Evolution is one of the most elegant and parsimonious scientific theories ever constructed.  It unifies and adds insights to fields as seemingly unrelated as genetics (the mechanism behind inheritance and random mutation in evolution) and geology (the biogeography of fossil organisms that follows from evolution also helps support the theory of plate tectonics).  And though evolution has great explanatory power, it is really a quite simple thing to understand.  It is not vague and mysterious like the inner workings of a woman’s mind.  Unlike physics, it doesn’t require any great prior knowledge of obscure mathematics.  Still, though, misunderstandings concerning evolution persist.  Much of this is the result of willful ignorance on the part of religious literalists, but even those who claim to accept evolution would be hard pressed to articulate exactly what it is and what it entails.  What follows, then, is a brief overview of 10 of the most common misconceptions concerning evolution.

1. Evolution is random.

Evolution is random in a sense, but it is a two-step process, and only one step is random.  The mutations and shufflings of DNA that drive evolutionary change are indeed random, but the genetic variations that spread through a population do so as a result of nonrandom selection pressures.  Thus, the main driving forces of evolution—natural selection and to a lesser degree sexual selection—are not random at all.  These selection mechanisms ensure that only organisms with certain qualities or traits that benefit reproductive success will survive, while those that lack them will tend to die off without reproducing.  Without these selection pressures, any mutation that resulted would be maintained in a population, and instead of finding fruit flies largely with functioning eyes, we’d instead find fruitflies with legs for eyes, and so on.  Of course, natural selection and sexual selection are not the only mechanisms at work.  Those mechanisms of evolution that are more random are less important in explaining diversity, though, and they usually only apply to very small populations (e.g., genetic drift, bottleneck effects).

2.  Evolution is goal-oriented toward an inevitable outcome.

Though evolution is not completely random, as noted above, it is also not completely determined to follow an inevitable course.  Evolution is not some conscious entity striving for, say, humanity as the pinnacle of evolution, after which it can retire and then play Bingo on Friday nights for the rest of its days.  No, the existence of mankind was not some foreordained goal of evolution, but instead a lucky accident of various circumstances, among them the evolution of mammals from reptiles, the extinction of nonavian dinosaurs, the evolution of primates, and so on.  If we were to rewind history to four billion years ago and play the history of life anew, it is extremely unlikely that evolution would proceed in the same fashion it did, much less create homo sapiens.  The isolated continent of Australia is a perfect example of the contingency of evolution on historical accident.  The strange, foreign flora and fauana of Australia result from its long evolutionary isolation, and that is why we find novel organisms like the various marsupials that live there.  We can think of Australia as a “separate Earth” with a differing history, and we can note that the organisms it produced do not perfectly accord with the organisms produced on the other continents.  If evolution were goal-directed, we’d think homo sapiens would perhaps arise independently there as well, but they did not.  As it stands, there is thus no reason or mechanism that could explain evolution as being consciously goal-oriented or directed to producing certain species.

3.  Organisms evolve through the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Many people believe that a giraffe evolved a long neck because each individual stretched its neck quite strenously to lengthen it, passing this change on to its offspring.  But characteristics that are acquired during life are not hereditary.  A bodybuilder will not give birth to a baby with huge biceps and perfect abs unless that baby also grows up to lift weights and continually work out.  A man who chops off his arm will not give rise to offspring missing arms.  When those examples are used, it seems fairly obvious that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited, but this is probably one of the most predominant misconceptions about evolution among those who accept the theory.

