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| - Rapture? What rapture? |
So Edward Dutton believes that histrionic Woke women are infected by a parasitic disease spread by cats.
It struck me that the same analysis could be applied to histrionic conservative women who believe in the "Biblical" Rapture. Ever noticed how many of them *worry about their cats* in the event of apocalypse?
And no, I´m not saying this is true. My point is that what´s sauce for the goose, surely works just fine for the gander. Not to mention the old tom!
Edward Dutton has stopped donning a false beard lately, but his speculations are still as "far out" as usual. Here, he claims that Woke women have a parasitical disease known as toxoplasmosis, the vector of which is...cats. Apparently, half of all domestic cats world-wide are infected with this disease.
He also speculates that the witches of yore may have been infected by the same parasite, which is why the cat has always been the symbol of evil. It also explains the stereotype of the "cat lady".
A lot of push back in the commentary section from right-wing cat owners...
So I just tried to read a 48-page paper titled “Ernst Haeckel´s Discovery of Magosphaera planula: A Vestige of Metazoan Origins?”, published in 2008 in “History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences”, apparently a journal. One of the authors, Andrew Reynolds, is a scholar of religion and philosophy. The other, Norbert Hülsmann, is a zoologist. And yes, their paper was quite hard to read!
It deals with
German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel´s discovery of a curious micro-organism off
the Norwegian coast in 1869, a creature Haeckel named Magosphaera planula, the
generic name meaning “magician´s ball”. The organism was only observed and
studied by the German naturalist himself, and only at this one occasion!
Despite this, it played an important part in the evolutionary speculations of both
Haeckel and others during the 19th and early 20th
centuries. It´s still occasionally mentioned in scientific works (and even on
Wikipedia), but only with a huge question mark as to its placement on the tree
of life.
In Haeckel´s theories, Magosphaera was first given the rank of a protist
(Haeckel apparently regarded protists as a somewhat nebulous group transitional
between plants and animals), but was later upgraded to a protozoan (a unicellular
animal) of the “blastaea” stage in the German naturalist´s “ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny” scheme. The fact that Magosphaera had only ever been seen by Haeckel
himself could easily be misinterpreted as science fraud, especially since
Haeckel have posthumously come under fire for his supposedly fake illustrations
of embryos. The two authors are therefore at pains to point out that they are
*not* accusing Haeckel of hoaxing. However, they do believe that he made an honest
mistake.
The magician´s ball doesn´t really exist. With one exception, no other scientist
has claimed to observe anything even remotely similar (the equally dubious species
Magosphaera maggii). The authors have actually looked for Magosphaera-like organisms
in the North Sea on several occasions, but always without success. They also
believe that Haeckel´s illustrations and descriptions of Magosphaera are
inconsistent. Haeckel had made other mistaken identifications, something he also
admitted. The purported missing link in animal evolution was probably two or
three different species of marine organisms temporarily hanging together,
perhaps even one kind of organism parasitizing another kind. I haven´t kept up
to speed on Haeckel-bashing lately, but I wouldn´t be too surprised if both
creationists and Woke evolutionists (who regard the German fellow as a
proto-fascist) will nevertheless use this unfortunate little episode to further
their respective agendas.
The article initially promises to discuss the social construction and “applied
metaphysics” of scientific objects, but there is very little of this in the actual
text, suggesting it´s just a nod to popular trends in academic research.
Obviously, a marine zoologist can´t be a postmodernist!
With that, I end this little conversation.
