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Comments on Tuesday 17 January 2006:
In a followup to my Science Is Rubbish post of a few days ago, now comes the exciting continuation of the series, Nature is rubbish. I know I said nature kicks the arse of science last time, but really, nature's had hundreds of thousands of years working on all this stuff, and this is the best it can do? It still hasn't even managed wheels, demonstrably more efficient in that a human with wheels, using no additional source of fuel or propulsion, can go faster for less energy than a human without wheels. Most notably with a bicycle, but even with crappy little tiny wheels as on a skateboard or rollerblades. And sure, germs and diseases are masterpieces of hard-to-resist murder, but while science is pretty crap at stopping diseases from being murderous, it does a damn good job at making them more murderous. I expect it can even make a murderous disease from scratch these days. And if that's not good enough, science can work up some pretty decent fucking huge explosions, when the best nature can do in that field is a slow clumsy forest fire.

Seriously, nature's so rubbish that we can't even tell if it wins in a fight of "nature versus nurture". Science obviously kicks the arse of nurture.

On a related note, science failed in our house today by the annoying blowing of a fuse; when I went outside to flick the switch, there was nature, shoving trees in my way, and some sort of crazy giant triffid seedpods the size of a child's fist, on the ground. There was no tree above for the seedpods to have dropped from. I mentioned this to the others in the house, to grunts of some interest but not enough to go and look. I wasn't sure the seedpods weren't some sort of horrible putrifying fruit (way to go again nature, you big jerk) so I left it alone. But then a few hours later, curiosity got the better of me, and I went out to give them a poke. This time I took a small pulley-driven mechanical chopping device that swiftly defeated the enemy trees (one point for science), and thus I could use one of the captured branches to poke at the seedpods. Once confirmed that they were hard and dry, not squishy, I brought one inside.

The insane Half-Life-esque appearance of the pod raised house-people interest more than the description could, and both came out to see where the pods had been found; this time I noticed there were more of the pods camouflaged on a vine that was creeping over the adjacent fence. A fresh pod was captured, and dissected in the laboratory, revealing a yellowish sweet-smelling pus-like substance inside. Identity was confirmed - the nightmarish fence-sitting triffids were, in fact, passion fruit vines. I hadn't even known passion fruit grew on vines, let alone that they grew on vines on our fence. A shame passion fruit are horrible, really. Stupid nature. [05:01]

Nameless
Science may kick nature's arse, but in developing humans, nature developed science...

stephanie
well it sounded like you had a big problem. good luck with it although i agree science does kick natures arse though i can see how science beats the living crud (literally) out of nature i mean look at the rain forests.

Baldrick
Wow, isn't it quite rare for these to fruit in rainy Britania. How do they taste?

Nature rulez

RavenBlack
I'm in Australia at the moment, so that explains that. Not back to the UK for another 6-ish months yet.

They were better than supermarket passionfruit, but meh, still more effort than they're worth.

Barbara90
The worst part is that a herd mentality has developed so hyper-parents justify their state of mind by making less anxious parents feel bad for not meeting the well-intentioned but ill-conceived expectations. ,
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