4. Individuals evolve.

Evolution does not apply to individuals; populations evolve, not individuals.  No matter how hard I concentrate, for instance, I will not manage to evolve the ability to shoot lasers out of my eyes, even though this would be totally sweet.  The major products of evolutionary success are the result of successive generations of selection within populations of a species.  If laser eyes were to evolve, the trait would not result from an individual one day growing laser eyes nor from laser eyes being evolved in a single-generation and present in a newborn baby.  It would presumably take countless generations to evolve the trait, and it would evolve only gradually, perhaps with the intermediates only having glow-in-the-dark eyes.  However, before you raise your hopes for our laser-eye future, I must say it is highly unlikely that laser eyes are an evolutionary possibility, as the structure would have to build off the foundations evolution has already laid.  It can modify and tinker with existing structures, but not build them anew from scratch, and hence laser eyes probably aren’t possible given the eyes we have to work with.  At any rate, the misconception about evolving individuals is so prevalent that the TV show Heroes blatantly uses this pseudo-evolutionary explanation to account for the presence of human beings with superpowers ranging from superhuman strength to invincibility.  Heroes tries to explain itself with badly maligned biology and poorly understood evolution, but in reality if people were to give birth to children with superpowers, presumably evolved in a single generation, the theory of evolution would topple from being unable to explain such a miraculous occurrence, and Richard Dawkins would be forced to throw his arms into the air and exclaim, “Eh, maybe this God character does exist.”  I guess what I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t watch Heroes if you understand evolution, because it will only piss you off; and on top of that, it also promotes the age-old innaccuracy of the mad scientist, wherein science is the result of all that is evil.  Someone should introduce the producers and writers to a real scientist.  They’d probably be surprised that most of them don’t laugh maniacally while designing robots to destroy the world.

5. God directed evolution or helped evolution overcome certain insurmountable hurdles.

This view, also known as theistic evolution, is little more than gussied-up creationism that passes for “evolution” in name only, though this semantic trick has swindled more than its fair share of scientists and lay people.  In fact, this is precisely the view of evolution espoused by the well-known Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe.  Behe, being a more sophisticated creationist, accepts that the evidence for evolution, speciation, and even common descent is overwhelming and supports the theory of evolution, but he instead hides his God in whatever evolutionary mechanisms are not fully explained yet.  Of course, as more and more becomes known, the gaps in which his God can hide become few and far between.  Currently, Behe likes to think God can explain resistant malaria, though why an all-loving and perfect being would do that is left without adequate explanation.  To put it simply, though many complex structures are present within living organisms, there is no reason to think evolution cannot explain their presence, as the evidence concerning the evolution of many other structures is well known.  It is only a small step to conclude that evolution also explains the other complex structures, as we already know it can explain complexity and account for speciation, and because the evidence for common descent is so overwhelming.  To try to pawn off the explanation on an untestable supernatural entity is not science, but the practice of shallow dogmatism and wishful thinking.

6.  Evolution supports eugenics and might-makes-right morality.

Evolution, as a science, is only descriptive, not prescriptive.  Simply because we observe something occurring in nature doesn’t imply that this is what OUGHT to occur.  If, for instance, I observe that my dog continually licks its own anus, this does not cause me to think that licking my own anus would be the right or moral thing to do.  Similarly, if I note that evolution is a ruthless process that culls species en masse, leads to astoundingly high rates of extinction, and so on, it doesn’t follow that we should adopt extreme laissez-faire capitalism that likewise ruthlessly exploits workers and children, and so on.  It is confusing, then, that people will consider evolution, note that creatures not fit for reproductive success die out, and then think that is reason enough to kill segments of the population regarded as “weak” for eugenic purposes.  The irony, of course, is the fact that culling a population down to a few select members with a few select features could be evolutionarily disastrous, for if the environment were to change in such a way that those traits were no longer beneficial, we’d all perish.  To use a figure of speech, you shouldn’t put all your eggs into one basket, and in that sense evolution does not support eugenics at all.  It is better to preserve evolutionary diversity, because sometimes what is “weak” in one scenario could be beneficial in another.  For instance, though having heterozygous sickle cell alleles leads to terrible consequences in those who have it in America, it can actually be advantageous for those who have the heterozygous allele in regions with malaria epidemics by preventing infection.  That is precisely why the sickle cell mutation has spread through the populations in those regions, because presumably it is better to suffer the negative consequences of sickle cell disease and live to reproduce rather than have normal blood cells and succumb to malaria.

