The Banana Man Chronicles-1: The abbreviated version

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

A week or so ago, I wrote about Banana Man and Crocoduck’s excellent new adventure where, on November 19, they are going to give away 50,000 copies of Charles Darwin’s classic book On the Origin of Species on various college campuses (not sure if ours is one of the lucky ones) but with the added bonus of a 50 page introduction by Banana Man.

The Banana Man claims that in those 50 pages he will, using his demonstrated powerful reasoning powers and rhetorical skills that I described in that previous post, demolish the theory of evolution by natural selection that has, for the last century, been the foundation of biology. And who is better able to provide an introduction to one of the greatest works of science than someone whose understanding of evolutionary theory is so deep that he thinks the banana could not have evolved to be so perfectly suited to being eaten by humans and thus had to be directly made by god?

For those who cannot wait until November 19 to see what delights are in store in Banana Man’s introduction, you can see read it here. Oddly, the link to the introduction no longer works, although it was live for more than a week. I don’t know if it is a temporary server glitch or it has been pulled from the site for some reason. I had downloaded the introduction earlier and still have it but you will have to take my word for it about what it contains until the book appears or the link is restored.

For those others who cannot spare the time to read all fifty pages, I have decided to take one for the team and devote some time to prepare a CliffsNotes version of Banana Man’s thesis (with my own commentary added of course) and these will form the topic of posts for this week. The reason I am devoting so much time to this is partly in response to commenter Derek’s point some time ago that I should not devote all my attention on refuting only the sophisticated religious apologists who don’t believe in anything remotely resembling what the average believer thinks, but also examine the views of more traditional believers. The Banana Man is as unlike the sophisticated apologists as one can get. Derek had in mind people like Albert Mohler and Cornelius Van Til who are somewhere in between those two extremes but one has to start somewhere so I will start at the bottom with Banana Man and work myself up from there. Furthermore, a case can be made that the kinds of views expressed by Banana Man have a greater following than those of the others.

Anyway, here is what Banana Man says in his introduction:

Pages 1-4: Short biography of Darwin. Banana Man ends this section with “At the age of seventy-three, Charles Darwin went to meet his Maker at Down house on April 19, 1882, with his wife, Emma, by his side.”

When I first read this, I thought that Banana Man was saying that god lived at Down house and that was where Charles went after he died and that Emma went along with him, and thus must have died at the same time as Charles. Of course, this is not true but is the kind of misunderstanding that can arise when you use soothing religious euphemisms like ‘went to meet his Maker’ instead of the straightforward ‘died’.

Since Darwin was an unrepentant agnostic right to the end, we have to assume that the Maker scolded him and sent the naughty boy to his room without dessert.

Pages 4-8: Timeline of Darwin’s life.

It is after this that the ‘attack’ on the theory of evolution begins in earnest. Given the level of Banana Man’s understanding of the theory, his attack on Darwin is like (to use the late Molly Ivins’ memorable phrase) being gummed by a newt.

Pages 9-15: Shorter version:

“Wow! Isn’t DNA amazing? It contains such a lot of information! It couldn’t have occurred by chance. Hence god exists.”

In other words, we get an argument from personal incredulity, based on the willful misrepresentation that evolution by natural selection occurs by pure chance.

Pages 15-22: Shorter version:

“There are no transitional forms. Hence evolution is wrong. Hence god exists.”

Sadly, Banana Man disses his faithful sidekick Kirk Cameron by not including the latter’s ingenious crocoduck argument. Why the omission? Does he also think Cameron’s argument is ludicrous? Et tu, Brute?

Pages 22- 28: Shorter version:

“I don’t understand how the blood circulatory system or the eye came about. Hence god exists.”

In other words, another argument from personal incredulity. Oddly enough, Banana Man does not include as another example the very banana that he had earlier described as providing irrefutable proof of god’s existence because it was so perfectly suited for human eating and impossible to conceive of as having evolved. Given that he will be forever after permanently associated with that fruit, the omission is inexplicable.

Page 29: Shorter version:

“Some vestigial organs may have some purpose. Hence god exists.”

Pages 30-36: Shorter version:

“Darwin was a racist and misogynist. Hitler was evil and an evolutionist. Hence Darwin was evil like Hitler. Hence the theory of evolution is bad. Hence god exists.”

