Pet peeve of the day: anthropic fallacy. I read an article that had the following hook: “most of the time, in most places, Earth would kill a human!” As in, if we came from Mars and just randomly landed on Earth, we’d probably hit ocean or glacier or desert or lava or something intolerable. The article, which I won’t link to, had the poor sense of describing this as some sort of amazing thing. Look how amazing we are! We’re alive. We must be so damned awesome to survive this horrible planet, which would kill us all normally. And far be it for us to live on Venus or Saturn or some crap like that.

Well, welcome to the anthropic fallacy, which is fantastically simple. We’re only around to write trite articles online, or to write silly blogposts, because we evolved in a particular environmental niche. No wonder we can’t survive underwater; we didn’t evolve underwater. Somewhere, a dolphin is echolocating about how amazing it is that those humans can stroll around in the baking sun without just falling over. So saying that the Earth or anywhere else is suited or not suited for our existence is rather pointless. We could marvel at how inhospitable the center of a star is for human life, but I can’t think of anything more collectively self-centered.

It’s not divine that existence appears crafted around us; rather it’s divine that evolution has crafted us to marvel at all.

My solution to writer’s block? Don’t write! Hahahah. Seriously. Tomorrow I will be having one of this blog’s first guest bloggers, one Nick Minichino, resident culture expert. Since I am completely uncultured, this promises to be funny, entertaining, and enlightening (no pressure Nick).

If you are interested in submitting a guest post to this blog, just leave a comment on this post with your contact info, and I’ll get in touch. Stay tuned…

mcchen.net, bwish.com, and the author of this blog would like to re-state our support for Johannes Vermeer’s rights or whatnot.

I apologize for the relative decrease in the number and complexity of posts, but this has been a difficult week for focusing. I have some ideas, though, to pull us up from these lean waters.