Will Storr - The unpersuadables: adventures with the enemies of science

Incontrovertibly brilliant.

ESQUIRE

Throws new and salutary light on all our conceits and beliefs. Very valuable, and a great read to boot, this is investigative journalism of the highest order.

INDEPENDENT, BOOK OF THE WEEK

Funny, serious, and richly vivid Read this book.

DAILY TELEGRAPH

Storr can open chapters like a stage conjurer, and his prose has an easy, laconic style, embracing Jon Ronsons taste for the fabulously weird and Louis Therouxs ability to put his subjects at ease. He is a funny and companionable guide [who] confounds expectations.

GUARDIAN

[Storr] seeks not to mock strange convictions but to get inside the minds of those who hold them. The result is an entertaining journey dotted with some fascinating reportage.

THE OBSERVER

FICTION

The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone (2013)

NON-FICTION

Will Storr vs. the Supernatural (2006)

For Farrah
for ending the madness

And then he said to me this is honestly true he said to me, Well you can prove anything with facts, cant you?

S TEWART L EE

How I Escaped My Certain Fate (2010)

A self is probably the most impressive work of art we ever produce.

J EROME B RUNER

Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (2002)

It is Friday night in a town called Devil and the community hall is full. Over two hundred people are gathered here in shuffling, expectant silence. There are elderly couples and clean young families, their prams parked squarely at the end of rows. A modest distance away from the front sits a line of pale women in Amish headwear. Their sturdy patriarch is planted beside them, his forearms crossed in front of his starched white shirt. Above our heads, suspended from the ceiling, two huge fans chew the heavy tropical air.

A local elder stands up and shuffles his way to the microphone. He is in his eighties, at least, and looks pale and fragile, like a drift of smoke. There is a squeal of feedback. He clears his throat. The sound of it bounces off the parquet floor.

Ladies and gentlemen, he says. Without further ado, it gives me great pleasure to, er, be able to introduce to you a man whose work Im sure youre all familiar with. Weve been looking forward to his talk for a long time now. Hes, er, travelled a long way to see us tonight, so please give a very warm welcome to Mr John Mackay.

Proudly, down the centre aisle, I watch him come: the man we all want to see. With his white prophets beard, charismatic glimmer and wide-brimmed bushmans hat, he clutches in his right hand a thousand pages of visions, violence and lore, of science, sects and sorcery, all the wisdom of all the worlds, everything anyone needs to know about anything. Mackay walks slowly through applause, takes his place at the front of the hall and waits for the crowd to settle. Once silence is regained, he finally begins.

Charles Darwin wrote a book, he announces. Does anyone know what its name was? His sparkly eyes scan the rows. The name of his book was The Origin of the Species. I have another book here. He holds up his leather-bound volume, its pages, weary at the corners, flop open. Its called the Bible. Tonight, the choice you have to face up to is this do you put your faith in Darwin, who wasnt there? Or God, who was?

As Mackay speaks, the hands of the church clock, down in the town centre, clunk to 8.30. By now, the place is almost entirely deserted. That is what it is like up here, a hundred and sixty miles north of Brisbane, Australia, on the humid banks of the Mary River. It is a place of early closing and close community; of pineapple plantations, clapboard churches, empty roads and old Holden Utes rusting in silent fields. The landscape itself is lush and strange, with its sinisterly christened creeks, monster cacti growing in gas station forecourts and vast rock formations that jut out of the land like ancient tumours. The locals dairy farmers, timber men and the descendants of gold-rush pioneers know the town as Gympie, an Aboriginal word meaning Devil. It is actually named for a freakish native tree, a murderous hermaphrodite called the gympie-gympie, whose flowers are simultaneously male and female, whose fruit is a lurid, tumescent purple and pink and whose pretty heart-shaped leaves are covered with hairs that contain a toxin noxious enough to kill dogs, horses and sometimes men. The gympie-gympie is a hysterical nightmare of nature; evidence, I believe, of the conscienceless magnificence of biological evolution. But, right here, right now, I am in an intimidating minority of one. Because all of these people and tonights main attraction an international Creationist superstar and tireless prosecutor of the diabolical trinity Darwin, Dawkins and Attenborough believe the gympie-gympies malevolence to be a direct result of Adam eating forbidden fruit and introducing sin, death and nasty prickles to a perfect world.

Mackay clicks a button. An image of an enormous bird flashes on to the overhead projector.

Whats the name of that funny little chicken? he says.

Nobody responds.

Emu! he says. They cant fly, but they can run like crazy. The interesting thing is, if you dig up their fossils, they used to be twice the size they now are. Thats change, but its not evolution.

He allows the last sentence to unfurl slowly in the sweating air above him.

If you take your Bible seriously you will notice that Genesis is emphatic that when God made the world there were no killers. Everything only ate plants. Now that is different to Charles Darwins picture of evolution. Genesis one and two are dogmatic. God made everything very good. Do you realise that means there was a world where even broccoli tasted good? Can you believe that? Thats what its talking about. It meant no killers, no carnivores, no competition and no struggle to survive. But what is that catchphrase you learned in biology at high school? Survival of the ? Fittest. But no such competition occurred back in Gods world. There was no struggle to survive at all. Everything survived.

Mackay presses his little button again and the famous silhouette depiction of the evolution of man appears.

You see the chimpanzee on the left? he asks. You see the man on the right? Thats the history of the world according to most high-school textbooks. You and I are just hydrogen and somehow or other we turned into people. But if you look at your Bible, it says that everything started perfect and went