This is your world: Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
Sometimes – just SOMETIMES – I regret living in the post-Scientific Revolution era. Sure, I like sanitation and the germ theory of disease and air planes and HDTV and all of that, but those goodies come at a price. That price is the fact that we live in a world where we rarely accept things without evidence (except when it comes from talk radio or cable news).
The result?
You and I live in a world where we DON’T believe in lots of weird and wonderful things.
For example, we don’t believe that some lambs are the fruit of a magical super-plant.
No, really.
In an effort to figure out why cotton exists, medieval “scientists” decided that the best possible explanation was that a special kind of lamb sprouted from a plant and was connected to to that plant by an umbilical cord. The Vegetable Lamb spent its life grazing about its host-plant and – once the plant died – the lamb died, leaving behind cotton.
THAT’s what science used to be like. Totally insane, comic-book crazy explanations for EVERYTHING.
And I CHALLENGE you to tell me you’d rather live in a world where cotton comes from a stupid, boring little bush rather than from an insane plant/animal hybrid that exists in a legendary far-off land.