7.  Radiometric dating is not accurate and does not work.

Radiometric dating, like any tool, works well when used correctly but ceases to work when misused.  Creationists are fond of claiming that carbon-14 dating does not work by citing specimens in which the dating tool produced flawed results.  The problem, of course, is that the creationists produce these flawed results by either deliberately misusing the tool or not understanding how it is meant to be used.  If, for instance, I were to proclaim that a stopwatch is never useful in measuring time because whenever I smash it with a hammer it ceases to give the correct result, that would not be a criticism of the use of stopwatches as a tool for measuring time.  Obviously, that is because a stopwatch is not supposed to be operated by smashing it with a hammer, and any physicist will tell you that stopwatches don’t work in circumstances in which they are hit with hammers.  Similarly, creationists like to do silly things like “carbon date” fossils that are completely mineralized and thus contain no carbon, or date fossils found in geological strata that lie outside the range of the particular radioactive clock in question.  Basically, the inconsistent dates that creationists like to give as evidence of the flaws of radiometric dating are actually evidence of the creationists’ inability to use a tool properly and in the correct context.  It is also important to note that radiometric dating is not used in isolation and can be combined with other methods of dating to double-check its accuracy, like using geological strata, tree rings, other present radioactive isotopes, and various other dating methods as outside confirmations of the initial results.

8.  Microevolution has been proven, but not macroevolution.

Macroevolution has never been directly observed, but that does not mean it is unproven.  It is supported by a wide variety of indirect observational evidence, from the hierarchical organization of biological classification, to vestigial and homologous structures and DNA, to biogeographical distribution, to transitional fossils, and to the order in which fossils appear in the historical record.  Just as we don’t need to have direct observational evidence to solve a murder, but can search for clues and remaining evidence that would result from a murder, so too can scientists justify macroevolution by finding the innumerable lines of evidence that point to such a conclusion.  The fact that microevolution and adaptation have been so well documented and observed is also strong evidence of macroevolution, as it isn’t any great leap to see that small-scale adaptations could build up to large-scale macroevolution over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.

9.  “Weak” organisms, like sloths, should not exist if evolution is true.

Because the mechanism of natural selection is often equated with “the survival of the fittest”, it misleads many into thinking that sloths should have long gone extinct, because they barely possess any energy to move faster than one mile per hour.  I once saw a video of a sloth crossing a street on YouTube, and it was like watching continental drift, and in fact had the sloth been awkwardly crawling toward the midatlantic ridge, it seems plausible that the drift would exceed the sloth’s speed to such a degree that the sloth would be moving backwards.  All that aside, it is simply wrong to conceive of evolution as survival of the strongest.  Whatever has the capacity to survive, even if it only allows survival by a thin thread, or becomes so specialized to a certain extreme environment that it would be totally useless should the environment change, will spread its genes through a population.  When birds live on islands with no natural predators, for instance, selection pressures no longer favor flight as a result, and with enough time these birds often evolve into plump, fat, land-dwelling birds with no defense mechanisms whatsoever.  This is because what makes an animal strong or gifted can be very costly.  Flight uses up a lot more calories than waddling about on the ground, so in the absence of any predators that necessitate flight (but also a higher caloric intake to maintain such activity), birds on islands will take to living leisurely lives on the ground.  With predators and necessary flight, they have to worry about avoiding predation and also finding enough food to maintain the energy for flight, but a bird with no predators doesn’t have to worry about flight and thus doesn’t have to worry about eating a lot to maintain flight, either.  It is thus quite mistaken to think every creature should evolve into some super muscular killing machine with laser eyes and the capacity to fly.

10.  Living fossils should not exist if evolution is true.

Evolution does not predict that organisms will necessarily continue to evolve.  They tend to continually evolve only because it is quite difficult to survive and because habitats tend to gradually change with time.  But many creatures, the so-called living fossils, undergo relatively little phenotypic change over the course of millions of years.  This is because they are so well adapted that little change is necessary to ensure survival.  It makes sense that evolution would not try to fix an organism that is not already broken, because random mutations rarely bestow any sort of beneficial change (most are benign) and thus evolution is not quite expert at “fixing” organisms with any proficiency (this explains why most end up extinct) .  Of course, it is important to remember that though many of these living fossils may appear phenotypically identical to ancient ancestors, it is unlikely that they have not experienced any sort of evolution.  Changes in their DNA, for instance, have surely accumulated—changes that may not result in any obvious outward change of appearance.  If a creature develops a mutation that affects its inner organs or blood, for instance, that won’t be outwardly apparent, and it would be difficult to tell whether these changes were present in the ancestors because soft tissues don’t easily fossilize.  In short, the existence of living fossils is perfectly compatible with evolution and even expected if such creatures were so successful that few selection pressures are exerted on them that necessitate any phenotypic changes.

