Dorymyrmex insanus
Check
Neivamyrmex opacithorax,
Check
Camponotus vicinus,
Check
Formica lugubris
Which one’s that again?
Hairy wood ant
Oh yeah, check
Lasius brunneus,
Is that the bullet ant?
No, it’s the Brown tree ant,
Oh,
You should know this by now, and lastly the Woodlouse ant, Myrmecina graminicola
Check
How many species of ant is that then?
12,348
OK Great.
Dad do we have to take all those different ants?
Of course we do! Now hurry up, where are you going to put them?
I thought on level 3 up with the squirrels, frill-necked lizards, weasels, dung-beetles, panthers, hedgehogs, caterpillars, hamsters, beavers, saw-flies, skunks<<<.
Beavers? Hang on, are we talking about level 3 or level 2?
Three.
No, I told you, beavers can't go on level 3, they have to go on level 2 with the elephants, inchworms, koalas, fruit flies, sloths, possums, bison, polar bears, cockroaches, grasshoppers, gerbils, armadillos, goannas, red pandas
Dad, quick! My wife just got stung off a bee.
Hold on, Ham, we’re in the middle of something here. and Shem why are you putting ants anywhere near the frill necked lizards?, They eat ants so if one of them gets out of its box what’s going to happen?
Well alright I’ll put the ants up the other end with the moths, lemurs , badgers, ladybugs, pelicans, horses, mallards, chipmunks,?
Oh speaking of horses, Dad, I forgot to tell you, the male horse that was hosting the large redworm parasites died.
What? I thought that the female rabbit had the large redworms?
No no, the rabbit is hosting the pinworms and one of the ticks.
Pinworms AND ticks? Dad, it won’t survive that!
what can I do? The parasite species have to have a host< to live in
Well what should I do about…
Whatever, but where do you want me to put the ants<< or lizards and all that
I don’t care, just go get them on board will you? I've still got to organise between 9 and 10 thousand bird enclosures before tomorrow and now I’ve got no male horse
10,000 BIRDS?
Are you including bats with those birds?
Yeah, Of course
Jeez, dad, do we have to take them ALL? Can’t we just…..
YES! How else are there going to be 10,000 species of bird after this is over?
Ok then I'll go start loading in the ants
OK just make sure that all the males are fertile.
What?
Well most male ants are just infertile drones that never mate, and there’s no point in taking them is there.
Hey, don’t forget that Giant Anteater, Myrmecophaga tridactyla, eats up to 30,000 ants and termites per day,
Oh, that’s a good point, you’d better bring an extra (math) 22 million ants for the giant anteaters
…right,…..um…
What are you standing around for? Go! Now quick, what do you want?
that horse should I just add its carcass to the meat we’re bringing on the voyage?
We’re not taking any meat, we haven’t got room,
Well what are the carnivores going to eat?
I dunno!!….??? Plants and stuff?
What?! the carnivorous animals’ digestive tracts are too short to digest cellulose and plant matter,
Well, they’ll have to make do
Hey Dad, the male dromedary camel just stepped ….
They’ll starve to death! Wait, Japeth! Dad, I don't fancy floating around in a confined space for a year with pairs of starving hungry lions, wolverines, leopards, crocodiles, dwarf mongooses, polar bears, hyenas, foxes, alligators, vultures, hawks, monitor lizards, dunnarts, quolls, grizzly bears, weasels, pumas, tigers and Asiatic black bears that might get a bit peckish along the way.
I don’t want to hear it, I don’t have time for this, I’ve gotta get back to making the snake-muzzles so that no animals get poisoned by anything
What? What?
Well, for the king cobras, death adders, banded rock rattlesnakes, copperheads, black mambas, gaboon vipers, cottonmouths, burrowing asps, mole vipers, stiletto snakes, whipsnakes, tiger snakes, taipans, black desert cobras, pit vipers,
Jeez, Dad do we have to take them all?
What? Of course we do, how else are 600 species of venomous snakes going to exist after this flood if we don’t take a pair of each of them? And they have to all wear muzzles or one of them might bite some animal and that would be the extinction of that species, wouldn’t it?
Gee, when you put it like that, we don’t really have much of a margin of error, do we..
Oh, you finally figured that out, did you?! We have ZERO margin of error, Ham. Not a single animal is to die on this voyage. Why do you think I haven’t been able to get a decent night’s sleep for the past few years?
What are you doing here anyway? Weren’t you meant to be shearing the sheep to make them a little more compact?
Yeah I was in the middle of that when my wife got a bee sting, so I came here to tell you.
Oh, for fckkkk’s - - Do you think I give a damn about a bee-sting when I’m trying to organise a year in a wooden boat with 4000 species of termites on board? AND woodpeckers, AND beavers, and !?
DAD, …. dad think about it!! it means that the bee that stung her is going to die, isn’t it.
