Why Your Favorite Animal Sucks and Mine is Better

Welcome to the very first, non-book related post on Biology for Bastards!

Enough of that shit, here's why you're wrong and I'm right.

According to a SUPER scientific Google search, Americans' top five favorite animals are:
1. Tiger
2. Dolphin
3. Dog
4. Horse
5. Lion

Now it's my expert opinion that those animals suck and everyone is missing the real hero/heroine out there. Let's start at the bottom and work our way up, proving why those animals are undeserving of the title before I tell you about your new favorite animal.

5. Lion = Nature's The Beatles (Fine, but definitely overrated)

Lion's are frickin' chumps. First off, the females are expected to do all the hunting and taking care of the children while the male just sits there and licks his balls. Secondly, is there anything less cool than that mane? Male lions all look like a bunch of rejects from the CATS musical or, even worse, some 80s hair band. Then there's all the lies... King of the Jungle? What jungle? Lions live in the damn savanna, which is definitely NOT a jungle. And before you bring up the Lion King (which, I remind you, is a children's movie) did you know that lions suck so much they didn't use lion roars in the movie, they had to use tigers instead? Yea, you got kicked out of your own movie. Next.

4. Horse = Helpful Jerks

...How...?

Without horses, the world wouldn't look or work the way it does now...probably. Super important for a lot of stuff but also kind of annoying. Walking around on those hooves which are really just their middle fingers so they're in a constant state of flipping everyone off (that's science). Sure they can run and pull stuff and whatnot, but they also let people ride them. I don't know about you, but if someone wanted to ride me, we would have to have a long talk before it happened and a safe word would have to be established. Not with horses though; you just jump on and they take you wherever you want to go. Are they helpful? Yes. Are they worthy of being your favorite animal? Fuck no.

3. Dogs = Man's Best (Needy) Friend

Yea...that's about right

I love my dogs. I have two of them. But there are also days I want to let them loose into the wilderness because they're so god damn needy. You know how human babies do nothing but eat, shit, and cry? Wouldn't it be great if we could have an infant for fifteen years? Let's get a dog. Sure, they're fun to have when they want to go on a walk, or play, or snuggle, but then they eat shit, vomit on your bed at 4 am, bark at absolutely nothing, and can't make up their mind to save their lives.

 Also, I'm pretty sure the evolution of dogs goes like this: 

Human: Hey dumbest wolf out there, want to be my friend? You can eat my garbage...

Wolf-Dog: Um...sure!

Human: Wow, you really are dumb

Wolf-Dog: Um...sure!

2. Dolphins = Rapists of the Sea

Sweet porn stache 

Dolphins rape people. Argument over.

1. Tigers = Pretty cool, but not cool enough

Neither of us knows what is happening here

I'll admit it, tigers are pretty cool. They eat people, and swim, and actually live in the fucking jungle unlike those liars at number five. But let's be honest with each other, how likely are we ever to see a wild tiger? They might as well be a unicorn as far as we know. And at the rate they're disappearing, give it fifty years and they'll be as real unicorns (sad, but true.) 

So what should your favorite animal actually be?

THE MOTHER FUCKIN' VIRGINIA OPOSSUM (Didelphis virginiana)!!

Don't believe me? Tough shit, you're wrong. Good God these creatures are amazing. Where do I even begin? Nipples? Penis? Fire? The 27th President of these United States? Rabies? Teeth? The Joy of Cooking? 

So the opossum (don't you dare forget the "o") has the most teeth of any North American mammal (50), one of the shortest gestation periods (science for pregnancy) out there at 13 days, is North America's only marsupial (mammals with a pouch), need I go on? Even if I don't, I will.

Notice that scary dick on the left

As North America's only marsupial and therefore the American kangaroo, it can give birth to up to fifty babies, affectionately called joeys, at once using its magical pseudo-vagina. I'm not kidding. Boy opossums have a terrifying-looking two-pronged penis and as a result, lady opossums have two vaginas. But when it comes time to have its babies, a magical portal between the two vaginas opens and the babies come out of this third pseudo-vagina (also known as the Central vaginal canal in the image below)

Once born, only thirteen babies get to survive because lady opossums only have thirteen nipples. Twelve are arranged in a circle and then lucky number thirteen is right in the middle. Like a bull's eye of teats.

Ok, enough talk about opossum sex (which I'm sure tickled some of your fancies a little too much). On to how they're resistant to a shit ton of stuff. Snake venom? No problem. An opossum doesn't give two shits, or even a shit for that matter, if it's bitten by a venomous snake. The amount of fucks it gives about snake venom is so low, people are actually studying it to see if we can make a universal antivenom out of its blood. It's that bad ass.