These are ten of the most common misconceptions about evolution.  There are surely more, but as you can see, many of the misconceptions are based on overlapping errors.  These misunderstandings must be corrected if we wish to see evolution eventually accepted by the general populace, and if we wish to be taken seriously as a scientifically literate people.

Abortion, still a controversial political talking point, really shouldn’t be much of an issue.  Whatever moral problems arise from abortion, properly conceived, stem from the fine gradient of cognitive and moral development that fetuses and children experience.  And though the demarcation between the child worthy of moral consideration and the organism without the proper cognitive status for this consideration is not clear-cut and absolute, it is nevertheless true that the extreme ends of the spectrums are rather obviously recognizable.  A zygote, blastocyst, or early embryo clearly do not possess the sorts of characteristics that qualify it for moral consideration, while the opposite end of the developmental spectrum, a normal adult, obviously does possess such characteristics.  Why people are still debating over the moral status of zygotes is beyond me.

At heart, though, even pro-lifers realize their extreme position that accords moral rights to embryos and zygotes is not unassailable.  In their zealousness to equate abortion with murder, and zygotes with fully developed human beings, they ultimately contradict their own intuitions.  For instance, if one asks a pro-lifer how an abortion doctor, or a researcher studying embryonic stem cells, should be punished in the event that abortion and stem cell research is prohibited, they frequently reply with a wide assortment of punishments that are decidedly unequivalent to the punishments we normally apply to murderers.  Some pro-lifers will even be so astonished at the question that they will simply stare at you blankly, as if the implications of the legislation they’re attempting to push had never been considered.  But in the end, few would say the punishment should be life in prison, the death penalty, or even anything longer than 50 years in prison.  The responses vary, but most betray an intuitive understanding that the death of an embryo, zygote, or blastocyst is not equivalent to the death of a small child or an adult.

In a similar manner, if you ask a pro-lifer to consider a hypothetical scenario where they have the chance to save either one child from a burning building or ten thousand children from a burning building, inevitably the staggering majority will answer that they’d save the ten thousand children rather than only the one child.  However, if you then rephrase the question and ask them if they’d choose to save either one child or ten thousand blastocysts from a burning fertility clinic, they almost invariably choose to save the single child over the multitude of blastocysts.  Of course, this response is nonsensical if they truly believe that moral personhood should be attributed to blastocysts, and it reveals a deep-seated uncomfort with the implications of their position.

Such questions give pro-lifers difficulties because their moral understandings have often been distorted and twisted by religious dogma that demands obedience rather than understanding.  But a true understanding of morality seeks to find the reasons behind our behavior.  Why should we not harm others?  Why should we behave morally toward others?  When considered thoughtfully, it becomes apparent that we should not harm others because they do not desire such treatment, because they dislike or fear the pain it would cause, and because we are capable of empathizing and understanding their point of view by considering our own reactions to the situation.  We can understand that it is wrong to steal, not because this is yelled down at us by divine fiat, hurled from God’s breath like a lightning bolt, but because we can reason that theft is unfair and would produce displeasure in ourselves and others.  That is, we recognize acts as immoral or wrong based upon the cognitive states they can induce in others (i.e., fear, pain, pleasure, etc.), and as a result of that, the capacity to have these cognitive states—to fear a potential outcome, to feel pain and displeasure, to reciprocate, and so on—is a necessary requirement for moral personhood.  An entity that lacks such states, like a stone, would not deserve moral consideration because the stone cannot fear our actions toward it, feel pain, or understand the unfairness of its plight as we pick it up and hurl it into a dark, murky lake.  This distinction explains at once why we do not accord special moral status to entities totally lacking cognitive capabilities, like rocks, plants, and bicycles.  It also neatly accounts for our moral treatment of animals, who are not treated as our moral equals presumably because we don’t think they are our cognitive equals, with those creatures that are less cognitive (e.g., insects) being given little moral regard while those that are more cognitive (e.g., dolphins, apes, and dogs) being frequently empathized with and cited as creatures deserving of rights.  It also conveniently explains the moral intuitions that guide the pro-lifers to answer the questions mentioned previously in a way that conflicts with their pro-life stance.  They’ll save a single child over 10,000 embryos from a fire because they recognize that the child can fear the fire, would feel intense pain and suffering, whereas the embryos would not because they lack the relevant cognitive traits.

