The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster by Bobby Henderson

Author:Bobby Henderson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780307485564
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2006-01-02T10:00:00+00:00

The Voyage of the Beagle

The Voyage of the Meatball nearly destroyed Darwin. He limped through his last year of studies and, following graduation, did what any man armed with a Cambridge degree would do: He took a five-year vacation to the Galápagos Islands. Suffering from nervous exhaustion—and having lost all faith in humanity—Darwin was now determined to befriend as many of the world’s animals as possible.

It was aboard the HMS Beagle that life began to turn around for him. In a freak gale off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, all of Darwin’s cookbooks were washed overboard; bored and suffering from severe skin rashes, young Charles picked up a book that would set his life on a new course. That book was Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which posited that geological features are the outcome of gradual processes that take place over eons of time. Something clicked in Darwin’s head, and in that moment of clarity he realized that a slow-cooked sauce would be exponentially more delicious than one that was merely heated from a can, something that had never before occurred to an Englishman. From this realization, he gleaned some other ideas related to Evolution, but he was really most excited about the sauce revelation. Within days, the Beagle’s cook was thrown overboard, and Charles Darwin took over the ship’s mess.

There were mussels galore in South America,13 and Darwin thrived. On October 2, 1836, he returned to England as a minor celebrity, having discovered fossils, finches, tortoises, mockingbirds, and modern cooking. His book The Voyage of the Beagle14 was a hit, and he was invited to dinner parties throughout London, where he cooked and talked throughout many a night. Some of the proceeds from the Beagle book went toward self-publishing On the Origin of Spaghetti Sauce, in which Darwin put forth his theory of slow-cooked sauce and perfectly boiled noodles as a divine representation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Sadly, the book never took off.

Still, Darwin had his day job, which consisted of little more than jotting down everything he noticed. To that effect, and prompted by the fascinating structural similarities between earthworms and various forms of pasta, he began studying worms.15 It is quite possible that this is the point where Charles Darwin finally descended into full-blown dementia. We will, however, never know the full truth, because Thomas Huxley, who had developed an unhealthy fascination for the fullness and length of Darwin’s beard, took it upon himself to follow Darwin around in an attempt to defend his mindless ramblings about worms.

It was Huxley who convinced Darwin to stop arguing that humans were descended from worms—or “in His16 image,” as Darwin was often quoted as saying. Huxley convinced his friend to claim that the lines of descent passed instead from monkeys, which he pointed out actually had appendages and bore an uncanny resemblance to certain people, including Darwin, who became known as “Monkey Man.”

Once Darwin made the intellectual jump from worms to monkeys, his theory really took off. He

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