Good job on this one Disney

On a slightly different note, remember Old Yeller? The book and movie about the dog that goes rabid and the family had to kill? If you had a pet opossum and not a stupid dog (see point three above), you wouldn't have to shoot your pet because OPOSSUMS ARE IMMUNE TO RABIES! Suck it Old Yeller. An opossum's body temperature is too low for the rabies virus to survive so the likelihood of you running into a rabid opossum is less than the likelihood of seeing a tiger that isn't in a cage (see point five above). In other words, opossums are indestructible.

Which happens to bring me to my next point. If you're familiar with the story of Prometheus but not the story of the opossum and fire, you need to stop being so "I only learn about white people stuff" and get your brain into some Mazatecan folklore. The Mazatecs were a group of people indigenous to Mexico and as their legend states, the opossum stole fire and carried it on it's tail, which is why opossums today have hairless tails. When's the last time you heard of a dolphin bringing fire to humanity? Never? Exactly.

From the 1962 version of The Joy of Cooking

Last point of today (believe me, I could go on and on and on and on and on and on and...) has to do with William Howard Taft and how he liked to eat. So around the turn of the 20th century, eating opossums was a big deal. There were recipes on how to properly prepare the glorious animal in the Joy of Cooking all the way up until the 1960s. The way President Taft works into this story is he was a big dude; the man liked to eat. At a fancy state dinner in the south during his presidency (which ran from 1909-1913), the President was served the classic dish of "Opossum and Taters" which was a roasted opossum served on a bed of sweet potatoes. It was a huge ass opossum and Taft ate the whole thing. After this, his marketing team tried to get the Billy Opossum to be a thing to compete with the Teddy Bear (named after Theodore Roosevelt, Taft's predecessor) but people liked Roosevelt more so the Billy Opossum (sadly) never took off.

So there you have it, the short version of why you have shitty taste in animals and why the Virginia Opossum should be everyone's favorite. Still disagree with me? Doesn't matter, because I'm right and you're wrong.

Ch 1.2: The Metric Fucking System

But hold up, if science is nothing more than explaining and predicting the natural world, why do people have so much trouble understanding science? Probably because you’re assuming “people” to mean “inhabitants of the United States” and everyone here wants to be special and NOT use the metric system. Oh the metric system. Of the roughly 7,700,000,000 people alive in the world, 7,315,000,000 use it. Of the remaining 385,000,000 individuals, 327,000,000 live in the United States. Liberia and Myanmar (or Burma, I’ve never understood why it has two names) are the only other countries in the world that use the same stupid system we do. Think of it like this: if 95% of people did one thing, while the other 5% did something else, which group would you choose to be in? If you’re American, Liberian, or Burmese, you’d pick the 5% group. But let me put this piece of information in your face in case youre still skeptical. According to Planned Parenthood (this is where I formally cite where I get this statistic but you’d never actually check so trust me and if you dont, Google it) even though condoms have a  98% effectiveness at preventing pregnancy, realistically someone can expect an effectiveness of 85%. So its three times more likely for a baby to be conceived if a condom is the only preventative used than it is to pick a random human off the planet and for them to NOT use the metric system. But we still dont use it because whatever. ‘Merica, right?

Lets do a little compare and contrast of the metric system and the imperial system (that’s what we use). We can start of easy, how many inches are in a foot? If you didnt say twelve, put this book down and go back to Green Eggs and Ham you savage. Next up, how many feet are in a mile? Please say 5,280. Ok, fun part: how many inches in a mile? The answer is 64,480 and if you were able to do that in your head, congratulations, you’re a liar. you just believed me before and didn’t fact check me, the real answer is 63,360. I promise I’m not lying this time. But seriously, how stupid of a number is 63,360? What’s even better is that we have sixteen ounces in a pound but eight ounces in a cup and a pound’s ounce and a cup’s ounce aren’t the same ounce. What the actual fuck? Meanwhile, the rest of the world is over there converting stuff easily because all they have to do is move the decimal point. And there aren’t a bunch of stupid words to remember because its just three standard units and then a few prefixes. So instead of remembering inch, foot, yard, mile, teaspoon, tablespoon, ounce, cup, quart, gallon, a different ounce, pound, and ton, you can just remember the three standards and realistically three or four prefixes. The units meter (m), gram (g), and liter (L), when combined with milli-, centi-, and kilo-, could get you by in just about every situation you would ever face as an average human. Its so straightforward, you should feel insulted that there are people out there who think we’re too dumb to be able to use it.

