I received a fascinating pdf of a book from the author of the Cape Cod History page — it’s by Bergen Evans, was published in 1946, and is titled The Natural History of Nonsense. As far as I’ve read yet, it’s a wonderful example of rational thinking, and makes one wonder why this kind of writing isn’t more representative of American popular literature.
Here’s a short sample from the chapter titled “Adam’s Navel,” which is about the curious history of the omphalos theory, and it also gets into some of the mixed signals our country was sending about race and intelligence.
This ingenious theory, that the real “use or office” of
Adam’s navel was to tempt men into the sin of being sensible, was
revived in 1857 by Philip Henry Gosse, the naturalist, as an
analogy to prove that while the fossils which the paleontologists
had discovered seemed to imply organic evolution, God might
have so arranged them at the Creation in older to damn nineteenth-century skeptics. Gosse had a few followers among the Plymouth
Brethren, but most men greeted his suggestion with shouts of
derision. It was inconceivable that God would have baited a trap
for anything so respectable as the Royal Society. And anyway,
they said, Adam’s navel was as dead as a doornail.But they were wrong. Although it was no longer a fashionable topic among the learned, it must have continued as a
subject for speculation among millions. For in 1944 it suddenly
raised its head in no less august surroundings than the Congress of
the United States, when a subcommittee of the House Military
Affairs Committee, under the chairmanship of Representative
Durham of North Carolina, opposed the distribution of The Races of Mankind to our soldiers on the ground
(among other reasons) that in one of its illustrations “Adam and
Eve are depicted with navels.”The Honorable Gentlemen’s motives for raising this particular objection can only be surmised. Perhaps they were
uncertain of orthography and of the scope of their duties and in
consequence assumed that Navel Affairs came under their
jurisdiction; but the chances are that they were just laying down a
smoke screen, for the pamphlet in question, a thirty-page booklet
prepared by two Columbia professors, contained information that
almost any politician would feel it his duty to conceal. It stated that
the concept of race is based largely on prejudice, that most of us
are of mixed blood, and that nonphysical racial characteristics are
probably the product of environment. And, most horrible of all, it
chose to illustrate this last assertion from tests given by the United
States Army in World War I which indicated that the average
intelligence of Negroes from some Northern states was higher than
the average intelligence of whites from some Southern states.
The OCR on this scan is very well done, and it’s only a 1.2M download despite being the whole book — let’s try not to bring the guy’s server to its knees, though.
Tag this for Davison. Then he’ll bitch about how Darwinism is immoral concerning cabbage ethnicity.
Only if the cabbage has a navel!
Cabbage is the tool of Satan. It’s been sent to this realm to tempt man into farting in church and subsequently forcing them to sit in their own pew as punishment.
If you want an alternate way of getting the file, it’s up on megaupload here.
Seems like it’ll be a fun read.
And obviously to test just how pious the Irish are.
Nice book. I’m reading it now.
The “gay” cause of common sense? Sounds like fun alright, if you like that “kind of thing”.
Brian,
“Gay” used to mean happy or fun. Today, it’s being used a lable for homesexuals. I suppose it is just nicer to call them Gay, as opposed to Homos, assuming they’re happy.
Y’all might enjoy “Did Adam and Eve have Navels?,” Martin Gardner’s essay collection published in 2000.
Triphesas – if I’d seen the megaupload file, I wouldn’t have spent many hours working on my own version. Google is your friend, but only if you keep in touch.
Today, it’s being used a lable for homesexuals.
Don’t worry Mark, the collapse of the real estate bubble should put an end to that viscous practice.
Mooser,
Sorry. I don’t know what’s with with me today. My spelling and grammar are way off. I meant to say, “Today, it is being used as a lable for homosexuals.”
Turn your spell checker on, Matt. You still aren’t there yet. Look up ‘lable’. I use m-w.com when I am on my old machine with no built-in spell check.
