The Final Adaptation

This project has gone through so many drafts, it's either really easy or really difficult to trace it's ideological path.
The rough outline?
There was an original focus on the initial contact of South America and acculturation, but it eventually evolved into a focus on oil pollution in Ecuador.
The final draft expressed that new media - in this case the internet and video usage - isn't helping to bring different groups together to share an ideology, but is facilitating the bickering between groups and making it easier to get at each other's throats. It seems that with video, an ethos appeal is most effective, as shown in the ChevronToxico and Chevron arguments. And with this evolution of the emotional movement, the audience eventually shuts down from an overflow of feeling. It's not that people aren't affected, but that people are affected so many times a day, no one can really feel more for one thing than another. Audiences simply adapt to a higher emotional tolerance, making emotional appeals essentially useless.
Thomas De Zengotita and his thoughts in Mediated and Jeremy Rifkin and his thoughts in The Empathic Civilization are the essential motivators for thought and the development of the "Knock Your Head Off Idea."
The final draft of my KYHOI explains:

Drilling in the Oriente region of Ecuador resulted in 18.6 billion gallons of wastewater running into the Amazon, devastating the environment and human population. The indigenous groups moved to sue for damages, and with no evidence for a single culprit, ChevronTexico was blamed because of their inadequate technology.

In order for drilling to take place, indigenous groups, like the Huaorani, were globalized. Texaco and Shell worked with missionary Rachel Saint to make contact. Those missionaries wanted to believe that they could aspire to a multicultural culture that celebrates difference and, at the same time, provides everyone with medicine, literacy, good roads, sewage treatment, universities, representative government, religious liberty, free speech - on and on. But, the reality is that if all that were realized, then there wouldn’t be much left of multiculturalism beyond a really big selection of interestingly spiced foods, intriguingly designed clothes and accessories, distinctively rhythmic music, and lots and lots of holidays. Differences that don’t make that much difference. 

The Huaorani received national funding in order to fight the encroachment of disease and acculturation. 13 nongovernmental organizations and 15 other groups were involved in their fight.

But because they were educated enough to defend themselves and find a path to justice through their lawsuit of Chevron, the indigenous groups have been identified as not being wholly indigenous, and therefore unable to represent their population.

Jeremy Rifkin argues that humans discriminate through blood ties, religious ties, and nationalistic ties, and that new media will bring together the world as one. But if these groups aren’t allowed to keep an identity, how is new media helping them? How do we define identity when it’s getting harder and harder to find anything that might qualify as exotic, because anywhere it has been encountered it has also been subjected to the mechanisms of mediation too numerous to itemize. The effect of this new media is that newscasters are implicitly nagging us to understand some place or event, to respond, to have an opinion, to care. But what the cumulative experience has actually mobilized, in the majority, is that characteristic ironic distance that aging activists mistook for apathy. But it wasn’t apathy as much as it was psychological numbness, a general defense against representational intrusions of all kinds - especially painful ones.

So when we see the images of disease, of Indians wearing Western clothes, of oil stained soil and polluted water, instead of being more empathic, we simply shut down.

-Brysk, Alison. "Turning Weakness into Stength." Latin American Perspectives 23 (1996): 38-57.
-Conklin, Beth A.. "Body Paint, Feathers, and VCRs." American Ethnologist 24 (1997): 711-737.
-Crude. Film. Directed by Joe Berlinger. Los Angeles: First Run Features, 2009. 
-Hecht, Susanna B., and Alexander Cockburn. The fate of the forest: developers, destroyers, and defenders of the Amazon. London: Verso, 1989. 
-Nimni, Ephraim Joseph. Marxism and nationalism: the misleading European heritage.. London: Pluto Press, 1987. 
-Prins, Harald. "A Handful of Ashes: Reflections on Tristes Tropiques." Contemporary Cultures and Societies of Latin America (2001): 94-99
-Rifkin, Jeremy. The empathic civilization: the race to global consciousness in a world in crisis. New York: J.P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2009. -Shapiro, Judith. "From Tupã to the Land without Evil: The Christianization of Tupi-Guarani Cosmology." American Ethnologist 14 (1987): 126-139.  -Trinkets and Beads. VHS. Directed by Christopher Walker. Brooklyn: Icarus Films, 1996. -Zengotita, Thomas. Mediated: how the media shapes your world and the way you live in it. New York: Bloomsbury, 2005. 