How could a pro-lifer respond to such a devastating criticism of his or her position?  Life begins at conception!  Such is the cry of the angsty pro-lifer in response to irrefutable reason.  Their endless barrage of worthless platitudes and stock catch-phrases suffice when argument will not.  For whatever reason, the claim that life begins at conception is supposed to be a show-stopper in the debate over abortion, and yet it is actually a mere red herring, consisting of reasoning as poor and flawed as the other justifications for the pro-life position.

First of all, the blithely asserted “scientific” fact that life begins at conception is not exactly true.  Biologists are actually a hell of a lot more subtle than that, as they’ve learned that black and white distinctions such as that are quite difficult to draw—a fact well known to biological systematists trying to demarcate species within an evolutionary framework, where creatures often blend into each other in fine gradients.  The same is true of life itself.  Traditionally, a living organism is said to be capable of regulation of its internal state, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction, as well as possessing a complex cellular structure.  But the inclusion of these characteristics is entirely arbitrary, and leaves out many entities that have most of these characteristics, though not all.  A virus, for instance, can be said to possess many of these traits.  It cannot grow or reproduce on its own, but it can take control over a host cell and use its cellular machinery to replicate itself, just as life can.  Even fire seems to possess many of these qualities, to a degree.  It burns energy to grow and reproduce itself, it can be said to respond to stimuli in a sense, and so on.  The ultimate proof of the fuzzy distinction between life and nonlife, of course, is the fact that all living organisms were derived from nonliving replicators.  Like viruses, our earliest ancestors probably could not replicate themselves on their own, and one proposed theory has them latching onto crystals as a mechanism for replication (because unlike a virus it did not have the good fortune of existing organic cells to parasitize).  So if anything, the whole definition of life is already murky without bringing zygotes and gametes into the question.

But do scientists really say life begins at conception?  Most, actually, would think the question rather pointless.  Life is a cycle.  Humans have a diploid stage, which is the stage in which we have sets of chromosomes from both parents, and we have a haploid stage, which is when the human gametes (the sperm and egg) have chromosomes from only one parent.  In humans, meiosis produces male and female gametes with half the normal number of chromosomes, and the mitotic process that builds our multicellular bodies only begins once the haploid gametes merge to produce a diploid zygote.  Pro-lifers like to trot out the fact that our gametes are haploid to try to show that they are only “half of us” and thus not fully human yet, whatever that means.  But if chromosome number defines humanity, then I suppose those unfortunate few with chromosomal disorders, like Down Syndrome, are not human according to pro-lifers; though I’m fairly certain they also oppose the abortion of those with Down Syndrome in spite of this.  Likewise, pro-lifers would probably be fairly amazed to learn that many organisms, particularly fungus and protists, have a strange life cycle wherein the multicellular “life” stage is the haploid stage, whereas the diploid stage is reserved for the zygote alone.  In these particular fungi and protists, the zygote divides by meiosis, halving the chromosome number, and then the haploid cells divide by mitosis to produce multicellular organisms (or in the case of the single-celled protists they “live” as the single haploid cell).  With this understanding of the murkiness of the life cycle, it makes sense that scientists do not proclaim just when “life” begins in human beings, whether it be during conception, implantation on the uterus, or whenever else.  This distinction is unnecessary and pointless.  The gametes, zygote, and multicellular human are all part of the life cycle.

With all those difficulties with the claim of life beginning at conception aside, the obvious refuation is that this is just simple misdirection from the relevant moral issue.  Whether the zygote is living is irrelevant to the matter.  We frequently eat and kill living things.  Plants and insects are living as well, and we do not endow them with special moral consideration.  So the mere fact that a zygote is alive is far from any sort of justification to treat it morally.  The pro-lifer can then try to argue that we should treat it morally because it is alive and human, but once again, this distinction is problematic.  Not all living humans are accorded full moral personhood, and it is even acceptable to kill human beings in certain circumstances.  Even the most ardent pro-lifers, for instance, would acknowledge that a baby born without a brain should not be treated as if it is worthy of a right to life, and few would say it must be connected to a life support system for the duration of its empty, nonsensory life.  Similarly, a human skin cell is living and human, but few pro-lifers would be willing to assert that my continual scratching of my crotch, which results in the continual death of the skin cells down there, is tantamount to murder.  Clearly, something more is needed than merely being living and human.

