30 Days to an Almost End - Day 07

Your favorite book

     The same is true of biology. It is no accident that we see green almost wherever we look. It is no accident that we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life; no accident that we are surrounded by millions of other species, eating, growing, rotting, swimming, walking, flying, burrowing, stalking, chasing, fleeing, outpacing, outwitting. Without green plants to outnumber us at least ten to one there would be no energy to power us. Without the ever-escalating arms race between predators and prey, parasites and hosts, without Darwin’s ‘war of nature’, without his ‘famine and death’ there would be no nervous systems capable of seeing anything at all, let along of appreciating and understanding it. We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection - the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth.

30 Days to an Almost End series list

Monday’s Excerpts - The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

This Week’s Book: The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

Preface
. . . I want to inspire the reader with a vision of our own existence as, on the face of it, a spine-chilling mystery; and simultaneously to convey the full excitement of the fact that it is a mystery with an elegant solution within our grasp. . . . (Page xiv)

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Chapter 6: Origins and miracles
     If the origin of life were a probable event by ordinary human standards, then a substantial number of planets within radio range should have developed a radio technology long enough ago (bearing in mind that radio waves travel at 186,000 miles per second) for us to have picked up at least one transmission during the decades that we have been equipped to do so. There are probably about 50 stars within radio range if we assume that they have had radio technology for only as long as we have. But 50 years is just a fleeting instant, and it would be a major coincidence if another civilization were so closely in step with us. If we embrace in our calculation those civilizations that had radio technology 1,000 years ago, there will be something like a million stars within radio range (together with however many planets circle round each one of them). If we include those whose radio technology goes back 100,000 years, the whole trillion-star galaxy would be within radio range. Of course, broadcast signals would become pretty attenuated over such huge distances. (Page 165)

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Chapter 10: The one true tree of life
     Indeed, it is important to understand that all mammals – humans, whales, duck-billed platypuses, and the rest – are exactly equally  close to fish, since all mammals are linked to fish via the same common ancestor. The myth that mammals, for instance, form a ladder or ‘scale’, with ‘lower’ ones being closer to fish than ‘higher’ ones, is a piece of snobbery that owes nothing to evolution. It is an ancient, pre-evolutionary notion, sometimes called the ‘great chain of being’, which should have been destroyed by evolution but which was, mysteriously, absorbed into the way many people thought about evolution. (Page 263)

Books finished this past week...
★★★★☆ Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
★★★★☆ Mortal Coils by Aldous Huxley

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)

Climbing Mount Improbable

     A black mass of emotions, that’s what I am these days. I think it’s all the encompassing, grasping and clasping me shut and tight away from the world. Another brick in the wall, unjustly so. The further I push the higher I build—climbing, well, maybe…
     I suppose what I’ve arrived at here is my own Mount Improbable, and I suppose what I have to do is climb.

Happy atheist Mother’s Day

     If there’s one thing I’m extremely proud of, it’s that my parents are both fairly atheistic.
     Growing up in this raped-by-religion world without someone shoving a theology down my throat—especially by my parents—has flung open wide countless doors for my mind to speculate and expand with scientific theories. As long as I can remember, I was always taught to believe science over a story, no matter how many people were whispering it into my ear.

     I laugh when people observe I am close-minded, or if they suggest I only have one view of things. Perhaps I do at times, although I do hope I don’t often come across as only having a single perspective. That alone goes against what my parents raised me to “believe in.” However, I will go on to say that I would rather seem narrow-minded into a scientific view of life than a one constructed of fairy tales.

     Happy Mother’s Day, mom. :)

P.S. My father is in my room as I type this, and asked me if I had seen the religious folks with megaphones last night during our drive through downtown. I answered with a no, and he replied, “Richard Dawkins hasn’t said it yet,”—I am watching “The Root of All Evil?”—“but these people have a mental sickness.”

Mysteries of My Creation

    Today is your (un)lucky day—have all you’ve ever wanted if you can only reach it on your own. My money’s on: you can’t, and that’s why you pushed away what you claimed was such a great thing for you, you selfish hypothetical gene. If you genuinely believe deep down that all you deserve is the shit that you spread, that is all you will ever even be. The rewards won’t exist, you’re less than that to me. This is the time of your last feeding. I hope you’re as happy as you deserve to be.

