Women are supposed to always look fit and healthy and pretty. But everything that is sick and tired is all very human — and I think that being human is a big taboo. When people say that the book is about taboos, I ask them, what do you mean? Shit? Piss? Menstruation?

Menstruation is in many ways extremely annoying and quite disturbing, for all its normalcy. But it isn’t really spoken about that much, is it?

The problem with taboos is that you think you’re the only one. And Helen always wants to know: Does it smell the same with other women? How do other women’s vaginas look? We’re all completely isolated. It’s not a group of women that menstruate; we’re on our own. But where does that come from? Mothers still don’t think it’s a good thing to be a woman.

1. The discovery of relict populations of extinct hominins such Homo erectus and Australopithecus. Yeti enthusiasts notwithstanding, I don’t think this is going to happen. The world is now too well explored for us to have overlooked a large, savannah-dwelling primate. Even Homo floresiensis has been extinct 17,000 years. But if it did happen, it would change everything.

2. A successful hybridisation between a human and a chimpanzee. Even if the hybrid were infertile like a mule, the shock waves that would be sent through society would be salutary. This is why a distinguished biologist described this possibility as the most immoral scientific experiment he could imagine: it would change everything! It cannot be ruled out as impossible, but it would be surprising.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/jan/02/richard-dawkins-chimpanzee-hybrid

“know that perception, cognition, language and emotion are rooted in the brain. But it is still tempting to think of the brain as it was shown in old educational cartoons, as a control panel with gauges and levers operated by a user — the self, the soul, the ghost, the person, the ‘me.’ But cognitive neuroscience is showing that the self, too, is just another network of brain systems.”

http://www.fsmitha.com/review/pinker.htm

See here: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/virginprophecy.html

Unless you are very, very good at translating essentially “dead” languages, going back to “read the original” (which isn’t really possible anyway, according to Bart Ehrman, since there are not originals), you have to find reliable sources. Many of which are cited in the Carrier piece.

On top of all that, you have to add the fact that people in the grip of prophetic bullshit will trim, modify, and otherwise cut to suit the facts to fit the story they want told.