¶ Procreation
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Index Entry
Procreation:
"If you think about it, it’s probably a very difficult design problem to get an organism to want to procreate. Go to the mirror and stick your tongue way out and have a good look at it. If you didn’t have one of those and a salesman came to your door and said, ‘I’d like to sell you one of these things. You stick it in your mouth and it does you a lot of good,’ I doubt that you’d be very likely to buy that tongue. If you were to take a look at your guts, your kidneys, and then had to go to a supermarket and buy a kit to make a baby, I don’t think you could put it together at all. If each of us could see all the organic equipment required to regenerate this extraordinary walking coral reef that we really are, I don’t think anybody would procreate.
“So in order to be able to get us to procreate, nature gave us a beautiful covering which sort of simplifies, at least, all the frightening colors and coils and such. We have a simplified skin stretched over us, and nature has done a whole lot of tricks, trying to make this thing attractive enough so that procreation will actually occur.”
