An excerpt:

Lots of evolutionary changes just don’t look manageable by random mutation. Some orchestrated jump seems necessary. How does an animal evolve color vision, given that doing so would require elaborate changes in eye chemistry, useless without simultaneous elaborate changes in the brain to interpret the incoming impulses, which changes would themselves be useless without the retinal changes?

Or consider caterpillars. A caterpillar has no obvious resemblance to a butterfly. The disparity in engineering is huge. The caterpillar has no legs, properly speaking, certainly no wings, no proboscis. How did a species that did not undergo metamorphosis evolve into one that did? Pupating looks like something you do well or not at all: If you don’t turn into something practical at the end, you don’t get another chance.

 

Think about this. The ancestor of a modern caterpillar necessarily was something that could reproduce already. To get to be a butterfly-producing sort of organism, it would have to evolve silk-extruding organs, since they are what you make a cocoon with. OK, maybe it did this to tie leaves together, or maybe the beast resembled a tent-caterpillar. (Again, plausibility over evidence.) Then some mutation caused it to wrap itself experimentally in silk. (What mutation? Are we serious?) It then died, wrapped, because it had no machinery to cause it to undergo the fantastically complex transformation into a butterfly. Death is almost always a discouragement to reproduction.

Here’s the text of The Abolition of Man.

From the comments below the story:

I had the same procedure done to me once–not because I was a hunger striker but because they were afraid I was hemorrhaging profusely into my stomach.
They take a tube and they shove it up your nose, and then it goes down into your esophagus. In my case, like in most others, it doesn’t go through all those u-turns gently..
But the worst of it was that when you’ve got a big, thick tube going up your nose and down your throat, it feels like you’re being strangled. It’s just that you’re being choked from the inside of your throat instead of having someone cut it off by wringing your neck. It probably doesn’t need to be said that it also makes you feel incredibly nauseated.
They brought two giant orderlies into the ER to hold me down–so I’d stop screaming about how I was choking to death and stop trying to pull the tube out of my nose and up out of my stomach.
As big as the orderlies were, and as bad off as I was at the time (I’d lost almost 70% of the blood in my body by that time), I remember thinking I’d rather take a swing at them, and hit them with something in the ER big and heavy–rather than have to sit there with that tube in my nose for one more second.
They’re doing that to those hunger strikers every day?

Yeah, that’s torture.

Christopher Hitchens on Water-boarding:

“You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.”

Here are two articles about Joseph Campbell, and where he gets it wrong:

http://www.tektonics.org/copycat/campbellj01.html

http://www.answers.org/cultsandreligions/campbell.html