Hiro Protagonist

While watching television this afternoon I watched a special on Dragons on the [H]itler channel. An anthopologist on the show postilutes that dragons are universal to human cultures. The large number of Google hits for the term "dragon" is given as proof. This seemed ridiculous as proof to universalism, especially since their search was limited to matches in English. Nonetheless, I thought to compare to a few other words :









So, a large number of hits indicates that these are cultural universals?

Oh, I'm not sure what this means, if anything but it seemed strange, there were more hits for holocaust than for Nazis....





Anyways, the write up of the show had this synopsis:

A spirited exploration of the history, science, and legend of the world's most notorious beast--the dragon, the best-known creature that never was. Throughout history, dragons influenced wars, science, art, and religion. They appear in almost every culture and many still believe in dragons. How could different cultures, isolated by geology and millennia, all invent the same creature? If the dragon is simply the product of our imagination, how could distant peoples, with no knowledge of each other, all invent the same beast? One of the reasons dragons are a perennial favorite is that even though they are the ultimate predator and antagonist, it's also fun to identify with them. In the end, we want to be the dragon as much as we may want to slay the dragon.

The science of something that doesn't exist? You'd think a show like this would have some quotes by Joseph Campbell.... sadly, you'd be wrong.