-- old enough. I can even remember when folks said stuff like, "Y'know what this is? It's a sideways smiley-face!" without being all meta-sarcastic 'n' shit.
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hide, witch, hide / the good folks come to burn thee / their keen enjoyment hid behind / a gothic mask of duty - P. Kantner
I was 19 and didn't even know the smilie existed until I was...a bit older.
But the thing that annoys me the most about this, is that I no longer respond to birthday threads, 'cos I miss so many, so I tend to PM those peeps whose birthdays I do catch, and I can't PM :-) :-(
But what a graphic communication revolution that little guy started, eh? I tip my hyphenated right parentheses to ya. Even my colon tilts in yer honour. It's a keystroke world.
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“Passion makes the world go round. Love just makes it a safer place.”
It’s amazing to think that this humble organism, having formed in the primordial digital ooze of the very early cyberworld, is the common ancestor to today’s wealth of smilie life forms, more than 3,000 separate species of which occupy the “life style niche" of this board alone. It’s an example of Darwinian evolution:
Start with ancestor: :-)
Apply (as previously explained by Kilik) Darwinian monkey butt sex:
And evolution eventually produces a diversified wealth of ever greater and richer complexity, including movement:
And from that, one can educe that God has set the smilie evolution in motion in order to fulfill an intelligently designed concept of interactivity that goes way beyond the ughs and ooh-oohs of the rudimentary armpit-scratching primate prototypes, and into the sophisticated space age (nearer heaven, perchance?) beings that He has guided us to become since our first - rather unpalatable - primordial soup. Indeed, davidm. You couldn't be more right!
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“Passion makes the world go round. Love just makes it a safer place.”
And from that, one can educe that God has set the smilie evolution in motion in order to fulfill an intelligently designed concept of interactivity that goes way beyond the ughs and ooh-oohs of the rudimentary armpit-scratching primate prototypes, and into the sophisticated space age (nearer heaven, perchance?) beings that He has guided us to become since our first - rather unpalatable - primordial soup. Indeed, davidm. You couldn't be more right!
Thanks for bringing this up, Petra. It’s at the heart of the current Intelligent Design vs. evolution debate.
Since the mid-90s, with the publication of his book “Smilies’ Black Box,” Michael Behe has argued that the original ancestral smilies are irreducibly complex, and hence must have been created by an intelligent designer. He invites us to consider :-)
Behe argues that unless all the components are in place from the beginning — the colon, the dash and the close-parenthesis — then the organism is useless. Consider : by itself, or – by itself or ) by itself. No smilie there!
Evolutionists, of course, argue the full smilie component evolved in a stepwise process over a huge amount of cybertime, and that prior to functioning as a “smilie” the individual components served other purposes. Later, descent with modification co-opted those purposes to produce the first full-fledged :-)
Critics point out that in general, when ID advocates say that smilies were “intelligently designed,” what they really mean is “livius drusus did it.” Also known as “drususdidit,” or the “drusus of the gaps” argument, this claim has no explanatory force, and if accepted it would be a show-stopper for smilie science.
Happy Birthday, :-)
Re: Happy Birthday, :-)
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Linear Mode
