Walk like an echinosaur

Intelligent Design

I’m not one to mock the beliefs of others. Well, okay, I plainly am, but sometimes people’s beliefs mock themselves, and the anonymous proponent of the Reverse Theory (which I came across while working as a messageboard moderator at the BBC) is one such. An unusual take on Biblical inerrancy combined with some evolution-bashing for extra points, the Theory (for so I shall charitably refer to it) runs thus:

Thousands of years ago, when dinosaurs and Egyptians roamed the earth [don’t ask], all the limestone was floppy. This is obvious because limestone, as any fule kno, is made of sea creatures, and sea creatures are nothing if not wet. Clearly limestone is dry, therefore at some intermediate point in its history, it was floppy. [At this point we know we are wriggling in the grasp of a rhetorical genius.] Further evidence for this floppiness is, um, evident from the existence of the pyramids at Giza – for how, after all, could mere Egyptians be expected to construct such edifices from something hard? It is to laugh.

One imagines teams of dedicated limestone-twangers, carefully selected for their skill at flicking jelly at their classmates in Egyptian kindergarten, lining up the latest block in some bizarre crustacean siege engine, ready to be flipped into place with millimetre precision. Or maybe vast pharaonic refrigerators were used, with runny limestone being poured into a carefully greased pyramid mould and stored on the bottom shelf next to some bendy celery and some beef jerky. It’d explain the mummies and jars of organs, assuming the ancient Egyptians took my approach to refrigerator hygiene (i.e. operating on the assumption that eventually, anything that’s going off will eventually putrefy and drip out the bottom, obviating the need for removal).

Anyway, I digress. The dinosaurs, when not maurauding and causing havoc amongst the jelly artificers, survived on a diet of the floppy limestone, which of course in its transitional stage was still fishy and nutritious. And thus a bizarre equilibrium was reached, with the dinosaurs only taking the occasional nibble from Cheops’ tomb, and the Egyptians trying not to get stuck in the dinosaurs’ teeth.

But then disaster! Baked continually in the barbaric pre-Christian sunlight, the limestone hardened! The Egyptians (having invested so much effort in the preparation of their tasty, pointy chilled snacks) became so disheartened that they allowed themselves to be outwitted by a hydrophobe with a big beard, showing such lamentable culinary invention that they failed to realise the possibilities presented by an endless supply of frogs and locusts. For the dinosaurs, meanwhile, with their useless forearms, the hardening of the limestone was a catastrophic event from which they never recovered. Unable to harvest their favourite foodstuff, they died out, thus conclusively proving that God created the Earth in 6 days, and apes descended from man.

Wait, what?

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