my science is factyer than your science.

Check it out! This guy found a skeleton which shows that humanity did NOT evolve from apes, but instead that apes are an offshoot of a common, hominid ancestor, so in a way apes kind of evolved from humans.



Smug motherfucker. Look at him, crossed arms and everything, he's all like.

"Yeap. Just unveiled the most groundbreaking finding since, uh, pretty much since the inception of evolutionary biology. What?"

The worst part is he gets away with it, because everybody knows he's a total badass and will go all research-karate on your sloping brow. Read the article here.

Makes you wonder about the possibility of knowing when something that's taken for granted as incontrovertible fact by literally millions of people is shown to be dead fucking wrong. You at least have to question the nature of fact, and whether it's a purely human construction. Can something have a "truth" that exists somewhere outside of subjective experience? Or is it all in your head? And then that calls into question the whole scope of everything called "reality," and after that you pretty much start a blog and don't sleep again ever because. you. can't. stop. THINKING ABOUT IT.

Ahem.

Really, though, the more I think about it, the more it seems that "knowing" is actually a secular word for "believing." Scientists and atheists both get twitchy when you start throwing around words like "belief" and "faith," so they just coined another term for it. I mean, it makes me twitchy, too, because religion scares the hell out of me, and to think that I was somehow participating in religion... ooh, makes my skin positively CRAWL. So the notions that every fact is just an idol, that every idea just a belief, and that every time you think you know something you're actually taking it on faith - well, you might as well just go in for the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorn while you're at it.

Now, to me, there are only two sane responses to this potentiality:
1. Believe in everything
2. Don't believe in anything

Sadly, I don't believe either of those two options are actually possible. Anyway I've tried them both and they haven't worked for me. All I got was a feeling like, "Sorry! The human brain isn't set up like that!" And now I can't even lay the blame on monkeys.

"See? And you guys said it was all our fault. The raping, the stealing, the murder. Well, the joke's on you. It's PEOPLE, man. You won't have Kong-Kong to kick around any more."

So, uh, hey. Does this mean we stop arguing about evolution versus creationism now? No, but seriously, folks. Knowing is a losing game, and we're all playing it. Where, then, does that put reality?

Answers may be submitted, with links to any relevant research data provided, at the bottom of this or any other post.

Signed,
Doctor Apocalypse, PhDUH