He is merely typical of the occasional drop-in who thinks that he (it's usually a he) will school everyone here, lecturing us all with the blunt force of his ego.

But, Surprise! Glenn's regular readers & commenters are a very diverse group, who seldom agree with one another, much less with a drop-in exhibiting trollish behavior, but still cooperate and share information with one another, and-- to his great chagrin-- the arrogant visitor.

Earlier Kitt mentioned the sense of camaraderie in these threads. It's still here, but it has become very heavily punctuated. And, as a result, some of the once- indispensable regulars comment less often, if at all.

If one accepts the notion of a "salon" (and one could reasonably expect that as a minimum on this site), it's a perverse interpretation of hospitality that encourages one to attack even before scoping out the landscape.

...but, since everyone's throwing the names of their own favorite evolutionary theorists (and their books) into the pot, I'd like to add one, too. This thread is probably dead, but just for the sake of posterity...

Elaine Morgan's The Descent of Woman was published in 1972, but I don't think it's ever received due attention.

From the online excerpt:

http://www.amazon.com/Descent-Woman-Elaine-Morgan/dp/0285627007/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199374384&sr=8-1

The longer I went on reading his own books about himself, the more I longed to find a volume that would begin: ‘When the first ancestor of the human race descended from the trees, she had not yet developed the mighty brain that was to distinguish her so sharply from all other species…

Of course, she was no more the first ancestor than hew was—but she was no less the first ancestor, either. She was there all along, contributing half the genes to each succeeding generation. Most of the books forget about her for most of the time. They drag her onstage rather suddenly for the obligatory chapter on Sex and Reproduction, and then say: ‘All right, love, you can go now,’ while they get on with the real meaty stuff about the Mighty Hunter with his lovely new weapons and his lovely new straight legs racing across the Pleistocene plains. Any modifications in her morphology are taken to be imitations of the Hunter’s evolution, or else designed solely for his delectation. [emphasis added]

The book is an amusing read if nothing else, if only for the intellectual gymnastics that Morgan's "Tarzanists" put themselves through trying to explain such evolutionary developments as the hymen.

One can hardly blame the author for having such a romantic view of parenthood, when our culture is completely saturated with images that romanticize babies and parenting. Especially mothering.

I don't know about the Angelina adoption syndrome, but it does seem that celebrities are having babies left and right, and that there is something of an "accessory" aspect to the whole thing. Not that the arents feel that way about their children, but that the whole experience is spun that way in the media. That it's trendy to have a baby.

And yet, it's also romantic. The beautiful pictures of adorable babies in lovely clothes, bathed in soft sunlight, surrounded by picture-perfect parents. It's quite a seductive landscape. Add a few hormones, and some difficulty conceiving and/or carrying to term, and it's bound to create an intense longing.

Still, the author wrote with an awareness of her own tendency to romanticize. We really can't expect much more honesty than for someone to speak of their own blind spots, or filters, or biases. She did that. And-- she explained why she decided against adoption and tried IVF.

I'm always amazed when commenters here feel at liberty to judge someone else's human feelings. Not just their behavior, but their actual feelings.

ondelette!?

Not a chance.

If anything, ondelette is (and I was actually thinking about this yesterday when he was so moved by that interview of Turley by Olbermann) much more akin to the canary in a coal mine. (cyberspace being the coal mine)

ondelette is the sort of person to whom we should all pay attention, out of concern for him, and also for ourselves.

It is rare for him to display such heated passion in a discussion; more often, he shares his amazing font of knowlege, but there are times when no other reaction than such a rant is possible or even makes sense.

* * *

Glenn is wise not to censor his comment threads, because they do become so revealing. However, it might not be amiss to require some newbies to go back and read some of the archives before posting their own comments. After all, any one comment is really just a snapshot, not a paradigm, not anything generalizable, and yet, it happens all of the time, that someone will drop in and latch on to a comment or two and think they've got the entire background, dna, and biases of the commenter. The archives, however (except for the true anonymouses) reveal the more complicated truths about everyone in this disparate collection.

You would find many more interesting questions and answers about other evolutionary changes in Morgan's book. [The one you already mentioned makes it more difficult being female, at least in my opinion.]

For example, why would we lose body hair, and at the same time gain subcutaneous fat? Why do we walk upright when two legs are never faster than four? And why did we learn to speak when on the plains it might have put us at a disadvantage?