Only a little more on-topic:
You know, kids are still coming out of Sunday Schools with the idea that men today have one less rib than women. Mine did, and they wouldn’t believe me when I showed them pictures of skeletons. I blame the Baptists (in this case).
Matt Lacrosse @ #12 said:
(emphasis mine)
*snort*
Good one, Matt. BTW, job advise. Learn to spell ‘label’ if you want to be a programmer.
βPer
Amazing! I read ‘The Natural History of Nonsense’ maybe half-a -century ago, along with Martin Gardner’s ‘Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science’. I suppose that’s the pedigree of my scepticism. Disheartening that both books could be reprinted now, with almost no substantive changes. You’d have to change the name of ‘Ruth Drown’ (therapy by radio waves) to ‘Hulda Clark’, but the scams and pseudoscience still lurk in the shadows, ready to re-emerge when the tide of sense and knowledge ebbs.
Please keep up the good work. Mock them hard.
βPer said: “Learn to spell ‘label’ if you want to be a programmer.”
*chuckle*
Thanks for tip. It might be the late night programming that is having an adverse effect on my writing skills.
Sorry PZ, for posting such a crudely written comment.
Good one, bPer. Learn to spell ‘advice’ if you want to be a spelling/grammar Nazi. ‘Advise’ is a verb.
Bring a pillow and blanket, lay down, and have a nice nap. The mindless droning of the nutter in front will put you to sleep in no time. Before leaving, be sure to thank the other vistors for allowing you a whole pew to sleep on.
the average intelligence of Negroes from some Northern states was higher than the average intelligence of whites from some Southern states
But how can that be, when we were repeatedly assured in the Race and IQ thread that it’s simply a neutral empirical fact that whites are more intelligent than blacks? Hmmm, I wonder if it has anything to do with (stupid racists) mistakenly treating an attribute of an average over a set as if it were an attribute of members of the set.
Can’t you all see what this article is doing? It’s turnig us against eachother! Time to ban cabbages of all kinds now!
Ray @ #17 said:
LOL. Yes, indeed. That’s what I get for rewording my comment carelessly.
Matt: programming (late-night or otherwise) seems to have the opposite effect on me. The language keywords become so second nature that I end up typing them when I mean to type other words. e.g. ‘them’ becomes ‘then’
bPer,
My brain is typically two or three words past my fingers when I’m typing. I’m also dyslexic to some extent. Late night anything seems only to exacerbate the problem.
This needs to be uploaded to all those ebook usenet groups that are always flooded with new age and religious BS.
Matt LaCrosse @#21:
I only wish I could think ahead of my typing. Never learning to type is a bit of a handicap for a person who makes his living in front of a computer.
These consistent inadvertent spelling errors can be frustrating. I remember a few months ago being puzzled by a term that one of the more prolific commenters here was repeatedly using. His spelling and grammar are consistently top-notch, so I assumed it was spelled correctly. I spent 10-15 minutes trying to find out what the word meant, without success. Sheepishly, I posted a comment asking him what the word meant. He replied that he had simply been mis-spelling the word each time. It was sort of a portmanteau, so I can understand how it happened. Bummer when you trust your fingers to type words you know perfectly well how to spell and they let you down – consistently! :)
Matt #8,
“I suppose it is just nicer to call them Gay, as opposed to Homos, assuming they’re happy.”
Back in the days, when we had to hide, it was used as a code word.
You’d say “are you gay ?”, a hetero would answer, “what do you mean, well yes I’m fine”. A homosexual who knew the code would of course answer differently.
After a while, the word came out, and the expression stayed.
So, no, we’re not particularly more “happy” (nor mentally sick as so many Christian fundamentalists might think…).
Nice book, but I found this a bit amusing:
Apparently “very little snow” goes a long way!
The South has problems with education. The auto plants have had troubles with employees not being literate. Many Northern transplants have found it takes four Southern employees to fulfill the tasks completed by one Northern employee. For many years it was accepted that a Northern high school diploma was the equivalent of a Southern “Ivy League” degree.
