Smedley on natural selection

Please welcome Smedley again.

The broader controversy

The broader controversy is as follows.

Denialists like myself (and our insurance company backers) reasonably state that millions of people practice telekinesis in order to make themselves sick with AIDS-like diseases, in which they develop immune and mitochondrial abnormalities and die needlessly, using the mind-over-matter technique of having bad thoughts.[Smedley 2011]

On the other side, sick people childishly seek to have those denialists, whose only goal is to help, thrown in prison for the rest of their lives using normal Newtonian kinetic means, or more precisely, the legally sanctioned due process threat thereof.

(In our technical jargon, we call those bad thoughts.)

The lesser-known controversy

There is also a debate about natural selection. It is very interesting.

You see, denialists are experts on the subject of these massively-self-destructive, AIDS-like-disease-causing abilities, while sick people erroneously ask:

Why would this assumed ability to make oneself seriously sick (telekinetically or otherwise) ever evolve?

They even go into detail with this type of defence reaction:

Isn't it more plausible that the damage to so many parts of the body is simply ordinary damage from pathogens and toxins, which the body is trying to fight off, instead of an unexplained mind-over-matter ability that would have no survival value?

We know about the opportunistic infections. We know about the cytokine patterns.

Why drag mysticism into it?

As you can see, these are disturbed people. It is not acceptable to ask these questions and they know it.

Still, I am generous to a fault, so I have an answer.

The answer

The ability is always self-destructive, but it is possible to reverse its damage with the help of psychiatrists. That is why it didn't get weeded out by natural selection.

We are not blaming sick people. They are merely having too much subconscious fun. Admit it: who doesn't secretly like nausea? The bastards don't want to get better.

This is obvious and we shouldn't be discussing it. Those questions are bad thoughts.

The ancestral environment

There is only one question. Did the ancestral environment have psychiatrists? This is the acid test of our theory.

Yes, of course it did. That would be the shamans.

Therefore the massively self-destructive abilities would be reproductively neutral or even advantageous.

Non-human animals and telekinesis

A side debate concerns why non-human animals would evolve these abilities. Or are humans the only ones?

Given the peer-reviewed fact that an estimated tens of thousands of fish and farm animals (and some humans) died from hysteria over so-called "water poisoning" (with 20 tonnes of aluminium sulphate in Camelford, UK in 1988) the denialists have clearly won this debate.

It is patently evident that animals can think themselves sick. I really don't understand why people miss this.

Providing a complete explanation is simply a matter of discovering the fish, cow, pig, dog, and rabbit shamans.

A rare photograph

Here Bobby has a friendly edema contest with Bunny. They spent hours showing off new tricks.

Plate 1: if humans have the power to change their bodies in biologically-impossible ways using their minds, then we can infer that lagomorphs can also. Bunny's edematous right otic appendage (left) is clear evidence of hysteria. Bobby is shown on the right for scale. Telekinesis is what makes it all possible. (You cannot see it in the still image, but Bunny, who is a resident of LeRoy, New York (in the colonies) also developed tics.)

Extrapolating this evidence to AIDS-like and MS-like diseases is left as an exercise for the reader.

Note: if Bunny looks like a turtle-bunny chimera, that is an artefact of the photographic equipment. Samuel is a cheapskate. He pays me nothing for my posts and he supplies me with substandard equipment. [Editor's note: our cameras at The Kafka Pandemic are state of the art, but they require practice.]

Conclusion

Please collect a few pennies for the denialists. Their only goal is to help.

William Smedley

[Editor's note: Sir William Smedley is the author of Moral Failure in Multiple Sclerosis and more than 100 papers on subconscious fun in MS, autism, and industrial chemical spills. He is a recipient of the DUUM-IN award for innovative nosology.]

Acknowledgements

[Editor's note: the elusive Higgs Boson, a fine geographer, consulted on Smedley's previous post.]