Our belief in progress should be shaken by the fact that a president in our late times could not make without great trouble a speech like the one delivered by John F. Kennedy in 1962 at a dinner for the America’s Cup crews. In that speech, JFK stated that it is "a biological fact that all of us have, in our veins, the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean." A half-century after the death of this young president, we find ourselves in a society that has devolved in some ways, because if such a basic or obvious statement about life and its origins is made publicly, it shocks millions of Americans who believe a supernatural ape created the whole universe for the single purpose of establishing a rocky planet on which the moral behavior of a bipedal ape is tested and judged. And so it is no surprise that creationists are very upset about the Super Bowl ad for Carnival Cruises that quoted this old speech, which is poetic and though not accurate is essentially godless...

“I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it’s because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it’s because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins, the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea—whether it is to sail or to watch it—we are going back from whence we came.”

In fact, some years ago, a scientist told me that the ratio of salt to water in our body is not actually that of the sea we have today but of an older, more ancient sea. We are the record, a memory of a kind of sea that no longer exists. And animal life on land is nothing but this sea behaving strangely. Our lives form the hypersea.