Since the Southern economy was based on forced slave labor, it can’t be expected that education would be on the forefront of policy. Why spend money on educating the middle and working classes? They just might realize that planters were rather useless and leading the South into a Civil War.
This is instructive in that the current administration has the hallmarks of classic planter ideology. Your place in the universe is not from merit. It derives from birth and religious orthodoxy.
In the “Natural History” I come on this gem of an analogy:
The tumult and the shouting over the motion of the earth
was too violent to subside completely in three short centuries. There are still sporadic outbursts of protest, and now and then some zealot will seize an old weapon discarded in the fray and deal the astonished world a blow on the pate with it. He is not always sure of the issue involved, or of the original purpose of the weapon, but it has a convenient handle and makes a loud thwack, and that is enough for him.
A perfect expression of the incessant cycle debate between science and religion. Stuff doesn’t stay proven because the kooks and morons don’t pay attention to anything but their own nattering.
ice
It is also available on my modest and untidy site: http://kwhitefoot.quotaless.com/images/The%20Natural%20History%20of%20Nonsense.pdf
Oh my! This is so ironic. Back about 15 years ago I was working in an ecology lab. I happened across an annual report from a funding agency (general reinsurance, maybe?) funding part of one of the projects I was working on. Naturally it was a slick shiny publication. But the thing about this report that stuck with me ever since was this quote that was on the inside front cover. It was attributed to Bergen Evans from the book “The Natural History of Nonsense.” I happen to think it is one of the greatest quotes of all time. It is a quote to live by. It is a quote for rationalists everywhere. Of course I saved it and I share it with you here. Remember it and spread it:
“The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis. For in the last analysis all tyranny rest on fraud, on getting someone to accept false assumptions, any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.”
Bergen Evans
The Natural History of Nonsense
And, most horrible of all, it chose to illustrate this last assertion from tests given by the United States Army in World War I which indicated that the average intelligence of Negroes from some Northern states was higher than the average intelligence of whites from some Southern states.
I’ve lived the last 12 years in the South, and this observation does not surprise me.
Imagine how folks who deal with social behavior feel when they realize that Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is still on point, though he could add a number of examples that have occurred since 1841.
“The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis. For in the last analysis all tyranny rest on fraud, on getting someone to accept false assumptions, any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.”
Nice. Seems like it would be a rather beneficial meme.
Wow, thank you so much! I read this book when I was in junior high and had totally forgotten about it in the 50 intervening years. But thanks to your memory jog (and the download!) I now can look back and recall that this book in particular was instrumental in pushing me out of the lockstep formation and helping me to be able to think for myself.
Kudos!
–The F Man
βPer: You seem to code in a BASIC dialect, right? If so, try changing to a /real/ language, will ya? :P
“Mold” said (#27): “The South has problems with education.”
No kidding. Anybody who has been following the Florida Board of Education brouhaha about actually putting the word “evolution” in the education standards already knows this. Turns out there are Florida counties where the creationist loons outnumber the rational humans. See, for instance, http://www.beacononlinenews.com/dailyitem.php?itemnum=602 – or, from one of my favorite authors, Carl Hiaasen: http://www.miamiherald.com/540/story/421075.html
In my teens I fair read the type off the library’s copies of Natural History of Nonsense and Spoor of Spooks (also by Evans) . I have a copy of NHoN in my library but can’t lay hands on it at the moment. The download is hard to read.
So that explains the weird diorama in the Creation Museum where Adam and Eve are standing in water up to their waists. There are more naughty bits in need of covering up than I originally suppposed.
dkew-
I think it might actually be the same as the one you did, since the file sizes are the same. I got the megaupload link in an email earlier this morning, and since PZ made the note about not trampling your server too badly, thought I’d share it. If I shouldn’t have, I’m sorry.
