Burgess Shales reveal secrets

G'day G'day Folks,

It's not every day that paleontologists make a new find and this is certainly not one of them. It's rather more a re-interpretation of a famous site called the Burgess shales. Here there are beautifully preserved fossils of some gentle soft bodied creatures. I am greatly indebted to Conway Morris for his insight into understanding the unusual character of the specimens caught in a sudden soft mud slide. Less enlightened attempted to shoehorn them into existing branches of the evolutionary tree. Not Conway. He saw them as evolutions on other trees. Other trees that didn't make it into the modern world.

Able though he was, Conway didn't have the benefit of knowing about modern nlpers so I thought I would add a few interpretations of my own.

One feature that fascinated me was the trail of techniques they left behind. Here is an example.

The Ten_minute Accomplishment Cure.

This was guaranteed to make anyone feel better.

Now wouldn’t it be great to know a technique persevered from antiquity. This one truly stands the test of time. It was first discovered in strata only several layers removed from the slime mould.

Now think of a solid citizen with ten years of real world accomplishment.

Make sure you find someone whose accomplishments have clearly benefited others. That's a bonus.

Right.

Now call them "stupid" for not wanting to change.

Guess what?

They don't want to change the way you want them to.

So you get to call them stupid again.

And you get to feel even better.

Then there are the presuppositions of communication.

The one I like best is.

"The one who draws breath first loses."

Early scientists mistook these fossils for bull frogs, though the frog genus is now in dispute. They are fairly convinced about the bull part but there is some suggestion that this is merely sexist stereotyping.

Of course all this is all pretty irrelevant because the Burgess shales were one of nature's little misadventures that didn't evolve into anything found in the modern day cyber-nlper, did it.

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