Oh NO. Well what species of bee was it?
I don’t know, how many are there?
Well let’s see, there’s Trigona minima, Apis mellifera, Osmia ribifloris, Megachile Pluto, Bombus pratorum, Bombus terrestris
Dad just give me a number, it’ll save time.
About 20,000.
20,000 pairs of bees, REALLY, do we have to take them all?
pfft YES! How else are there going to be 20,000 species of bee after the entire planet has been submerged for a year unless we take a pair of each of them?!?! What the hell is wrong with you people? Now go find out which bee species we need a new one of. And tell all the other bees to not sting things for the next year.
right
Dad, the camel just
….Just a quick question, Dad, female FLEAS drink 15 times their weight in blood every day, should they be getting that from just one animal or should we let them roam around getting it from whichever animals they want?
I don’t frigging care, just as long as it survives.
Right.
Dad, I’ve been trying to tell you, the male Dromedary camel just stepped on one of the snails.
NOOOOO!!!!!!! Which snail?
I dunno exactly, but I HAVE figured out it was either
What do you mean you don't know which one?
I don't know, it’s totally squashed and they're only half loaded.
Half loaded, I’m a 600 year old man responsible for seeing that the earth is populated with millions of species of animals after god insists on drowning all but a single boatload of the frigging things! Could you at least TRY to help me out a bit? No wonder I’m going to turn into a hopeless alcoholic when this is all over …
Bloody hell, just keep the camels away from the snails from now on.
In fact keep them away from anything else that they might accidentally step on, too. In fact, keep every small animal away from any animal that might step on it. . Night and day, with zero margin of error. Go!
Dad, can we use the area on level 1 between the chickens and buffalo as a kind of hospice for treating animals who are on the brink of starving to death or dying of disease?
What?.
Well, you are going to be providing veterinarian care for every single species of animal on the planet for the whole voyage, aren’t you?
Hmmm, I hadn’t actually considered that.
Well, every animal’s gonna have insufficient food and space for a year, it’s not,…impossible that a few of them might get sick and die
Oh no no no, no animal is allowed to die
, well that's what I mean, dad!.
Can I just butt in quickly, Where are we going to put the polar bears?
Wherever there’s room, I don’t care. We’re busy <<<<< trying to work out
We have to keep them away from the penguins obviously, but that’ll mean having TWO cold areas rather than just one.
What are you talking about?
Well, shouldn't we at least try to make a kind of cold area, <<<so the animals from cold environments….
It's a frigging ARK, Ham – made of wood! - not a frigging 5-star sight-seeing luxury liner for well-to-do arctic animals<<<<<
What, so you're gonna put penguins and fur seals next to desert scorpions, meerkats, and camels?
Listen, genius, we live in an age in which a frigging wheelbarrow is a piece of high tech equipment so how do you suggest we make a cold area,
Alright alright cancel that….
Wheelbarrow – that might help me get the sloths in. Frigging slow bastards, I don’t know how they got here from their native Central America.
Central what?
Anyway, dad I just need to clear this up, as well as being veterinarian to e very single species of animal, you’ve got to be doctor to US, coz you said WE’re each going to have to carry a few parasitic infections, in order to preserve them, too.
Yeah, So behave yourself or I’ll assign you to carry the crab lice.
You said I could have just the headlice
What? Did you organize the parasites already? Why did HE get the headlice? What did I get?? I’m not carrying the hookworms, am i? I don’t fancy spending a year on a boat with diarrhoea.
Japeth, we’ve all got to make certain sacrifices to save animals like the hookworms.
Awwwww?! it’s not fair, he was always the favorite son, friggin Shem, I think I’ll become the world’s first anti-semite after this is all over.
OK then, good. Now dad, Frogs.
What about them.
Well I was just about to load them all in,
All 4740 pairs at once, I hope?
yeah, of course, and I was thinking that maybe we don't need to take them at all because they like water, and I figured
FFS, Are you suggesting that because frogs like water, then they'll be happy to float around in a 29,000 foot-deep ocean for a year?
Well, what? 29thousand feet?
Besides, I’m still not exactly sure how god plans to make the oceans habitable for both freshwater and saltwater life anyway
OK then,, but do we have to take them all? 4,700 is a lot of species
How else are there going to be 4700 species of frogs later if we don’t take a pair of each?! Do the frigging math, man!!!
Did you really say 29,000 feet deep?
Dad!, the praying mantises just mated and the female bit the male’s head off .
NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!, I was afraid of that!!!
Why did it do that?
Well, that’s just what the females do,
I was going to make a helmet for him tomorrow morning, too!
Oh, shit, I just swatted a fly, this wasn’t one of ours, was it?
You’ll have to go and make sure that none of ours have escaped. Don’t do that again.
Frogs, dad!?
Screw the frogs, Where am I gonna get another male praying mantis!
Yeah, what should I do about that…
Just – dad What do frogs eat?
