Pulp Anthropology

Fri 07 August 2009

I was reading Reddit for maybe the second time in my life, when I decided to check out the best-of comments. I came across this thread, and thought someone should make this as a video. I can't because I'm uncreative and broke, but I wrote the script in case any of you 0 readers would want to.

[M. Wallace]

Describe Australopithecus' role in human evolution.

[Brett]

...What?

WALLACE upends a table, scaring BRETT.

[M. Wallace]

What does Australopithecus have to do with human evolution?

[Brett]

Wha-What?

[M. Wallace]

Australopithecus ain't no ancestral form I ever heard of. Do they have fossil records verifying our descent from Australopithecus?

[Brett]

What?

[M. Wallace]

Anthropology motherfucker! Do you have a degree in it?

[Brett]

Yes!

[M. Wallace]

Then you understand my inquiry?

[Brett]

Ye-Yes!

[M. Wallace]

Describe Australopithecus' role in human evolution!

[Brett]

...What? I...

[M. Wallace]

SAY WHAT AGAIN! SAY WHAT AGAIN - I DARE YOU! I DOUBLE DARE YOU MOTHERFUCKER, SAY WHAT ONE MORE GOD DAMN TIME!

[Brett]

Australopithecus....it's...it's....it's a hhhh...hominid..

[M. Wallace]

GO ON!

[Brett]

It's... it's... it's extinct...

[M. Wallace]

Does it not look like evidence for macroevolution?

[Brett]

What?

WALLACE shoots BRETT, BRETT exclaims in agony

[M. Wallace]

DOES IT NOT! LOOK LIKE EVIDENCE! FOR MACROEVOLUTION!?

[Brett]

Y-Yes!

[M. Wallace]

Then why the fuck d'you ask me for more evidence?

[Brett]

I...I...didn't...

[M. Wallace]

Yes you did - yes you did Brett. You asked for transitional forms. And evolution doesn't like jumping species in one generation.

Do you read Dawkins? A little passage I got memorized, sort of fits this occasion.... God Delusion: Chapter 8, BEETHOVEN FALLACY:

"Imagine that an intermediate species, say Australopithecus afarensis, had chanced to survive and was discovered in a remote part of Africa. Would these creatures 'count as human' or not? ...Even if a clear answer might be attempted for Australopithecus, the gradual continuity that is an inescapable feature of biological evolution tells us that there must be some intermediate who would lie sufficiently close to the 'borderline' to blur the moral principle and destroy its absoluteness. A better way to say this is that there are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates HAPPEN TO BE EXTINCT!!"

I memorized that because I thought it was some cold ass shit to say before I popped a cap in some one's ass, but now I understand that you're Australopithecus, I am the gradual continuity that is an inescapable feature of biological evolution, and Mr. 9mm here is Natural Selection.