mouths, but he sounded incredulous, at least to me. “And they demonstrate their disapproval over this by murdering adults?”
I nodded slightly. “Apparently.”
Hollus was quiet for a few moments longer, his spherical torso bobbing slowly up and down. “Among my people,” he said, “we have a concept called”—and his twin mouths sang two discordant notes. “It refers to incongruities, to events or words that convey the opposite of the intended meaning.”
“We have a similar concept. We call it irony.”
His eyes turned to the newspaper again. “Apparently not all humans understand it.”
9
I’ve never smoked. So why do I have lung cancer?
It’s actually, so I’ve learned, somewhat common among paleontologists, geologists, and mineralogists of my generation. I was right, in a way, when I attributed my cough to the dusty environment I worked in. We often use tools that pulverize rocks, creating a lot of fine dust, which—
But lung cancer takes a long time to develop, and I’ve been working in paleontology labs for thirty years. These days, I almost always wear a mask; our consciousness has been raised, and almost everyone does so when doing that kind of work. But, still, over the decades, I’d breathed in more than my share of rock dust, not to mention asbestos fibers as well as fiberglass filaments while making casts.
And now I’m paying for it.
Some of Susan’s and my friends said we should sue—perhaps the museum, perhaps the Ontario government (my ultimate employer). Surely my workplace could have been made safer; surely I should have been given better safety instruction; surely—
It was a natural reaction. Someone should pay for such an injustice. Tom Jericho: he’s a nice guy, good husband, good father, gives to charity . . . maybe not as much as he should, but some, each month. And he was always there to lend a hand when someone was moving or painting their house. And now good old Tom had cancer.
Yes, surely someone should pay, they thought.
But the last thing I wanted to do was waste time on litigation. So, no, I wasn’t going to sue.
Still, I had lung cancer; I had to deal with that.
And there was an irony here.
Some of what Hollus was saying about what he took as proof for God’s existence wasn’t new to me. That stuff about the fundamental constants was sometimes referred to as the anthropic cosmological principle; I’d touched on it in my evolution course. He was certainly right that the universe, superficially at least, seemed designed for life. As Sir Fred Hoyle said in 1981, “A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.” But, then again, Sir Fred championed a lot of notions the rest of the scientific community balked at.
Still, as Hollus and I continued to talk, he brought up cilia—although he called them “ciliums;” he always had trouble with Latin plurals. Cilia are the hairlike extensions from cells that are capable of rhythmic motion; they are present in many types of human cells, and, he said, in the cells of Forhilnors and Wreeds, too. Humans who believed that not just the universe but life itself had been intelligently designed often cited cilia. The tiny motors that allow the fibers to move are enormously complex, and the intelligent-design proponents say they are irreducibly complex: there is no way they could have evolved through a series of incremental steps. Like a mousetrap, a cilium needs all of its various parts to work; take away any element and it becomes useless junk—just as without the spring, or the holding bar, or the platform, or the hammer, or the catch, a mousetrap does nothing at all. It was indeed a conundrum to explain how cilia had
I nodded slightly. “Apparently.”
Hollus was quiet for a few moments longer, his spherical torso bobbing slowly up and down. “Among my people,” he said, “we have a concept called”—and his twin mouths sang two discordant notes. “It refers to incongruities, to events or words that convey the opposite of the intended meaning.”
“We have a similar concept. We call it irony.”
His eyes turned to the newspaper again. “Apparently not all humans understand it.”
9
I’ve never smoked. So why do I have lung cancer?
It’s actually, so I’ve learned, somewhat common among paleontologists, geologists, and mineralogists of my generation. I was right, in a way, when I attributed my cough to the dusty environment I worked in. We often use tools that pulverize rocks, creating a lot of fine dust, which—
But lung cancer takes a long time to develop, and I’ve been working in paleontology labs for thirty years. These days, I almost always wear a mask; our consciousness has been raised, and almost everyone does so when doing that kind of work. But, still, over the decades, I’d breathed in more than my share of rock dust, not to mention asbestos fibers as well as fiberglass filaments while making casts.
And now I’m paying for it.
Some of Susan’s and my friends said we should sue—perhaps the museum, perhaps the Ontario government (my ultimate employer). Surely my workplace could have been made safer; surely I should have been given better safety instruction; surely—
It was a natural reaction. Someone should pay for such an injustice. Tom Jericho: he’s a nice guy, good husband, good father, gives to charity . . . maybe not as much as he should, but some, each month. And he was always there to lend a hand when someone was moving or painting their house. And now good old Tom had cancer.
Yes, surely someone should pay, they thought.
But the last thing I wanted to do was waste time on litigation. So, no, I wasn’t going to sue.
Still, I had lung cancer; I had to deal with that.
And there was an irony here.
Some of what Hollus was saying about what he took as proof for God’s existence wasn’t new to me. That stuff about the fundamental constants was sometimes referred to as the anthropic cosmological principle; I’d touched on it in my evolution course. He was certainly right that the universe, superficially at least, seemed designed for life. As Sir Fred Hoyle said in 1981, “A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.” But, then again, Sir Fred championed a lot of notions the rest of the scientific community balked at.
Still, as Hollus and I continued to talk, he brought up cilia—although he called them “ciliums;” he always had trouble with Latin plurals. Cilia are the hairlike extensions from cells that are capable of rhythmic motion; they are present in many types of human cells, and, he said, in the cells of Forhilnors and Wreeds, too. Humans who believed that not just the universe but life itself had been intelligently designed often cited cilia. The tiny motors that allow the fibers to move are enormously complex, and the intelligent-design proponents say they are irreducibly complex: there is no way they could have evolved through a series of incremental steps. Like a mousetrap, a cilium needs all of its various parts to work; take away any element and it becomes useless junk—just as without the spring, or the holding bar, or the platform, or the hammer, or the catch, a mousetrap does nothing at all. It was indeed a conundrum to explain how cilia had
Similar Books
