Annie Dillard, author

I learn that ten percent of all the world's species are parasitic insects. It is hard to believe. What if you were an inventor, and you made ten percent of your inventions in such a way that they could only work by harnessing, disfiguring or totally destroying the other ninety percent? -Annie Dillard, author (b. 1945)

Ms Dillard exhibits here some very fuzzy thinking. It is hard to imagine that there are any inventions that don't harness other inventions, and the purpose of many inventions is to disfigure, in the sense of alter in some way (for example a lathe), andfor many others the function is to destroy other things (e.g., a trash compactor).

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