Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Friday, October 23, 2009

The History of Sex Education

DNA. Can't make babies without it, right? Yet, back into the mists of time, people had no idea what DNA was. So to our modern scientific standpoint, maybe we might be inclined to look back upon the people of that savage day as pretty much ignorant (or if you will, innocent) of the hard particulars of baby-making. Back before it was fundamentally understood, before the discovery of Watson and Crick.

But you'd be wrong, though. If you make a study of it, you'll find that the historical record is simply littered with indicators that ancient peoples knew what was what, when it comes to you-know-what. If you're capable of deciphering some of the lewder myths, you can see they had a pretty big inkling of the all the process particulars. And taking a step back from hard science, here, why wouldn't they? After a few thousand generations of witnessing the subtle connect of cause and effect, they'd be able to put it together on a higher level than simply "hey! This feels good." Sure! At some point, they'd be able to put one and one together and be able to say: "Hey! This thing puts babies in!"

See, we try to act like science holds all the answers, but really, a lot of that stuff was figure-outable.

What the heck is DNA, anyway? I mean, everybody talks about it like they know how it works, and they show you pictures of it and stuff, but then when you look at it it just looks like some kind of weird, twisty Lego set. How the heck could that grow into a baby?

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