Breaking down those three metric prefixes is a very simple thing. Milli- has the same root as millennium, which is one thousand years (something I hope you already knew…), so whenever you throw milli- onto a standard unit, you have one-one thousandth of that amount. There are 1,000 millimeters (mm) in a meter, 1,000 milliliters (mL) in a liter, and 1 Vanilli is equal to 1,000 Milli Vanillis (I’m way too proud of that joke which only three of you will get). Centi- shares a root as century, or cent, and just like there are 100 years in a century or 100 cents in a dollar, there are 100 centi-whatever in 1 whatever. Connected milli- to centi- is as easy as multiplying by ten or dividing by ten, which is just moving the decimal point once place to the right or left, respectively. Ten millimeters is one centimeter, and 100 centimeters is one meter. Going the other direction, we get kilo-. All you drug users will recognize this prefix because when its combined with gram, its the main way to measure mass. So one kilogram is 1,000 grams, a kiloliter is 1,000 liters, and kilometer is 1,000 meters.

For all of us who are metrically challenged, I’ve got a few methods to quickly approximate metric units into our goofy ass imperial units. A kilogram is roughly 2 pounds. Actually, its closer to 2.2 pounds per kilogram but like I said, they’re approximations. A meter is just a little more than a yard (which is three feet, or thirty-six inches…) so its close enough. If you want to approximate kilometers into miles, just think of a 5k. A 5k race is five kilometers, or 5,000 meters, and is roughly 3.1 miles. Something even cooler happens if you know what the Fibonacci sequence is, but I’m assuming you bastards have no clue what I’m talking about right now. The Fibonacci sequence is a math thing where the next number in the pattern is the sum of the previous two. It looks like this “1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, …” I bring this up because the FIbonacci sequence approximates the conversion from miles to kilometers. If you want to know how many kilometers are in ___ miles, its the next number in the Fibonacci sequence. Like I said earlier, three miles is roughly five kilometers, but if you want to know how many kilometers are in twenty miles, you can look at the Fib sequence (I got tired of writing Fibonacci), see that twenty is basically twenty-one, which tells you there are just under thirty-four kilometers in twenty miles (I just looked it up and twenty miles is equal to thirty two kilometers). Lastly, one liter is roughly the same as one quart, or two bottles of water.

x

Ch 1.1: What the Hell is Science?

Before we get to biology (aka the dying and the sex) we first have to address the characteristics that are common to all forms of science. That’s what this chapter is all about: what makes science different from all the other subjects out there.

Even the densest student has at least heard about the scientific method and the metric system. Now, they can’t tell you anything about either of them (some struggle to even tell you what the hell a meter measures--spoiler, it’s distance) but they at least know the words. And that’s a problem with a lot of people, they know the words but they have no clue what the fuck they mean. Take the word theory--if you really want to piss me off, tell me something in science is “just a theory.” When it happens in class, it makes me want to take my stapler and throw it at the person’s head. The word theory has been absolutely ruined by the general public, who think it’s just a guess. IT’S NOT A FUCKING GUESS. It’s as true as something can be. Gravity is a fucking theory. Go fall down a flight of stairs if it’s “just a theory” and let me know how you turn out.

So that’s something people don’t get: science is it’s own language and if you don’t know the language, it makes it difficult to understand. But on the flip side, that “language” is just something we apply to things we inherently do. Fundamentally, science doesn’t give a shit what we call it. We can say something is a theory, a fact, a guess, a marshmallow, a wonderflugg (I just made that up and I love it), or anything else and that doesn’t change what it actually is: a collection of protons, neutrons, and electrons (we’ll get to those in chapter two). So just keep that in mind as we go through everything. Science is innate, the words we use to describe them are just things (probably) old white men made up to make things simple for us to remember.

So if science is innate (which means natural if you lack a decent vocabulary and had no clue), what the hell is it and what does it do? Well, simply put, science aims to do a few things. First and foremost science is solely concerned with the natural world. Sorry all you ghost hunters and people with yetishes (yeti fetishes), those things aren’t real and that’s not science. Hundreds of years from now they might be considered science (it’s unlikely) but you never know. You’ve got to think about it, there was a point in time that there were only four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water (sorry, Captain Planet lied to you and heart isn’t one of them). We now know that is a bunch of crap and we have 118 elements. People once believed you became sick because you had bad blood, too much phlegm, or because you pissed someone off and they got the devil to do weird things to you but that all changed roughly two hundred years ago when the germ theory of disease was developed. So I like to think of it like this: everything we know in science can be followed by the phrase “as far as we know right now.” As new tools or instruments develop, science can change. And science will change. And that’s what make it so exciting.

