I have often heard said that we should abandon all scientific advances and return to our roots. For want of a better term, I shall call those professing these opinions “tree-hugging hippies”. (“Morons” seems too harsh.)
I hope that we can all accept that body fat above a certain percentage is unhealthy, no matter what particular shape we may be in. So nature, wanting what is best for us, has provided us with a mechanism that, should we acquire a certain amount of body fat, creates more fat. This creates a feedback cycle (from the Latin, feedback - “Mother nature”, and cycle - “is a vicious whore”.) which makes it difficult to maintain a healthy figure.
The underlying problem is that our bodies are not suited to a modern, first-world lifestyle. Look around next time you leave the house and count the sheer number of places you can get food. On my daily commute, I pass two grocery stores, five convenience stores, 7 fast-food restauraunts and several slow-moving people. I can eat anytime I want. But my body is terrified that I may never eat again, and therefore stores whatever calories it can just in case.
Having established that nature has programmed into our bodies an elaborate and effective self-destruct switch and having an abundance of other evidence in support of my thesis that I would be glad to produce if I could be arsed, let’s move on to all the things you will lose without scientific progress:
- Bananas
- White rice
- Farming
- Reading
- Clothes
- Hybrid automobiles
- Fishing
- French kissing
- Living past 20
I could easily go one, but that is a long parade of terribles already. Instead, I’ll make a list of things we can keep:
- Ridiculously high infant mortality rate
- A host of diseases cured in the modern age
- Dysentery
- Hunting for every bite of food
- Telling every generation everything you know because you can’t write it down
- Being back at the bottom of the food chain
- Doing everything with your bare hands because you don’t have tools
“But, but, but,” you protest vainly, as I have ceased to listen, “we won’t lose all those things. Even primates use tools.” Sure they do, but you can’t. Because tools are progress, tools are science. It’s a short trip from using sharp rocks to kill your prey to cell phone radiation giving you brain cancer, doncha know?
So let’s all put down the granola, pick our cement trucks and take the fight back to Mother Nature. As my dear friend once said, if someone tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back.
If you don’t have any cement trucks handy, you could accept that our neocortex is, in fact, natural and therefore the reasoning ability that allows to move from poking dirt with a stick to poking Martian dirt with an extremely elaborate and sophisticated stick in therefore natural. Then we could all move on and deal with the issues that are really important, such as teaching the media that there is a difference between Obama and Osama.
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