Fantastic stand up routine from George Carlin.

I’m sure a lot of you have seen the video by Kirk Cameron entitled “an atheists worst nightmare, the banana”.

For those who haven’t seen it here’s a link. Basically he argues that the banana is so well designed, being tasty, nutritious and easy to hold and eat that the only possible explanation is that they were designed by God.

My first reaction was to imagine the evolutionary process that produced bananas. Of course a fruit that tastes like crap and is difficult to eat is only going to be eaten as a last resort, whereas a nice, tasty nutritious fruit that is easy to eat will be the first choice for any animal. When a fruit gets eaten it’s seeds get distributed far and wide in a handy little package of manure. So by a gradual process of natural selection, the tastiest fruit thrive and spread. Hey presto we have a yummy banana.

I was wrong.

Fortunately, the truth does not support Kirk Camerons argument, but instead blows it completely out of the water.

Here is a natural wild banana

Wild bananas have fairly dry fruits with large seeds and no pulp. In Southeast Asia, the primitive seeded bananas are termed tae manu, meaning animal feces, implying that they are only eaten during times of famine.

The banana we see today is a result of years of selective breeding. So they were inteligently designed.

Here are the inteligent designers, the early native pioneers of agriculture in Papua New Guinea. I’m sure they would appreciate Kirk Cameron’s compliment but they’ll be the first to admit that they are not Gods.

I’d suggest to Kirk Cameron that next time he does a little research before making silly claims that he can prove the existance of God with a banana.

One claim often made by creationists and supporters of “intelligent design” is that there are very few transitional fossils.

In a way they are right, there are fewer transitional fossils than we might expect, but the reason for this is not that transitional forms do not exist. It has more to do with the methods used by scientists to name newly discovered fossils. The methods of naming were formed before the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.

This is explained excellently by Richard Dawkins in his book Climbing Mount Improbable.

“There are 55 million people in Britain but not a single one of them is intermediate between non-voter and voter. Just as, for legal purposes, a juvenile changes into a voter as midnight strikes on the eighteenth birthday, so zoologists always insist on classifying a specimen as in one species or another. If a specimen is intermediate in actual form (as many are) zoologists’ legalistic conventions still force them to jump one way or another when naming it.”

So one specimen of a homo habilis, may have features which make it more similar to homo erectus than another homo habilis specimen, but both will still be called homo habilis. If we look at the actual features of the specimens we can see a gradual slope of changes but creationists either through lack of understanding, or deliberate misrepresentation, look simply at the naming of the specimens and claim there are gaps, where none exist.

Of course there are some gaps in the fossil record, it would be surprising if there were not. Less than 0.01% of living creatures will ever become fossils and less than 0.01% of fossilised remains have been uncovered and studied. What we do have is a good selection of fossils showing how life on earth has gradually changed over millions of years.

New fossils are regularly being discovered which fit perfectly in a gap between two previously known species and invariably the creationists claim that there are then two gaps instead of one.

This has got to be the worst website in the history of the internet, truly dreadful on an epic scale.

You think that looks bad?

On the actual site, the rainbow background is a looped graphic cycling through all the colours, that white blob is a dove which flies around the page, and I’m not even going to mention the awful continuous looped “music”.

If you really want to subject your eyes to this abomination, click on the link below.
Works best (or rather worst) using IE.

Let me see it.
Those with photosensitive epilepsy will probably want to avoid this one.

From mwillett.org

Let us take responsibility for our own actions, inactions, strengths and frailties and not project them onto ghosts, spirits, stars, portents and gods unseen.

Let us have the courage to accept that one person’s faith is another person’s bloody-minded pig-headed refusal to accept the obvious.

Let us have the courage to accept that the person at the front of all crowds, including this one, doesn’t know all the answers.

Let us have the wisdom to accept that if our ancestors had fared differently in wars our communities would be holding different absurdities up as sacred truths, and the willingness to accept those absurdities would be seen as the badge of social trustworthiness or even the right to be allowed to draw breath.

Let us accept that the difference between a prophet and a madman is not what they say but whether the crowd accepts the story and tells their children to believe it.

Let us have the courage to accept that wanting to believe in something with every fibre of our being does not and cannot make it true.

Truth needs no help, no believers, no bowed heads and no amens.