Derb at Taki's Magazine On Intelligent Design: Do Peas Have Souls?
02/20/2014
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The War On Humans

My weekly column at Taki’s Magazine is up, title:  Do Peas Have Souls?

The backstory here is that a few weeks ago I published some ruminations on the Intelligent Design movement. 

As a scientifically literate person I of course can’t take Intelligent Design seriously, but I don’t mind it the way some people do. 

It’s one of those things that, as an immigrant to the U.S.A.,  I find quaint and interestingly American, like rodeos or peanut butter eaten with jam.  (Although, as I pointed out, to the degree that I.D. has any global significance, it is as a dogma of fundamentalist Islam.) 

If the I.D. people would join the cause of patriotic immigration reform, I’d be glad to buy them lunch…  Well, perhaps not all of them…

In that spirit my ruminations were polite, though analytical.  I even conceded (last segment) that they might have a fragment of a point.

To no avail, apparently.  I am told (can’t be bothered to check) that I.D.-ers are sticking pins in wax images of me all over the blogosphere.

One reader sent me a link to a video the I.D. people have just put out, The War on Humans, in which I am featured as a captain in Satan’s legions.  That’s what my Taki’s Magazine column is about.  Extract:

The video’s main point is to affirm human exceptionalism by contrasting it with the views of animal-rights fanatics, who have apparently now advanced into the vegetable kingdom:

12m30s.  A professor named Michael Marder… said that… peas in a sense are persons, too.

Striking, but not an original thought. Pythagoras (according to Aristotle), noting that sour bean curd smells like semen, deduced that beans have souls, and forbade his acolytes from eating them.

Read the whole thing at Taki’s Magazine.

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