That's a movie I've been meaning to watch for a while now.

I'm a documentary junkie.

Hopefully you'll see it the way I did and not the way the majority of reviewers did.  Is it too good for you to torrent or would you like me to find a good link?

I should watch it again, just to process it a second time.

A guy at work has a copy of the DVD for me, I just have to get it from him.

Is that the doco about the court case where 2 of the school board tried to get ID on the science curriculum?

You see, this is the thing.

Neitzsche once said, "Existence is absurd." Now, I don't pretend to be on the same level of thought as men like Neitzsche or Sartre but I came to this same conclusion myself when I was ten, and sitting in my room thinking. It started with trying to figure out religion, really, and over the years I've expanded it to a lengthy diatribe on why religion and atheism/science are one and the same.

I've been trying to think of a name for it, and the best I've come up with as of yet is "The construction of the self through the deconstruction of reality."

You start with "I." I know that I exist because I am aware that I exist. Cogito Ergo Sum - I think therefore I am. The fact that I am aware, and can question the validity of my existence proves that I indeed exist. All that is around me, this computer, my home, the people I see every day could, for all I know, be false illusions created by my mind to entertain myself and distract me from the fact that I am alone, but I know beyond any doubt that I DO exist, because I can ask the question, "Do I exist?"

I also know that I had an origin. I have a first thought, a first memory, and at some point I took my very first action, meaning that I originated from somewhere before that. The only information I have to go (without creating wild speculation) on are my senses and memories, so from them I can make assumptions as to where I came from.

Logic concludes that I came from Mother. Mother is the first other. My early memory is of her, and from what I've learned in my life I seem to have come from her, and since I know I have an origin, I cannot exist without having come from somewhere, so logic lends it to be true. and now Mother exists. There are two in the universe.

So where did mother come from? Her mother, and her mother and so on and so on, which could go on forever, so we generalize it. Where did "mother" come from? Humanity. Without the existence of humanity, neither mother nor I can exist, and we've proven both to be true, so this means that humanity also has to exist. So we've now proven the existence of the human race.

Where did humanity come from? The Earth. We share chemicals and minerals in our bodies in common with the elements that make up the Earth, so it stands to reason that the Earth is where our bodies - and basically we - came from. How they came to that specific configuration so that we can walk around and move about is a point of oft dispute, but irrelevant to the discussion at hand, so we'll just ignore it.

So where did the Earth come from? The Solar System. We see the sun, feel its heat, and have viewed the other planets and their rotation, and how their movements/alignment affect the Earth's movment, so basically the Earth cannot exist without the Solar system also existing.

Where did the Solar System come from? The Galaxy. We observe it, we study it, in much the same way as the planets in the solar system, so also the stars in the galaxy must exist in order for our own Sun to be allowed to exist and operate in its pattern.

Where did the Galaxy come from? The Universe. However it operates, it's cyclical, like all of the galaxies we can see, and it must exist to contain the existence and movements of all the galaxies, including ours. So we've proven that the universe exists.

So... where did the Universe come from? This is a point of much debate, but for the purposes of time constraints, you can narrow it down to two major factions: Religion or Science. Science believes that the Universe was brought into existence by a random explosion of energy, and most religions believe that the Universe was created by one god or another. Completely different, right? This is where the path diverges into two. So which one do you choose? Take the blue pill, and follow science, or do you take the red pill, and bow to religion?

For the purposes of simplicity, we'll take the path of science first. So, if the universe came from the big bang, where did that come from? An explosion of energy of that magnitude had to come from somewhere, some potential of some kind... so where? There are a lot of theories as to where, my personal favorite being Ekpyrotic, about two cosmic branes colliding every few eons to create a universe, but even if that one - or any of the others - turn out to be provable, then where did they come from? For them to exist they had to have an origin, even if they're nothing more than energy, that energy had to come from some potential... something had to set it in motion at some point. So, what did? And what set that into motion? And what set that into motion?

Now we backtrack, and take the other fork in the road: religion. So if God created the universe, then what created God? He's a being, a consciousness, at some point he had his first thought, took his first action... so from where did he originate? Was he created by an even higher being? Did he coalesce from some pool of chaos that existed before the universe? If so, then where did that pool of metaphysical protoplasm come from? And where did that come from? Etc, etc.

So what you can see is that these two branches of the road, these two hotly debated beliefs about the origins of the Universe, and of existence itself, only diverge for a short time until they finally come back together in one unifying commonality, one concept of origin:

In the beginning there was nothing.

And from that nothing, came something.

Of which all matter, energy, and all of existence was born from.

Existence is absurd.

The fact that we exist, that ANYTHING exists, is paradox.

TLDR

Basically yeah, when working with complete unknowns, the conclusions you draw require the person interpreting them to have faith in their accuracy (either faith in science or faith in God), because the extreme ends of both origin theories are neither provable and the real reason for our existence could be something that humans haven't even begun to understand or theorize about.

