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Let me start by saying that I always thought that Uncle H, my mom’s youngest brother, was a fun dude, athletic, good tennis player, etc., and as I got older, a good man and loving father. In spite of what I’m about to get into, he still is a good man in my mind. For me, family ties trump differences in ideology (if you let it).

I wasn’t around for the fiery arguments between my father and Uncle H, (I was probably busy ditching SAT prep class or some such thing), but years later, pops gave me a brief synopsis. It went something like this:

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Uncle H: “Studies have led biblical scholars to the conclusion that the Earth is somewhere in the neighborhood of 70,000 years old.”

Dad: “Ok, radiocarbon dating tends to be increasingly unreliable with specimens older than 40,000 years, I’ll give you that. But with the method of potassium-argon dating, geologists have been able to date rocks to be as old as four billion years old.”

Uncle: “The scientists are just plain wrong. The Bible tells me so.”
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So when I read some recent news (nod to *hydrated*) about the roots of the human genome, one of my first thoughts was, “Cripes, if there ever was a topic to avoid around ole Uncle H, this’d be it.” Most evolutionary anthropologists believe that the split between chimps and humans happened rather abruptly, around seven millions years ago. But according to a recent study by some folks at Harvard and MIT, not only did the final divergence happen more recently than previously thought, the split may have been much more gradual, being precipitated by early humans fucking early chimps to create a hybridized species. What’s more, Dr. Colin Groves, an anthropologist at Australian National University, “said that even today it could be possible for humans and chimps to have sex and produce offspring, although there would be ethical problems.” I’ll say.

Of course that got me to thinking, a bacterium doesn’t derive sexual pleasure upon dividing itself in two. A female sockeye salmon jettisoning a multitude of eggs while the male spews his spunk over them...it’s still doubtful they’re getting their rocks off, but maybe, just maybe. My friend’s beagle Lady frantically humping a living room pillow on the carpet in front of us? That bitch was feeling something alright. And the early hominids giving it to the chimpanzees? Oh baby, how can something so wrong feel so right!

After many arguments ending in proverbial door-slamming, my uncle and father eventually learned to avoid certain subjects altogether. Uncle H now teaches computer science at a Christian university in northeastern China, so I don’t get to see him all that often, but when I do, I’m careful to steer clear of what I now know to be contentious topics. And come to think of it, he’s probably just as deliberate as I am in keeping conversations to all things agreeable. Like I said, if you let it.