Stephen Jay Gould: The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox

I saw what you did there! Well, in Message 80 of this thread, our buddy AZPaul3 was responding to a post in which I said I objected not to scientific fact, but to dehumanizing rhetoric like being called a "machine." He used the very words I quoted when he was delivering another clip of his let's-call-them-rhetorical questions in my direction: Now I assume we could look at these questions in a few different ways. At face value it appears that he's ascribing these opinions to me (he even mentions a "special place" that I "seem to need"), even though I never claimed that I (or humanity, or whoever he means I might mean) was "supreme in the universe" or denied that humans share ancestry with all other life on Earth.It could be that he's parodying those opinions and wondering how anyone could seriously hold such silly beliefs. But in that case, why direct them at me, who never claimed that it was reasonable to hold such beliefs in the first place?Or it could be that he's just partaking in some of that harmless, oh-so-amusing cyber-bullying where someone lashes out at a perceived enemy with incoherent blather that's meant to insult and intimidate rather than foster discussion, and which he could disingenuously deny if called out on it.Hmm. This is a tough one.

I beeeleeeve what we have here is a failure to co-mun-A-cate.We are ape-bags of chemicals accurate but not very sexy. I once heard a joke: You know what a women is? It is the life support system for the vagina.Funny? Well it depends on where you are and in who's company it's told.I think a great many people are a mix between :
Me thinks thou dost protest to much...
and
What ever gets you through the night.I fall into both camps quite regularly. I like to stave off my existential angst and fear and loathing smothered in nihilism by telling myself all manner of romantic artistic things. I can delude myself rather well. That is why I find the character Sheldon on BBT so funny. He doesn't delude himself with romantic notions. He is the face of science itself.