Insects.
Which ones?
I don't frigging know. Just bring enough insects to feed 9,480 frogs for a year.
And use you common sense: little frogs like Brachycephalus didactylus from Brazil and Eleutherodactylus iberia from Cuba are only about 10mm long so they won't need as much food as the 12 in Goliath frog, will they?
Where’s Cuba?
Geez, dad, Let’s just take one pair of frogs, Dad. That’ll be enough?
FUCKING SHUT UP HAM!!! Do you guys think that if we leave species behind to drown, they’ll just appear magically later? Get out of here both of you, haven’t you got work to do?!
Shem, you go and find a way to make sure that the mosquitoes don’t spread any infections within the boat for an entire year.
Well has mosquito netting been invented yet?
Are you kidding?
Ok but before I do, did you really say 29,000 feet deep?
YES!, at least. It's going to rain so much that water covers the top of the world's highest mountain which is that high,
how long is it going to rain for?
40 days, and 40 nights.
So hold on, let me work it out, then….it’s going to come down at the rate of 350 inches of rain per hour at every point on the planet non stop for 40 days! some of the water will come from within the ground, too.
but still, But there’s less than 480 million cubic miles of water on this planet anyway, dad including that which is in vapor form. You’re basically saying it’s suddenly going to more than triple?
Well maybe that mountain’s less than 29 thousand feet high at the moment, I dunno, perhaps it will suddenly grow afterwards.
Pause
…but while I”ve got you all here: new rule everyone, from now on, every species of each animal has to be loaded in at the same time. <<<it’s just too messy…
What? What?
Dad there are only 8 of us. How are we going to oversee the loading in of every species of, say, rodent, at one time. I mean think of how long it took Shem to load in just the cat species. It was a bit like herding atheists, the way they all went off in different directions,
Yeah I had Cheetahs, Leopards, African Golden Cats, , , Eurasian Lynxes, Ocelots, Jaguars, Andean Mtn Cats going one way, Chinese Desert Cats, Lions, Pampas Cats, Caracals, Cougars, Jungle Cats, and Snow Leopards going another way, while the Marbled Cats, Asian Golden Cats, Canadian Lynxes, Pallas Cats, Servals, Bobcats, Tigers, Rusty-Spotted Cats, and Sand Cats went yet another way! Ah, it was a little bit frustrating and rather time-consuming
Dad, do we have to take all those cats?
FRIGGIN YES How else are there going to be Cougars and Leopards if we only take bloody Tigers?!- - what,
I really am surrounded by utter morons.
Especially you, Japeth, with this bloody snail crisis of yours . If we don't find those missing snail species, AND replace the one the unicorn trod on Yahweh and I
It was the camel, Dad, not the unicorn
I DON”T GIVE A SHIT!
We don’t even have unicorns: they’re not real.
What do you mean we don’t have unicorns?
They're mythological. It’s a fictional animal dad, so we’re not taking any.
(sigh – “fictional animal……”)
Well listen, smarty pants? Well when someone sits down and writes about unicorns later in Deuteronomy 33, Job 39, Numbers chapters 22 and 24, Isaiah 34 and Psalms 22 29 and 92, are you going to call him a liar?
Go, and Get, some Frigging unicorns from somewhere. Actually no, Ham you go and get some.
Right. 2 or 14, dad?
What do you think, Have u ever seen an unclean unicorn?
Well have u ever seen a clean one?
GRRRRRRR
Why would we take 14?
We’re taking 14 of all the clean animals.
What, for food? That’s a very good idea, actually….
No, to slash their throats and burn their carcasses when we’re back on dry land.
Oh, yeah, of course. Are we taking seven pairs of cows?
Yeah, he loves the smell of burning dead cow. What kind of deity doesn’t?
Well, just make sure they’re near our one and only window, since they each fart 26 gallons of methane gas every day
Ham, speaking of gut-wrenchingly disgusting smelling things that will make this voyage like a year in an open sewer, I want you to work out how to manage and dispose of several million animals’ piss and shit for a year. OK? And while you do that,…..
Right, but hold on, I’ve already given this shit some thought and I wonder if perhaps that is going to more than simply a one-man-job.
Why? – how much poo are you expecting there to be?
Well, I consulted an expert source who thinks the figure is going to be somewhere around 12 U.S. tons of animal waste being produced daily.
12 tonnes a day! I think we’re going to need a bigger shovel.
Now Ham, …. where are you getting that 12 tonnes of poo figure from? It’s certainly a lot of shit, but it actually seems woefully inadequate
Answers in Genesis.com?
“Answers in Genesis.com”?
Yeah,
Gimme that… hold on, it says here they're basing that estimate on us taking only about 16,000 pairs of animals. Are these people frigging idiots? How do they expect there to be millions and millions of variant species on the planet any time soon after this is all over?
