Pools and Polls and Pulls
Here’s the Gene Pool intro. You can find today’s live chat here. Submit your questions for it here.
Good afternoon. People have been asking me why some invitations to join The Gene Pool read the way they do, for example:
“Come on in. The water’s warm! We are a reader-lubricated $ite.”
“Why is the water warm?” you asked in significant numbers. I realized many of you were denied a key clue, because the Bob Staake cartoon that illustrates The Gene Pool exists only as a GIF in an original post, still archived and available and called “About,” where I first introduced myself. So, I have reproduced the GIF above, for your convenience and instant viewing pleasure, and now you know why the water is warm.
For many years, I had decided that when I got too old and tired and jaded to do a regular column and big stories, I would go into semi-retirement with a nationally syndicated column called The Grumpy Old Fart, in which I would kvetch to all the whippersnappers about all the modern things that bugged me, gol-darnit. So for many years I have been subtly practicing for this in virtually everything I’ve ever written. Many of you know my peeves. I thought this would be a good time to lay this out so YOU can weigh in on them. It also will give me and my tireless Substack guide, Biff Wellington, a way to gauge how efficiently the polling software works when challenged. It’s a relatively new addition to the Substack bag of trickery, and I intend to use it a lot.
So, here is our first, primitive, poll.
Below, a list of a few famous bugaboos of mine. Which do you agree with THE MOST? (You must choose one, even if the choice is hard or if your degree of annoyance for any is minuscule.)
A: Adults who ride bicycles on narrow-ish sidewalks instead of on the streets. // B: People at the table who blow on, say, hot soup in their spoon before eating it. // C: People who engage the cashier in banter when there is a line behind them. // D. People who drive big, boat-like cars on narrow city streets. // E. Drivers too timid to go out into the intersection to turn left, leaving everyone behind them to miss the light.
Okay! Did that seem to work? Now we will try a second, more intricate poll. It is in two parts.
The following are the ten best one liners from last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival’s standup comedy competition. You are going to tell me your favorite from each group. And then we will discuss it in the chat portion of The Gene Pool, and I will patiently explain to most of you why you are wrong.
Group One: A: “I keep randomly shouting out ‘Broccoli’ and ‘Cauliflower’ – I think I might have Florets Syndrome.” // B: “Working at the job center has to be a tense job: knowing that if you get fired, you still have to come in the next day.” // C: “I needed a password eight characters long so I picked ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.’ ” // D: “I’ve decided to sell my Hoover… well, it was just collecting dust.” // E: “If you get pregnant in the Amazon, it’s next-day delivery.”
Group 2: A: “I've just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again.” // B: “By my age, my parents had a house and a family. To be fair to me, so do I, but it’s the same house and the same family. // C: “I spent the whole morning building a time machine, so that’s four hours of my life that I’m definitely getting back.” // D: “I can’t even be bothered to be apathetic these days.” // E: “I used to live hand to mouth. Do you know what changed my life? Cutlery.”
Okay! On to one more thing generated by reader questions.
In introducing the Gene Pool, I mentioned that I had once — many, many years ago — presented a mathematical proof that there is no God, and that my proof was accompanied by a graph illustrating my thesis. Many readers demanded to see this outrageous and potentially offensive argument, so here it is. First, the graph, which was created jointly by me and the incomparable Chatwoman, Liz Kelly, the Post chat’s first and most competent and ambitious administrator / partner. Liz scoured the Web and found it, hidden among detritus. That’s it, below. Neither of us could find my accompanying manifesto — The Post sometimes purges old stuff — but I have re-written it below the graph to the best of my memory.
Here’s how it goes:
If there is one certain measure of the march of Civilization — the civilizing of humankind — it is the slow but steady dismantling of presumptions of magic to explain the world. An inexorable pull downward, away from superstition and toward science and reason.
In the beginning, it was all magic and superstition. The sun was dragged across the sky by a chariot. Diseases were caused by evil goblins dwelling in the viscera. If you sacrificed people or animals to the Gods you would be spared famine and other misfortunes. A solar eclipse occurred when celestial dragons devoured the sun. Sneezing gave Satan a moment to enter the body and do his dirty work on the soul, which dwelt in the liver.
People were scared and ignorant. All they had were simpleminded stories that gave them a degree of comfort. If one thinks one kind of understands the nature of the hostile world, one feels less like a poor soul buffeted by chance alone — one feels marginally better. One feels one can do something to improve one’s life — say, sacrifice a gnu.
As the centuries passed, the magical thinking declined, piece by piece, step by step. Science and logic gained prominence over superstition. Astronomers figured out the solar system, and then the universe. Modern medicine was born and matured. Finally, societally, agonizingly late, the presumed divine right of kings was dismantled, slowly but steadily, from place to place. (In some nation-states, kings were thought to have the God-given power to cure disease by touching the diseased.)
The advance of science and logic was implacable and unstoppable. At no point did it hiccup or backtrack. Not once did the medical community decide, wait, we were wrong! Heart attacks are not, in fact, caused by a buildup of cholesterol in the coronary arteries but, indeed, as we had long suspected, are caused by a wicked, jealous humpbacked gnome in your spleen. Never did astronomers discover that the ancient Chinese almost got it right — turns out an eclipse occurs not when the sun is eaten by a dragon, or when the moon passes in front of the sun, but when the sun is eaten by an enormous celestial hamster!
Presumptions of magic were in an uninterrupted, unimpeded slanted line down and to the right. The pull of reason. The terrifying, thrilling truth of Enlightenment.
There is really only one remaining magical, mystical theory left. But it’s a biggie. And persistent. It’s the notion of an afterlife and an all-powerful, benevolent deity who created life and to whom we can pray and be heard. Frankly, it bears some of the same earmarks of the much earlier presumptions of magic: Offering hope and comfort in an existentially scary world. It is not a bad thing. In many ways, it’s a good thing. It is just not a true thing.
Here’s where Gottfried Leibniz comes in, in a fraudulent but interesting observation of mine that gives gravitas to my argument. (Incidentally and most ironically, “Gottfried Leibniz” means “God Peace Love Nice” in German, and you are learning it here exclusively for your $5 this month.)
Anyway, Leibniz (and Isaac Newton, whose first name means “one who laughs”) gave humankind the Calculus, which gave us the concept of “approaching,” which I do not understand very well, but — and this is verbatim from the math books: “To say the numbers in the sequence (a subscript n) are approaching a number A means that the distance between (a subscript n) and A gets close to 0, as the index n gets larger.”
I have only a primitive idea of what that means, but I’m happy to translate it colloquially for all of us idiots: As something steadily approaches a certain value, and the distance between them is inexorably shrinking — it’s headed there, goddamn it, and nothing will derail it.
So, look at the chart above, punk, and ask yourself this question: Are we headed to point A or point B?
End of sermon, as it were.
And last, overnight a conspiracy theory erupted all over Twitter that Damar Hamlin, the football player who suffered cardiac arrest but recovered, is dead and was replaced, in the stadium at the Bills game, by a … clone. Or robot. Or body double. And that the Deep State is responsible. Exactly why they did this is unclear, but it might have something to do with that day a still-alive John F. Kennedy Jr. was supposed to finally emerge out of hiding, along with Tupac.
I’d welcome your thoughts about this intriguing possibility in the interactive portion of The Gene Pool, linked to below.
Okay, so now it’s time to shift to the excitingly interactive part of this chat — where you ask questions for me to answer, or leave comments about how my answers suck. You will find that next half of the chat … here . As always, ask your questions … here.