I can’t figure out how this happened: there was no link to Hank Fox on my blog!
I’ve noticed Hank on SEB, UTI, Pharyngula, and a few of my other favorite haunts. He’s nobody’s fool, and shines a million-candlepower lamp on the false assumptions and faulty conclusions that are strewn all over the comment sections. He has his own website. And yet… no link!
Would you rather I warn you that he’s not a friend to religion? or would you prefer to find out for yourself? Here’s a little sample of Hank’s writing:
…You know those ancestors of ours from 20,000 years or so ago? No, not the Neanderthals, the other ones. The Cro-Magnons, the “modern” humans.
Don’t ever believe that those people were stupid. They were every bit as brainy as you and I, and considering that they didn’t have the cushion of civilization, they may have been even smarter. Possibly even MUCH smarter.
Maybe they had to be. Whereas our dullards today are cradled in a supportive society, their dullards were eaten by saber-toothed tigers, or stomped to death by wooly mammoths.
Snatch a Cro-Mag kid out of the past and drop him into a modern kindergarten and he’d probably do just fine, school-wise. He might do better than fine — give him a little caring and encouragement and he might be one of those kids who go to college at the age of 12, and end up with a Ph.D. by the time they’re 17.
Think about all that brainpower back there in the past.
And then think about the extremely brief span of modern history from the first stirrings of organized and directed realio-trulio capital-S “Science” to the time when men walked on the moon. It really took only a couple of hundred years.
WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO US?? The Egyptians could have had a space program. The Greeks could have had a real science of the human mind. Renaissance Italians could have had genetic engineering.
Those of us alive today could have been functional immortals living on a paradise planet, with no population problems, no pollution, and no energy shortages. Hell, we could be conversing with genetically-engineered English-speaking elephants by now, watching book-writing chimpanzees being interviewed on Mars by Oprah.
Instead … we’re here. Only here.
We have people — real, actual human beings, somebody’s mommy and daddy, and somebody’s favorite little girl — DYING because we can’t seem to get enough food to everybody.
We have coral reefs dying all over the world. Oceans being fished out. Elephants killed for farmland. Chimpanzees killed for meat. Whales killed for sushi. Bulls and bears killed for entertainment …
Hank’s website isn’t the easiest to navigate but his writing is definitely worth reading! I hope he gets his blog into full production soon, too.