farla: (Default)
farla ([personal profile] farla) wrote2006-04-12 07:15 pm

Intelligence

"Note how, as you can see in the picture here, the trachea and esophagus are actually connected, which is why we can choke to death. I'd like to see someone explain how this is intelligent design."

"It's pretty stupid from an evolutionary standpoint," I said. "So wouldn't it make more sense to say it was intelligently designed, and God just hates us?"

"No. No it would not."
wintersheir: (Default)

[personal profile] wintersheir 2006-04-12 11:41 pm (UTC)(link)
Aww. Sucks when teachers won't play along. x)

Today I learned that despite their initial similarites, the cephalopod eye is better-designed than the human eye; they have their photoreceptors in front of all the neural material, while ours are backwards (so the light has to travel through the nerves to hit the pigments) and they don't have a blind spot.

I think this is further evidence that octopi are meant to succeed us as the dominant form of life. They're just waiting for an opportune moment to raise their cities from the abyss and enslave us all to work the land. @_8 Cthulhu ftagn!

[identity profile] farla.livejournal.com 2006-04-13 08:09 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes, but if we act now, we may be able to stop them. Due in no small part to their inherent superiority in design, the cehalopods have yet to develop the additional fine-tuning of structure that allow us to see so well. We must kill them now, in their moment of weakness, before they grow too powerful.

Also those damn X-men and the rest of the mutants.

I'm actually more interested in octopi brain structure and thought processes. Mollusks split off so early in evolution that there was no brain to speak of, meaning that the brains of squids and octopi have evolved completely independently of the rest of life on earth. People talk sometimes about trying to communicate with aliens who will have completely different brains than ours totally ignoring the fact that for octopi ARE about as alien as you can get, and pretty smart as well. If we could just extend their lifespan...

(Anonymous) 2006-04-15 08:17 am (UTC)(link)
I'm surprised your teacher decided to bring that up instead of hyena genitalia.

[identity profile] farla.livejournal.com 2006-04-16 04:26 am (UTC)(link)
Well, we had to learn human anatomy for the exam, despite the fact that, as he kept pointing out, humans have all sorts of bizarre structural anomalies. To make up for it, he made sure to highlight all the things that could go wrong at each point in graphic detail.