Dad this is what we’ve been trying to tell you, it’s MICROEVOLUTION.
Hmmm, hold on, that sounds to me like some kind of theory or something.
No no, it’s only a theory if it involves speciation. Otherwise it's a fact.
Basically it’s animals undergoing minor mutations across generations that eventually compound in such a way as to give rise to a huge variety of forms within kinds.
Well within what kind of time frame, coz I don’t remember god saying he was happy to wait for tens of millions of years for animals species to gradually develop after this flood,
Millions?
Millions of years?r
Well how long?!
Well, I’d say,… I dunno, maybe 5 generations?
Maybe ten?
15 at the most
Are you frikkin kidding me? You’re saying we take one pair of one type of bear, and within a few generations we’d have grizzly, polar, brown, giant, Tibetan blue, spectacled, sun, Asiatic black, and panda?
Well they’re all bears, dad, it wouldn’t take all that long, would it.
“It wouldn’t take that long” WHAT THE FUCK WOULD YOU KNOW?! Think about it!!
under ordinary circumstances, mutation due to duplication errors during meiosis or DNA replication is going to be extremely slow, isn’t it, in the order of 1 error per 10-100 million bases, unless it was sped up by some sort of radiation, or viruses, mutagenic chemicals, or the disfunction of some enzyme that ordinarily helps catalyze the polymerization of deoxyribonucleotides into a DNA strand or something. And it’s not as if God’s going to come along and inflict mutagenic chemicals onto these animals, nor expose the planet to excessive ultraviolet radiation in the hope that he can fast-track the transition from one pair of some rodent all the way to beavers, rabbits, ferrets, long-eared spiny-tailed squirrels, white-faced tree-rats, red-bellied brucies, Wyoming pocket gophers, silver mountain voles, Peruvian vesper mice, woodchucks, Siberian chipmunks and orange-spined hairy dwarf porcupines, within a few hundred years– and then suddenly step in and slow the process back down to a normal rate of change once he’s got all the animals he wants- especially if there isn’t adequate time for natural selective pressures to help sculpt each form of animal to adapt them for survival in certain eco-systems and geographical environments.
And anyway, think of the population bottleneck, guys. Even taking two of every single animal means that every species on the planet is going to be left with practically no genetic variability to allow for adaptability and disease immunity, the offspring are going to be all inbred and the infant mortality rate will be so bad that we’ll be lucky to even get to the 5th generation
So if you’re suggesting reducing the animal population to pairs of only 12,000 KINDs, whatever that is, how the hell is there going to be ANY decent mutation for natural selection to act upon at all even IF it had time to,…
It simply will not work! There’s no way in the world that the planet will be promptly populated with the range and breadth of variant species that god intends for his planet after this flood, unless we take a breeding pair of every single species, and there is just no other way.
Dad I’m going to tell you straight up: I don’t like the facts you just presented, so I’m going to completely ignore them and go on believing that taking just one breeding pair of each kind will be enough ..
Yeah me too.
Yeah, dad. It’s my choice what I believe, and that science of yours is getting in the way.
OK then, I’m with you guys.
What?
I don’t have a choice, I’ve just got to go along with what you’re saying…….
But dad, all those facts that you just explained,…
SO? You guys understood what I said but YOU ignored it, right?
Completely. totally
Well I’ve got to do the same. Both of our plans are bat-shit crazy, but if I can’t convince myself to believe this story SOMEhow, then I might start to question other aspects of my belief in Yahweh, and I don’t wanna start on the slippery slope towards a meaningless worthless atheistic life of only believing things that make sense.
Dad did you ever consider that what we’re doing here is total bullshit historically but actually a meaningful metaphor for something?
but what could it possibly be a metaphor of?
Perhaps for demonstrating how Yahweh is a mass-murdering psychopathic death-obsessed cry-baby deity who kills everything He possibly can when He doesn’t get his own way? Yeah, I see your point.
Yeah, and I’m not going to admit that to myself, either, so from now on, I choose to believe that Yahweh is going to just - magic every problem away, and that way I can go on believing it So what if it reads exactly like an ancient cultural fairy-tale hey?
Yeah, this is a story that deals with the creator of the universe! Since when did these kinds of stories have to make a fucking ounce of sense?!
<THUNDER and rain>
And just in the nick of time, too!!
SO!!!!
quick then, before I have a crisis of faith, Start unloading all but two of the cats, you take out all but two of the birds, two rodents, and two marsupials, you take out all but two of the dinosaurs,
We hadn’t gotten to loading them in yet dad, remember? We didn’t have any friggin room.
Well good, that saves us time. We’re only going to need one kind of dog, which means we can probably take out wolves and hyenas and all that, camels and donkeys are pretty much like horses so take them out, - no, take out the horses and leave the donkeys coz they’re smaller, they can have horse and camel babies instead,
get rid of all the beetles except two, there’s 350,000 species we don’t need!!!