My Current Work Load

     People have this misconception of me doing nothing with my time. If I shed light on them about my personal life, they’re either surprised and dumbfounded into being speechless, or critical in a variety of ways.
     To clarify for as broad a single audience I can reach: I study all day, every day. A few months ago when I realized I had the time and capabilities to study to this degree, it became my life. I don’t need a job—although I am trying to get one now, for pretty obvious reasons that exist in California until the latter part of this year—and my focus has become paramount to before after my diagnosis of ADD alongside a prescription of Vyvanse (Adderall). My constant attitude is that all knowledge unknown won’t be for long, and nothing is impossible of being held in my grasp.

     Tonight I organized my book “work load” after tidying up my room a bit, and took a picture to show my boyfriend. Before sending it I thought, instead of just sending him the photo with a detailing of what all is pictured, why not share with COSA18 and elaborate a little further than the limits that would likely have bored Jonathan anyway? So for a little proof that I’m not useless or lazy, here we go.

     On the left are the books I have already read, but have yet to completed the excerpts for. From top to bottom they are as follows:

• The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
• Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
• Island by Aldous Huxley
• The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis
• Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
• Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins

    In the middle and on the right are books I have yet to read, but hope to within the next month and a half. The middle stack is science and non-fiction:

• A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot by George Williamson
• The End of Faith by Sam Harris
• The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin
• Evolution for Everyone by David Sloan Wilson
• The Book of Animal Ignorance by John Mitchinson and John Lloyd
• A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking
• Brave New Worlds by Bryan Appleyard
• Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

     To the right is strictly fiction:

• The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings by Marquis de Sade
• Jacob’s Hands: A Fable by Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood
• After Many A Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley
• A Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson

Monday's Excerpts - River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins

     River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life is a great read for anyone with an interest in Dawkins’ methods of the public understanding of science. Whether new or old to the man’s explanations, you’ll be refreshed with Dawkins’ style of presentation in a compact space of roughly one hundred and fifty pages, or introduced to his elaborate, yet simplistic explanations of the wondrous world and universe we inhabit. River Out of Eden is bound to leave you thirsty for more of his elegant writing style, and science in general.
     I haven’t read a book faster than I read River Out of Eden. From cover to cover it took me around three hours of a morning. Admittedly, I am a huge fan of Dawkins and had a relative understanding of nearly every topic he discussed in River Out of Eden, which might have quickened my pace. However, by reading his ideas in a space designed to be minimal, I got a deeper understanding of certain topics that already grasped my interest—such as dendrology—despite his discussion of it in other books. (For the curious: I believe Dawkins elaborated at length on dendrology and dendrochronology in The Greatest Show on Earth, which also happens to be my favorite book of all time.)
     If you haven’t read this yet, I highly recommend it for any audience. This is by far his easiest book to understand that I’ve read, which is quite a few. (I might even be nearing having read the majority of his works, but I shan’t count now.)

This Week's Book: River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins

Chapter 2: All Africa and Her Progenies
     We get our mitochondria from our mothers only. Sperms are too small to contain more than a few mitochondria; they have just enough to provide the energy to power their tails as they swim toward the egg, and these mitochondria are cast away with the tail when the sperm head is absorbed in the egg at fertilization. The egg is massive by comparison, and its huge, fluid-filled interior contains a rich culture of mitochondria. This culture seeds the child’s body. So whether you are female or male, your mitochondria are all descended from an initial inoculum of your maternal grandmother’s mitochondria. None from your father, none from either grandfather, none from your paternal grandmother. The mitochondria constitute an independent record of the past, uncontaminated by the main nuclear DNA, which is equally likely to come from each of four grandparents, each of eight great-grandparents, and so on back. (Page 47)

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Chapter 3: Do Good by Stealth
     In the light of Nilsson and Pelger’s results, it is no wonder “the” eye has evolved at least forty times independently around the animal kingdom. There has been enough time for it to evolve from scratch fifteen hundred times in succession without any one lineage. Assuming typical generation lengths for small animals, the time needed for the evolution of the eye, far from stretching credulity with its vastness, turns out to be too short for geologists to measure! It is a geological blink. (Pages 82-83)

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Chapter 4: God’s Utility Function
     Why are forest trees so tall? Simply to overtop rival trees. A “sensible” utility function would see to it that they were all short. They would get exactly the same amount of sunlight, with far less expenditure on thick trunks and massive supporting buttresses. But if they were all short, natural selection couldn’t help favoring a variant individual that grew a little taller. The ante having been upped, others would have to follow suit. Nothing can stop the whole game escalating until all trees are ludicrously and wastefully tall. It is ludicrous and wasteful only from the point of view of a rational economic planner thinking in terms of maximizing efficiency. But it all makes sense once you understand the true utility function—genes are maximizing their own survival. . . . (Page 121)