I remember a few months ago being puzzled by a term that one of the more prolific commenters here was repeatedly using. His spelling and grammar are consistently top-notch
Why thank you! (The “term” was “theologician”.)
I’ve lived the last 12 years in the South, and this observation does not surprise me.
The notion that it should surprise anyone seems subtly racist.
Thank you Lane Smith – I was looking for a new tag line for my email signature, this will do splendidly!
Nice book, but I found this a bit amusing:
One of the most persistent errors regarding climate is that the Arctic is a land of eternal snow and unendurable cold. […] Actually, the Arctic is dry, and there is very little snow there. […] At no time, says the Federal Writers’ A Guide to Alaska, is it ever totally dark in the Arctic, because of refraction and moonlight on the snow…
Apparently “very little snow” goes a long way!
Well, yes – obviously it means that snow doesn’t fall very often*, but when it does it tends to hang around (what with the climate being cold). It’s badly written, I agree, but it’s trying to make the point that saying it is always snowing in the Arctic is wrong.
*A pedant would say that of course the snow only falls once. There may be snow falling on two successive days, but that’s different snow each time.
> tempt men into the sin of being sensible
Reminds me of the time I was accused of having “had the common sense educated right out of me”.
Well, yes – obviously it means that snow doesn’t fall very often…
Does it? :) I’d have written simply “it doesn’t snow very often in the Arctic” (which is an oversimplification), but maybe that’s just me. But I think a reader who’s unfamiliar with the Arctic would be even more confused after this “debunking” of Arctic myths.
Something else that sticks out is the discussion of animal cognition – but maybe skepticism of altruism etc. was more justified given the state of the science in 1946. Frans de Waal might say that this book promotes some myths of its own, though :)
Good recommendaiton, this book is hysterically funny and wickedly witty.
Cj
AnonCoward @#35 teased:
Bad guess, my friend. I tried BASIC for a while, long after learning vastly superior languages, and found it hopelessly inadequate. I prefer Niklaus Wirth’s languages (ALGOL professionally and Pascal at home), which express conditional statements as
IF <boolean expression> THEN.
If by “/real/ language” you mean C and its many variants, I don’t hold them in very high regard. Just can’t respect a language that uses the equals sign for assignment – too BASIC-like. 8-0
Ah, a man after my own heart. C is evil — any language that can have a puzzle book, and in which people take pride in terse and cryptic code, is harmful. And C++ made it worse. When I discovered operator overloading, I just want to throw my hands up and puke on the keyboard. The ability to so freely redefine the basic symbols of the language sounds like a powerful tool, but it’s a recipe for chaos and confusion.
My ideal of a computer language is Object Pascal. Object programming is essential, but it needs to be done in a constrained and structured way — and Pascal syntax is so clean and beautiful.
(Does anyone program in Pascal anymore? At the universities I’ve been at, everyone uses that horrible Scheme in introductory courses.)
(Does anyone program in Pascal anymore? At the universities I’ve been at, everyone uses that horrible Scheme in introductory courses.)
Shit, I remember programming in Fortran.
On a temp job i had two summers ago, I was doing data entry. They set my up on a VAX TERMINAL! I didn’t know the bloody things still existed. *shudder* horrible memories of a 7:30 am class in which the Prof didn’t know the pre-requisites did not require differential equations, so a bunch of us–who were two semesters away from taking DiffEq–were like, “What’s that squiggly thing mean?” Of course, we ChemE majors were the only ones required to take a specific course in Fortran–all the other engineers had it built into a different class.
If by “/real/ language” you mean C and its many variants
Well, you guessed wrong as well. I was, of course, speaking of Assembly, the only /real/ language. :P
Oh, the beauty of having absolute control, the poetry of being able to optimize everything and their dog. :)
How I long for the days when people finally realize the nonsense of these high-level languages and return to pure powerful progamming.
I learned C, C++, Java, and Assembly in college. but at work I do almost all my programming in Pascal (legacy code). I taught myself hte language in the first few months on the job.