(no subject)

[joysweeper]

I'm watching "Cosmos", Carl Sagan's short television series, on Hulu.  It's good.  Some of the stuff is sort of outdated, but it was produced in the seventies, and all things considered it's still pretty sound.  I like Sagan.  Even if he was a bit of a mammal supremacist.  (Early mammals evolved at about the same time as early dinosaurs.  Dinosaurs took over all the awesome roles.  We didn't get anything exciting until after all the big dinosaurs were dead.  If those roles were reversed, I might now be some sauro-avian typing in irritation about how everyone assumes the hairy animals were inferior just because they don't dominate the earth anymore.)

Notably, "One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue" (is that an awesome title or what?) has one of those animated evolution things going from microbes to man.  And!  The end product is female!

This pleases me to no end.  The "evolving out of the water" charts always have a male end product.  It's a small sign of our screwed-up gender issues.  Male is always the default, female is this weird accessory thing instead of, I don't know, half the damn species.

*cough*   Good series, anyway.  Sagan's all right.