Books finished this past week...
★☆☆☆☆ The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)

Monday's Excerpts - The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition by Richard Dawkins

     I did another marathon reading of Dawkins this weekend, completing The Selfish Gene at 3 AM this morning. I could have finished sooner, but I procrastinated heavily on Sunday. Shockingly—at least to me—I seriously considered throwing away my goal. Somehow, I pushed through the actual physical pain of my brain being packed with so much information in such a short time span. I am very proud of myself, and I am so glad I didn’t try to justify not following through with what I originally intended.
     I recommend this book to everyone. It’s not as easily understood as it claims, but it’s not as big of a trick as Einstein’s Relativity. The Selfish Gene isn’t capable of anything less than benefiting the human mind, no matter the amount of The Selfish Gene's detailed information it absorbs.
     Science made easy by metaphors; Dawkins finest quality as a writer. It’s easy to see after reading The Selfish Gene why it’s widely considered his “crown jewel,” but my favorite remains The Greatest Show on Earth. If I could have a love affair with a published work, The Greatest Show on Earth would be my dirty little secret.

This Week's Book: The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition by Richard Dawkins

Chapter 3: “Immortal coils”
     It is its potential immortality that makes a gene a good candidate as a basic unit of natural selection. But now the time has come to stress the word ‘potential’. A gene can live for a million years, but many new genes do not even make it past their first generation. The few new ones that succeed do so partly because they are lucky, but mainly because they have what it takes, and that means they are good at making survival machines. . . . Conversely, what are the properties that instantly mark a gene out as a ‘bad’, short-lived one? There might be several such universal properties, but there is one that is particularly relevant to this book: at the gene level, altruism must be bad and selfishness good. This follows inexorably from our definitions of altruism and selfishness. Genes are competing directly with their alleles for survival, since their alleles in the gene pool are rivals for their slot on the chromosomes of future generations. Any gene that behaves in such a way as to increase its own survival chances in the gene pool at the expense of its alleles will, by definition, tautologously, tend to survive. The gene is the basic unit of selfishness. (Page 36)

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Chapter 3: “Immortal coils”
     As an aside, one of the good features of this theory is that it leads us to some rather interesting speculations. For instance it follows from it that if we wanted to increase the human life span, there are two general ways in which we could do it. Firstly, we could ban reproduction before a certain age, say forty. After some centuries of this the minimum age limit would be raised to fifty, and so on. It is conceivable that human longevity could be pushed up to several centuries by this means. I cannot imagine that anyone would seriously want to institute such a policy.
     Secondly we could try to ‘fool’ genes into thinking that the body they are sitting in is younger than it really is. In practice this would mean identify changes in the internal chemical environment of a body that take place during ageing. Any of these could be the ‘cues’ that ‘turn on’ late-acting lethal genes. . . . (Page 41)

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Chapter 10: “You scratch my back, I’ll ride on yours”
     A long memory and a capacity for individual recognition are well developed in man. We might therefore expect reciprocal altruism to have played an important part in human evolution. Trivers goes so far as to suggest that many of our psychological characteristics—envy, guilt, gratitude, sympathy etc.—have been shaped by natural selection for improved ability to cheat, to detect cheats, and to avoid being thought to be a cheat. Of particular interest are ‘subtle cheats’ who appear to be reciprocating, but who consistently pay back slightly less than they receive. It is even possible that man’s swollen brain, and his predisposition to reason mathematically, evolved as a mechanism of ever more devious cheating, and ever more penetrating detection of cheating in others. Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism. (Pages 187-188)

Books read this past week...
★★★★★ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
★★★★★ The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition by Richard Dawkins

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)

Dear President Obama, please recognize Darwin Day

     On and around February 12th people all around the globe gather in conferences, meetings, at zoos, museums, homes, schools, parks, etc., to celebrate the life and work of Charles Darwin, born on the 12th of February in 1809.

     Over a century ago while aboard the Beagle, Darwin began to ponder the inhabitants of Earth. The plants and animals he witnessed could not possibly have been placed here by a supernatural deity, for how would there be more after the initial six days? Why would God place different tortoises or finches on different islands of the same climate, within a close proximity? These are just two of the thoughts that led Darwin to one of science's greatest discoveries.

