In Spring 2009, the world will be celebrating the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth and the sesquicen-tennial of the publication of The Origin of Species.
The following is my little tribute to Mr. Darwin.

Essays on the controversy between Creationism and Evolutionary Theory as they may have been written by our great comic icons.

By Ed Tasca

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Copyright © 2006 Ed Tasca. All rights reserved.  

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as imagined

 

Chico:  Captain Spalding, they say you don't believe in evolution.

Groucho:  You wouldn't either if you saw the dame I was with last night.

Chico:  I think we were descended from the monkeys.

 

Groucho:  I would too, if I had to look at that mug in the mirror every day.

Chico:  Yeah, well what about that fossil record?

 

Groucho:  I demand to have my name taken off of it.

Chico:  So what's so scientific about the bible stories?

Groucho:  Look pal, everything starts with somebody starting it. Except for my wife. She never starts anything.  She's always got a headache.

Chico:  That's not true. She starts trouble.

Groucho:  Are you trying to start something? Then, let's take it outside. On second thought, you take it outside.  I'm not wearing a coat. 

Chico:  So you think everything started with one man in paradise who has everything he wanted?

 

Groucho:  Yeah, it's a comedy.

Chico:  And then he wants to share it with a woman.

 

Groucho:  Okay, so maybe it's a tragedy.

Chico:  So where's the science in that?

Groucho:  I'll tell you where the science is. As soon as they meet. They start multiplying.

Chico:  There's more to science than multiplying.

Groucho:  Not at my college.

 

Chico:  What about subtraction?

Groucho:  They tried it. But there were no grandparents to leave the kids with.

 

Chico:  That's not subtraction.

Groucho:  Maybe not. But it was better than Cain's solution.

Chico:  Cain liked math?

Groucho:  Yeah, he married all his sisters. Called it addition.

Chico:  What happened to the women?

Groucho:  They left him.

Chico:  Revolting!

Groucho:  Yeah, most of them were. That's how we got--

Chico:  I know--division. What about the dinosaurs?

Groucho:  Leave my mother and father out of this.

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Tasca, never content, had decided to try his hand at penning the same tribute to Darwin in the hand of his favorite humorists, entertainers and writers.  Enjoy. 

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Questions about life as we know it

As imagined
by Ed Tasca

 

Here we go:

Number TEN.  If God created man in his own image, how do you explain back hair?

NINE. If human ears evolved from the top of our heads to the sides, what happened to my boss?

EIGHT. For the dinosaurs on the ark, did Noah have a T-Rex Whisperer?

SEVEN. Did Charles Darwin have a gorilla in his wedding party?

SIX. Are humans in Southern California still evolving?

FIVE. Can the fossil record be converted to a CD?

FOUR. If fish evolved into reptiles and reptiles into mammals, will mammals eventually evolve into Klingons?

THREE. Do apes still get angry when we say we are their descendents?

TWO. Can we have our tail back at least until we're out of high school?

And the Number One Unanswered Question about life as we know it is:

ONE. If evolution is real, are humans really the best it could come up with?

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It's official. According to Science Magazine, scientists have confirmed what most of us have suspected since prom night that the human species actually propagates stupidity. So here's my stupid-ditty.

Was it evolution made us lame
Or Adam and Eve's sad pact?
I don't know where to place the blame
For how we human act.
Though man rules the planet,
Seems he kept the dumbest genes.
So homo sapiens, please can it,
We're still Pleistocenes.
Descarte's a fink.
His words a sham.
He meant, I do NOT think,
Therefore I am.
It's no spoof,
So don't deride me.
I have the proof
He's sleeping here beside me.
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One day as the stone Unicorn contemplated the tip of his unique single golden horn, questions he hadn't considered before entered his mind, "Who am I?" And "Where did I come from?" 

His desire to know was so great that he leaped off his pedestal onto the grass below to find out.  "Am I just a mythical creature that no one ever took seriously?" he asked the tip of his horn.

"A mythical creature? Not at all," he heard a coarse, tiny voice answer.

