Why are humans so repulsed by the idea that they are animals? Perhaps "Terror Management Theory" can shine some light on this important issue. When I started this blog in 2006, one idea that motivated me was that human beings simply can't deal with the idea that they are animals.…
I bristled yesterday as I read yet another faux-controversy concocting article in my misguided home town paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. You see, Body Worlds is coming to my town and the morality “experts” are getting restless. The “concern” is that maybe we shouldn’t be staring at dead bodies. The morality experts quoted…
Today’s topic is high heeled shoes. Why do women wear the damned things, I sometimes wonder. Those women wobble around, they take longer to get from here to there, they often trip on small sidewalk imperfections, and they regularly fall and get hurt.
I will confess: my gut reaction is that a woman’s IQ relates inversely to whether that woman tends to wear accident-inducing high heeled shoes. I think of women who flock to such shoes as women who aspire to become Barbies or Princesses. Before you write a comment to protest, I realize that my gut feeling is a gross over-simplification. I also have an analogous gut feeling with regard to men who aspire to higher forms of masculinity by rushing to engage in dangerous activities such as motocross or hang-gliding . . .
I never understood high heels. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I don’t think that women who wear high heels are “hotter” than those who don’t. To the contrary, I’m annoyed by high heels. Most woman who wear them look uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that they become objects of my pity, not lust. But many other men (and women) disagree with me. For proof, take a look at almost any advertising (and see here and here and here (for 8” heels!)).
Because I appear to be obtuse regarding this particular slice of human sexual responsiveness (and a tad bit concerned about my lack of responsiveness!), I have chosen this subject of high heels as yet another port of …
Why do so many people fight the idea that humans evolved from simpler life forms?
Perhaps, this resistance is the natural consequence of the "chain of being," the long-time teaching that God and the Angels are the most superior forms of existence, humans inferior to them, and "beasts" and plants more inferior still, with rocks at the very bottom.
[The 1579 drawing of the great chain of being from Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana]
Even though biology does not recognize a status hierarchy among living things, the “chain of being” schematic nonetheless lingers in the minds of some people, especially among people who fail to appreciate the immense biological record uncovered by dedicated scientists, the importance of the scientific method and the elegance of evolutionary theory.
Those who oppose evolution tend to be the same people who go around dissing organisms traditionally plotted lower on the chain of being diagram. A good example would be the (lack of) respect given to sponges. You can almost hear the fundamentalists spitting and hissing as they utter something like the following: "How dare those evolutionists claim that we come from sponges!"
To me, however, this reasoning does not reveal a scientific dispute, but only ignorance regarding the intimate biological relationship between humans and sponges. I find the harsh anti-evolutionary rhetoric of fundamentalists to be, essentially, anti-spongist. Since one can further trace human ancestry all the way to bacteria, I find such reasoning also anti-bacterialist. It makes me want to shout: You anti-spongists! You anti-bacterialists!
The remedy for this attitude problem of fundamentalists is that they need to take the time to honor and appreciate the complexity of "simpler" organisms.