Are we nothing more or less?

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What life-forms might we expect to find on a water planet?

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Unabashed, undeterred, ungulated sperm machine.

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This'll deflate a few egos.

Everything dies. Live with it!

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Evolving in a land down under

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And still yet another ungodly heathen blog for all you naturally evolving freethinking agnostic Yanks out there from a land down under:

I have often said that I want atheism to become a normalised aspect of modern society (and of course that implies also that I want religious belief and agnosticism, but not religious exclusivism, to be normalised). I take a “let a thousand flowers bloom” philosophy for social polity. So I want to suggest a term: Affirmative atheism. Atheists need to be able to affirm their right to exist, partake in civil society, and so forth without being prejudicially treated (as they were, to my shame, by the Australian media when the Atheism conference was held in Melbourne, and which is why PZ was here). Evolving Thoughts

And capitalism? God forbid we fuhgeddaboudit.

I get 10% of all profit from that term.

AM I WHO AM?

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"In giving rise to man, the evolutionary process has, apparently for the first and only time in the history of the Cosmos, become conscious of itself." ~Theodosius Dobzhansky
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On human shoulders.

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"This earth is one of the rare spots in the cosmos where mind has flowered. Man is a product of nearly three billion years of evolution, in whose person the evolutionary process has at last become conscious of itself and its possibilities. Whether he likes it or not, he is responsible for the whole further evolution of our planet." ~Julian Huxley, Essays of a Humanist
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Man vs. the Cosmos

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"Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it." ~T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, Romanes Lecture, Oxford 1893.
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Waste not, want not.

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"[Man's] face is set in the same direction as the main tide of evolving life, and his highest destiny, the end towards which he has so long perceived that he must strive, is to extend to new possibilites the process with which, for all these millions of years, nature has already been busy, to introduce less and less wasteful methods, to accelerate by means of his consciousness what in the past has been the work of blind unconscious forces." ~Julian Huxley, Essays of a Biologist
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Prevalence of the Populist Opposition.

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"The most evolution could produce would be the idea that 'might makes right.' When Hitler exterminated approximately 10 million innocent men, women, and children, he acted in complete agreement with the theory of evolution and in complete disagreement with everything humans know to be right and wrong ... If you teach children that they are evolved from monkeys, then they will act like monkeys."
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A Tarnished Golden Rule?

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"With what other than condemnation is a person with any moral sense supposed to respond to a system in which the ultimate purpose in life is to be better than your neighbor at getting genes into future generations, in which those successful genes provide the message that instructs the development of the next generation, in which that message is always 'exploit your environment, including your friends and relatives, so as to maximize our genes' success', in which the closest thing to a golde rule is 'don't cheat, unless it is likely to provide a net benefit'"? ~George C. Williams
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