27 September—From my earliest days in nursery school I was led to believe that there was no such thing as spontaneous generation—the process or processes by which living organisms are produced from nonliving matter. Scientific fact. I mean, spontaneous generation was presented as science fiction or fraud, like a perpetual motion machine or an engine that runs on air or plain water and has been kept from production by the petroleum mafia—and now, of course, the EV mafia. (I dare not go into pervasive theological science fiction. For now.)

But last Thursday’s Republican-American brought me out of the cave of ignorance I had been imprisoned in for 80 years. (I started nursery school in my fourth month, because my patriotic mother did her thing for the war effort by riveting B-17 fuselages; she was Rosie the Riveter.)

Anyway, the caption to a picture of a luna moth on the front page of the Waterbury rag’s Country Life section asserted, “This lovely luna moth appeared on the back screen door of an Oxford home, giving the owners the chance to enjoy a creature that has a life expectancy of only several days, due to its lack of reproductive organs. Sometimes you can be at the right place at exactly the right time.”

Indeed you can. And luna moths do indeed have pretty damn short lives.

So my first thought was, okay, moths are among Earth’s creatures that can reproduce asexually as well as sexually in order to survive and sustain the species. I’ll spare you the biological vocabulary. But then it occurred to me that in order to reproduce any way at all the creatures must have reproductive organs. Or at least one.

Moreover, it’s well-known that the Republican-American would never but never allow misleading information about politics, history, or anything else to actually be published; and we know the caption was written by someone who knew what he, she, or they was or were writing about; and the copy editor and proofreader surely would have corrected any errors.

Since luna moths lack reproductive organs, then, the only—and obvious—conclusion must be that the species of luna moths (Actias luna) has been able to survive for all this time only by spontaneous generation. Remarkable—impossible—as that may seem, it must nevertheless be the case because the Republican-American hasn’t printed a correction . . .