     On the 24th of November in 1859, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was bravely published. Outside of a few copies given away for promotion, every last one of the 1,250 copies published sold at wholesale the very same day.

     Although The Origin of Species has been worked and reworked, edited and reedited into near oblivion, straying far from Darwin's original points, there is no denying that his theories have changed the way we look at science forever. Darwin realized that all living things on our world came about by evolution from a sole ancestor, branching off in a nearly unfathomable amount of branches. And then, we held the concept natural selection.

     To this day, people still deny the theory of evolution. We can only imagine all the horrors Darwin boldly faced after so many years of fearing the turn out his concept would have. His intentions were not to declaim the idea of God, but to persuade the idea of evolution. Without his realizations, studies, clarity, and strength, I'm not sure science would be in the same place it is now, with the same power it rightfully carries. Perhaps it would be different, very different. But maybe it wouldn't be different at all, so why not honor all evolutionary biologists on Darwin Day? Personally, Darwin Day is about unity of all species, especially the one that seems to need it most - Homo sapiens.

     So please, help those already aware and sign this petition urging the United States' wonderful President Barack Obama to publicly recognize Darwin Day. It is so important that the leaders of all nations recognize the importance of science and make our intolerance of religion in science classrooms known. It is highly improbable there is room for God in the universe, but there has been room for science.

     If you are interested in seeking events around your area, you can check out lists here at the International Darwin Day Foundation  and here at RichardDawkins.net.

     (If you sign the petition you may comment this blog or email me letting me know and I will update this post with a link to your blog or personal website of choice. Thank you.)

Monday's Excerpts - The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot with editor Frank Kermode

     I'm going to do something a little different today with Monday's Excerpts. I'm going to post excerpts from various T.S. Eliot poems, all taken from the book The Waste Land and Other Poems. I just read the book this past week, and really enjoyed it. Now I regret putting it off for so long a few months ago! I'm going to highlight my favorite lines of the excerpts.

This Week's Book: The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot with editor Frank Kermode

Prufrock and Other Observations. 1917.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But thought I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slight bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have sent he eternal Footman hold my coat, and I snicker,
And in short, I was afraid. (Page 6, lines 79-86)

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Prufrock and Other Observations. 1917.
Portrait of a Lady. Part II.
“You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no more remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see.” (Pages 10-11, lines 47-49)

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The Waste Land. 1922.
Part 'V. What the Thunder Said'.
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyaya: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands (Pages 68-69, lines 400-422)

Books read this past week...
★★★★★ The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins
★★★★☆ The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot with editor Frank Kermode
★★★★☆ Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harriss

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)

Thursday's Thoughts - Theme: Evolution

This Week's Theme: Evolution

“Promise yourself to live your life as a revolution and not just a process of evolution.” - Anthony J. D'Angelo

“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.” - Richard Dawkins

“I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.” - Kurt Vonnegut

'Here is My Real Head' series Pt. 3

Organ Grinder by Marilyn Manson
I am the face of piss and shit and sugar

I do a crooked little dance with my funny little monkey
What I want, what I want is just your children
I hate what I have become to escape what I hated being
Calliopenis envy from your daddy
You're not gonna hear what he don't want to hear
What I say disgusts him
He wants to be me and that scares him
"let's do a funny little dance with my funny little monkey"
The black keys
Here is my real head, here is my real head
I wear this fucking mask because you cannot handle me
Here is my real head
They try to blink me not to think me
Don't want to bring me out
I am the rotten teeth, my fists are lined with suckers
My prison skin's an eyesore-mirror-sketch-pad
I am your son, your dad, your fag, I am your fad
Here is my real head, here is my real head
I wear this fucking mask because you cannot handle me
Here is my real head

Here is My Real Head series 
Pt. 1 - Addiction & Self Mutilation
Pt. 2 - Childhood Grooming & Sex and Relationships
Pt. 3 - Worth of My Peers & Trust
Pt. 4 - Being Honest with My Parents
Pt. 5 - The Sound and Feel of Carpet

5. Worth of My Peers

     There are quite a few people in my life that I don’t think the world would mourn over if they were to die tomorrow. Also, there is a smaller number of people that I believe are better off dead. They serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever to society and are positively a waste of existence on this planet. Their consumerism is wasteful, especially if it’s constant without equal or nearly rivaling productivity. This scale loosely decides who I would annihilate or cripple tomorrow if I were playing the fictional character God’s hands.

