Brain taco.

You contemplate the majesty of Earth from orbit-- the sheer beauty of it and the situation, you marvel at the technological achievement of mankind to take you there.

But then you have to take a shit in a vacuum pump.

It seems like the crude fact that we are animals always finds a way to sneak on us right when we are feeling more sublime. We are often reminded that for all our cognitive milestones we are really just monkeys at best, wet bags of organs at worst.

Yet we pursue the notion that we are somehow different to all the other monkeys, that we have something special or divine that makes us unique: and this is not entirely unfounded. The one thing that makes us anomalous is the fact that we are aware of it. Our world is not only populated by physical, tangible, visible things. Our world includes more subtle things that are also real, abstract concepts like numbers. You can have three stones and the stones are also real for your dog, but the three eludes him. But the three is right there too.

I think this is quite wonderful, really. That we, through evolution alone, were granted such a big brain. Because that's pretty much it: we are monkeys with fucking huge brains.

Taxonomy helps putting man in biological context. It (beautiful, beautiful taxonomy) places us as primates, which is a type of mammal, which is a type of vertebrate, which is a type of animal, which is a type of eukaryote. So we know more clearly what we are, and how lucky we are to be able to read all this, let alone build spaceships and theoretical frameworks to figure out the Universe's mysteries.

That is pretty awesome.

Epilogue:

So even though I am a monkey that understands calculus, I am still driven by curiosity, hunger and lust. I am really in no position to laugh at the poor beaver that follows a pheromone trail into a hunter's trap: I have also made some very stupid, horny choices. None of them has cost me my skin yet, thankfully. So the morale is this: it is very fortunate that we are such clever apes, let us use our brains more often.

Epilogue 2:

I am fully aware that monkey and ape are not really the exact same thing, and I use both words liberally. But fuck it, I really like the word monkey. Monkey monkey monkey.

Epilogue 3:

It grinds my gears when someone makes a point that we should say 'the evolution theory' instead of just 'evolution'. Well we don't say 'heliocentric theory' anymore, do we?. We are about as sure of evolution as we are of the Earth not being at the centre of the Solar System. Get the fuck over it.

Epilogue 4:

It also grinds my gears (unrelated, really, but pisses me off nontheless) when the fact that oil is running out is made up to be a political statement. It's not, it is a geological fact. Geological facts don't give a shit about our energy policies.

Epilogue 5:

Fuck this shit, Im going home.