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jewelsong
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 6:46 pm
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Hal, I would very much like to hear (read) your answer to the question, several posts above, about what your issue with evolution really is.

Because I must confess that I don't understand your objection to it at all. You seem to be going 'round in circles about what you think should and should not be taught in schools. You even said that schools should teach Darwin, but not evolution. Which is a little...contradictory. At least, IMVHO.

So maybe you can shed some light on what exactly the problem is (in your view) with the teaching of evolution in a Science class.


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LalaithUrwen
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 6:50 pm
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One friend I can think of, who is a meteorologist, doesn't believe that it is anything more than cycles of warmer and colder temps. We're in a warm phase now. So I suppose, to answer your question, that would be the people I know who don't buy global warming deny that it is actually happening or, at least, that it is anything more than a normal cycle in the earth's fluctuating temps.


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halplm
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 7:21 pm
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jewelsong wrote:
Hal, I would very much like to hear (read) your answer to the question, several posts above, about what your issue with evolution really is.

Because I must confess that I don't understand your objection to it at all. You seem to be going 'round in circles about what you think should and should not be taught in schools. You even said that schools should teach Darwin, but not evolution. Which is a little...contradictory. At least, IMVHO.

So maybe you can shed some light on what exactly the problem is (in your view) with the teaching of evolution in a Science class.
I would refer you way back to my first post in this thread, but that was a long time ago.

The way evolution was taught to me, and the way I understand it is taught outside of places like Texas... is that it is the only explanation for where all life came from. That this is scientific fact, and any theories that differ, are just wrong.

The mechanisms that Darwin observed, that we see happening all around us, Natural selection that is, is absolutely amazing. I would never disagree that this is fundamental to all biological sciences. I, myself, have become increasingly interested in it throughout my life. I absolutely think this should be taught in High School.

However, extrapolating what we observe now, backwards in time, to theorize about common ancestry, does not follow from what we observe today. Yes, absolutely, some very closely related species have common ancestors. Perhaps many species have common ancestors. However, the further back in time you go, the more this becomes guesswork, and the less it becomes science. Yes, you can study the fossil record scientifically, and the conclusions reached about said fossils are scientific.

However, it is my contention, that expanding those conclusions to speculate on common ancestors of modern life is at best guesswork, and at worst scientists out to make a name for themselves by plugging in one more hole in a tree of life with far too many holes.

I don't mind teachers saying that many animals today share common ancestors, that much is obvious. I do mind them saying everything shares ONE common ancestor. Is that possible? Certainly. Is it the best guess scientists have about how things happend, Sure. Is it Fact? There's no way to know given our current level of knowledge.

That's what I would like to hear said. Because as soon as it is stated to be a fact, it's claiming that people who believe their religion says otherwise are wrong. I could say, I think God created a large number of animals a long time ago, and since that time, the animal kingdom has diversified much further. There is nothing in the fossil record to contradict this. There are no observations we can make that say this is wrong. But by claiming that the idea we all share one common ancestor is fact, you're saying my statement is impossible.

Is saying God created life scientific? No. Does that make it wrong? No. I'd just like science teachers not to be saying the opposite.

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jewelsong
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 7:42 pm
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But by claiming that the idea we all share one common ancestor is fact, you're saying my statement is impossible.
Well...hm. I think that the common ancestor theory is probably right. And I don't see how it makes you "wrong" or your statement impossible. Because if God made us all...well, then - aren't we all made from the same material?

The coolest scientific fact I know is that we are all made from stardust. The very matter that formed the stars is in our atoms. I find that amazing and humbling and in no way contradictory to my beliefs. In fact, I think it confirms them.

We - all of us, and all life as we know it - were present as part of the Beginning.


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halplm
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 8:00 pm
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You are correct, and a common ancestor makes sense even from a creation point of view, even if it's not done strictly from the process of natural selection. You start simple, and build on it.

There should be a way to teach what is known and what is theorized, without coming across sounding like anyone that believes the universe was created is a fool denying the plain facts in front of them.

I'm not saying there aren't fools that do that, but the fact is we don't KNOW what happened even a few hundred years ago... much less thousands or millions. To teach students as if we DO know, somehow seems dishonest, trying to indoctrinate young people not to question. Since science is driven by people questioning, this seems backwards.

I'm kind of rambling, but my problem with this issue is more complex than say, school boards in Texas...


I wanted to go back to one of Lali's questions, which I don't think I answered, the one about "having a problem with death and mistakes driving evolution" or something like that. I'm not sure I understand the question entirely, but Natural selection doesn't require death to provide diversity, death just makes it faster. If there was no death, there would be much less diversity, because there would be less reproduction, as resources would be very limited. MOst of us probably wouldn't be here.

