AP, Reuters, and your favourite new source have the story: a fire in Indonesia is killing orangutans. More than two hundred are already dead  – and it’s entirely possible that, within the next few weeks, the entire orangutan population of Sumatra will be dead.

So I started copying and posting lists – how to avoid palm oil, which companies use it and looking for petitions to sign.

And then someone asked me what’s wrong with palm oil.

Turns out – dead orangutans are just the start of it.

What’s wrong with palm oil?

A lot.

• The demand for palm oil is going to make orangutans extinct. And very, very soon.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I hate these things.

Turns out, “these things” have a name – “The March of Progress”.

And, as it turns out, I’m not the only one who hates them…
The “March of Progress”, the iconic evolutionary image of an ancestral ape transforming into a proud, tool-wielding human, is not going anywhere. There is perhaps no other illustration that is as immediately recognizable as representing evolution, but the tragedy of this is that it conveys a view of life that does not resemble our present understanding of life’s history. Stephen Jay Gould addressed this two decades ago in his book Wonderful Life, in which he wrote;
“Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction

Love this.

To be entirely honest, I kind of hate those normal monkey-to-man-walking-in-a-line-demonstrating-evolution things. (Yes, hominin species got taller over time, and, yes they got more “human” in appearance. BUT, it screams that “it was all about becoming human”. Which is a fallacy. Because it implies that the Homo sapiens form was inevitable, is better, and everything else before was a rough draft. It’s practically an echo of the “Humans are the most specialist of all!” pre(early)-Darwinian thought.) Continue reading