His focus widened in a little jiggle of his head and he turned see an inches-tall garden gnome in a wilted, pointy cap and a long white beard. It stood smiling at him from a patch of zinnias.  "Animals that are part-man and part goat and dragons that breathe fire, these are mythical creatures, not a gentle animal who never bothers anyone, like you," the gnome said.

"But if I am real, where are the other unicorns?"

"I think you need to go back to the beginning," the gnome said.  "Back to the time when there were so many new creatures running around nobody needed to imagine imaginary ones."

"But how can I do that?"

"You're a stone statue and you're talking to a plaster garden gnome. How hard can it be for this author to take you back to where it all started?"

And without another word, author magic, which is nothing if not sudden and startling (as long as the punctuation is right), propelled the Unicorn back in time and dropped him right into the Garden of Eden. Brilliant with iridescent green trees surrounded by thick, leafy hedges and high spongy grass, the garden teemed with frisky little creatures whistling happy melodies. It was a jubilant paradise not unlike rural sections of Toontown.

 

Now, right smack under a plush acacia tree the Unicorn found Adam lolling in its shade eating a fig, a big fig or maybe it was a great date. When Adam saw the little pony with the golden horn, he was astonished. He leaped to his feet the way astonished men always do when they are genuinely astonished and he said, "You're a unicorn!"

"Yes, I am," the Unicorn said, tipping his horn in affirmation.

"Where did you come from?" Adam asked.

"Well, this garden gnome asked the person writing this story to send me back here from thousands of years in the future to ask a question."

"You can tell a writer to do that?"

"That's right," the Unicorn said.  "I don't think you can do that with all writers. Just the ones who obviously don't have anything else to write about."

"So what's this question that's so important?"

"Am I for real?" the Unicorn spoke up boldly.

"Well, of course, you're for real! If you weren't for real, would you be able to come back here and say, "Am I for real?" and stick your horn in my face like that."

"So then what happened to the rest of us unicorns?"  

"Well," Adam said, "the truth is I'm still not sure myself. Let's see. One day, the Almighty came to me for a favor. He needed help with his favorite little horned ponies, which would be you unicorns. He was afraid you were too shy and gentle. In fact, he gave you the weapon on your snout to protect yourselves against other creatures. Remember, a lot of God's creatures didn't turn out exactly as he planned. The other day, in fact, he threatened to hit the dinosaurs with a meteor. Of course, He was only joking. He jokes a lot. I don't think he'd ever really do it! He's really a very gentle God."

"So shyness and gentleness are a bad thing?" the Unicorn asked.

"No! But, you see, The Almighty thought you might be TOO shy, because the truth is you weren't multiplying."

"Multiplying?"  The Unicorn was befuddled.

"Yes. It's the only way to flourish here."  Adam then lowered his voice and went on: "If you don't multiply, you disappear. Now, pardon me for saying so, but I'm pretty good at this multiplying business, so the Almighty asked me to explain to the unicorns how to be great multipliers."

"So what happened?"

"Well, I took the unicorns to the Tree of Knowledge, and to make sure they got this right, I had the rabbits demonstrate. The unicorns rushed away to their secret crannies to give it a go! And so, I thought that was that. Mission accomplished."

"But there are no unicorns in the whole world." The Unicorn was befuddled yet again. Adam, too, was befuddled. The author was even befuddled (and started in on his first drink).

"All I know is," Adam said, "when I went to the Almighty to tell him that the unicorns were off doing their multiplying," the Almighty said, "I hope you told them that part about adolescence?"

"Adolescence?" I said to the Almighty. "What's adolescence?"

Before Adam could go on, and through a sudden clap of thunder, the Almighty puffed apart a cloud cluster and roared down at his firstborn: "Species go extinct if you don't explain adolescent children to them! You were born fully-grown, so you haven't a clue! If you'd spent more time AT the Tree, Adam, instead of sitting under one, you'd have known all this."

Another thunderclap shook the heavens and the Almighty roared again, this time at the author. "Author," he said, "I'm the Almighty and I don't need any thunderclaps, so cut them out or I'm going to wipe out all your punctuation!"  Then the Almighty thrust a finger at Adam and said (without any thunderclap, mind you), "Why do you think I made sex so good, Adam! So creatures would forget this adolescence thing!"

