Deleted User: Nice view !

Deleted User: How’s the water ?

Maynard: I've looked and I've looked but all I find is conspiracy theory stuff. How did you figure out that you had lower body temp and that you were outside of evolution by natural selection?

snippy: crit·i·cal think·ing noun the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.

Maynard: There is no place you’d want to find yourself without up-to-date antivirus software, an airtight pop-up blocker, and ideally a strong stomach. Many links concerning Rh-negative blood look kosher enough in your search results but when clicked release a flood of wide-eyed theories about ethnic migration, blood-type-based dating tips, and offers to trace your ancestry back to extraterrestrials, angels, or lizards.

Maynard: As with most of our species' biological oddities, scientists believe that Rh-negative blood initially resulted from a DNA mutation that evidently served some sort of evolutionary purpose that research hasn't quite yet nailed down. Having the gene for Rh negativity seems to improve resistance to the parasitic condition called toxoplasmosis, which may hint at an answer, but no one knows for sure.

Maynard: No one knows for sure: five magic words that will forever summon swarms of crackpots from dankest cyberspace. Some try to tell you that the children of the Nephilim, an antediluvian race of fallen angels and/or giants casually mentioned in Genesis, still walk among us—ye shall know them by their Rh-negative blood. Others will list the “reptilian” physical characteristics Rh-negative folks possess, including extra vertebrae and lower-than-normal body temperature. Yet others want to talk about the AB-negative blood supposedly found on the Shroud of Turin. But two major sets of opportunistic cranks stand out, each armed with their own theories about Rh negativity.

Maynard: The first crew is relatively benign, of a type familiar to all battlers against pseudoscience: those who for more than half a century have recast the divine beings of the world’s religions as “ancient astronauts,” crediting extraterrestrials with constructing the pyramids and inspiring the stone heads of Easter Island. You've seen their paperback bible in thrift stores, or on your favorite hippie uncle's bookshelf: Chariots of the Gods?, by Erich von Däniken. (Who, the blood-type fans excitedly insist, was Rh-negative himself!) But for some scholars of this ilk, aliens weren’t here just to jumpstart our civilization. They manipulated us on a cellular level, creating, according to UFO-centric author Nick Redfern, “a slave race to dutifully mine gold.” The evidence? You guessed it: Rh-negative blood.

Maynard: You're more likely, though, to encounter the suggestion that Rh-negative blood makes its possessor superior to others. Sometimes this leads to charming kookdom—the Basque people have an extraordinarily high Rh-negative rate of 25 to 35 percent, which entrances that strange subset of Basquophiles who believe them to be a magical race that built Stonehenge and travelled regularly to North America centuries before the age of exploration.

Maynard: Unfortunately, this viewpoint attracts far nastier sorts too. Forever on the lookout for some minor genetic distinction between ethnicities to bolster their worldview, certain white supremacists are tickled a melanin-deficient pink about the fact that about 15 percent of people of European descent will tend to be Rh-negative, while less than one percent of Africans, Asians, and Native Americans will. Thus, predictably, you’ll see assertions that Rh-negatives have a higher IQ and that the fair-skinned Caucasian traits of Northern Europeans were caused by the mutation. Stray far enough into the muck and you'll find “proof” that Jesus was Scandinavian—with AB-negative blood, natch.

snippy: who gives a fuck? go shit on a monkey!

gettheledout: I imagine a party at saint snippys compound being like that scene from Romancin the Stone where Michael Douglas throws a big bale of weed on the fire. Goodt times!