Gardner - Did Adam & Eve have navels?: debunking pseudoscience

More praise for Martin Gardner and Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?

Martin Gardners contribution to contemporary intellectual culture is uniquein its range, its insight, and its understanding of hard questions that matter.

Noam Chomsky

Nobody has worked harder or more steadily to defend and enlarge this little firelit clearing we hold in the dark chittering forest of unreason.

The New Criterion

Martin Gardner is a national treasure. [This book] should be compulsory reading in every high school and in Congress.

Arthur C. Clarke

What sets Gardner apart from the rest of the debunking crowd is that he doesnt just take potshots at the sitting ducks of fundamentalist thought or kooky cults; the sacred cows of science appear equallyand hilariouslyin his deadly cross hairs.

Salon.com

A recreational excursion among ignoramuses.

Booklist

Chapter 1

How British artists handled the navel problem is discussed along with many reproductions of paintings in Horace Walpoles four-volume Anecdotes of Paintings, vol. 1, ch. 3. This monumental work, published in England during the years 1762 to 1771, was later expanded and revised by other authors. It may still be in print as an Ayer reprint.

Philip Gosses many books include Canadian Naturalist; Introduction to Zoology; The Ocean; A Naturalists Rambles on the Devonshire Coast; Acquarium; Birds of Jamaica; Naturalists Sojourn in Jamaica; A Manual of Marine Zoology (two volumes); Life; Actinologia Britannica; The Romance of Natural History; and other popular books. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica says that for a time he taught zoology in Alabama.

Chapter 2

There are thousands of missing link fossils, and every year more are found. Examples are the stages between reptiles and mammals, between reptiles and birds, between land mammals and whales, between horses and their progenitors, and between humans and their extinct apelike ancestors. The so-called fossil gaps are partly due to the rarity of conditions for fossilization and to the relatively rapid series of mutations emphasized by Gould and his associates.

Chapter 3

This is not strictly true. There were a few earlier but undistinguished stories about Earths encounter with NEOs; for example, Edgar Allan Poes The Conversation of Eiros and Charmian (1839). Two former Earthlings, now disembodied spirits, recall Earths destruction by a giant comet. It withdrew from Earths atmosphere all its nitrogen. The remaining oxygen caused Earth to explode in flames. Everett Bleilers Science Fiction: The Early Years (1990) lists The Comet, a story by S. Austin, Jr., also published in 1839, in which Eartli is destroyed by a comet.

Chapter 4

Matthews account of the visiting magi is retold in greater detail in the apocryphal Book of James, a Greek manuscript of the second century. Legend has it that it was written by a half brother of Jesus. According to Origen, he was one of Josephs sons by a former marriage. Chapter 15, verse 7, describes the Star as so huge and bright that it rendered all the other stars invisible.

Chapter 6

For details on the remote viewing of atoms, consult Extrasensory Perception of Quarks (Theosophical Publishing House, 1980), by British physicist Stephen M. Phillips; his two-part article Extrasensory Perception of Subatomic Particles, in Fate (April and May 1987); and Resolution in Remote-Viewing Studies: Mini- and Micro Targets, by Puthoff, Targ, and Charles Tart, an SRI report of June 1979.

Puthoffis so quoted in Power Structure, by Tom Chalkey, in Baltimores City Paper, June 29, 1990.

Arthur C. Clarke, in his 1997 novel 3001, takes Puthoffs conjecture about inertia seriously enough to base an inertial space drive on ZPE. See Chapter 9 of the novel.

Chapter 7

See, for example, David Z. Alberts vigorous defense of Bohms theory in Bohms Alternative to Quantum Mechanics, in Scientific American (May 1994). Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, with a Ph.D. in physics. More on Bohms theory can be found in his book Quantum Mechanics and Experience (Harvard University Press, 1992).

Chapter 11

The neocortex is a highly developed part of the cortexthe outside layer of gray matterthat began its evolution with mammals. It is thought to be the region where memories are finally stored, and where reasoning takes place.

Chapter 13

The Yarn of the Nancy Bell, the best-known of W. S. Gilberts comic ballads, is an account of cannibalism forced by a shipwreck. The yarn is told by the sole survivor, who ate nine of his shipmates.

Chapter 16

See Kenneth Feders article American Disingenuous: Goodmans American Genesisa new chapter in Cult Archaeology, Skeptical Inquirer, Summer 1983, pp. 36. Coles review of Goodmans Psychic Archaeology in Skeptical Inquirer, Spring/Summer 1978, pp. 1058; and Coles review of The Genesis Mystery in American Antiquity, Vol. 50, 1985, pp. 69293.

Chapter 19

Some sources say that Applewhite met Nettles when he was visiting a friend in the hospital. Nettless daughter says they met at a drama school. (See New York Times, April 28, 1997.)

Earlier cults have recommended castration to curb male sexual passions. The most famous intentional castration in the history of Christendom was the self-castration of Ori-gen, the greatest of the church fathers next to Augustine. Unable to curb his lust for young women pupils, Origen sliced off his testicles. He was sorry later that hed done it. Do may have felt a kinship with Origen, who believed in a plurality of inhabited worlds, the pre-existence of human souls, and the ultimate salvation of all sinners, including the devil.

Chapter 21

After INSERM, Frances medical research agency, closed down Benvenistes laboratory, he opened his own Digital Biological Laboratory south of Paris. He recently claimed to have transmitted water memory over the Internet, using e-mail. And he is suing two Nobel Prize winners, physicist Georges Charpak and biologist Franois Jacob, and physicist Claude Hennion for writing unkind things about him. On Benvenistes monumentally flawed homeopathic research, see Chapter 4 of my On the Wild Side (Prometheus, 1992).

Chapter 23

I suspect that Jerry Lucas is now much ashamed of this book, but not Del Washburn. In 1994, Scarborough House published his Theomatics II: Gods Best-Kept Secret Revealed. Steve Abbott, reviewing this ridiculous book in the Mathematical Gazette (July 1996), wrote: I have wondered how to dispose of it. I have rejected throwing it in the dustbin, as I cant bear to destroy books. I could give it to a charitable shop, but it might be bought by someone impressionable, and I wouldnt want to be responsible for the consequences. So it will stay on my shelf unread, unless a Gazette reader asks me for it."

Farrakhans history is flawed. The first slave ship did not arrive on our shores until 1619.

Chapter 25

An unexpurgated edition of Darwins autobiography, edited by his granddaughter Nora Barlow, was published in 1958 and is currently available as a Norton paperback. Earlier editions of the autobiography had been heavily censored by Darwins family, mainly to remove Darwins biting criticisms of some of his contemporaries.

Books by Martin Gardner

Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science

Mathematics, Magic, and Mystery

Great Essays in Science (ed.)

Logic Machines and Diagrams

The Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions

The Annotated Alice

The Second Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions

Relativity for the Million