On the way to Tumble Tots Davies started asking questions which were clearly leading somewhere. It started with whether I went to Tumble Tots when I was a little girl and me saying no and I didn’t think there were things like TT when I was a little girl, perhaps he should ask Granny. Why? Because she looked after me when I was a little girl so she would have been the one to take me to TT if there had been TT. Thoughtful silence broken by:
D: Who looked after all the babies before there was grown ups?
N: There was always grown ups darling, otherwise there would have been no babies
D: No Mummy. You said that when dinosaurs were on this planet it was before people existed.
N: Yes, that’s right
D: So when the first people came they would have been babies, so who looked after them?
We then danced round the whole chicken and egg type thing with him insisting that it would have been babies before grown ups but quickly got to that being fairly irrelevant anyway because the main question was not whether the first people were in their infancy ot their pensionerhood but how the bloody hell they had gotten here at all. Ah! Bugger!
I briefly talked about how people who believe in God believe that He created the whole world and everything and He made the first two people – as grown ups – and everyone alive now is from their children and their children’s children etc. I then very warily touched on people being descended from apes but as I am totally wobbly on the whole evolution thing myself and luckily we pulled up at TT at that point the conversation was put on hold.
Help!!! Need to get my own knowledge on theories and beliefs up to speed on this one so I can provide some better answers next time he asks – which he will 🙂
Is there an Usborne book of ‘how we all got here in the first place’? 🙂
Don’t ask me I’m a creationist LOL Not sure about the Usborne book – have a look in the main catalogue that you got. One good thing about LC not talking is that she isn’t asking any awkward questions yet LOL
Comment by Karen b — 25 February 2005 @ 8:55 pm
|Don’t ask me.,.. Fran has this idea that her great great great great great grannie was a lizard… i don’t think i expained evolution quite well enough…
Comment by Merry — 25 February 2005 @ 9:46 pm
Don’t ask me either, I start with creation though quite happy to have some evolution and varying timescales along the way. Maybe he’ll forget about it for a couple of years …?!!
btw, did you mail me the stew recipe for the third time? because I haven’t got it! Don’t know why not if not, I haven’t been fiddling with my email today … think my server doesn’t like stew or something?
Comment by Sarah — 25 February 2005 @ 10:01 pm
oh grr – maybe some other Sarah somewhere now has three recipes for beef stew – will try again 🙂
Comment by Nic — 25 February 2005 @ 10:10 pm
And some other Jan…? Our email’s been a bit weird this week though.
Comment by Jan — 25 February 2005 @ 10:22 pm
very curious – or as Woody has said at least three times in our house from Toy Story today – strange things are happening. It shows as sent to both of you (Sarah x 3) but I’ve just tried to forward it to myself at the laptop and it hasn’t appeared here either… I will get it to you one way or another I promise (can’t bring myself to blog it though – what if someone managed to break through the top level security to discover what it was I was so keen to keep secret and found, gasp, the recipe for beef stew 😀
Comment by Nic — 25 February 2005 @ 10:28 pm
Yes I would like that elusive stew recipe please – pretty please 🙂
Comment by Karen b — 25 February 2005 @ 11:17 pm
Well I suppose I ought to be able to say something sensible about the evolution of humans bit. I think starting with the word ‘descended’ really gets people off on the wrong track – I think it puts in the head the idea that G-G-G-Grandad was a Chimpanzee or somesuch – I prefer to stick to the word evolved. I blame the well known ‘Ascent of man’ picture, with an ape gradually turning into a human. It plants the idea that there is this sort of direct line from and ape to man. A better image to hold is really that of a tree structure, all modern primates have evovoled from a common ancestor (or possibly afew) that lived some millions of years ago. As time went by, this led to different branches of the ‘tree’ developing into chimps, Orangutans, Gorillas etc. In evolutionary terms we are all on an equal footing.
This hasn’t really yet come up with E yet, though bits have, we’ve talked about fossils, about dinosaurs (of course), and we got into bit of aconversation at Dynamic Earth – when looking at the ‘primordial soup’ bit about ideas about life starting very simply and then developing into more complicated animals. BTW if anyone wants to read anything on the ideas of evolution I recommend the books of the wonderful essays by the late Stephen Jay Gould, he blends science , art, literature and history into some fascinating writing. I’m always amazed at just how much different stuff he has delved into to think about and write the stuff.
Comment by Chris F — 25 February 2005 @ 11:53 pm
stew recipe arrived@23:15! thank you 🙂
Comment by Sarah — 26 February 2005 @ 4:31 am
Thanks Chris, that was great – will look up Gould’s work. 🙂
And Sarah – at last!!! 🙂 Karen’s has arrived too, has yours Jan?
Comment by Nic — 26 February 2005 @ 8:13 am
Yes, thanks Nic
Comment by Jan — 26 February 2005 @ 8:22 pm