Pages 36-39: Shorter version:

“Darwin and Albert Einstein and some other well-known figures in scientific history were not atheists. Richard Dawkins and Francis Crick cannot prove that god does not exist. Hence god exists.”

This was pretty much it as far as arguing against the theory of evolution went. Frankly, I was disappointed. Given all the money and resources that Banana Man was pouring into this venture, I had expected better arguments or at least a mention of those golden oldies, the banana and the crocoduck.

As one can see, these are the same old arguments against evolution that have been thoroughly refuted over and over again. Biologist Jerry Coyne makes a clinical dissection of these arguments against evolution here.

I think that Herbert Spencer’s response in 1891 is still the best: “Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution as not being adequately supported by facts, seem to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.”

Next: The last ten pages where Banana Man gets to the point of the exercise.

POST SCRIPT: Mr. Deity explains how baptism by water came about

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Racism and nepotism

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from the publishers Rowman & Littlefield for $34.95, from Amazon for $25.16, from Barnes and Noble for $26.21 ($23.58 for members), and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

The desperate attempt by the nutters to claim that the Obama administration is not legitimate is truly weird given that he well and truly trounced his rival John McCain in the last election. The nutters seem to find it hard to accept that a black man (despite being smart, educated, well-spoken, poised, self-confident, and with an attractive family) has become the leader and visible face of the nation. Is this irrational and vitriolic response to Obama the fruit of racism, as this cartoon by Tom Tomorrow suggests? Racism is a loaded term that is normally reserved for active and conscious antipathy towards people of another race. What we may be seeing here may be more complicated than that.

There seems to be the sense among nutters that the presidency and other high positions in society are niches that are properly the domain of white people, the ‘real Americans’. This reaction seems to be fueled by the sense that any black or Hispanic person who achieves a prominent position (apart from the sports and the entertainment worlds) must have got there using some kind of unfair advantage. So Barack Obama, being black and coming from an underprivileged background, must have cheated somehow to get where he is.

As former president Jimmy Carter says:

I live in the south, and I’ve seen the south come a long way, and I’ve seen the rest of the country that shared the south’s attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African Americans.

And that racism inclination still exists. And I think it’s bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the south but around the country, that African Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It’s an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply.

One also gets the sense that some people expect that Obama should show gratitude that he has been ‘allowed’ to become president and so should adopt the obsequious posture of the ‘house Negro’, as described by Malcolm X.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia) said that Obama should show ‘humility’ when he spoke recently to the joint session of Congress about health care. In other words, he shouldn’t be ‘uppity’. The unctuous Sen. Lindsey Graham said after Obama’s speech, “I was incredibly disappointed in the tone of his speech. At times, I found his tone to be overly combative and believe he behaved in a manner beneath the dignity of the office.”

It did not bother Chambliss and Graham when George W. Bush, who epitomized arrogance, showed utter contempt for Congress and for anyone who disagreed with him. Bush’s rudeness and condescension towards others was legendary. But since he was to the manner born, it was ok.

The nepotism that comes with the sense of privileged entitlement is also at play. When incompetent white people in the ruling classes use their family and social connections to perpetuate their privileges and reach positions of prominence, it does not even merit any mention, because the political and media world is filled with such people and they all think that is just fine.

William Kristol is the poster child of someone who rose to prominence and influence because of family connections and despite his manifest incompetence. His father, the late Irving Kristol, was the founder of the neoconservative movement and very influential politically. University of Colorado professor of law Paul Campos relays this telling anecdote about a conversation that Irving Kristol had with Columbia University political science professor Ira Katznelson.

The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. ‘I oppose it,’ Irving replied. ‘It subverts meritocracy.’

Campos writes that “my blogging colleague Robert Farley pointed out that “in the modern configuration of the conservative media machine, [William] Kristol occupies an unparalleled central position of power . . . Right-wing journalism and punditry is absurdly nepotistic; everything depends on relationships.”