Be excellent to each other.

Be excellent to each other.

Totally.

I'm an agnostic and a hater of organized religion, but I think that the possibility that there might be some intelligent design makes a lot of sense.  Like, how in the shit does a plant know that it is easy prey, so it somehow sends genetic signals to it's offspring to grow spines as a defense?  Or how in the blazing fuck does the Rafflesia arnoldii realize that by creating the smell of rotting flesh, that it can attract flies to pollinate it?  I mean, this shit boggles my mind.

There aren't genetic signals, or a realization in plants.  Instead, you have change over time that looks like magic to people that live on average less than 100 years.

Consider a field of plants.  We'll call them "Danzigs".  These plants are all just chilling, enjoying the wind and the sun.  Over time, they populate a few other nearby fields, and maybe a few riverbanks.

Now, the Danzigs that are down next to the river, they have to survive against regular spring floods.

If there are 100 Danzigs next to the river, and 100 of them die in a flood every year for a thousand years, then you'll see no adaptation for surviving floods because there's no species survival.
If there are 100 Danzigs next to the river, and 0 of them die in a flood every year for a thousand years, then you'll also see no adaptation for surviving floods because there's no selective forces at work.
If there are 100 Danzigs next to the river, and 80 of them die in a flood every year for a thousand years, then you'll eventually end up with a set of Danzigs that are well-adapted to floods because there is a selective force that causes a living species to change over time.

The Danzigs that are not next to the river will not adapt to flooding.  Perhaps they'll adapt to strong winds (100 Danzigs, 40 blown down/yr), or a lot of heat(100 Danzigs, 60 lost to drought/yr), or predators (100 Danzigs, 90 eaten/yr).  But, over time, the River Danzigs and the Field Danzigs might cross-polinate, resulting in features from each being included in the genetic history of the other.

Long story short, thorns came about because some plants weren't eaten and were allowed to continue to live.  some flowers smell like shit because flys were drawn to those shit-smelling flowers more often than the non-shit-smelling flowers during breeding.

Evolution is about selective forces applied to populations.  Evolution isn't a conscious decision, it's just the end result of shit dying.

Exactly. And for every right move that any given organism makes, there are a fuckload of wrong ones that don't stick around because they didn't work. It's not magic, more like guesswork.

And that said, for every organism that makes enough right guesses to stick around, there are a fuckload of organisms that didn't make enough right moves in time to survive at all.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121675178/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

The ability of an animal to shed its tail is a widespread antipredator strategy among lizards. The degree of expression of this defense is expected to be shaped by prevailing environmental conditions including local predation pressure. We test these hypotheses by comparing several aspects of caudal autotomy in 15 Mediterranean lizard taxa existing across a swath of mainland and island localities that differ in the number and identity of predator species present. Autotomic ease varied substantially among the study populations, in a pattern that is best explained by the presence of vipers. Neither insularity nor the presence of other types of predators explain the observed autotomy rates.

So, here we have a study where the presence of vipers (a predator with poison) is providing a selective pressure that normal predators in other locations is not able to provide.  Thus, the lizards that have survived in those areas are the ones which were able to detach their tails.

Why don't they just evolve into birds that eat the snakes?

Why don't they just evolve into birds that eat the snakes?

i hate you.

More information on how evolution works.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122294661/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

If a species is translocated outside its native range, some of its traits (evolved to match conditions in the ancestral range) likely will be maladaptive.

The spread of cane toads (Bufo marinus, native to central and South America) through tropical Australia has created major ecological problems. Although many native predators cannot deal with the toxins of the invasive toads, 'meat ants' (Iridomyrmex reburrus) kill and consume many metamorph toads. Might this be a mismatch between the invader and its newly invaded range, whereby the morphology, locomotor ability and/or behaviour of cane toads renders them vulnerable to a predator that poses little danger to native anurans?

Unlike the frogs, (1) toads selected open microhabitats and were active diurnally, thus increasing encounter rates with meat ants; (2) toads failed to detect and evade approaching ants; (3) toads exhibited poor locomotor ability (short slow hops, reflecting their small size and short limbs); and (4) toads frequently relied on an ineffective defence mechanism (crypsis) when attacked.

In combination, these traits rendered cane toad metamorphs far more susceptible to predation by meat ants than were any of the native frogs tested. That vulnerability presumably reflects lack of coevolution between cane toads and Australian ants.

Australian ants are bastards.

Bull ants hurt when they bite. I mean really hurt.

Wait till the fire ants make it down south.

or the cane toads, tripping over them in the dark can cause major damage.

Just have a friend baby sit you!

We have fire ants here. They fucking suck.

Some people have reactions to fire ant bites, and have to take medication for the rest of their lives.

I fucking hate insects.

I once popped a fire ant bite on my foot and managed to squirt myself in the eye. True story.

I have a scar on my ankle from when I was a kid and like, ten or twenty fire ants bit me in the same spot at once, and it got infected or something and put me into a fever.