Thursday, November 21, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Larry Niven

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Here is where the predictions failed: We didn't take Cargo Cult mentality into account: "if somebody has something I don't, he must have stolen it."
We didn't understand how good we could get at communication — when you have something that someone else doesn't, the whole damn planet knows it.

 
Larry Niven

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I would like evolution to join the roster of other discredited religions, like the Cargo Cult of the South Pacific. Practitioners of Cargo Cult believed that manufactured products were created by ancestral spirits, and if they imitated what they had seen the white man do, they could cause airplanes to appear out of the sky, bringing valuable cargo like radios and TVs. So they constructed “airport towers” out of bamboo and “headphones” out of coconuts and waited for the airplanes to come with the cargo. It may sound silly, but in defense of the Cargo Cult, they did not wait as long for evidence supporting their theory as the Darwinists have waited for evidence supporting theirs.

 
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