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So that paper I was supposed to be writing? The one that's, theoretically speaking, due today in about two hours?

Let's put it this way: The last thing I coherently remember is consuming excessive quantities of Jolt and perhaps a No-Doz pill. I know I wrote after that, because in the morning I woke up to the shrieking of my alarm with my notebook in my lap. Here is what was written in it:

Dear Brain,
Caffeine makes you concentrate, yes, but it would be nice if you could concentrate on Darwin instead of going into spiritual/religious anxiety overdrive.
Hugs and Kisses,
Self

Dear Self,
--FART--
Deepest affection,
Brain

After that edifying conversation was three-quarters of what resembled a five-page paper, written in a style which at best could be called "quaint" and at worst could be called "the product of not reading many books written after 1900," in which a gibbon and a warbler finch get together over tea and argue about Darwin's scientific method.

I swear I am not making this shit up.

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BEST POST OF THE WEEK!!

Even better? I'm going to turn it in as-is (with a conclusion tacked on) and see how the professor reacts.

Good luck! Cause I have a problem accidently letting wimsy into Scientiftic papers and it has never gone over really well. Good grade or not you should post it here.

It happened that one day, through events too fantastical to describe in this humble paper, the Finch and the Monkey, those two common subjects of Darwinian conjecture, took tea together in the Monkey’s house. In the course of the afternoon they fell to discussing the man who had written so extensively about them both.
“It seems to me,” said the Monkey, “that this Darwin, no matter how much he fancied himself a scientist, was never quite adept at putting his own ideas through a properly rigorous scientific examination. Would you like anything in your tea, by the way?”
“I've never had tea before,” replied the Finch, “so I don't know. And I don’t particularly think it matters whether Darwin’s ideas were properly examined or not. They made perfect sense, after all, and explained a great deal.”
“As did a great number of other hypotheses, most of which turned out to be elegant, clever, and completely and utterly untrue. I don’t know how much human contact you’ve had on that backwater island of yours—”
“I’ll thank you not to insult my home,” snapped the Finch, ruffling her feathers irritably. “I’ve certainly taken more part in the evolutionary process than you, sitting around in your great stinking zoo all day with the rest of the baboons.”
“As I was saying,” continued the Monkey, ignoring the jibe, “you probably aren’t familiar with the human scientific method. It has four steps: to observe unexplained phenomena, to come up with a hypothesis to explain them, to perform experiments to confirm the hypothesis, and to submit the results to other scientists for independent verification. The hypothesis should be testable—it’s not much use if it can’t be proved or disproved, after all—and falsifiable, that is to say it should allow itself to be discredited or modified by further discoveries. Ideally, it should also have some degree of elegance. And I’ll thank you to remember that I’m a gibbon, not a baboon,” he added as an afterthought.
“So what’s unscientific about Darwin, might I ask? He saw unexplained phenomena, he explained them elegantly, and I’m to understand that his explanation was later verified by genetics and the fossil record.”
“Yes, but he didn’t actually test his hypothesis, did he? That’s the most important step, and he didn’t do it. He left it to later scientists who did it for him. Before genetics and the fossil record, Darwin was just another theorizer who just so happened to be right.”
“Which, in my humble opinion, points out more a flaw in the scientific method than in Darwin’s work. With evidence as compelling as his, did he truly need later experiments to be convincing?”
“Only a glorified pigeon like yourself would consider that a flaw in the scientific method, not Darwin’s work.”
“You said falsifiability was an important factor in a theory’s viability, according to the scientific method,” said the Finch in the syrupy sweet tone of one turning her opponent’s words back against him. “Shouldn’t that mean that the method itself should be disprovable if it is to be valid, by its own standards? And dear, I’m a warbler finch, not a pigeon of any variety, glorified or not.”
“Well, according to Darwin, whom you seem to love so much, you and all your fellow finches really are nothing more than glorified pigeons, just as man for all his scientific method is nothing more than a glorified form of, well, me.”
“Cousins, actually. Descended from a common ancestor, not from each other. But don’t change the subject so. I still don’t see how Darwin was being unscientific.”

(...continued in next comment because of the damn character limits.)

“Well, for another thing, in several areas of his theory Darwin used his work as a cultural soapbox, and the parts where he did so he turned out to be plainly wrong. It was sexual selection, mostly, as well as a few ideas from Lamark—I should think it queer indeed if by sitting down for tea too often I chafed away my tail, or if having thus rid myself of it I fathered bare-bottomed children; and yet he predicted just that.”
“Falsifiability, my dear, falsifiability. Darwin knew when he published his theory that many parts of it were pure speculation, and that most of them would be proved false when more facts were available. I think that like any scientist, he would be happy to see the false views debunked (Darwin 243-4). He would be frankly astonished to realized how much has survived intact into the present day.”
“And yet, my dear Finch, the fact remains that he never tested his theory of evolution, and the predictions he made—about what archaeology might find next, about the future of human moral evolution—had a disturbing tendency to turn out false.”
“Well, I’d like to see you come up with a way to test evolution with the resources Darwin had available to him. It’s not like relativity, you know; you can’t come up with equations and test them out in a lab and declare the theory is sound when everything adds up. Darwin didn’t even consider that evolution through natural selection can occur rapidly in response to a drastic change in the environment; he thought that all or most evolution took place on a timeline too vast for man to see changes happening at all.”
“What he had available to him is beside the point. The speculations that have since been disproved weren’t merely thought experiments carried in the wrong direction; they were instances of Darwin allowing social conventions to infect his hypothesis, cloaking bigotry under the mantle of objective science. His racism, his sexism, his classism, all were defended as being part of evolution.”
“And the beauty of the scientific community is that those parts were discredited and eliminated from the theory of evolution as a whole, while the parts that were soundly reasoned and researched remained intact.”
“So you admit that Darwin’s work wasn’t perfect?”
“I never claimed his work was perfect, only that in general he was right, no matter what arbitrary methods his work might not have conformed to.”
“The scientific method isn’t arbitrary,” said the Monkey, bristling.
“No, I suppose it’s not,” the Finch conceded, “but nor is it absolute. You can hardly expect Darwin to have abided by a procedure that didn’t exist in his time, after all.”
"But he didn't perform any experiments--"
"The experiments and verification eventually happened, though, didn't they? Are they any less valid if they weren't performed by their creator, or is the theory itself less valid because its creator didn't follow your modern procedures?"
"No, I suppose not."
"Very good. Oh, look at the hour," said the Finch suddenly, "I must be off."
"But you've barely drunk any of your tea!"
" I'm afraid it doesn't agree with me. Give a few warbler finches a generation or two with only tea as substinence and perhaps we'll evolve a liking for it, but until then I can't abide it. Good day, Mr. Monkey."
"Good day."

You're my hero. O_O

That, no matter what format, was actually a really good paper! I feel very humbled by it, as a matter of fact. I'm in a scholarship program for my supposed writing abilities, yet when I read this, my writing seems elementary.

Very impressive.
-Tix

Really? I happen to think it's an organizational nightmare that has very little to say and takes a long time in saying it, but whatever floats yer boat.

Oh lord. That's wonderful! It totally showed that you clearly really know the material, isn't that all that should matter? (Well grammer and spelling to ofcourse...)

I swear I am not making this shit up.

And for this I love you like WOAH.

*cracks up* I think that is brilliant. Don't forget to tell us what happens with it! I hope your professor is at least amused and gives you a 2.5 on it (or whatever silly grading scale your school may have)

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So going to fail this paper XD

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