blogs.discovery.com/animal_oddities/