Check
Neivamyrmex opacithorax,
Check
Camponotus vicinus,
Check
Formica lugubris
Which one’s that again?
Hairy wood ant
Oh yeah, check
Lasius brunneus,
Is that the bullet ant?
No, it’s the Brown tree ant,
Oh,
You should know this by now, and lastly the Woodlouse ant, Myrmecina graminicola
Check
How many species of ant is that then?
12,348
OK Great.
Dad do we have to take all those different ants?
Of course we do! Now hurry up, where are you going to put them?
I thought on level 3 up with the squirrels, frill-necked lizards, weasels, dung-beetles, panthers, hedgehogs, caterpillars, hamsters, beavers, saw-flies, skunks<<<.
Beavers? Hang on, are we talking about level 3 or level 2?
Three.
No, I told you, beavers can't go on level 3, they have to go on level 2 with the elephants, inchworms, koalas, fruit flies, sloths, possums, bison, polar bears, cockroaches, grasshoppers, gerbils, armadillos, goannas, red pandas
Dad, quick! My wife just got stung off a bee.
Hold on, Ham, we’re in the middle of something here. and Shem why are you putting ants anywhere near the frill necked lizards?, They eat ants so if one of them gets out of its box what’s going to happen?
Well alright I’ll put the ants up the other end with the moths, lemurs , badgers, ladybugs, pelicans, horses, mallards, chipmunks,?
Oh speaking of horses, Dad, I forgot to tell you, the male horse that was hosting the large redworm parasites died.
What? I thought that the female rabbit had the large redworms?
No no, the rabbit is hosting the pinworms and one of the ticks.
Pinworms AND ticks? Dad, it won’t survive that!
what can I do? The parasite species have to have a host< to live in
Well what should I do about…
Whatever, but where do you want me to put the ants<< or lizards and all that
I don’t care, just go get them on board will you? I've still got to organise between 9 and 10 thousand bird enclosures before tomorrow and now I’ve got no male horse
10,000 BIRDS?
Are you including bats with those birds?
Yeah, Of course
Jeez, dad, do we have to take them ALL? Can’t we just…..
YES! How else are there going to be 10,000 species of bird after this is over?
Ok then I'll go start loading in the ants
OK just make sure that all the males are fertile.
What?
Well most male ants are just infertile drones that never mate, and there’s no point in taking them is there.
Hey, don’t forget that Giant Anteater, Myrmecophaga tridactyla, eats up to 30,000 ants and termites per day,
Oh, that’s a good point, you’d better bring an extra (math) 22 million ants for the giant anteaters
…right,…..um…
What are you standing around for? Go! Now quick, what do you want?
that horse should I just add its carcass to the meat we’re bringing on the voyage?
We’re not taking any meat, we haven’t got room,
Well what are the carnivores going to eat?
I dunno!!….??? Plants and stuff?
What?! the carnivorous animals’ digestive tracts are too short to digest cellulose and plant matter,
Well, they’ll have to make do
Hey Dad, the male dromedary camel just stepped ….
They’ll starve to death! Wait, Japeth! Dad, I don't fancy floating around in a confined space for a year with pairs of starving hungry lions, wolverines, leopards, crocodiles, dwarf mongooses, polar bears, hyenas, foxes, alligators, vultures, hawks, monitor lizards, dunnarts, quolls, grizzly bears, weasels, pumas, tigers and Asiatic black bears that might get a bit peckish along the way.
I don’t want to hear it, I don’t have time for this, I’ve gotta get back to making the snake-muzzles so that no animals get poisoned by anything
What? What?
Well, for the king cobras, death adders, banded rock rattlesnakes, copperheads, black mambas, gaboon vipers, cottonmouths, burrowing asps, mole vipers, stiletto snakes, whipsnakes, tiger snakes, taipans, black desert cobras, pit vipers,
Jeez, Dad do we have to take them all?
What? Of course we do, how else are 600 species of venomous snakes going to exist after this flood if we don’t take a pair of each of them? And they have to all wear muzzles or one of them might bite some animal and that would be the extinction of that species, wouldn’t it?
Gee, when you put it like that, we don’t really have much of a margin of error, do we..
Oh, you finally figured that out, did you?! We have ZERO margin of error, Ham. Not a single animal is to die on this voyage. Why do you think I haven’t been able to get a decent night’s sleep for the past few years?
What are you doing here anyway? Weren’t you meant to be shearing the sheep to make them a little more compact?
Yeah I was in the middle of that when my wife got a bee sting, so I came here to tell you.
Oh, for fckkkk’s - - Do you think I give a damn about a bee-sting when I’m trying to organise a year in a wooden boat with 4000 species of termites on board? AND woodpeckers, AND beavers, and !?
DAD, …. dad think about it!! it means that the bee that stung her is going to die, isn’t it.
Oh NO. Well what species of bee was it?
