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Thursday, April 30

Disparity

Granted I don't spend a lot of time perusing the salvos from the various sides of the religious culture wars, but regardless I've never seen a book receive almost entirely "best possible" or "worst possible" ratings from readers. It's not particularly surprising, given the almost total polarization among those who would want to read a book like this, but it's still amusing.



Also amusing is this book apparently uses the "banana is proof of God" argument I've seen pop up recently in various media. The general argument as put forth in its original source is that the banana has a number of characteristics that show it was designed for human consumption (it fits the human hand perfectly, it has a tab for easy opening, it's naturally color-coded to indicate when it can be consumed, it's nutritious, etc.). The easy retort to this is that the bananas we know are the result of a few thousand years of human-directed selective breeding (not unlike how our species took the timber wolf and selectively bred it into the poodle) and uncultivated bananas show no more "human-specific design" than any other edible seed pod. (It also begs the question of how the pineapple and the coconut fit in, given how difficult those fruits are to eat without tools of some sort.)

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