At that critical moment, the little gnome reappeared and tugged on the sleeve of the author (who, after having been scolded [and worse edited] by the Almighty, was now drinking heavily). The gnome begged the author to rescue the Unicorn from the ugly truth of its forebears" decision that offspring just weren't worth the aggravation.

And so, in a trice, the Unicorn found himself tottering atop the pedestal in the garden once again, gazing at the tip of his golden horn and pondering a mystery he would never come to understand: "What's adolescence?"

Moral: Good sex sometimes comes at a high price.

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The fundamental mathematics intricately interwoven into Creationism is the subject of a new book by Stephen Hawking, promising to be more convincing than the bible, but with less sex. Evolutionary theory, it argues, rests on a foundation of blind faith because the fossil record was written by people who had never seen a stegosaurus. Creationism, on the other hand, proposes a single principle: that nothing starts by itself, unless you have misread the instructions and assembled it improperly.

As for evolutionary theory and how it has created the human body, it's apparent that little research was done by focus groups, and this is why we have irritable bowel syndrome. Evolutionists also point out the natural beauty of a forward-bending knee, because a backward-bending knee would make it impossible to sit at a bar.

Creationists say that if we were spun into life by billions of mutations, would we have this perfect anatomy, which works just fine to do whatever we need it to do, at least after our first coffee.

"What about the fossil record?"  An evolutionist friend, an oddly simian look-alike man, always says, plucking lice from his body hair.

 "False starts,"  I always respond, spraying him with an alcohol-based disinfectant.

 "What about the dinosaurs?" he insists, kicking at a small bird that landed at his feet. "I guess you think they were on the ark?"

"Yes," I parry, "But clearly confined to steerage."

Perceiving himself to be losing our debate at around this stage in the exchange, he starts removing a flint-blade knife from a cinch made of bear intestine, and I have to excuse myself. I do this by bounding up into a tree and begging him to evolve, if in fact he believes this might be possible in some way.

 

"Come down from there and act like a man," my evolutionist friend says, cleaning his nose with his tongue. "Homo Sapiens. We're Homo Sapiens! We're the culmination of millennia of natural selection and advanced night courses," he tries to add, waving his blade and sneering.

I'm invariably left with no other recourse but to leap down on him, squeezing my arm about his throat to asphyxiate him, and, in the end, winning the argument without another word.

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Am I the only one who thinks evolution has stopped?
I remember when we said people we hated were behaving like animals. We don't say that any more. Because animals these days are really a lot nicer than we are.

Has an ape ever broken into your home and stolen your stereo equipment? Have you ever seen an obese ape? Have you ever seen an ape with a gun? I'll bet there's never been an ape who had a colonoscopy.  Or needed one. 

And we call them Lower Life Forms. They mind their own business. They know when they've had enough. They don't think opossum are going to hell because they sleep upside down. They make no judgments about anything, except how to survive.

We think we evolved because we got rid of our tail and those pointy ears. Is that evolving? I think a tail might be a neat thing to have. There'd be a lot more Olympic events if we had tails. And pointed ears! What was wrong with pointed ears? Everybody liked Mr. Spock!

And did you notice when we split off from the apes, they never once complained. Can you blame them? All we did was complain. You smell. You have lice. You grab yourself in public. You screech with your mouth full. How long can you stand that, before you say, hey, why don't you go live in a cave!

And we did. We lived in caves for thousands of years. Segregated ourselves from all the other animals. And what did we do? We spent all our time drawing pictures of them on the walls. Homo sapiens. Who gave us that name? We did. Yeah, we're so smart, we figured out how to blow up the entire planet by pushing a button.

And what's the deal with the fancy clothes. Yeah, we put on fancy clothes. But does that make us evolved? I don't think so. What about that Otsi guy, that frozen guy they found in the Alps a few years ago. He was 5,000 years old. He had Italian shoes on. And probably the latest in Italian fashion, if you like wearing grass held together with tree sap.

