Paul Allen's PBS TV Series Rebuttal to Rock Prophecy:

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Paul Allen = RED, and Michael Fairchild = BLUE

BONOBOS

EV 2001: Sometimes what separates species is more social than physical, as it is with our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. Chimpanzees and bonobos live in similar jungles in equatorial Africa. They look alike, live in the same size communities, and eat similar foods, yet violence is a fact of life for chimpanzees. Battles between neighboring communities are common. So is the physical abuse of females by males. Bonobos, on the other hand, are essentially peaceful. In all instances bonobos are predisposed to make love, not war. So why are humankind's closest relatives so different?...Chimpanzee society is horridly patriarchal, horridly brutal in many ways from the female point of view. For the young males, at late adolescence, it's almost a rite of passage for them; in order to be an adult male chimpanzee, you have to be able to dominate all of the females. So that's rough from the female's point of view, they regularly get beaten up in horrid ways...The bonobos, on the other hand, seem to find sex thoroughly enjoyable…they go at it in every way imaginable. You get standard heterosexual interaction, which are often face to face, the way they are in humans. You also see what we call ventral upright mating where a male and female hang together out of the tree, suspended, and have sex. Males have sex with other males, what we call rump rubbing, where they stand and rub their scrotums together. We also see something among males called penis fencing, where males will suspend off of branches by their arms and rub their erect penises back-and-forth. And then a very remarkable behavior in which two females rub their genital swellings together in rapid sideways motions...A little bit different in our climatic history, a little bit different in our food history, and we might have evolved to be a totally different, more peaceful, less violent, more sexual species. *

RP 1999: For unnatural attitudes [human] society daily pays a price of violence and excessive aggression. Some anthropologists find a lesson for humans in the example of bonobos chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Bonobos are closer to humans than they are to gorillas, for example, they communicate through complex vocalization, they form permanent close friendships, they divide themselves up into cliques, and they are capable of jealous rivalries. The Mangutu tribe of Zaire believes that these chimps once coexisted with ancient humans as a single family. Many primate specialists theorize that the bonobos closely resemble the common ancestors of humans and apes. A unique trait of these chimps, however, is the way they've eliminated violence from their lives by practicing sex as a basic form of communication. Bonobos are the only primates besides humans that mate in the intimate face-to-face position. Expressions of sex and affection are observed in every aspect of their society. Every member of the troop is available to rub genitals with every other member, including males with males and females with females. From infancy, the baby chimps are trained to participate in an ongoing bisexual orgy. The result is a society in which violence is unknown. Free sex keeps the peace.


ENVIRONMENTAL ADVANTAGES, MEN WRITE THE RELIGIONS

EV 2001: …[Pre-history], a time during which [humans] were almost always roaming the plains and forests of Africa. How does that affect the way we operate today? [Scientists] have been looking at things like mate choice, different kinds of standards of beauty, social exchange…The bonobos live in an environment where you have herbs much more continuously on the ground…[but] guerrillas eat the fruit on the ground, leaving the chimpanzees heavily dependent on fruit trees. To get their share, the female chimps forage alone. Mothers, with babies ranging in age from one to about five, can't move on as quickly as the males…the mothers had to sit and wait for the offspring. So it's typical that the males reach the feeding ground first, and the males finish all the food by the time the mothers arrive. So the mothers disburse, away from each other and away from the males, and that means they can't have much opportunity to form bonds with each other.

RP 1999: Pastoral societies roamed in tribes that were dependent on herds and flocks. It was the males among them who, during long hours spent watching over grazing animals, had the time to construct philosophy and dream up stories, explanations, and myths. The movements of these tribes across the plains brought them into conflict with outsiders who sought to control territories. These male-oriented societies were the ancestors of Hebrew nomads and Indo-European pastoralists. From India westward they laid the foundation for paternal customs. Their male-dominated civilizations took root around the river valleys of the Near East…These tribes introduced the male warrior gods: Zeus and Yahweh.


EV 2001: There's a new group of scientists called evolutionary psychologists. They are interested in how human evolutionary history affects the way we think today…a growing but controversial body of scientific thought that claims much of present day human behavior is rooted in our distant past…Those who are not fit will not succeed. Darwin called this natural selection, because the forces of nature select which organisms will survive. The survivors will be those whose variations, fortuitously, adapts them better to changing local environments, and then, because they pass on those traits to their offspring, the population changes. That's natural selection. It's the principle of local adaptation. You make creatures that are better suited to the changing climates of their local habitats.

HERD THINNERS

RP 1999: When food shortages, droughts, floods, or changes in climate create conditions hostile for human life, reproductive biology in some people starts to change. We struggle when our environment puts us under stress. When we become strained to a certain point, a threshold that is different for each person, the stress triggers a signal in the body. Some people are rendered infertile from stress, others remain fertile but conceive offspring which nature intends to be infertile. Such progeny are homosexuals, people predisposed to a form of sex that produces no children.

EV 2001: A struggle for resources slows [population] growth, while death and disease, war and famine, check the population… Exactly the same struggle takes place throughout nature…Why are we not overrun by insects and frogs, given the rate at which they reproduce, the number of eggs produced by each and every female?...Sometimes it's the ugly ducklings that are better adapted to the situations of life…they have more offspring. Nature selects them to pass on their traits to future generations.

RP 1999: Gays are nature's gentle way of decreasing populations during periods when an environment is losing its capacity to nourish the numbers of people that inhabit it. If too many people struggle under stress in that environment, many will conceive gay offspring and reduce their numbers as these homosexuals have no children. The reduced human population thus decreases its strain on the environment. Nature intends this, to allow environments time to replenish themselves, which in turn supports more life.

RP 1999: When the human herd overpopulates an environment there is not enough food, shelter, relaxation, or time. People get anxious, exhausted, and stressed. But we've evolved a biological corrective mechanism, and it's activated by stress. Couples start to conceive offspring who grow up and don't reproduce because they're gay. Over several decades the population of the next generation is reduced. This is nature's way of adapting humans to conditions of scarcity, giving the environment time to recover. "How can stress inhibit conception?" asks Dr. Alice Domar, a psychologist who specializes in human infertility. "We're not sure. But we know that stress can definitely impact ovulation, stress can cause tubal spasms, and we know that stress can impair sperm production."

RP 1999: Professor Robert Chatterton adds, "New mothers who have premature infants often have difficulty with lactation and we know that stress is one of the factors that inhibits milk let down."…Nature accomplishes "birth control" when a society gets so stressed it produces a new generation that numbers many non-reproducers - gay people - instilled by nature with an innate tendency not to multiply. This is the purpose of homosexuality: intended to avert births, nature's herd thinners. Humans have a built in biological monitor which senses when the herd needs thinning and automatically adjusts the rate of reproduction through the number of gays being born.

EV 2001: Ken Ham, fundamentalist Christian [says] "Homosexuality is wrong. People understand."

RP 1999: Dr. Domar's research has revealed that of 284 women who tried unsuccessfully for an average of 3 years to get pregnant, 42% conceived shortly after completing a program of anti-stress relaxation techniques. Stress is always present at various levels among all people at any given time. During bad times we struggle and our stress increases. Our bodies respond to stress and something in us, possibly genetic, changes so that we conceive kids who are gay, and tend not to have children of their own. Population is thus lowered according to nature's plan. It's as if our bodies are programmed to interpret stress as a signal to thin the herd. This is not to imply that homosexuals are the result of a "malady" or something gone "wrong" with people who are stressed. On the contrary, herd thinners are very helpful to humans and the environment.

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