One of the reason that science can and will definitely change is that science is based entirely on evidence. Science doesn’t give a shit what you or anyone else thinks. You don’t believe in something? Great, science doesn’t care. You think Pluto should be a planet and not a dwarf planet? Who gives a shit? Pluto is a chunk of frozen rock flying around a giant ball of burning plasma and nothing more. So as more evidence comes in, science will have to change. You can’t ignore something just because it contradicts whatever you’ve already discovered or because it goes against what you expected to find. If you do ignore it, you’re a horrible scientist and probably a horrible person. As more and more evidence is collect, it strengthens an idea until that idea becomes ALMOST unarguably true. Science doesn’t like absolutes: so it tries to avoid words like “always” or “never” because there is almost always (see what I did there) an exception to everything. So it comes to a point where every piece of evidence says something and that something will probably will never change and when we reach that point, a theory is born.

That brings us to the last major thing that science can do: make predictions. But not just any predictions, like actual predictions that are based on the facts and evidence we just talked about and not on random-ass guessing. Because I can predict that this book is going to become a bestseller, become the first in a long line of “____ for Bastards” books, make me a shit-ton of money and allow me to disappear forever, but odds are, thats not going to happen. Science, on the other hand, actually has reasoning behind the predictions. Like if I stick a fork in an electrical outlet, I’m probably going to get the shit shocked out of me. That’s based on ALL the evidence of all the other geniuses who saw a fork, saw an electrical outlet, and thought that little face in the wall wanted a mouthful of metal. Or if the average global temperature keeps increasing, sea levels are going to rise and everyone who lives around the coast will have to become mermaids and mermen (which don’t exist).

THose three fundamental properties can be rolled into one basic sentence that explains nearly every branch of science that exists: using data based on evidence, science attempts to explain and predict events in the natural world. Thats it. Nothing more. Deal with it.

Prologue

I’ve always wanted to write a book. Its definitely towards the top of my bucket list, which happens to be very short and not that detailed, but that’s a different story for a different day. The problem with writing a book (at least for me) is that I have a problem maintaining the focus and dedication to write a two hundred page document. I get about five or six pages in and then move on to something else. Because my bucket list is the poorest excuse for a bucket list in the history of bucket lists (with the exception of that movie starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman) my book-related entry is literally “write a book” with no other details. So the lazy person in me could easily write a short children’s book and call it a day. But that’s not what I want to do, which brings us here.

At the time of writing this sentence, I have been a high school science teacher for nine years. Over the past almost-decade, I’ve seen many students enter my classroom, hold on to every word I say and every little thing we do, gain a great understanding of biology, and move on to study it in college. But for each one of those students, I’ve seen countless more walk into my room, oblivious to anything going on around them, goof off and not pay attention, fail, retake the class, fail again, and basically barely get by. Now as a public school teacher, I have a certain set of professional rules I have to follow. No swearing, no telling the students who would much rather flirt with the boy or girl next to them (or across the room) how I really feel about their pitiful attempts to get some action, and having to keep everything PG, or at least PG-13.

But science and especially biology isn’t exactly a PG-13 subject. Biology is all about death and sex. Everything an organism does is to either prevent death or to make babies. I challenge you to find something that doesn’t connect to one or both of those actions. And while all this is taking place, there is some crazy stuff that is happening in the background. The longer I taught, the more I’ve realized that my class would be much more interesting if I could just speak bluntly about what is going on. Maybe then the unmotivated students who are more concerned with their social life would be more engaged (to throw out some good educational jargon). If I could freely drop F-bombs, S-words, discuss P’s and V’s with no concern about which parent is going to email my principal and try to get me fired, the class would be my dream job. That’s how we got to here. So this prologue has been clean. It's been censored. It is the advisory warning that in the pages following these, things are going to get vulgar. If that offends you, stop reading now. But then again, if you picked up a book titled “High School Biology For Bastards,” you probably don’t mind colorful language. Let’s learn some fucking biology.

Foreward to the Prologue

Here goes nothing.

I'm going to write a book. I'm also starting a blog. They're going to be one and same for the time being. The purpose of this blog is to motivate me to keep writing the book. I'm going to post sections of the book as I finish them to this blog. Once done, hopefully I can get them printed and bound or whatever the book industry calls it these days.

So like I said, here goes nothing.

**Edit: I'm posting all this stuff unedited. Its a work in progress. So forgive any typos or whatever. Just wanted to put that out there...**