neologist wrote:Brilliant post, mega. And might I suggest you read the encyclopedia?
OK, perhaps we should all read through several encyclopedias and come back in a year or so to discuss this further.
There's nothing wrong with reading an encyclopedia or two. Recently I have been reading the Animal Life Encyclopedia. In a year or so I'll probably be finished with all 9,000+ pages. (If you were to remove the pictures it would be ~ 5,000 pages, about two and half times as long as the Bible.) I'll probably start reading a generalized encyclopedia sometime after I finish this, though I'll probably step back and work on smaller reading projects. :wink:
The "book" that I linked to will consume a bit of time reading but nowhere near as long as an encyclopedia, or even the Bible for that matter. The origin and development of life is among the most important questions one can ask about the Universe we live in. I think it is also safe to say that most of us have many years to seek the answer to that question. Fortunately, the "book" I linked to does not require that long to read. A person can set aside a few hours per week and get through that "book" in a reasonable amount of time.
You can also have your computer read it to you if you are short on time. Download and install the
Opera web browser, go into the preferences dialog, install the voice libraries, and then you can have your computer read text back to you by selected the text you want to read, right-clicking, and choosing the "speak" command from the right-click menu. If you are too busy cooking dinner to sit down and read, crank the volume up on your computer speakers and have the computer read it for you. This is what I did for Baron d'Holbach's "
The System of Nature."
I do not know why reading is looked down upon when it concerns such an important question. It is as if people expect several billions of years of organic evolution to be fully explained in a 10-minute YouTube video