How could a pro-lifer possibly overcome these impenetrable objections?  In my experience, they cannot, but not for wont of trying.  Perhaps the favorite tactic when cornered in such a dispute is to make the argument from grossness.  That is, they will try to demonstrate that abortion is immoral because it looks disgusting, and in trying to demonstrate this will link to silly websites plastered with pictures of aborted fetuses and embryos.  Strangely, of course, there is a stunning lack of images featuring aborted blastocysts or zygotes.  Presumably this is because they would not contain blood and would not be visible except under a microscope.  So the argument from grossness, it should be noted, does not apply to emergency contraception like Plan B or stem cell research, thank heavens!  Of course, the argument from grossness would equally well apply to the embryos of chickens, pigs, and cows.  It would even apply to the adult chickens, pigs, and cows the pro-lifers are so fond of eating, preferably after dipped in a nice, fried batter.  Naturally, merely because something looks gross or disgusting does not make it immoral.  If we were to witness the home video of a pro-lifer’s pregnancy, for instance, most would find the video immensely disgusting, shuddering at that huge thing ripping through such a tiny hole, and nearly vomiting when the mother puts her lips to the infant’s head even while it is covered in gooey afterbirth and placenta.  This, of course, does not make childbirth immoral.  Also, it has been confirmed for me several times that when I am constipated and taking a huge shit, and then seek out all my friends to show them the huge shit I produced, which evokes reactions like ”that shit is nasty” and “seriously, you fuck, we don’t want to see that disgusting, mile-long shit,” this is hardly proof that shitting is immoral.  And if it is, then I’m afraid we’re all going to hell.  But in the end, unless the pro-lifer is willing to remark that anything that appears disgusting is immoral, this “argument” simply fails.

The last refuge of the pro-life scoundrel, for some strange reason, is the beating heart.  Their bumper stickers, for instance, like to proclaim that near the end of the embryonic stage, a beating heart is present in the little “baby”.  Why the presence of a beating heart is considered some indicator of moral worth befuddles me to this day.  As with my other objections, many of the animals we eat have beating hearts, and yet that does not seem to provide them with very many moral rights, unless the right to be mercilessly harvested for McDonalds is a right.  And beyond that, if I were to present a pro-lifer with a hypothetical person whose heart who has stopped beating, and whose blood is being circulated by a machine, it is doubtful that the pro-lifer would therefore find it acceptable to stab and and punch this person merely because they lack a beating heart.  This is, like the appeal to life beginning at conception, nothing but a red herring.

So far, I’ve addressed some of the more ridiculous and common arguments for the pro-life position, but the last argument I’d like to address is perhaps the most respectable, as it at least attempts to produce a reasonable argument rather than a red herring, but it nevertheless fails.  Basically, the argument states that because the embryo has the potential to develop into a normal human being, it should be treated as such.  But the problem with this formulation is that even a single sperm or single egg has this potential, so masturbation could be seen as mass genocide, and a woman who has her menstrual period could be sued for neglect of her children.  Of course, there is a more potent formulation.  The more potent form runs something like this:  after fertilization, or after implantation on the uterine wall, or after the heart starts beating, the probability that the embryo will develop into a fully-functioning human being increases dramatically, and therefore we should treat the embryo accordingly, because eventually it will possess the cognitive capacity that endows it with moral personhood.  It is a more potent argument because it accounts for the probability of full cognitive development, and so sperm would not qualify, as a single sperm’s chance of becoming an adult human being is rather tiny.  The problem with the argument, of course, is that the possibility of having the qualities relevant for moral personhood is an overt admission that the entity currently does not possess these qualities, and therefore should not be treated as if it does.  For instance, it is possible that I could get a degree in science, train to be an astronaut, and then eventually operate a space shuttle and fly to the moon.  This possibility, no matter how likely, does not mean I should be treated as if I currently can fly to the moon, of course, and NASA would be crazy to therefore offer me a seat on the next manned expedition to the moon.  So this argument, like the others, doesn’t strike me as particularly successful.