KYHOI

The "Script"

Dr. Wesch said he wanted a script with everything that's going to be in the video and we should know it basically down to the second. What that means to me?
Make your video.

So, I made the video, but it's really only a rough draft at this point, right? It's not due yet and I still have time to make some changes if changes should be made.

I'm not going to write a script for this. That would be ridiculous when it's available to watch.

I've spent the past few days starting a finishing a 20-page paper for Prins about genetic mutation, finishing it, then I started in on this. Now I need to start studying for a test I have on Tuesday and spend until Wednesday preparing for the kiddies to do world sim.

I need a nap.

KYHOI

I've basically made my solid analytical defense of my "knock your head off idea" in my past couple of blog posts, mainly Full Research Plan.

I'm asserting that instead of finding new ways to discriminate, we've built on them. South American Indians in Ecuador dealing with the Chevron/Texico oil spill have been and still are dealing with discrimination from blood ties, religious ties, and nationalistic ties.

Other than that, I'm a little lost in how I'm going to display this in two minutes. I'll have to be creative. Which is extremely difficult for me.

I have three projects due on May 5th. One of them is a research paper for Prins (which I actually got an e-mail about last night and there's a rough draft due next Monday...crap) and I'm more stressed out about this.

Things are not looking up for me right now. One way or another, this will all get done.

I know this is extremely short, but I basically hashed all my ideas and defense out in another post. So that's that.

I'll be going to bed when Dr. Wesch wakes up.

Battle Royale: De Zengotita v. Rushkoff

In the first chapter of Thomas De Zengotita's Mediated, he said, "you are completely free to choose because it doesn't matter what you choose. That's why you are so free. Because it doesn't matter. How cool is that?"

Pretty darn cool.

When I read this, my chest got tight. My heart skipped a beat.
Because he's right and I'd had the same idea.

Junior year of high school, I started my search for colleges, just as I'm on the hunt for graduate schools now that the end of my "junior" year as an undergrad is wrapping up.

I spent so much energy looking for the perfect place for me. So much stress. TOO much stress.

The big contenders in the beginning were South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (I was going to be an engineer) and KU (what a mistake that would have been, huh?).
But I didn't REALLY know that I wanted to be an engineer, so if I had committed to an engineering school, I would have been setting a permanent path. I would have been boxed in.
Just like having a child and naming it Jeeves. It has no other career path other than to be a butler (That's a Seinfeld joke).
I felt like I needed to know what I wanted to do before I went to college, but I KNEW that I had to go to college to know what I wanted to do. You can see where the stress comes in.

So I went to an engineering school at KU the summer going into my senior year and realized I did NOT want to be a engineer. Too many answers to one question. I like black and white. I like right and wrong. So I was going to be a physicist instead. There's good money in that, and I'm a woman, so affirmative action was going to give me an extra boost.
I had decided on KU.
And then K-State customer service was out-of-this-world and gave me more money than KU did.

So I went to K-State (with my brother, which was a major reason I didn't want to go to K-State), started the physics program, got myself a hot boyfriend, joined the marching band, the rugby team, and got involved.

I would have been happy no matter where I went.
It didn't matter what I chose.
This realization has stuck with me every since. A constant reminder that the things that look like big things, really aren't.

It doesn't matter what you choose.

I then changed my major to anthropology and got rid of the boyfriend I realized wasn't so hot. I also never see my brother.
Still happy. No - happier. My choices didn't matter. I still have the moments in my day where I can be doing to most mundane things, pause, and think, "I could never be more happy than I am in this moment."

Douglas Rushkoff disagrees with us (Thomas De Zengotita and me). In the first chapter of Program or be Programmed

That the decisions we make DO matter and on such a scale that they not only affect the quality of our lives now, but the lives of future generations.

He says this in regard to programmers (who write code) and the programmed (who use it), stating that the programmed are continuously getting less out of life and are consistently "less" because they are not creating and taking active roles in the new medium of computers.
But I feel that this concept of the programmer and the programee goes beyond code writing. You can be programmed in culture. You are programmed by your peers.

So, who's right?
I might like right and wrong, black and white, but when there is no definitive right and wrong, black and white, I like debate. I like philosophy. I like "why are we here" and "what's the meaning of life".

