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.

I don’t think so. Virgil Griffith pulled out the top ten books read by students at various universities (it turns out Facebook collects that data for you), and then tried to correlate that with the average SAT/ACT score of each university. The result is a mess. You might be able to say that schools with low admission standards are more likely to have students who read the Bible and Fahrenheight 451, while the universities with the higher academic reputation are more likely to have students reading Lolita and Ayn Rand, but the overall distribution is more suggestive of chance — there is large, diverse pool of books read by university students, and facebook is plucking out a nearly random subset.

The display leaves a lot to be desired, too. What does the size of the lozenges mean? Standard deviation? I’d need to see something about the actual numbers for each book, too — how many universities have The Grapes of Wrath in their top ten, and how many students is the sample based on? A small college with only a few students on Facebook is a situation that is readily skewed.

I’m only mentioning this to torment you all, so you can stare at this chart trying to make sense of it as long as I did.

I love bookstores — I like the ones that have huge stacks of strange used books where you can find surprises, and I also like the big online stores where I can order anything I want. My kids are all the same way; when we make trips into the big city, the whole mess of us usually end up spending hours in places like Cummings or Uncle Hugo’s. But I finally found a bookstore with no redeeming values at all, one I will never patronize.

It’s called Abunga, and their motto is “Empowering Decency as your Family Friendly Bookstore”. What that means is that they allow bookstore members to vote against books, and if enough people reject a book, the store removes it from its database. This makes no sense to me. There are a lot of books that I deplore, and the way I cope with them is that I don’t buy them. I don’t go to the manager and tell them that no one else should be allowed to buy them.

So of course one set of books already banned is Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Looking around the site, it seems that they’re mainly pushing is religious pablum, naturally enough.

It seems a small thing, but that’s what you get when you give a religious cult majority rule — it’s not an opportunity for them to relax and enjoy their culture, but a reason to suppress minority views.

Every year, John Brockman comes up with a question and asks the eclectic group on the Edge forum to answer it…then all the answers get bound up in a book. In the past he has asked, “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”, “What is your dangerous idea?”, and “What are you optimistic about?” This year’s question is now revealed:

When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy. When God changes your mind, that’s faith. When facts change your mind, that’s science. What have you changed your mind about? Why?

It was a tough one. There are so many trivial things that we change our minds about — toast with my oatmeal, or a muffin? —but they don’t make for interesting reading. I’m afraid I got rather general in my answer, and argued that there is a commitment in science to look for data that will change your mind about something you are advocating, which creates an interesting paradox: if your goal is to change your mind about something, doesn’t finding evidence to change your mind mean that on a higher philosophical level you haven’t really changed your mind? For a scientist to really change his perspective would require a retreat into dogma.

Anyway, look for the book when it comes out — there are always infuriating and enlightening answers in them.

The NY Times has published a list of the 100 most notable books of the year. I’m feeling inadequate because, while I read a lot of books, not one of them happened to be on this particular list. I’m thinking that I’d better rush out and get one that is on the list, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard, because that looks like it might be awfully handy at this point.

Of course, I’ve got an excuse. Most of the books I’ve read are science books, and as Chad notes, not one science book made the cut. I guess science was just un-notable and uninteresting this year. Or perhaps the NYT auto-blurb generator choked and died when confronted by difficult texts that didn’t involve depressed exotic people talking, talking, talking endlessly about their powerful love.

Donald Prothero asked me to pass along this request for feedback. He wrote an excellent book on evolution (with illustrations by the inimitable Carl Buell) that beautifully complements the theory with the details of common descent. If you’ve read it — I’m working on my copy now — let him know what you think!

EVOLUTION AND FOSSILS

Last night’s Nova program did an outstanding job, given the nature of
their show and the time limits imposed by their format. But we still have a
long way to go to convey to the general public just how strong the fossil
evidence for evolution has become. Those few animations of fossils in the
Nova special and website were OK, but most of the public (especially those
with creationist leanings) distrusts animations, so we need to show them
actual fossils that are relatively easy for a non-paleontologist to
interpret. We need to make the case over and over again that there are
hundreds of nice transitional sequences in the fossil record, from the micro
to the macro scale, to overcome the creationists’ systematic campaign of
lies and distortions about fossils. Their mantra is “There are no
transitional fossils,” and as Josef Goebbels once said, a lie repeated often
enough becomes the truth. We need to counteract this propaganda, and the
nice specials about dinosaurs (with little or no evolutionary content) are
not enough.

As readers of this website know, Carl Buell and I just put together a
book on the topic, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}
(Columbia Univ. Press, available on their website or on Amazon.com. I’m
flattered by the nice comments about Carl Buell’s art in our recent book
(webpost on Pharyngula.org, Oct. 18). Carl did an amazing job putting
together beautiful restorations of extinct critters, as well as many new
versions of phylograms and family trees of extinct animals to show just how
many transitional fossils the creationists must deny. We tried as much as
possible to bring in the most up-to-date information about transitional
forms, especially the more recent discoveries that only the specialists know
about. We even managed to scoop the scientific literature–we have an image
of a transitional giraffid fossil with a neck intermediate in length between
a modern giraffe and primitive short-necked giraffid. Nikos Solounias
graciously sent it to me, even though his article is still in press.

Now that the book is out, I’d appreciate any feedback from the readers of
Pharyngula.org about what you liked or didn’t like, and what you would
recommend in the way of changes. I’m about ready to revise it slightly for
the second printing, so timely reviews would be very helpful.

Dr. Donald R. Prothero
Lecturer in Geobiology
California Institute of Technology