As for the the "mistakes" portion, I'm assuming you mean mutations? Well, we lable them as "mistakes" but who's to say they are? One could argue they are supposed to happen, as they can.

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Lidless
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 8:26 pm
Als u het leven te ernstig neemt, mist u de betekenis.
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Hal, your post about the six days of creation was masterful. Well done. Alas the example you chose was a relatively poor one - and this is where I have a problem with the literalists. The latter claim that translators and the Council Of Trent were also guided by God, never mind the original authors.

The word translated as "day" from the original iGenesis 1 s incorrect. "Passage of time" is a more accurate translation from the original Aramaic.

The fact that the original "virgin" for Mary should have been translated as "young woman" is somewhat ignored by many faiths.

And herein lies my problem with the non-[i/i]literalists. If the Bible is not the word of God, as the Bible itself warns (and hell comes to those who distort it), what is real, and what is not? What is allegorical, and what is pure man-made? Leviticus springs to mind. Either god on an acid trip or Man using God to justify their own rules, prejudices and observations.

Last edited by Lidless on Thu 31 Jan , 2008 8:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Dave_LF
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 8:29 pm
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hal, you seem to have much more stringent criteria for what can be considered fact and history in the field of evolutionary biology than you do anywhere else (unless you just don't bring the others up). Does it bother you if someone claims it is a FACT that there was an ancient Egyptian civilization that formed around the floods of the Nile? We can't observe that, after all, or repeat it; we can only deduce and draw conclusions based on the marks the past has left on the present.
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The way evolution was taught to me, and the way I understand it is taught outside of places like Texas... is that it is the only explanation for where all life came from.
Evolution is not not not not a theory about where life came from. Period. Please stop making this claim.


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halplm
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 8:31 pm
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My sarcasm sensor is broken Lidless, so I'm not sure if you thought my points were good or not... you seem to agree with the general gist of it, though... My statement was not supposed to be a quote from the bible, but an illustration of how people react to something like it.

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The Watcher
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 8:36 pm
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hal -

Thank you for your last two posts. Now I do see where you are coming from, and I can say that yes, I do agree with you on many points. :)

ETA: Well, now I should correct that to say last THREE posts. Wow, you guys are fast around here!!

Last edited by The Watcher on Thu 31 Jan , 2008 8:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Lidless
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 8:39 pm
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No sarcasm intended. It was a well-reasoned post from a premise.

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halplm
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 8:41 pm
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Dave_LF wrote:
hal, you seem to have much more stringent criteria for what can be considered fact and history in the field of evolutionary biology than you do anywhere else (unless you just don't bring the others up). Does it bother you if someone claims it is a FACT that there was an ancient Egyptian civilization that formed around the floods of the Nile? We can't observe that, after all, or repeat it; we can only deduce and draw conclusions based on the marks the past has left on the present.
"Historical Fact" and "Scientific fact" are very different things. If you want to state it as a historical fact that dinosaurs lived a long time ago, you won't get an argument from me. To state it is a scientific fact they were the ancestors of a specific animal alive today... is where I have a problem. If you say they might be the ancestors of a specific animal alive today, even if you say it seems likely... no argument from me.

Historical facts are always taken with a grain of salt. We know there are always distortions or misinterpretations. Scientific facts, are perceived by laymen, of which most people and all students are, as devoid of distortion or misinterpretation. All of us here know, that is usually not the case, as we can always discover more and learn where we made mistakes.
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The way evolution was taught to me, and the way I understand it is taught outside of places like Texas... is that it is the only explanation for where all life came from.
Evolution is not not not not a theory about where life came from. Period. Please stop making this claim.
If you ask people on the street, what evolution is, I would argue 99 out of 100 would answer it is the science about "where life came from." That may not be accurate, but my whole point about all of this, is that when you teach a high school student, the way we currently do, about evolution, they leave with the impression that that's where life came from.

I am not making the claim that this is what evolution is. I'm making the claim that this is the perception of people who are taught about evolution the way it is currently taught.

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halplm
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 8:44 pm
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Lidless wrote:
No sarcasm intended. It was a well-reasoned post from a premise.

Kudos.
Ok, cool, sorry for the paranoia... it's just that everyone's out to get me you know ;)

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jewelsong
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 8:53 pm
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If you ask people on the street, what evolution is, I would argue 99 out of 100 would answer it is the science about "where life came from." That may not be accurate, but my whole point about all of this, is that when you teach a high school student, the way we currently do, about evolution, they leave with the impression that that's where life came from.