As another example, recently George Bush’s daughter Jenna was hired as a reporter by NBC, at a time when many real journalists are losing their jobs. Last year Glenn Greenwald listed the hereditary political aristocracy that now exists in the US and, in a more recent post laced with biting sarcasm, commemorated the Jenna Bush announcement by naming some of the people in the media who have benefited from this kind of rampant nepotism, and noted the flagrant double standards at play.

They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it’s really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment. They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personal responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency. Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from. There’s a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters.
…
[A]ll of the above-listed people are examples of America’s Great Meritocracy, having achieved what they have solely on the basis of their talent, skill and hard work — The American Way. By contrast, Sonia Sotomayor — who grew up in a Puerto Rican family in Bronx housing projects; whose father had a third-grade education, did not speak English and died when she was 9; whose mother worked as a telephone operator and a nurse; and who then became valedictorian of her high school, summa cum laude at Princeton, a graduate of Yale Law School, and ultimately a Supreme Court Justice — is someone who had a whole litany of unfair advantages handed to her and is the poster child for un-American, merit-less advancement.

I just want to make sure that’s clear.

That’s how the word ‘meritocracy’ is currently interpreted in the US.

POST SCRIPT: Blackwashing

In his inimitable backhanded way, Stephen Colbert brutally exposes the attitudes behind some of the animosity towards Obama.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'The Word – Blackwashing
The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Protests

Why are nutters taking over the Republican Party?

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from the publishers Rowman & Littlefield for $34.95, from Amazon for $25.16, from Barnes and Noble for $26.21 ($23.58 for members), and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

The previous three posts have pointed out that the Republican Party is becoming more and more identified with the nutters, which consists of a coalition of birthers, deathers, tenthers, and Christianists. You can now add to that list the ‘foppers’ (standing for ‘frightened old people’) who seem to have bought into the notion that health care reform is part of some kind of secret agenda specifically aimed at harming the elderly. The comic strip Doonesbury has a nice series of six cartoons (beginning on September 21) on the foppers.
[Read more…]

Old style conservatives going into the wilderness

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from the publishers Rowman & Littlefield for $34.95, from Amazon for $25.16, from Barnes and Noble for $26.21 ($23.58 for members), and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

As the previous two posts have discussed, the nutters seem to be taking over the Republican Party. The old style conservatives, taken aback by the enthusiasm with which the party rank-and-file unhesitatingly clasped true nutter Sarah Palin to their collective bosom in 2008, are now feeling even more marginalized, alarming them so much that they see no future for themselves in the party.
[Read more…]

Republican presidential hopefuls and the nutters

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from the publishers Rowman & Littlefield for $34.95, from Amazon for $31.65, from Barnes and Noble for $26.21 ($23.58 for members), and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

Telling indicators of the strength of the nutter movement (consisting of birthers, deathers, and tenthers) within the party has been the fortunes of the prospective Republican candidates for the presidency. Sarah Palin is, of course, a true nutter and has always been much beloved by this group so her presence does not tell us anything new. But a good sign of the increasing nutter influence is that Palin’s fellow nutter, congresswoman Michelle Bachman (R-Minn), seems to be hoping that god will speak to her and tell her to run for the presidency, and former senator Rick Santorum is also toying with the idea although he was drubbed in his last campaign for re-election as US senator from Pennsylvania. Any party with a reasonable grip on reality would be embarrassed to have these people as prominent members, let alone have them as potential standard bearers.
[Read more…]

Update on the future of the Republican Party

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from the publishers Rowman & Littlefield for $34.95, from Amazon for $31.65, from Barnes and Noble for $26.21 ($23.58 for members), and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

When I last wrote on this topic in July, I compared the various factions within the Republican Party to see which segment was likely to take leadership. The four major groupings I identified were the old style conservatives, the rank-and-file social values base, the Christianists, and the neoconservatives.
[Read more…]

The Adventures of Banana Man and Crocoduck

(My new book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from the publishers Rowman & Littlefield for $34.95, from Amazon for $31.65, from Barnes and Noble for $26.21 ($23.58 for members), and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

Those two mighty warriors for Jesus, evangelist Ray Comfort and his trusty sidekick the aging Boy Wonder Kirk Cameron, have come up with a new scheme for fighting the evil theory of evolution which they, along with many religious people, think is threatening to bring about the end of civilization as we know it. Two days before the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species on November 21, they plan to distribute 50,000 free copies of the book at 50 prominent universities. The catch? They have added a 50-page introduction where Comfort will point out all the flaws in the theory. They can do this because the copyright has expired on Darwin’s book.
[Read more…]

God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom

My new book is now available! I received my copy in the mail yesterday.