6. Trust
     I grow irritated when people claim they have trust issues. Typically these are people that are unable to handle the aspect of a healthy relationship that involves trusting their partner enough to not constantly badger them about cheating or their whereabouts. These are weak people, and mainly self-assigned as such. They are therefore casting themselves even deeper into the well of weakness. These folks don’t usually have historical issues with trust, they’re just bitches, immature and irrational bitches.

     If you have a history of trusting relationships gone awry, you don’t have ‘trust issues’. You have a genuine problem that needs addressing, care, and attention by yourself and what may seem unfortunate, by others you have to learn to trust. I am one of these people. To have been groomed so well—and I am so well groomed I belong collared and leashed on a showroom floor—that I had to have trusted the people that brushed me to their liking. With the intense level I climaxed and plateaued at, I trusted them an awful lot.

     I don’t trust anyone entirely, but not in the typical way. I don’t have the problem of trusting people with secrets because I don’t have anything that is a secret, or won’t be a secret for long.
I wouldn’t trust anyone, not even my parents, brother, family, or closest friends with my life. It’s a wonderfully cute concept to think of your loved ones saving your life, especially in the place of theirs, but I wouldn’t trust anyone to save me from death’s grip, especially if they were in harm’s way themselves or were being forced to choose between their life or mine.
I don’t whole-heartedly believe that anyone would give their life for me when it came to the carnal reality of being faced with their own death. Like Winston in the unfortunate year of 1984, I would expect them to shout at the top of their desperate lungs, “Do it to Alexis! Do it to Julia! Not me! Alexis! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!” I wouldn’t blame them, I accept the reality of a human being not wanting to die and offering up everything imaginable to not have to prematurely.
Truthfully, I’d be flattered if someone that loved me, loved me deeply enough to think of me for last person they’d offer instead of themselves as their ultimate sacrifice. By being last, I would be the most loved and I’d be honored by their ultimate and complete betrayal.
     In that light, I wouldn’t give my life for anyone I presently know. If I had to pick someone I’d die for, I couldn’t name someone I am personally acquainted with. If I could choose to die for someone I don’t know on a personal level, it’d probably be for Marilyn Manson or Richard Dawkins because of all the things they’re still doing for the world to make it a better place for children to grow up in, and children are the most important class to me. Were they to have stopped yesterday with no intentions of restarting their revolutions, they’d be scratched off my list of possibilities without little resentment, if any at all.
     If need be, I would endure physical and mental pain and torture in place of someone’s life, heck, I might even offer a limb for someone I deeply cared for. But if it came to my untimely death as a choice against theirs, they’re the ones dying prematurely.
     I have two main reasons, the stronger of the two is that I am young and have a lot I’m going to do in my life with more time to do it than the majority of the people I care for. I don’t consciously think of the people I love as being lesser than me, but an appropriate example of how my perception of trust differs is that I do not trust anyone other than myself to create productive and positive change in the world. No one could ever convince me they would without a doubt, though if someone were able to, I would reconsider giving my life for theirs because I don’t consider myself as an entirely above the collection of people I love because I have no proof that I am or am not. I might not be the most beneficial or productive to society out of the group, but I am the only person I can trust one hundred percent.
     I have high self-worth despite my flawed learned personality traits. In any other case my proclamation of self-worth wouldn’t be frowned upon, so don’t you care hypocritically frown here.

Calculate Your God Delusion Index

     Picked up The God Delusion again today, so I can finally finish reading it. Upon its completion, I'll be moving on to The Origin of Species or Climbing Mount Improbable.

     I'd make a poll for my readers to vote on which route I should head down first, but I'm not sure I even have enough readers to make it worthwhile. I'm also not sure if I have enough readers that have read both books, or have an understanding of both to have a reasoning behind the choice they'd make. Ah, well! If you have an opinion, feel free to post it here.

     Moving on, I found the following video on Samuel's "Buddhist Okie". I don't normally watch six minute videos, especially requiring interaction, but this flew by considering how much I laughed at the ridiculousness of it (you'll see the humor if you're atheist as well). However, it's not exactly meant to be a joke, which is the baffling part.

     Anyway, you'll need a pen and paper unless you're good at keeping a numeral score in your head. I'm personally not the greatest at it, but turns out I didn't need to— I got a score of zero. Make me proud and get the same, or at least have it churn your brain enough that were you to take it again you'd get a lower score. I'd love to know what you got, so post it in a comment once you're done. Even if you get something insanely high, don't worry.

