“Molasses is a little like amber,” Diogenes said. “It flows so slowly that sometimes it seems to be solid. Creatures can be imprisoned in it and apparently be held motionless in it. They must deceive themselves as to their own time scale, for if they do not deceive themselves they will be dead . . . . Things can not have been going on for the orthodox time at the orthodox pace.” — "Out of the Molasses Trap" “There are no duplications in the Pristine World, and there are no no

Since acorn worms and the human lineage diverged 570 million years ago, pharyngeal slits for filtering food evolved into gills for extracting oxygen, and later into today’s human upper and lower jaw and pharynx, which encompasses the thyroid gland, tongue, larynx (voice box) and various glands and muscles between the mouth and the throat. Humans and other terrestrial vertebrates actually initiate vestigial gills while embryos, though they disappear quickly and rarely persist

“Your machine can say how old a thing will be in its totality, but it can’t say how old a thing is right now?”— “Mostly it can do both. The present orientation can nearly always be coaxed out of it, though the clock considers the present of little importance. This is no gadgetry, people. It is positive science and it is wonderful.” “The block has solved many problems of involution and devolution,” Barnaby said. “Naturally the clock does not accept evolution, or has any intell

“But we haven’t any wings, father,” Job Salto protested. “You have feathers, and feathers are certainly an intimation of wings. Some of you even have a few elbow-feathers. I will call them pinion-feathers, and perhaps your elbows will have turned into wing-pinions by tomorrow.” But Darwinism and all the denials that make it up does give silly and evil answers; and it is guilty of Mistakes of Interpretation against dozens of sciences as well as against the Word of God. — unpub

Philosophical, unloved Lafferty this time. "Symposium" is not reader-friendly, so it is no surprise no one talks about it. As with the demanding "Buckets Full of Brains," Lafferty is more interested in his ideas than in charming the reader. Summary without commentary is also unhelpful in its case, so let’s cut to it. Here is a metaphysical story about mechanical, chattering alphabet blocks in a child’s toy box. The blocks do not know the most important fact about their story-

“A superior smile is the sovereign wonder-worker,” Griggles Swing said to Belinda Greenglow on a Monday evening. “One smiles superiorly at God and is one-up on him. But if God would smile superiorly at man, he must do so anthropomorphically, on man's own terms. The morning stars snickered and the little hills melted like wax when this was first discovered. When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Job 38:7 The hills melted like wax at the

“Lord Randal had invented the bow-and-arrow. But Axel could shoot the arrows farther and faster. And higher. And when he was six years old, Axel did what many persons have dreamed of doing: he made his mark on the sky. He dipped the heads of his arrows in mud, and he shot them up with uncanny accuracy and made mud marks on that transparent sky-cover which was twenty meters above them. He made about a hundred mud marks that conveyed a message in the written form of ‘code Chald

Today, theistic evolution and an unexpected connection to Lafferty's unpolished “Claudius and Charles.” By the time I was growing up, most Catholics had made their peace with theistic evolution, an ongoing attempt to bring Christian theology into harmony with the modern synthesis. That effort is not new, and it long predates Darwin. Early Church Fathers like St. Augustine of Hippo spoke of rationes seminales, or “seminal reasons.” He believed that God had placed hidden potent

Paul Saka’s article on “Been a Long, Long Time” (1966/1970) argues that Lafferty’s target in that story is evolution. I touched on this in an earlier post, but since then, I have had Lafferty and evolution on my mind. Today I want to turn to his unpublished “Claudius and Charles.” The story doesn’t exist in the finished form that Lafferty usually achieved at the end of his writing process. Still, it is an intriguing story—arguably the most savage fictional statement he ever m

Let's begin with being right. The English reformers who enclosed the commons were right. Efficiency rose, though it cast peasants into poverty for centuries. The American temperance advocates were right that banning alcohol could curb abuse, and America got gangster empires and political corruption. The chemists who added lead to gasoline? Engines ran more smoothly with less knocking, poisoning generations. Then there is asbestos, antibiotics for livestock, and Mao’s war agai

But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? — Job 12:7–9 “What is really the situation, Austro?” I asked. He drew a hand in his drawing tablet. Somehow he had the perspective all wrong, for the hand was a million times bigger than the drawing tab