(March 19, 2014 at 9:06 am)Chad32 Wrote: I say we shouldn't waste space with a bunch of graves. Not that we shouldn't have anything to remember someone by, but the land could be used better than that. Boy.I remember a routine that George Carlin was doing about finding more room for housing. He first offered up golf courses as a site that could be razed for housing, and the audience was just howling with laughter as he dismissed the needs of pansy rich folk to play a stupid game. Then he offered up cemeteries as his next example and there was one of those really awkward moments where people started to laugh and then choked it back when the words sank in. Carlin, being Carlin, wasn't slowed by this at all and barked about how useless it was to waste land on corpses, and the audience continued to laugh nervously with none of the energy it had just a few moments prior. The audience reaction made the bit that much funnier for me.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