Recognizing Darwinism

            I get it now, how important it is to know of the world before you attempt to know of anything else. Within that, fully understanding process of evolution through natural selection (the obvious truth), and realizing there is no sky-god reclining on a cloud mapping out my life. I believe in evolution, I disbelieve in gods, but I don’t really know in-depth what all that entirely means.

            So now I’ve come to the conclusion that to grasp anything of the world to my fullest potential, I need to grasp why I’m here, and unfortunately but especially why I’m not. Instead of reading on with my list of famous fiction and sociology non-fiction, I’m going to head in the direction of Darwinism and read The Origin of Species after I finish 1984.

            For a long time I thought it was silly to prioritize reading Dawkins and the like before anything else. I regard religion—or lack of religion, depending on how you play with words—as a hobby when practiced beyond principle belief or disbelief. By reading The God Delusion with priority over Huxley or Orwell, I considered that hypocritical because it appeared to me as a hobby— entertainment if you will.

I was clearly wrong. If I believe in things I know little of, or don’t have a solid list of the truths I’ve recognized,  it will affect everything else I do in one way or another, sometimes big, sometimes small. It would be impossible and ridiculous for me to hold a sociological argument about why people are a certain way when I don’t even know why the world is a certain way.

            I’m not sure how I conceived the idea that not knowing of the world before knowing of its inhabitants wasn’t the most important thing I could be focusing my studies on.

In the very least, we are fortunate I didn’t need much convincing or evidence to recognize reality. I wonder if that says something of my character?

Happy holidays everyone~!

     First of all, I want to say happy holidays, regardless of what you're celebrating. While I'm the type that gets The God Delusion (no one saw the irony in that except for me, until I pointed it out) for Christmas, I truly believe the world shouldn't need a holiday to love one another and wish good things upon fellow man. So as if it were any other day of the year, I hope today has treated you as wonderfully as you deserve.

     My family does celebrate Christmas, although non-religiously. Our holiday consists of gathering under one roof and spending time with each other after exchanging gifts, which is the smallest part of what matters to me today. From the honesty within my heart, the best part about today, and any other holiday or special occasion, is having both of my parents under one roof for an extended period of time. That means more to me than anything because it's a rarity, I live with my father and my mother is biologically my aunt, so I don't see both everyday.

      I am still sick today, but I woke up around 9:30 AM and ate a cinnabun with pecans on it. My mom arrived a little while later, and then the gift unwrapping began.

     My brother got a lot of nice gifts, his main gift from our parents being a Wii. He was really excited, they had built him up to believe that he'd be spending his Christmas money this weekend on one, and now he can just spend it on games. I'm really happy for him.

     I got a lot of nice things, too much in my opinion since I didn't do anything besides exist this year to deserve them. I actually didn't expect any of the wonderful gifts I received, except maybe the book I already mentioned and Star Trek on Blu-Ray. I was pleasantly surprised. If you're interested, here's a list I compiled earlier today for a post on Babalon—

- Dell Laptop

- Hello Kitty laptop bag from Sanrio Luxe

- Pandigital Panitouch 8" Photo Frame

- Hello Kitty boots "w/ fur" (so amazing!)

- Hello Kitty pajamas

- Hello Kitty clipboard

- Hello Kitty nail file

- Giant Hello Kitty coloring book/sketch sheets (literally, this thing is bigger than an opened calendar)- Hello Kitty gumball machine

(yes, I do enjoy Hello Kitty, lol)

- White and rainbow plush throw blanket

- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

- Nightlight by The Harvard Lampoon

- The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

- Collage Collector film strip photo frame

- 3-D frame that's decorated and says "believe", "serenity", "patience", "wisdom", & "truth"

- Star Trek on Blu-Ray

- Tons of candy yum yum yum

- $100 cash, $50 Target gift card, & $15 Starbucks gift card

EDIT: Not sure how I could have forgotten:

- Year pass to all Universal theme parks

- Year pass to Sea World, Aquatica, and Busch Gardens

     Now it's almost time for dinner, ham, potatoes, etc. Once again, happy holidays everyone, and remember what's important—family. Maybe not your biological family, but whoever you deem your family. For me, my friends are my family. Love you all~.

     Also, check out my mom's new blog, "Life After Success, Triumph, & Love"!

P.S. Thank you mom & dad.