Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Welcome to Fantasy Exhibit

From all my studying, some of which I’ve shared in this journal, I’ve realized that the scientific view of evolution is nowhere near as cut and dried as they like us to believe, even though they’ve been able to convince an unthinking, unquestioning public that it is.  It is to a point where they claim it is now proven beyond any doubt, and no longer just a theory.  The public, which has been mass brain washed, tend to just blindly accept what the scientists feed them, mostly because they don’t think it through, but also because they’ve grown accustomed to a regular diet of “evolution as fact” by the scientific community, and don’t care how or why the scientists came by their information.
            This usually burns me up, but every so often, I just have some fun with this situation, like when I went to the Denver Museum of Natural History with my brother Terry and his family so that my niece Heather could fill out an eight page paper full of questions pertaining to the museum’s Prehistoric Exhibit.  Terry and I were graciously taking the whole thing in stride, and we came up with some sharp commentary:
¯  Terry said this exhibit should be introduced by Ricardo Montalban in a white suit:  “Welcome to Fantasy Exhibit.”
¯  One of the questions on Heather’s paper was something like, “What was the Precambrian explosion called?”  I said, “A miracle!”
¯  The museum displayed the old standby material about natural selection using the dated brown moth/white moth example from England’s industrial revolutionary period, showing how brown moths were predominant when the trees turned brown and how white moths regained prominence when the trees became white again, and I jokingly added, “and that’s how moths changed species in the past to eventually become human beings.”
¯  One of the exhibits displayed paintings on the walls, and Heather had to write on her paper the strange thing about the Hadrosaur.  The artist had painted a tiny Leprechaun on the dinosaur’s back, and Terry said, “Why not?  Everything else is fantasy!”
¯  We didn’t even have to make a joke out of these next two, as they were funny enough on their own!  Towards the beginning of the exhibit was a recipe for evolution, which was something like this:  Take natural elements such as oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon, add water and sunlight, protein, amino acid, and time, and allow to form together into organized patterns [emphasis mine]! Sadly, our group was the only ones laughing at this – everyone else seemed to take it seriously.  Right next to this was a chart showing the stages of evolution with only the following pictures:  Fish, landfish or amphibian, reptile, and human.
¯  Terry and I overheard some lady telling a child how man evolved from fishes.  We thought she should have carried it to its logical conclusion.  “Here, Honey!  These fish fossils belonged to your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother Mertle.  Everyone thought she had the most beautiful scales in the family!
¯  At the end of the exhibit, patrons could look through a large window at the museum employees plying their trade.  I immediately did a voice over narration, a-la Crow T. Robot from Mystery Science Theater 3000, using his deep, instructional voice:  “And here you can see our top team of scientists working diligently to continue to give our museum visitors false information and distorted facts.  Watch them as they busily dust rocks and fossilized pieces of feces!  See them examine sketchy, theoretical evidence to the mysteries of the past and pass it along to you, the unsuspecting public, as undisputed, scientific assurities!"

¯  At the end of the exhibit was a reproduction based on the fossilized remains of “Lucy,” the supposed ape/human hybrid discovered by the respected archeologist Dr. Richard Leaky.  The museum, of course, had a small, furry, ape woman behind glass, giving her two all-knowing glass eyes full of intelligence and knowledge, and giving her the appearance of an apish sage full of the wisdom of the universe and the secrets to our past.  We felt they shouldn’t have stopped there, and that they should have done what they really wanted to do, making her animatronic so she could talk to these people.  She should have a refined, British accent, I think, to magnify the wisdom of her eyes.  I can see it all now:  Impressionable kids and their equally impressionable parents and teachers, strolling through the museum, when suddenly, they hear the voice of this simple ape-woman telling them about the past and evolution, and they watch, hypnotized, fascinated, and absorbing every word as truth, as if this creature was actually an all knowing voice from the past:

      “Hello.  My name is Lucy.  I am ever so pleased to meet your acquaintance.  I lived and died a long time ago, and my remains were only recently discovered by a brilliant archeologist by the name of Richard Leaky.  Well, as I’m sure you can just imagine, Dr. Leaky caused quite a stir among scientific, and even religious circles, when he found me, for you see, I am you!  I am your past!  I am the proof your modern day scientists have been searching for that links you to the lower forms of life you evolved from!  My ancestors (and yours too!) used to swing from the trees!  Like the apes you see in the zoo and on television documentaries, they lived a savage existence, hunting and gathering (and trying to keep from being hunted and gathered themselves!)  But by the time I came along, we had gained something very special!  We had gained intelligence, and imagination, and creativity!  No longer tree dwellers, we started walking upright, and with the invention of fire and tools, we slowly changed from hunters to farmers, tilling soil and working the land to grow crops to eat, and domesticating the animals we hunted for food, raising them as livestock instead, just like your modern farmers tend to cows and chickens and pigs!  We became much more than mere simians.  We gained personhood!  We were homo sapiens, human beings, just like you, and we called ourselves ‘mankind!’”

- From my journal, April 1999 

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