I am not making the claim that this is what evolution is. I'm making the claim that this is the perception of people who are taught about evolution the way it is currently taught.
I don't know that this is true, really. I have never heard of evolution being taught as a theory of "where life came from." It is taught as a scientific way of explaining how life has changed over time...how it has evolved.

It says nothing about how it actually began. Or why.

(Of course, the average person on the street tends to be an idiot and not know how many states there are or what the capital is or who the first President was...so maybe it's not just evolution that they aren't getting.)

I think that, in order to find out how evolution is "currently taught" in high schools, you would need to do a lot more research into the curriculum and textbooks used in a fairly large sample of US public schools. You said you got your information from yourself and your brother...and I assume, from one public school system. If this IS, in fact, how evolution was taught to you, then it was wrongly taught. But I don't know that you can make such a wide generalization about how evolution is taught in public schools across the US.

Most people I have spoken to seem to understand that. People I know who have a beef with evolution due to religious beliefs have it because they believe all life was created at once, as it says in Genesis and that God made every single species that exists today at one time and so on. The fact that we can actually observe evolution happening (in bacteria and so on) has caused some creationist camps to invent terms like "micro" and "macro" evolution - in other words, it's okay for teeny tiny organisms to evolve, but not bigger ones.

I understand your points better now. I think you have a rather odd view of science and the scientific method, but I get where you are coming from.


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halplm
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 9:07 pm
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I think "micro" and "macro" evolution rather refers to "micro-evolution" creating diversity within species, and "macro-evolution" being the creation of new species. But really, creationists shoot themselves in the foot by caring about species at all, as it is a thoroughly arbitrary man-made organizational designation (not arbitrary as in ill-defined, but arbitrary as in there could be other organizational methods). I don't generally hang out with a bunch of people discussion the latest creationist ideas, but I don't think the terms are used much any more.

Part of the problem with this argument, is that some people are still arguing with stuff they heard about 20 years ago... on all sides of the discussion. Someone hears "creationist" and every wacko theory someone who labeled themselves as a creationist gets attributed to this other person, which is quite unfair. As an example, people in this thread kept going back to making it sound like I wanted to teach ID and creationism in schools... which I don't think I ever said here ;).

And yes, I admit my view of the scientific method is skewed a bit by my education in mathematics, as I like thinks to haved nice proofs, and science generally only proves things might be the way we think, not that they are exactly.

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jewelsong
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 9:16 pm
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Mathematics makes my head explode.

Which is a bit odd, since I totally and inherently understand musical theory. Which is just mathematics, really.

But seriously...my brain don't do maths. :D


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The Watcher
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 9:18 pm
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hal -

I am also a mathematics lover, but what is so perfect and logical (most of the time) about mathematics is not so clean and clear with science. Think of science more like one does with statistics and probabilites and potential outcomes while still winnowing through the outcomes, and then you have grasped science maybe a bit better. It would like to be exact, but we are always learning more and more about it. I think of what I read as a child concerning the universe and back then, black holes were speculation, predicted, but never proved. Now, we pretty much know that black holes do exist. But, that concreteness that mathematics supplies is a huge factor into science, the two are close cousins.

But your explanations have done quite a bit to at least help me understand where you are coming from, and I mean that as a compliment.

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halplm
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 9:22 pm
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Oh I get that science works that way, but I admit i'm "skewed" to want it to be "proof."

In addition to "historical fact" and "scientific fact" as I discussed before, I could ad "mathematical fact" and finally be in my own true comfort zone...

but then again, you can take that to extremes as well, and get into some funky math that changes your perception of numbers at their very core, and suddenly things aren't so comfortable ;).

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Dave_LF
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 9:24 pm
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halplm wrote:
"Historical Fact" and "Scientific fact" are very different things.
I'm not sure they are; the events a historian considers are typically much further in the past than the ones a scientist thinks about and data is generally more scarce and less reliable as a result, and the historian has to passively accept whatever data fortune has left lying around while the scientist actively tries to generate new data, but the process is still the same. Look at the data and try to figure out what happened. Come up with an idea and consider whether the data support it. Generate more data if you can. Wash, rinse, repeat. In any case, history and science are both legitimate techniques for acquiring knowledge. One can't simply dismiss the conclusions of "biological historians" because they supplement the techniques of pure science with those of history.

