We bought a filing cabinet at an office supply store today. It is one of those secular office supply stores that is open on Sundays. A store like that could never become our Official National Office Supply Store. In a crisis, we rename French Fries, and we certainly don't allow no secular filing cabinets.
While waiting, I watched a mother and her daughter go through the registry line. "If that young girl want to know what she is going to look like twenty-five years from now," I thought, "she should look at her mother." Something in that young girl's construction plans came through, remarkably unscathed, from her mother.
The Rev. Franklin Graham is the Rev. Billy Graham's son. Billy was "the Pastor to Presidents". Franklin is Our National Seed Saver. He told John King, at CNN: “I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father, like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother."
(All the brains in the Graham family are passed down through the mothers, and they favored their daughters.)
As it happens, all of us share something unique from our mothers. Part of our genetic coding indicates--believe it or not--that we have a common really-great-grandmother. Human beings are not a very diverse species. If we were, that same genetic coding would show a variety of really-great-grandmothers. It doesn't. We are really-related! (Ouch! Franklin and I are related.)
Today, there are about seven billion human beings. Most of us are neither Islamic nor Jewish. (Sorry about the seed business, Franklin!) That is a lot of people! Seven billion is about as many as there are mosquitoes on one cabin screen door up in the Arrowhead region of Minnesota in the summer. Scientific evidence shows that as little as seventy or eighty thousand years ago, the entire human population may have been as small as a few hundred; perhaps even smaller. Our common maternal genetic material indicated that every human being is a descendent of a particular human woman: our common really-great-grandmother! If that were not so, some human being, somewhere, would have genetic evidence of a different maternal type.
We know that our species originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago in a mild climate. Not long after the emergence of human beings as we know them, a massive glaciation had effects that made much of Africa uninhabitable. It lasted for more than a hundred thousand years. Somehow, about the time of the glaciation, the human population had to have been crowded into very small regions of Africa that could support complex life, and the survivors of that awful condition began to spread all across the earth. Every single one of them shared a grandmother from about that time; a really-great-grandmother! that's us!
Some of us have black skins, still. Some of us are pale runts, some stout, some lithe. Some have incredible, scientific, detective minds, and some have goofy ideas about how one becomes a Jew or a Muslim. Some deny the facts, and tell fantasmagoric stories about having been created, whole and handsome and ignorant, about 6,000 years ago. And every one of them is a relative!
Don't even bother to check out your seed! We all look a little bit like our common really-great-grandmother. And she was Black.
While waiting, I watched a mother and her daughter go through the registry line. "If that young girl want to know what she is going to look like twenty-five years from now," I thought, "she should look at her mother." Something in that young girl's construction plans came through, remarkably unscathed, from her mother.
The Rev. Franklin Graham is the Rev. Billy Graham's son. Billy was "the Pastor to Presidents". Franklin is Our National Seed Saver. He told John King, at CNN: “I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father, like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother."
(All the brains in the Graham family are passed down through the mothers, and they favored their daughters.)
As it happens, all of us share something unique from our mothers. Part of our genetic coding indicates--believe it or not--that we have a common really-great-grandmother. Human beings are not a very diverse species. If we were, that same genetic coding would show a variety of really-great-grandmothers. It doesn't. We are really-related! (Ouch! Franklin and I are related.)
Today, there are about seven billion human beings. Most of us are neither Islamic nor Jewish. (Sorry about the seed business, Franklin!) That is a lot of people! Seven billion is about as many as there are mosquitoes on one cabin screen door up in the Arrowhead region of Minnesota in the summer. Scientific evidence shows that as little as seventy or eighty thousand years ago, the entire human population may have been as small as a few hundred; perhaps even smaller. Our common maternal genetic material indicated that every human being is a descendent of a particular human woman: our common really-great-grandmother! If that were not so, some human being, somewhere, would have genetic evidence of a different maternal type.
We know that our species originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago in a mild climate. Not long after the emergence of human beings as we know them, a massive glaciation had effects that made much of Africa uninhabitable. It lasted for more than a hundred thousand years. Somehow, about the time of the glaciation, the human population had to have been crowded into very small regions of Africa that could support complex life, and the survivors of that awful condition began to spread all across the earth. Every single one of them shared a grandmother from about that time; a really-great-grandmother! that's us!
Some of us have black skins, still. Some of us are pale runts, some stout, some lithe. Some have incredible, scientific, detective minds, and some have goofy ideas about how one becomes a Jew or a Muslim. Some deny the facts, and tell fantasmagoric stories about having been created, whole and handsome and ignorant, about 6,000 years ago. And every one of them is a relative!
Don't even bother to check out your seed! We all look a little bit like our common really-great-grandmother. And she was Black.
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