I don’t know, how many are there?
Well let’s see, there’s Trigona minima, Apis mellifera, Osmia ribifloris, Megachile Pluto, Bombus pratorum, Bombus terrestris
Dad just give me a number, it’ll save time.
About 20,000.
20,000 pairs of bees, REALLY, do we have to take them all?
pfft YES! How else are there going to be 20,000 species of bee after the entire planet has been submerged for a year unless we take a pair of each of them?!?! What the hell is wrong with you people? Now go find out which bee species we need a new one of. And tell all the other bees to not sting things for the next year.
right
Dad, the camel just
….Just a quick question, Dad, female FLEAS drink 15 times their weight in blood every day, should they be getting that from just one animal or should we let them roam around getting it from whichever animals they want?
I don’t frigging care, just as long as it survives.
Right.
Dad, I’ve been trying to tell you, the male Dromedary camel just stepped on one of the snails.
NOOOOO!!!!!!! Which snail?
I dunno exactly, but I HAVE figured out it was either
What do you mean you don't know which one?
I don't know, it’s totally squashed and they're only half loaded.
Half loaded, I’m a 600 year old man responsible for seeing that the earth is populated with millions of species of animals after god insists on drowning all but a single boatload of the frigging things! Could you at least TRY to help me out a bit? No wonder I’m going to turn into a hopeless alcoholic when this is all over …
Bloody hell, just keep the camels away from the snails from now on.
In fact keep them away from anything else that they might accidentally step on, too. In fact, keep every small animal away from any animal that might step on it. . Night and day, with zero margin of error. Go!
Dad, can we use the area on level 1 between the chickens and buffalo as a kind of hospice for treating animals who are on the brink of starving to death or dying of disease?
What?.
Well, you are going to be providing veterinarian care for every single species of animal on the planet for the whole voyage, aren’t you?
Hmmm, I hadn’t actually considered that.
Well, every animal’s gonna have insufficient food and space for a year, it’s not,…impossible that a few of them might get sick and die
Oh no no no, no animal is allowed to die
, well that's what I mean, dad!.
Can I just butt in quickly, Where are we going to put the polar bears?
Wherever there’s room, I don’t care. We’re busy <<<<< trying to work out
We have to keep them away from the penguins obviously, but that’ll mean having TWO cold areas rather than just one.
What are you talking about?
Well, shouldn't we at least try to make a kind of cold area, <<<so the animals from cold environments….
It's a frigging ARK, Ham – made of wood! - not a frigging 5-star sight-seeing luxury liner for well-to-do arctic animals<<<<<
What, so you're gonna put penguins and fur seals next to desert scorpions, meerkats, and camels?
Listen, genius, we live in an age in which a frigging wheelbarrow is a piece of high tech equipment so how do you suggest we make a cold area,
Alright alright cancel that….
Wheelbarrow – that might help me get the sloths in. Frigging slow bastards, I don’t know how they got here from their native Central America.
Central what?
Anyway, dad I just need to clear this up, as well as being veterinarian to e very single species of animal, you’ve got to be doctor to US, coz you said WE’re each going to have to carry a few parasitic infections, in order to preserve them, too.
Yeah, So behave yourself or I’ll assign you to carry the crab lice.
You said I could have just the headlice
What? Did you organize the parasites already? Why did HE get the headlice? What did I get?? I’m not carrying the hookworms, am i? I don’t fancy spending a year on a boat with diarrhoea.
Japeth, we’ve all got to make certain sacrifices to save animals like the hookworms.
Awwwww?! it’s not fair, he was always the favorite son, friggin Shem, I think I’ll become the world’s first anti-semite after this is all over.
OK then, good. Now dad, Frogs.
What about them.
Well I was just about to load them all in,
All 4740 pairs at once, I hope?
yeah, of course, and I was thinking that maybe we don't need to take them at all because they like water, and I figured
FFS, Are you suggesting that because frogs like water, then they'll be happy to float around in a 29,000 foot-deep ocean for a year?
Well, what? 29thousand feet?
Besides, I’m still not exactly sure how god plans to make the oceans habitable for both freshwater and saltwater life anyway
OK then,, but do we have to take them all? 4,700 is a lot of species
How else are there going to be 4700 species of frogs later if we don’t take a pair of each?! Do the frigging math, man!!!
Did you really say 29,000 feet deep?
Dad!, the praying mantises just mated and the female bit the male’s head off .
NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!, I was afraid of that!!!
Why did it do that?
Well, that’s just what the females do,
I was going to make a helmet for him tomorrow morning, too!
Oh, shit, I just swatted a fly, this wasn’t one of ours, was it?
You’ll have to go and make sure that none of ours have escaped. Don’t do that again.
Frogs, dad!?
Screw the frogs, Where am I gonna get another male praying mantis!
Yeah, what should I do about that…
Just – dad What do frogs eat?