Or maybe I'm just on the surface. Maybe they only seem like conflicting ideas.
Any thoughts?
This is dire in the life of Katy and one can only have big ideas standing on the shoulders of giants.

Wheezy Waiter hits it spot on

Yeah. So I follow Wheezy Waiter on YouTube.

This is how I'm feeling about the project right now. And I'm being a pretentious jerk.

Full Research Plan

After the trailer, my research has become more focused.

With suggestion from Professor Wesch, instead of South American contact and the injustices that have been done since/because of western influence (I can't tell you how difficult it was to try to put together a "story" that incorporated pre-South American mediation, because, well, they weren't mediated), I'm going to be focusing on the Chevron/Texico oil contamination in Ecuador.

More research into the topic will be needed, with a much-anticipated viewing of CRUDE, and delving into who the major players are. Not only lawyers, judges, indigenous people, and CEOs, but those in the Ecuadorian government who are, essentially, protecting Chevron, extending their reach and destruction by playing a meddling middle-man.

Chevron as well as Chevron-accusing sources, like ChevronToxico, will be investigated in order to gain both view points, and material for the two minute project.

We watched videos today in class in order to spark some kind of "big idea" of our own. I wasn't having one until Dr. Wesch defined the difference between Rebellion and Revolution. Rebellion is a regime change. Revolution is a total system change.

I couldn't help but think of 1776, John Adams, and William Daniels' line, "this is a revolution, dammit, we're going to have to offend SOMEBODY!"

This led me to the realization that Bob Dylan was right, you do have to serve somebody, no matter who you are.
And then to an idea, more of a question, really, Does anything ever change?
I know the idea's been had before. By many people. In many situations. But this one applies to something generally thought about as having a change.

Douglass Rushkoff, in his "Program or be Programmed" stated that new forms of media came about with new forms of thinking, but a generation behind. Writing brought about Islam, but instead of readers there were listeners to those who could read (people gathered in a square listening to a rabbi read scripture). The printing press brought about Protestantism, but instead of creating writers, people were reading. His "big idea" is, What is the digital age bringing about?

My answer? It doesn't matter because nothing really ever changes anyway. Before classifying me as an existential hack, hear me out.

Thousands of years between the development of writing and the evolution of the printing press, yet we're still focused on the existence of God; people fighting people about what they believe, how to act, and what's moral. The digital age only brings about a more efficient manner of getting at each others' throats.  Someone always wants to be in charge.
"I'm the leader, I'm the one that says when we go."
Gotta Serve Somebody.
Again, not a new idea because, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In "Twitter Revolution: Iran vs. USA", a concept DC Comics and Alan Moore, the soldiers at Lexington and Concord, and the prehistoric peoples at Hohokam and Chaco had thought of before Twitter was ever a twinkle in anyone's eye was put forth: governments should be afraid of their people, people shouldn't be afraid of their governments.
Building on these rebellions/revolutions through Twitter, I refined my idea. Things are different. At least on the surface, but nothing changes.

Evident from the news mash-up of Iranian and American ways of dealing with social networking in similar situations with similar reactions, things are not different. There is, however, the illusion of being different. If the United States didn't have that veil of "justice" hanging over its head, there'd be none. We wouldn't know what to define justice as. Unfortunately, when our government gets to define justice, it also defines the actions needing justice, ipso facto, only veiled. 

The modes of keeping subjects and followers of these two institutions may be different, but they are indistinguishable from one another at their core.

Jeremy Rifkin's "The Empathetic Civilization" backs up these ideas. Primates strive to be empathetic. People strive to be empathetic. It's embedded within us, right down to our dendrites and axons. But we only want to be empathetic to people who are like us. Not different from us.
This explains our inability or unwillingness (yes, the differences between those two could change a whole outlook, but it's practically impossible to differentiate between them when there's limited study on the subject) to empathize with those who we continually exploit in the third world. Exploiting their natural resources, their labor, and eventually taking their lives.
The same concept was used in WWI and WWII in nationalistic propaganda. The Germans were displayed as dark, ape-like creatures, and the Americans were the hero coming to save the damsel in distress.
If you make the "enemy" nonhuman, it makes him that much easier to hurt. Because he's not like you.
Rifkin argues that there have been stages to this dehumanization of "alien" peoples. First, people discriminated through blood ties; if you're not in my band or family, you're alien. Then, people discriminated through religious ties; if you don't believe in the same God or the same rules I do, you're alien. Finally, people now discriminate through national ties; if you're not from the same country I am with the same cultural practices, you're alien.
I argue we didn't change the way we discriminated, we only built upon the manner in which we did so. Structural racism exemplifies this human ability to integrate the ideas of blood ties, religious ties, and nationalistic ties seamlessly.


