davidvoegtle.net

Every once in a while you run across something online that makes you come up short. I’m sure someone else has made this insight somewhere else in the past, but it was the first time I had seen it:

God hates squid: From the comments, here’s something bizarre: creationists (at least the ones at Answers in Genesis) have defined life and it excludes squid! I have yet another reason to reject the Bible, in this case for disrespecting perfectly wonderful invertebrates.

Many scientists make the distinction that vertebrates have hemoglobin [ . . . ] and invertebrates [that] do not have red blood. As far as we’ve researched at this time, all vertebrates have hemoglobin and invertebrates do not, though there may be exceptions we are not aware of.

So, animals that contain hemoglobin (vertebrates) and therefore have red blood can be considered “living” and animals that contain hemocyanin, or other proteins (invertebrates) and therefore have blue (pink/violet or brown) blood can be considered “nonliving”. This is further supported by Scripture since the Hebrew for “blood” (dawm) is derived from the Hebrew for “red” (aw-dam). [ . . . ] So the logical conclusion can be made that a “living” creature is one that contains red blood.

[. . . ] What I’d really love to see now, though, is the rhetorical squirming they’d go through when it’s pointed out that human embryos do not develop red blood cells until about the 5^th week of development, and therefore the early embryo, by their own definition, is not living. Heh.

(Via Pharyngula.)

Well, isn’t that just fascinating? I think it is, but I’m generally considered easy to amuse. Bring it up at your next party and see if you can get the fireworks going.

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