[ExI] a little essay on anger and respect

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat
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>
>>>>...  Belief overrides reason almost every time for the vast majority of people.  


>>>...Sure does...   spike


>> ...How do you know this,  Spike and Ben?

>...It's a consequence of evolution.  People have been selected for belief to trump reason because genes for doing so survived better.

>...It's the subject of that paper one person looked at.   Keith


I am a firsthand witness to this.  

The man convinced against his will 
is of the same opinion still.  

Isn't that the old saying?  Are there any exceptions?  A few.  Read on please.

I can offer many examples, but I will just mention a rather striking one.  I was at a museum which was mostly about Native American culture, but they had a small dinosaur skeleton, a hadrosur.  I was gazing at this beast in complete awe, when a person who is a poster-child example of creationism-at-all-costs-to-reason-and-logic offered his explanation of how that skeleton came to be: it was carved from stone, an idol of sorts, which now confuses the true believers.

At the back of your heel there is a spot where the Achilles tendon attaches to the Calcaneus.  Did you ever wonder how it attaches?  I hadn't either, until I was looking at that fossilized dinosaur skeleton, specifically at the structure analogous to our calcaneus.  I was most astonished to discover... that insertion site had been perfectly preserved by whatever preserved the rest of that skeleton.  

I couldn't find a good photo of it on the internet, but if you think about it... how do tendons attach to bones?  Why haven't you pondered that before now?  Ponder that now.  Then recognize there must be some kind of rough patch or something on the surface of the bone to give the tendon something to grab onto, perhaps a bunch of holes parallel to the tendon.  Before I saw that skeleton, I never thought of that, but... there, right in front of my lying eyes... was a perfectly... preserved... Achilles tendon insertion site.  Ah.  That beast waited 80 million years to teach a mammal about the reality of evolution.

Within days, I realized the evidence of evolution was overwhelming.  I realized it was curtains for all fundamentalist religion that is based on creationism (which is really all of religion.)  Evolution was real, we are all just dust in the wind.  Dust in the wind.  I resisted that conclusion with every fiber of my being, but there was the evidence staring me in the face: a perfectly preserved tendon insertion on a fossilized dinosaur.

spike