Guest Blogger....

Good evening everyone.

We have a special guest blogger this evening.  My eldest, Jesse, is going to explain, in perfect high school logic, the evolutionary relationship between clouds and jellyfish.

Okay.  First things first, the following information comes from a couple of my friends from school, and not originally from me. Second, the explanation requires the entire story, which didn't start at the original explanation of this concept.

One Monday, during last period, my friend Jeffrey called me over to his desk to ask me a "serious rabbinic question": which came first: the Torah or the dinosaurs? 
Now, Jeffrey was sitting there with two other friends of ours, both of whom were perfectly capable of answering said question.  However, that is beside the point.  My response was that dinosaurs occurred somewhere in Ma'aseh Bereishit, and let's assume, for logic and realism's sake, that the Torah was written after the fact. 

At the end of the day, I found my friend Jonathan at his locker and told him about this.  Jonathan is an atheist by personal choice.  His response to the story was that, although he and I may disagree on the subject of who exactly wrote the Torah, we could both agree it was not written by dinosaurs.  I agreed with that; it was definitely written by a sentient being who could write (i.e. either people or God).  Jonathan then said, "No, just not by the dinosaurs."  "Oh, yes.  A squid wrote it." (I said the first incredibly unlikely possibility that I could think of.) Jonathan then defended the squid, "Squids are smart!" I amended my selected animal to a jellyfish, at which point Jonathan launched into an explanation of  the evolution of the jellyfish.  This logic was as follows:

Evolution (at face value) says that similar things are related.

The jellyfish is ninety-something percent water.

Clouds are ninety-something percent water.

Therefore, the cloud and the jellyfish come from a common ancestor.  This common ancestor must also be at least ninety-something percent water; therefore, the common ancestor between the cloud and the jellyfish is... the watermelon.

I was telling my friend Josh about the conversation this weekend, and Josh pointed out a serious flaw in Jonathan's logic (which is not easy to do). Josh said that gas came before biological matter, indicating that the cloud--which is made of water in gas form--is actually the common ancestor of the watermelon and the jellyfish.  The second issue that Josh noted is that plants came before animals.  Therefore, the cloud evolved into the watermelon, which in turn evolved into the jellyfish.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet evolution in its most basic definition.

Thus conclude the words of the teenagers.  We now return to the owner of this blog.

It is with some trepidation that I come to realize that we are turning the world over to these teenagers.

I think I need a glass of water.  Oh never mind.

Good night.

R/SCG