I sat in class silently fuming about this. It's not a big idea. But it's an idea and it's mine and it works into my views about how Chevron can mutilate Ecuador's environment leaving its people barren and diseased.


Stemming from that, this project is hypocritical. I realize the intentions and fully support them. However, undergraduates in a semester - now roughly rounded to about 5 weeks - are not going to put together the kind of thoughts "giants" could put together with a minimum of 10 years to think of these "great ideas". Dr. Wesch realizes this, a man as brilliant as he is doesn't let things like that slip past him, but the pressure is still there. And maybe that's the point. Maybe the first step is to realize you don't know anything. Then you can start the research in order to stand on the shoulders of giants.


GO KSTATE :3

Project Trailer...Take 2

Right. So. This version? Much better than the last. Less time, less heartache and grief, and a better result.
Bring it, Derek.

One of the major helpers in getting this finished was Indigenous People of South America. There are other geographical areas of interest. Might help out some others.

Project Trailer

Whew. I did not expect the number of hours I spent working on this to be so high. Could just be my complete lack of experience and difficulty finding information and sources
(I spent at HOURS browsing music after music, video, photos, data, etc...), but I think it mostly had to do with the medium. Video.

I'm an essay writer. It's what I've been doing since my first encounter with the public school system 15 years ago. Essays don't require creativity, just a logical plan of thought laid out before me. Not usually a problem when I know what I'm writing about, no matter how much information I need to condense.

With video however, it's not just a story to read or hear, it's also a story to see. Putting things together in a way that makes sense in this manner took me days.

I'd been thinking about where I wanted to go with this, how I wanted the story to start, which story I wanted to tell since last week. This week, on Wednesday, I started working. Late nights turned into early mornings with little sleep, Thursday's class making me paranoid about the quality of my product. This isn't something I can just piece together in a logical formation, but I need to make a kind of "quilt" from multiple sources, making them all say what I want them to say.

It's evident to me from my product that I'm still having trouble with the idea of patch working, but the more I get used to it, the better I should get.
...I say that now.

I know in class, when we watch the trailers, I'm going to constantly be comparing my work to the work of everyone else.
The probable stiffest competition? Derek. Kid's a genius with video.

Today, I spent a solid, continuous 10 hours working on this. The weird part? I never got bored or distracted.

Time to turn it in.
Deep breaths.

South America. WHAT.

So far, it looks like the vision for South America is to explore South American contact, its affects on the cultural and religious practices, and South America's eventual integration into the world system, now becoming popular with shamanic tourism. A potential issue is that South America is a pretty big place. We have not yet zeroed in on a specific area. Whether this will become a problem or whether we can effectively cover a few key areas has yet to be seen.

Have to admit, I'm pretty excited.

The article I summarized in my last blog post will be one of the major players in European affects on South American culture and religion. It's SO specific to the subject and displays change perfectly.

However, since the assignment is to summarize 2 sources, I'll include two more.

Joseph Bastien's Mountain of the Condor: Metaphor and Ritual in the Andean Ayllu also displays the integral, unique cultural and religious practices of South America.
The beliefs of Indians in the Andean ayllu is based on this metaphor of the body. They see the geographical layout of the land as a literal body and it permeates their beliefs in marriage practices - they must marry from a different level of the mountain in order to keep trade relations amicable because no one horizontal area is self sufficient.
Their belief in life cycles - the puna (top of the mountain ~ 14,000 m +) is seen as the head, or origin of the person. As life goes on, the person travels down the mountain in rivers. When you die, an underground river takes you back to the top of the mountain to be born again from the head or origin.
Their belief in sickness and witchcraft practices - the head is the origin, so if someone has access to your hair they are able to affect the rest of the body and it must be healed by an ayllu affected by water - the medium of the river of life.
Basically every aspect of life in the Andean ayllu is affected by this body metaphor of their mountainous environment.
The area Bastien writes about - the Kataan - is a relatively isolated area of Bolivia, difficult to get to in the dry season, but treacherous in the wet season. Therefore, not many visitors are received and their cultural practices remain healthy, but still have some outside threats. The Kataan healers and diviners have a kind of "power" modern science can't explain. Yet, missionaries try to shut down their practices and if they are seen be outsiders, insults like "dirty Indian with the medicine bag" are hurled at them.