So I don't see where anything has changed.

I think evolution is going into reverse. You can tell that just by looking at television.

I remember television shows when they had smart guys on them. Dick Cavett, William F. Buckley. Walter Cronkite. Now, we have reality TV. Who are these people? Why are they on television? All they do is behave badly. And we watch them. Is that where we're evolving? 

I thought Australopithecus was a pretty nice bunch of people. They were happy living simple lives on the savannah. Maybe their personal hygiene left something to be desired, but they didn't seem to mind. And what did we do? We killed them off and invented deodorant. I don't see how that makes us so superior. That just makes us nasty creatures, and we're still nasty. It's in our genes.

All I'm saying is Homo sapiens better wise up!

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If we're set on teachin' this Creationism business in our schools, shouldn't there be some kind of arithmetic behind it to get the kids all squealing that the whole subject's just a cruel hardship, like they do with all the other natural sciences.

Now, you take evolution. That Mr. Darwin, he knew a thing or two about how to come up with a scientific theory. Have to know how to figure the dates of a lot of old bones, he said, to understand how we humans changed from monkeys to what we are right now. Mr. Darwin never said what change he was talking about. And then there are the billions of mutations. These mutations, they tell me, is the way nature makes these changes in every creature on earth, but slow so's not to scare anybody, like it surely might, if a creature had a tail one day and then suddenly woke up and it was gone. So you see, already, the kids would have a lot of figuring to do.

So I asked myself what arithmetic there was for kids trying to get the hang of Creationism.  Certainly there had to be something, what with Mr. Bush himself telling us that this Creationism idea was in fact another scientific "point of view."

Well, I went right back to the beginning, that would be the good book of Genesis. And here's what I found out. First of all, Creationism says that everything starts with somebody starting it, nothing starts by itself. I have to admit that this seems to be mostly the case, even though I do remember an old mule I had, that I had high hopes for. 

Now, the Creationism folks, they say you'll find it this starting up situation in every physics book ever written. It's called Point A.  Course Point A can't be called just Point A, when you're talking about the start of something as spectacular as our universe, so the Creationists decided to call this Point A the Intelligent Designer, a power something like the folks who make up the moving picture shows I suspect, because this power started everything off where every good show begins, with a man and woman who could get us all laughing out loud.  Adam and Eve.

Now, far as I can tell, this is where that arithmetic really gets going. Adam and Eve got to watchin' the animals and decided they liked this business of multiplying.  In fact, it seems they may even have graduated top in their class, seeing how fast humankind spread out everywhere. But all this romping about, it didn't last for all that long. Eve looked around one day for grandparents to leave her kids with. And, well, it dawned on her and Adam that they was stuck with their first subtraction problem. That's right, and there didn't seem any solution could be found, since she and Adam were born orphans. Course, even today no one, not even Mr. Einstein, has been able to figure out this subtraction problem. Now, Cain's solution for subtraction it seemed to most everybody had some flaws, and I suspect his other siblings were mighty quick to point this out.

But this Cain fellow, he was no slacker. He followed up his subtraction studies with something he called addition, where he started marrying sisters and even some nieces, and he declared this was the first arithmetic that all good young boys should be learning, and of course, the boys all seemed to be okay with this, while the girls, well, they were still trying to help solve that old subtraction problem.

Yep, the mathematics was now startin' to get complicated. Genesis tells us that Eve was mighty attracted to that Tree of Knowledge. She was there looking for answers to all this new figuring, the poor woman was, getting real desperate as it turned out. But the more barking up this tree she did, the more things got worse. Eve got herself duped by another garden creature posing as somebody who knows something but really don't. You might say it was our first politician, and he got them both mixed up in a new mathematical problem: division.  Adam was hopping mad, and well, the whole mess got 'em all thrown out of that garden. And as you know, things just were never the same again.

Well, sir, that's what I figured this Creationist science to be all about, just good old-fashioned, everyday arithmetic our kids can learn a thing or two from. But I'm afraid I'm still looking for the evidence of it. 

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Copyright © 2006 Ed Tasca. All rights reserved.