[b]Mary Roach
Sudden loud noise triggers a cluster of split-second protective reflexes known as the startle pattern. You blink to protect your eyes, while your upper body swivels toward the sound to assess the threat. The arms bend and retract to the chest, the shoulders hunch, and the knees bend, all of which combine to make you a smaller, less noticeable target. Snapping the limbs in tight to the torso may also serve to protect your vital innards. You are your own human shield. Siddle says hunching may have evolved to protect the neck: a holdover from caveman days. A big cat stalking prey will jump the last twenty feet and come down on the back and shoulders and bite through the neck.[/b]
Cue Satyr?
Death. It doesn’t have to be boring.
Hell, it can be downright terrifying.
Téléclitoridienne means simply “female of the distant clitoris,” but it had a lovely, aristocratic ring to it—calling to mind a career woman in heels and sweater set, cabling reports from her home in Biarritz. At the very least, it had a nicer ring to it than “frigid.”
We need more words like that, don’t we?
…there are naturally large individual differences in the chemical makeup of people’s saliva.
I never doubted it.
And finally, my gratitude to UM 006, H, Mr. Blank, Ben, the big guy in the sweatpants, and the owners of the forty heads. You are dead, but you’re not forgotten.
Among other things, no one will ever say that about me.
Lacking any scientific means of pinning down the soul, the first anatomists settled on generative primacy. What shows up first in the embryo must be most important and therefore most likely to hold the soul. The trouble with this particular avenue of learning, known as ensoulment, was that early first trimester human embryos were difficult to come by. Classical scholars of ensoulment, Aristotle among them, attempted to get around the problem by examining the larger, more easily obtained poultry embryo. To quote Vivian Nutton, author of The Anatomy of the Soul in Early Renaissance Medicine and the Human Embryo, analogies drawn from the inspection of hen’s eggs foundered on the subject that man was not a chicken.
So, do chickens have souls?