Laura Fishman's Claude d'Abbeville and the Tupinamba: Problems and Goals of French Missionary Work in Early Seventeenth-Century Brazil is a resource displaying rituals and European contact with South America
Essentially, Claude d'Abbeville is a Capuchin (a reformed order of Franciscans) father and he goes to South America working under Portugal, Spain, and France, arriving in Maranhao in Brazil in 1612. D'Abbeville reported that the Tupi Indians received the French well, and went so far as to classify them as "great prophets of God," so d'Abbeville was convinced that the time had "come for God to be adored and recognized" there. His positive letters back to France served as propaganda in order to recruit more Capuchin missionaries in the area, but, in fact, the more time d'Abbeville spent with the Indians, the less he believed they were receptive to his cause and the more frustrated he became. Although the Tupi believed in spirits running and affecting their lives, the missionaries didn't believe that was really a viable religion. Missionaries spent time trying to educate the people in a specific area, but these people are nomads constantly looking for their utopia, making the radiation of education difficult. D'Abbeville, although disgusted by some of the Tupi practices like cannibalism, found a kind of peace within the Tupi. He writes that Indians offer “a good lesson for a Catholic family, who, even though they have received the light of faith and the sacrament of marriage, cannot live together in peace for a single day without quarrel, discord, and division." D'Abbeville laments that the French Catholics have strayed so far from the true essence of Christianity, while the Tupi, who are a "primitive" people live so well in the image of God. For this reason, he was not a proponent of baptism in the New World where the indigenous peoples would have to renounce their beliefs in order to be Christian. Still, d'Abbeville believed that Christianity was the only correct way to live, and wrote in letters back to France that contact with more civilized Christians than were already present in the New World (slavers and land owners) would aid in the conversion of the Indians. All in all, d'Abbeville renounced the ways of the Catholic Reformation mentality of the time, but still managed to show no respect for the native culture he had immersed himself in.

Early South American Mediation

I just erased everything I had written about this article for the last half an hour.
It sounded - and it looked - like an essay.
Then I realized, "Shit, this is a blog. All this is far too formal. I should curse in my revision."
So it was thought, SO. IT. SHALL. BE.

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to write as if you, the reader, haven't read the article or you have. To be on the safe side, Imma just do a recap of the billion pages of interesting (anthropologists have this knack of saying the same thing a hundred different ways making their papers SO much longer than they need to be) so I can get to the meaty stuff about media influence:
So this dude, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, is a South American Indian in the 1500's (after Spanish conquest). He's the son of a high-ranking, crown-backing Peruvian and an Inca princess. His half brother went off to the Franciscan order at 12, came back to the village to be a model Catholic citizen, and educated Guaman Poma. Guaman Poma goes through his whole life seeing Indian military rebellion fail against the Spaniards time and time again. Since writing is important in Spanish culture, Guaman Poma decides to write to King Philip III of Spain giving a kind of "no taxation without representation"-esque protest. He doesn't want the Spanish to go away, he just wants the Andes to be treated as a sovereign nation instead of a colony. Guaman Poma writes a 1200 page book about the history of Peru and includes 398 illustrations to go along with it, as was popular in European culture at the time. The weird thing about it? He skews the history of his country so it more closely resembles that of European nations and Christianity. He recognizes his sneakiness for what it is and even goes so far as to call himself original. Guaman Poma is one sly dog. Unfortunately, it's believed that his History didn't make it all the way to the King and was intercepted by a Dane and put into a private collection to collect dust until it was found in 1908.