My publishers say that the book can be obtained through the usual outlets. You can order it from the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and also through your local bookstores.

I have a request to make of readers of this blog. If you have the time, I would really appreciate it if you could write reviews of the book on sites like Amazon and elsewhere, and make the book known to people and groups whom you think might be interested in it or might like me to come and give talks on it.

The book deals with the thorny question of the role of religion and the Bible in US schools. While school prayer has been one important facet of these attempts and has perhaps received the most publicity, the teaching of evolution has also been, at least in the US, the focus of many court cases involving various subtle shades of meaning and interpretation of the U.S. constitution, testing in particular the limits of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US constitution, which states simply that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

My book interweaves this general history of religion in schools with the specific history of the opposition to the teaching of evolution in US classrooms, starting with the Scopes trial in 1925 and ending with the intelligent design Dover trial in 2005, focusing on how the nature of this opposition has itself evolved as a result of repeated setbacks in the courts.

The book’s dust jacket gives a good synopsis of the book.

In God vs. Darwin, Mano Singham dissects the legal battle between evolution and creationism in the classroom beginning with the Scopes Monkey trial in 1925 and ending with an intelligent design trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005. A publicity stunt, the Scopes Monkey trial had less to do with legal precedence than with generating tourism dollars for a rural Tennessee town. But the trial did successfully spark a debate that has lasted more than 80 years and simply will not be quelled despite a succession of seemingly definitive court decisions. In the greatest demonstration of survival, opposition to the teaching of evolution has itself evolved. Attempts to completely eliminate the teaching of evolution from public schools have given way to the recognition that evolution is here to stay, that explicitly religious ideas will never be allowed in public schools, and that the best that can be hoped for is to chip away at the credibility of the theory of evolution.

Dr. Singham deftly answers complex questions: Why is there such intense antagonism to the teaching of evolution in the United States? What have the courts said about the various attempts to oppose it? Sprinkled with interesting tidbits about Charles Darwin and the major players of the evolution vs. creationism debate, readers will find that God vs. Darwin is charming in its embrace of the strong passions aroused from the topic of teaching evolution in schools.

Jim Paces, executive director of curriculum of the Shaker Heights City Schools in Ohio and one of the early reviewers of the book, said the following:

[This] captivating new book draws on his knowledge of both history and science to provide an expert analysis of the ongoing opposition to the teaching of evolution in America’s public schools. He offers a clearly written, concise explanation of the evolution-religion controversy which has continued to play out in local school districts across the country. This is an absolute “must read” for school officials and community members alike . . . indeed for anyone interested in a fascinating illustration of who decides what should be taught in our nation’s schools.

Barbara Forrest, professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University and co-author of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, said:

In recounting the history of creationism through major legal cases, Professor Singham correctly exposes the fear that drives creationists to keep searching for ways to undermine the teaching of evolution despite consistent defeats in the federal courts. He shows convincingly that, while religious objections to evolution persist, such objections are ultimately powerless to stop the advancement of science. This book expands the growing list of excellent books available for anyone who wants to understand the phenomenon of American creationism.

Charles Russo, Professor of Education and Law at the University of Dayton, wrote in the Foreword that the book:

presents a highly readable and comprehensive analysis of this fascinating area. With the perspective of a physicist rather than a lawyer, educator, or social scientist, Mano Singham applies his dispassionate scientific eye in such a way that he presents fresh insights into the ongoing controversy over who should control the content of curricula, scientific or otherwise, in public schools.

At its heart, God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom offers a valuable learning experience for all of those interested in education, religion, science, and the law.

In a way, the readers of this blog shared in this book’s creation because its nucleus consisted of a series of posts that I wrote a few years ago.

I hope that those of you who read it find it as least as enjoyable as I did writing it. And, again, please write a review if you can.