Insects.
Which ones?
I don't frigging know. Just bring enough insects to feed 9,480 frogs for a year.
And use you common sense: little frogs like Brachycephalus didactylus from Brazil and Eleutherodactylus iberia from Cuba are only about 10mm long so they won't need as much food as the 12 in Goliath frog, will they?
Where’s Cuba?
Geez, dad, Let’s just take one pair of frogs, Dad. That’ll be enough?
FUCKING SHUT UP HAM!!! Do you guys think that if we leave species behind to drown, they’ll just appear magically later? Get out of here both of you, haven’t you got work to do?!
Shem, you go and find a way to make sure that the mosquitoes don’t spread any infections within the boat for an entire year.
Well has mosquito netting been invented yet?
Are you kidding?
Ok but before I do, did you really say 29,000 feet deep?
YES!, at least. It's going to rain so much that water covers the top of the world's highest mountain which is that high,
how long is it going to rain for?
40 days, and 40 nights.
So hold on, let me work it out, then….it’s going to come down at the rate of 350 inches of rain per hour at every point on the planet non stop for 40 days! some of the water will come from within the ground, too.
but still, But there’s less than 480 million cubic miles of water on this planet anyway, dad including that which is in vapor form. You’re basically saying it’s suddenly going to more than triple?
Well maybe that mountain’s less than 29 thousand feet high at the moment, I dunno, perhaps it will suddenly grow afterwards.
Pause
…but while I”ve got you all here: new rule everyone, from now on, every species of each animal has to be loaded in at the same time. <<<it’s just too messy…
What? What?
Dad there are only 8 of us. How are we going to oversee the loading in of every species of, say, rodent, at one time. I mean think of how long it took Shem to load in just the cat species. It was a bit like herding atheists, the way they all went off in different directions,
Yeah I had Cheetahs, Leopards, African Golden Cats, , , Eurasian Lynxes, Ocelots, Jaguars, Andean Mtn Cats going one way, Chinese Desert Cats, Lions, Pampas Cats, Caracals, Cougars, Jungle Cats, and Snow Leopards going another way, while the Marbled Cats, Asian Golden Cats, Canadian Lynxes, Pallas Cats, Servals, Bobcats, Tigers, Rusty-Spotted Cats, and Sand Cats went yet another way! Ah, it was a little bit frustrating and rather time-consuming
Dad, do we have to take all those cats?
FRIGGIN YES How else are there going to be Cougars and Leopards if we only take bloody Tigers?!- - what,
I really am surrounded by utter morons.
Especially you, Japeth, with this bloody snail crisis of yours . If we don't find those missing snail species, AND replace the one the unicorn trod on Yahweh and I
It was the camel, Dad, not the unicorn
I DON”T GIVE A SHIT!
We don’t even have unicorns: they’re not real.
What do you mean we don’t have unicorns?
They're mythological. It’s a fictional animal dad, so we’re not taking any.
(sigh – “fictional animal……”)
Well listen, smarty pants? Well when someone sits down and writes about unicorns later in Deuteronomy 33, Job 39, Numbers chapters 22 and 24, Isaiah 34 and Psalms 22 29 and 92, are you going to call him a liar?
Go, and Get, some Frigging unicorns from somewhere. Actually no, Ham you go and get some.
Right. 2 or 14, dad?
What do you think, Have u ever seen an unclean unicorn?
Well have u ever seen a clean one?
GRRRRRRR
Why would we take 14?
We’re taking 14 of all the clean animals.
What, for food? That’s a very good idea, actually….
No, to slash their throats and burn their carcasses when we’re back on dry land.
Oh, yeah, of course. Are we taking seven pairs of cows?
Yeah, he loves the smell of burning dead cow. What kind of deity doesn’t?
Well, just make sure they’re near our one and only window, since they each fart 26 gallons of methane gas every day
Ham, speaking of gut-wrenchingly disgusting smelling things that will make this voyage like a year in an open sewer, I want you to work out how to manage and dispose of several million animals’ piss and shit for a year. OK? And while you do that,…..
Right, but hold on, I’ve already given this shit some thought and I wonder if perhaps that is going to more than simply a one-man-job.
Why? – how much poo are you expecting there to be?
Well, I consulted an expert source who thinks the figure is going to be somewhere around 12 U.S. tons of animal waste being produced daily.
12 tonnes a day! I think we’re going to need a bigger shovel.
Now Ham, …. where are you getting that 12 tonnes of poo figure from? It’s certainly a lot of shit, but it actually seems woefully inadequate
Answers in Genesis.com?
“Answers in Genesis.com”?
Yeah,
Gimme that… hold on, it says here they're basing that estimate on us taking only about 16,000 pairs of animals. Are these people frigging idiots? How do they expect there to be millions and millions of variant species on the planet any time soon after this is all over?
Dad this is what we’ve been trying to tell you, it’s MICROEVOLUTION.