And I'd repeat that if you throw out evolution on the grounds you're describing, a whole lot of less controversial science is going to have to follow it out the door.
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Historical facts are always taken with a grain of salt. We know there are always distortions or misinterpretations. Scientific facts, are perceived by laymen, of which most people and all students are, as devoid of distortion or misinterpretation.
But that is a problem with the layman. Science teachers should not be forbidden from presenting ideas as true or correct simply because people don't understand the implicit caveats. Most science courses start with a discussion of what the scientific method is and cover some of the now-discredited ideas that used to be commonplace (this is especially true for evolution classes, which for some reason nearly always begin by talking about LaMark). With that done, everything that follows is implicitly prefaced with "these are the best ideas we've had so far, but you never know when someone might come up with a better one".
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If you ask people on the street, what evolution is, I would argue 99 out of 100 would answer it is the science about "where life came from."
Same as above. The solution to this is more lessons in evolution, not fewer of them.


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halplm
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 9:42 pm
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Dave_LF wrote:
halplm wrote:
"Historical Fact" and "Scientific fact" are very different things.
I'm not sure they are; the events a historian considers are typically much further in the past than the ones a scientist thinks about and data is generally more scarce and less reliable as a result, and the historian has to passively accept whatever data fortune has left lying around while the scientist actively tries to generate new data, but the process is still the same. Look at the data and try to figure out what happened. Come up with an idea and consider whether the data support it. Generate more data if you can. Wash, rinse, repeat. In any case, history and science are both legitimate techniques for acquiring knowledge. One can't simply dismiss the conclusions of "biological historians" because they supplement the techniques of pure science with those of history.
This is my perception as well, but when talking about evolution in the past, you look at things FAR older than historians usually look, and you are looking at whatever was left lying around. It's my very point, that this is scarce and less reliable, and no new data can be generated from it... making the speculations about the data we do have, much more suspect.
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And I'd repeat that if you throw out evolution on the grounds you're describing, a whole lot of less controversial science is going to have to follow it out the door.
Who's throwing out evolution? I'm just saying that parts of the theory should not be so strictly stated as scientific fact, as they usually are.
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Historical facts are always taken with a grain of salt. We know there are always distortions or misinterpretations. Scientific facts, are perceived by laymen, of which most people and all students are, as devoid of distortion or misinterpretation.
But that is a problem with the layman. Science teachers should not be forbidden from presenting ideas as true or correct simply because people don't understand the implicit caveats. Most science courses start with a discussion of what the scientific method is and cover some of the now-discredited ideas that used to be commonplace (this is especially true for evolution classes, which for some reason nearly always begin by talking about LaMark). With that done, everything that follows is implicitly prefaced with "these are the best ideas we've had so far, but you never know when someone might come up with a better one".
Again, it's not about forbidding teachers to teach what is true or correct, it's about making sure they don't teach in such a way that the student is left with a false understanding on what is true and correct. It is absolutely a problem with the layman who misunderstands, but that shows the inherant teaching is flawed as well, or where did the misconception come from?

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The Watcher
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Posted: Thu 31 Jan , 2008 10:03 pm
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I certainly do not want to insult some of the very excellent teachers that are members here, but let us remember that those who teach do not have science degrees or mathematics degrees, but at least here in the US, a Bachelor (or Master's) of Arts in Education. And, I hate to state it, but even those who go on to teach science themselves may not understand science as well as the person who took an undergrad or then further grad studies in a Bachelor's of Science course of studies.

Do not even get me started on the idiots who get themselves elected to school boards, or, like in the Texas case originally cited here, appointed by politicians to regulate education when they have NO background whatsover in it at all.

As far as the growing ignorance and misconceptions of the mass of the American public, I think there are several factors. Firstly, we here in the US hugely discount teaching things like mathematics and science in our public school systems compared to places like Japan or parts of Europe or emerging nations like India and China. Politics has entered into it, the gross amounts of pablum that we are fed from mass media has fed into it, and somewhere along the line, America itself went from the wonder years of high tech and R&D being cutting edge as it was in the fifties up into the eighties to becoming more insular and protective, more worried about keeping what it had than delving boldly into the future.

Just ask the kids. Who now says they want to grow up to be a scientist? We do not celebrate our scientists, we celebrate drug addicted Hollywood bimbos and athletes with steroid problems. If you look at any major "news" site, chances are that at least today, you saw news about Natalie Holloway, Brittany Spears, Obama and Clinton dirt, and the upcoming Superbowl. Think about it, does any of that crap even matter?

We have gotten so fearful in America at least that when the FDA announced that it would approve a vaccine to guard young girls against cervical cancer caused by a form of HPV (genital warts), certain groups went on the warpath saying it would lead to increased promiscuity among teens. WTF? :scratch:

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Never under any circumstances take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

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Glaciers melting in the dead of night and the superstars sucked into the supermassive...
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