Using placebos as part of treatments

Nowadays, the testing of new drugs often involves comparisons not only with placebos but also with older established drugs in three-way double-blind tests. What is emerging from these trials is that the placebo effect seems to be getting stronger, which means that new drugs in clinical trials are having a harder time showing that they are better than the placebo. Another consequence of stronger placebo responses is that some well-known drugs used is the trials as the older standard (and that had beaten the placebo in earlier tests) seem not to be able to do so now.
[Read more…]

The placebo effect

In the previous post, I described the practice of homeopathy and explained why it should no longer be taken seriously. Now that we know that its originator Samuel Hahnemann was basically treating his patients with water, what made him think his treatment was effective? There is no evidence that he was a fraud or charlatan, foisting on his patients something he knew was bogus in order to take their money. He was probably genuine in his belief in the efficacy of his treatment.

It is likely that he was misled by the placebo effect, where patients recover from an illness due to any number of factors that have nothing to do with treatment provided by the doctor. People who want to believe seize on these random events and see patterns that don’t exist. For example, since colds get better after a few days, it is possible to get gullible people to believe that practically anything is a cure for cold since if you take it soon after the onset of symptoms, presto, the cold disappears in a couple of days.

Steve Silberman in Wired Magazine describes how the placebo effect was discovered.

The roots of the placebo problem can be traced to a lie told by an Army nurse during World War II as Allied forces stormed the beaches of southern Italy. The nurse was assisting an anesthetist named Henry Beecher, who was tending to US troops under heavy German bombardment. When the morphine supply ran low, the nurse assured a wounded soldier that he was getting a shot of potent painkiller, though her syringe contained only salt water. Amazingly, the bogus injection relieved the soldier’s agony and prevented the onset of shock.

Returning to his post at Harvard after the war, Beecher became one of the nation’s leading medical reformers. Inspired by the nurse’s healing act of deception, he launched a crusade to promote a method of testing new medicines to find out whether they were truly effective.
…
In a 1955 paper titled “The Powerful Placebo,” published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Beecher described how the placebo effect had undermined the results of more than a dozen trials by causing improvement that was mistakenly attributed to the drugs being tested. He demonstrated that trial volunteers who got real medication were also subject to placebo effects; the act of taking a pill was itself somehow therapeutic, boosting the curative power of the medicine. Only by subtracting the improvement in a placebo control group could the actual value of the drug be calculated.

The placebo explains why so many medical procedures that are now viewed with horror were standard treatments in the past. Bloodletting, bleeding with leeches, attaching maggots, dousing with cold water, were among the treatments once recommended. Charles Darwin suffered from all manner of undiagnosed ailments that included frequent vomiting and he subjected himself to various uncomfortable water treatments in the belief that they helped him. His beloved daughter Annie died of an unknown illness after receiving similar water treatments.

In my own building on the third floor is a small museum of medical history that contains all manner of gruesome-looking medical devices that no one thinks of using today but once were believed to be effective, even state-of-the-art. As long as the physician and patient had confidence in the treatment, it must have seemed to work.

Because of the repeated discrediting of medical treatments that were once considered effective, it has been suggested that the history of medicine is actually the history of the placebo effect, with new placebos replacing the old, leading to the uncomfortable suggestion that our current treatments, however sophisticated they may seem, are merely the latest placebos.

But there is reason to think that we now have a much better idea of what really works and what is a placebo because Beecher’s work led to the invention of the practice of double-blind experimental testing, where neither the patient nor the researcher collecting the data and doing the analyses knows who is receiving the experimental treatment and who is receiving the placebo.

By 1962, the government had started requiring drug companies to perform clinical tests with placebos in order to get approval and this has led to the elimination of outright quackery in medicine. Without such precautions, people can, even with the best of intentions, subtly distort the results to get the result they want or expect.

As a result of the widespread adoption of double-blind testing, there is good reason to think that our current practices are significantly better than those of the past, and that we are no longer so easily fooled by placebos.

Next: Using placebos as part of treatment.

POST SCRIPT: How double blind tests work

Double-blind tests are useful not only in medicine. Richard Dawkins shows what happens when it is used to test the claims of people who think they can detect the presence of water by dowsing.

It is interesting that when the tests show the dowsers that the “powers” they thought they had is non-existent, they make up stuff to enable them to continue believing. Does that remind you of anything?