The most prolific parent in world history is credited with 888 children. This was Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty [1672-1727], the Sharifian emperor of Morocco (Wright 1994, p. 247). Boy, just what you want - a guy whose nickname is ''the Bloodthirsty'' passing along his genes to nearly 900 children.

There are 16 million male descendants of Genghis Khan (Zerjal et al. 2003).

Umpierre et al. (1985) investigated the spermicidal properties of different kinds of Coca Cola. They found that classic Coke and new Coke were not effective spermicides, but Diet Coke killed human sperm dead, dead, dead. Writer William Hartson (1988) says that ``what the experimenters do not take into account, however, is whether sperm actually like Coke. Perhaps they drank a lot of the diet Coke and slimmed themselves to death...''

The species of fruit flies called Drosophila bifurca are distinguished by producing sperm cells that are 20 times longer than the adult fruit flies (Pitnick et al. 1995). Imagine if this were true for humans. The sperm would be 115 feet long. Sex would be very painful for the man, and scary for the woman. And if there were any subconscious cross talk between species, it might explain why many women are afraid of snakes.

In the debate between evolution and intelligent design, consider some really bad design examples (Holt 2005). Why does a human have an appendix? You can live without it, and having one, if it bursts, can kill you. Why do men have nipples? They serve no purpose. How about the laryngeal nerve, which connects the brain to the larynx in mammals. Does it go directly? No. It extends to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and runs back up the neck to the larynx. In the giraffe that means the nerve must run 20 feet extra to get from the brain to the larynx. Not very intelligent design!

References:

Hartson, William, 1988, Drunken Goldfish and Other Irrelevant Scientific Research , New York: Sterling Publishing Co., pp. 61-63

Holt, Jim, ``Unintelligent design,'' New York Times magazine, February 20, 2005, issue, 15

Pitnick, S., Spicer, G. S., and Markow, T. A., 1995, ``How long is a giant sperm?'' Nature , 375 , 109

Umpierre, S. A., Hill, J. A., and Anderson, D. J., 1985, ``The effect of `coke' on sperm motility,'' New England J. Medicine , 313 , 1351

Wright, Robert, 1994, The Moral Animal - Why We Are the Way We Are: the new science of evolutionary psychology , New York: Vintage

Zerjal, T., et al., 2003, Amer. J. Human Genetics , 72 , 717

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