In the end, pro-lifers will continue to show us pictures of cut-up, mangled babies, and they will continue to make bad arguments about beating hearts and the falsified “scientific” consensus concerning the beginning of life, but at least we can take solace in the fact that they are so horribly inconsistent and contradictory in their reasoning that they can be sort of amusing, like self-righteous clowns without grease paint.

My friend Ziztur’s top ranked Amazon customer review of Ray Comfort’s book You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can’t Make Him Think, was recently deleted, along with every other negative review.  Nearly 600 people had rated her review as helpful.  And she has not only read the book, but is ripping all of its arguments to shreds in her daily “Ray a Day” posts.  If Ray is indeed responsible for the deleted comments, and he seems to be the prime candidate given that his explanation for the missing reviews is an obvious lie, then his reputation as a retard and a scoundrel only becomes all the more solidified.  I encourage all of you to visit the amazon page for his book and vote for the review that you find to be the most accurate.  Ziztur has reposted her review and I feel it deserves the top spot.  Go and support her review if you agree that it is helpful.  And go read her “Ray a Day” posts for even more Comforty goodness.

How Ziztur manages to devote so many days to this muttering retard is beyond me.  When I take on his arguments, I try to go for the quick, decisive knockout and be done with it, but she is dragging this out to criminal lengths, humiliating the poor man over and over again each day, showcasing his shit-encrusted arguments and then obliterating them ad nauseam.  At least I had the mercy to put the man out of his misery in a single post.  But she is dragging out the torture over weeks, beating his arguments mercilessly into the ground.  The horse that Comfort led to the water has long since died from intellectual dehydration, and on top of it this young woman is beating this dead horse again and again and again with the long rod of truth, leaving nothing but blood, hooves, and the remnants of Comfort’s child-molestor moustache.

Ziztur, you should almost feel ashamed.  This is an unfair fight.  This is tantamount to kickboxing with a toddler or arm wrestling a baby bird or defeating a retard in a spelling bee.  But it is a necessary unfairness, for it is unfortunate that this retarded toddler has a soapbox upon which he can reach millions with his ridiculous, dangerous arguments.

In general, the ladies and Mr. Saint Gasoline usually do not mingle very well together.  Like oil and water, we don’t mix; and also like oil and water, when we are both put into a test tube we tend not to absorb each other and form a solution, which is probably good, or else swimming would really suck.

I know what you’re all thinking.  Dear, gentle reader, you must be shocked and astounded that I remain perpetually single in spite of my devastatingly rugged good looks, immense narcissism, and indefatigable ability to stare at myself in the mirror while shirtless.  In fact, I am what many people would call a “catch”.  Of course, this is probably used in the negative sense, as in “catching a cold” or “catching a case of herpes”.  Like herpes, though, I am swollen and red and pus-filled and will grow on you over time, only to be suppressed by your immune system and then rise again during periods of stress.  In short, I’d be the perfect boyfriend.

So the problem, as I see it, is not my amazing personality or many talents or even my intense—some would say overbearing and glorious—attractiveness.  It seems that I am just too perfect.  I show up on a first date, say tremendously witty things, try to make out with them within five minutes and end up getting my beard in their mouth, constantly mention my penis and make allusions about its lackluster size, occasionally piss myself with excitement, and inevitably the girl never returns my phone calls when I call her seventeen times at 3 in the morning and subsequently leave countless messages indicating my various mood swings, ranging from bawling pleas for acceptance to overconfident rants about my glory.  I can totally understand why a girl may not find herself worthy of such majesty, though.  Or as the kids used to say, I can see why they ain’t ready for my jelly, because my booty is apparently quite tasty and delicious and bootylicious.

But in all seriousness, I am perpetually stuck in first date-ville.  And going on first dates is a lot like living in Awkwardsville, USA; population 2.  Being male, of course, I suppress this awkwardness and instead assume a date is going swimmingly, because it is in my own self-interest to assume any sort of attention paid to me is some sort of signpost toward future copulation.  The male brain is not wired to rationally assess a woman’s interest.  It is wired to assume every woman is interested, to resist rejection as long as possible, to put one’s penis in as many things as possible, and to hope that one of those things the penis eventually ends up within is somehow a woman rather than an overripe watermelon.  (Sadly, it is usually the watermelon.  Why must that watermelon always be so conveniently located right in front of my crotch?!)