Hmmm, hold on, that sounds to me like some kind of theory or something.
No no, it’s only a theory if it involves speciation. Otherwise it's a fact.
Basically it’s animals undergoing minor mutations across generations that eventually compound in such a way as to give rise to a huge variety of forms within kinds.
Well within what kind of time frame, coz I don’t remember god saying he was happy to wait for tens of millions of years for animals species to gradually develop after this flood,
Millions?
Millions of years?r
Well how long?!
Well, I’d say,… I dunno, maybe 5 generations?
Maybe ten?
15 at the most
Are you frikkin kidding me? You’re saying we take one pair of one type of bear, and within a few generations we’d have grizzly, polar, brown, giant, Tibetan blue, spectacled, sun, Asiatic black, and panda?
Well they’re all bears, dad, it wouldn’t take all that long, would it.
“It wouldn’t take that long” WHAT THE FUCK WOULD YOU KNOW?! Think about it!!
under ordinary circumstances, mutation due to duplication errors during meiosis or DNA replication is going to be extremely slow, isn’t it, in the order of 1 error per 10-100 million bases, unless it was sped up by some sort of radiation, or viruses, mutagenic chemicals, or the disfunction of some enzyme that ordinarily helps catalyze the polymerization of deoxyribonucleotides into a DNA strand or something. And it’s not as if God’s going to come along and inflict mutagenic chemicals onto these animals, nor expose the planet to excessive ultraviolet radiation in the hope that he can fast-track the transition from one pair of some rodent all the way to beavers, rabbits, ferrets, long-eared spiny-tailed squirrels, white-faced tree-rats, red-bellied brucies, Wyoming pocket gophers, silver mountain voles, Peruvian vesper mice, woodchucks, Siberian chipmunks and orange-spined hairy dwarf porcupines, within a few hundred years– and then suddenly step in and slow the process back down to a normal rate of change once he’s got all the animals he wants- especially if there isn’t adequate time for natural selective pressures to help sculpt each form of animal to adapt them for survival in certain eco-systems and geographical environments.
And anyway, think of the population bottleneck, guys. Even taking two of every single animal means that every species on the planet is going to be left with practically no genetic variability to allow for adaptability and disease immunity, the offspring are going to be all inbred and the infant mortality rate will be so bad that we’ll be lucky to even get to the 5th generation
So if you’re suggesting reducing the animal population to pairs of only 12,000 KINDs, whatever that is, how the hell is there going to be ANY decent mutation for natural selection to act upon at all even IF it had time to,…
It simply will not work! There’s no way in the world that the planet will be promptly populated with the range and breadth of variant species that god intends for his planet after this flood, unless we take a breeding pair of every single species, and there is just no other way.
Dad I’m going to tell you straight up: I don’t like the facts you just presented, so I’m going to completely ignore them and go on believing that taking just one breeding pair of each kind will be enough ..
Yeah me too.
Yeah, dad. It’s my choice what I believe, and that science of yours is getting in the way.
OK then, I’m with you guys.
What?
I don’t have a choice, I’ve just got to go along with what you’re saying…….
But dad, all those facts that you just explained,…
SO? You guys understood what I said but YOU ignored it, right?
Completely. totally
Well I’ve got to do the same. Both of our plans are bat-shit crazy, but if I can’t convince myself to believe this story SOMEhow, then I might start to question other aspects of my belief in Yahweh, and I don’t wanna start on the slippery slope towards a meaningless worthless atheistic life of only believing things that make sense.
Dad did you ever consider that what we’re doing here is total bullshit historically but actually a meaningful metaphor for something?
but what could it possibly be a metaphor of?
Perhaps for demonstrating how Yahweh is a mass-murdering psychopathic death-obsessed cry-baby deity who kills everything He possibly can when He doesn’t get his own way? Yeah, I see your point.
Yeah, and I’m not going to admit that to myself, either, so from now on, I choose to believe that Yahweh is going to just - magic every problem away, and that way I can go on believing it So what if it reads exactly like an ancient cultural fairy-tale hey?
Yeah, this is a story that deals with the creator of the universe! Since when did these kinds of stories have to make a fucking ounce of sense?!
<THUNDER and rain>
And just in the nick of time, too!!
SO!!!!
quick then, before I have a crisis of faith, Start unloading all but two of the cats, you take out all but two of the birds, two rodents, and two marsupials, you take out all but two of the dinosaurs,
We hadn’t gotten to loading them in yet dad, remember? We didn’t have any friggin room.
Well good, that saves us time. We’re only going to need one kind of dog, which means we can probably take out wolves and hyenas and all that, camels and donkeys are pretty much like horses so take them out, - no, take out the horses and leave the donkeys coz they’re smaller, they can have horse and camel babies instead,
get rid of all the beetles except two, there’s 350,000 species we don’t need!!!