On to the meaty stuff.
Guaman Poma's ability to process Spanish culture and use it to his advantage as a persuasive tool displays an extreme ability for abstract thought. This guy's an effing genius (I warned you about the cursing). In his History, while shaking the Spanish hand, he's pulling out a knife with the other.
Some pictures display raping of Indian women, Indian exploitation, murder, and abuse. Others, to Spaniards, would project a feeling that Andean culture was accepting Spanish culture. However, Guaman Poma was hinting that Spanish culture was actually taking in Andean culture, a concept the Spanish would not have appreciated. The creation of the pictures is the influence of Spanish culture, but to fully understand them, a knowledge of Andean cosmology is needed. Andean culture favors the view of the illustration as opposed to the view of the onlooker, so much of what is drawn should be flipped about the y-axis in order to have a "Western" view of things.
Guaman Poma, in his plea to the King, proposes that the Inca is no one but "His Catholic Majesty." However, what he's really saying is that "His Catholic Majesty" is the new Inca.
See what I mean about that "sly" thing?

Has the Inca culture been fused with Spanish in order to create a new culture comparable to neither, but taking inspiration from both, or has the Andean culture remained mostly the same, resisting outward influences?

Revolution in Egypt: A 4-Minute Introduction

Revolution in Egypt: A 4-Minute Introduction: "

	Revolution in Egypt: A 4-Minute Introduction Leave your questions for Question Tuesday in comments! In which John discusses the Egyptian protests, which may become a burgeoning revolution in Egypt or may just descend into rioting and looting. Included in the discussion are Egypt's dictator and/or president Hosni Mubarak, the Tunisian protests, the fight for representative democracy, the presence of the Egyptian army, and so on. All images can be found at wikimedia commons: commons.wikimedia.org	From: vlogbrothers Views: 151076 0 ratings
	Time: 03:59	More in News & Politics

"

So this is how you vlog?

Basically, putting something on the internet is like George Michael filming himself reenacting his favorite scene from Star Wars. It never goes away.

And it actually relates to class? Weird.

Modern Library has a list of the 100 best novels compiled into two sections: The Board's List and The Reader's List.

From The Board's List, I've read 7 novels:
Ulysses
The Great Gatsby
Brave New World
1984
Lord of the Flies
The Catcher in the Rye
Heart of Darkness 

From The Reader's List, I've read 14 novels:
To Kill a Mockingbird
1984
Anthem
Ulysses
The Great Gatsby
Brave New World
Catcher in the Rye
Lord of the Flies
Beloved
Heart of Darkness
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Ender's Game
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Fahrenheit 451

Twice as many novels from The Reader's List as from The Board's List. In terms of Mediated Cultures and anthropology, this leads me to a few thoughts.

There is a slight gap between the "experts" and the readers. Overlap is obvious, not that I was expecting there to be none, but the rankings of the books are completely different when they do overlap. What are the "experts" basing their opinions on to rank these books? Have experts lost touch with what's important in a book in favor of technicalities? "Hey, John Steinbeck is a boring hack, but he's a master at foreshadowing. That turtle? Brilliant. We'll put Grapes of Wrath at number 10."

Are the readers simply reading for enjoyment ("the story"), or are they reading to deepen their understanding about social norms? Are readers understanding and garnering the proposed "deeper meaning"? I'm a fan of the deeper meaning in books. Distopian societies, conspiracy, and satire are what it's about.

I know since this I'm fairly new to this, that there's no one following me, but I'll ask the question anyway:
Why do YOU read?

Like John Green, I don't care how you read, I just care that you do.

In the beginning the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

I'm not exactly sure how to use this. I'm sure this is common for most bloggers, at least at the beginning.

It's a bit righteous to think other people care enough about your life or the things you're interested in to share them with the world. I'll be the first to admit, if my life was a book, no one would want to read it. At least not yet. So far, it starts out slow.

Gag Halfrunt would be referring to me, in all seriousness, as "just zis girl, ya know?"

I'm not sure I have anything particularly unique to contribute to the internet world. I'm one person out of roughly 7 billion people - on one planet out of eight - in one starsystem out of 100 billion starsystems - in one galaxy out of 100 billion galaxies. I am enormously insignificant.

Essentially, Dr. Manhattan and I share a similar struggle. Humans are insignificant in relation to the rest of space and how much there is, but it's a "miracle" any of us exist in the first place. The mathematics involved in conception are astounding and evolution blows my mind. This ability to adapt almost seamlessly to one's environment is pretty much the single greatest thing since sliced bread.

Others disagree. Many are increasingly of the opinion that we've all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some say even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

But to them, I have one question: What was the greatest thing before sliced bread, anyhow?