I have tried almost everything to have a successful first date that leads to a second date.  I’ve refrained from ridiculing people when they profess a belief in some sort of crazy mystical crap, be it crystal healing, angels, astrology, or whatever.  And it is hard to withhold the inner turmoil that rages within me when I hear such bullshit, yet I do so with pained initiative at the behest of my lonely, lonely penis.  Yet even pretending to be credulous and accepting of the typical womanly superstitions has not helped.  My desperate penis, withered with disuse, sits huddled inside my pants as old cobwebs hang from my pubes.  As a result of this foreboding appearance and murdered sex life, my crotch is actually number 96 on the top 100 haunted places according to A&E, and many a ghost hunter holding a thermal reader has noticed a large uptick in heat generation after pointing their misused electronic devices at my crotch, assuring me that this is heat generated by some sort of spiritual entity and not my own body heat or the friction generated from my constant rubbing.  I have a fucking poltercock.

So, I am not compatible with the large majority of women.  This is a sad, terrible thing.  Mostly for the women.  They willingly deprive themselves of my astounding wit, vain superiority complex, and constant condescension toward them.  How they manage to get through the day, much less their shallow, empty lives, without my god-like presence is one of the great mysteries of the universe.  I can only console myself by constantly, incessantly, telling myself that they don’t deserve a man like me, that I am too good for all of them, as I softly whimper into my pillow at night, cuddling my pillow and pretending it is a woman, only to find that my pillow, in its strong distaste of me, evolves the capacity for speech just to tell me to get the fuck off of it and to stop whining like a silly little bitch.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is why I blog.  And also because there are stupid people on the internet saying stupid things.

Normally there’s not much of interest on Livejournal, unless you’re strange enough to take delight in random teenage angst, constant bickering and flame wars, or incessant whining about one’s love life.  But the following post from transformergeek is simply too good to resist quoting:

So I decided to join the KKK…

Sure, I don’t agree with their notion of white pride. And I don’t believe in their desire to cut off all American foreign aid, nor their desire to outlaw homosexuality, nor their anti-abortion stance. I think their plans for creating a Christian nation are horrible and damaging. And I think their history of racism is a truly terrible thing.

But there is a lot of good that comes out of being in the klan! A sense of community. A sense of belonging to something bigger than yourself. They’re deeply rooted in family and tradition. And some of the things they believe in, I also agree with. They believe in supporting strict environmental laws. They believe in balancing the budget. They stand behind states rights, and they strongly support veterans.

I can call myself a Klansman, even though I don’t agree with everything they believe in. And I can still go to klan meetings, even though I disagree with some of their core tenets. I’m just choosing the parts that I like, and I’m going to [go] with that, while I ignore the parts of The Klan that I disagree with.

So really, there’s nothing wrong with The Klan, or being a member. It’s just a personal matter of how the individual chooses to live their life.

The original post can be found here.

In case you’re a bit dense and don’t understand why this person wants to join the KKK, keep in mind that this is satire through analogy.

Still don’t get it?  Convert the phrases related to the KKK to those concerning Christianity and it may become clearer.

Now, while the analogy isn’t perfect, it is nevertheless amusing.  A lot of the rhetoric used by moderate Christians to explain past transgressions of the church, modern bigotry by fundamentalists, or the atrocities contained within scriptures is eerily similar to the framing techniques used by the modern KKK movement, which has apparently tried to distance itself from its claims of hatred and racism and instead sells itself as an organization devoted to community and love.  (I happened upon this knowledge after channel surfing and happening upon some sort of documentary on the KKK on the History Channel.)  This sort of rebranding occurs with most groups that spread bigotry and hatred once their shortcomings are revealed and they are villified.  Thus, homophobic groups are now scrambling to redefine themselves as protecting the family and children rather than oppressing homosexuals they see as abominations.

At any rate, I thought the analogy should be shared, because it deserves a more diverse audience than the trolls and preteens populating livejournal.  (And in case you are wondering, I fit well into the “troll” population on livejournal, and only rarely fill the preteen niche—please refrain from making any dirty sexual remarks about that last bit, by the way.)