BUT IT'S AN EXAMPLE OF PARODY (via Buttercup):

Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill (Meredith F. Small, 6/20/08, LiveScience.com)

Neurophysiologist Katherine Rankin at the University of California, San Francisco, has also recently discovered that sarcasm, which is both positively funny and negatively nasty, plays an important part in human social interaction. [...]

According to Dr. Rankin, if you didn't get the sarcastic tone of the previous sentences you must have some damage to your parahippocampal gyrus which is located in the right brain. People with dementia, or head injuries in that area, often lose the ability to pick up on sarcasm, and so they don't respond in a socially appropriate ways.

Presumably, this is a pathology, which in turn suggests that sarcasm is part of human nature and probably an evolutionarily good thing.

Take out the "presumably"'s and there's nought left of Darwinism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 22, 2008 9:03 AM