Spin cycle

Well, The Daily Mail Fail is at it again, this time with a claim that the CIA has declassified a book predicting the end of the world (which is going to happen soon, of course).  Illustrating the fact that there is no conspiracy theory so blatantly idiotic that there won't be people passionately espousing it, the whole thing has the End Times crowd running around making excited little squeaking noises, while the rest of us are wearing expressions like this:

The book is called The Adam and Eve Story, which should put you on notice immediately that we're not talking about hard science, here.  It's by a guy named Chan Thomas, a "former U.S. Air Force employee, UFO researcher, and self-acclaimed psychic," for whom, we're told, "there are no official records of [his] working directly for the CIA."

So we're definitely off to a flying start.

I guess there's no doubt that the guy's book, which was written in 1966, was considered classified until 2013, and only appeared on the CIA's database of declassified documents about a month ago -- and then, only 55 pages out of the two hundred or so in the original manuscript.  Why it was classified in the first place is uncertain, although it may be nothing more than the fact that anyone who worked on any sort of sensitive-to-security projects -- which Thomas apparently did -- automatically has anything they write classified until it can be reviewed and shown not to give away anything that needs to stay secret.

My surmise is the fact that it languished after that because no one at the CIA took it seriously enough to bother reviewing.

Anyhow, Thomas's claim is that there have been cataclysms on the order of every six thousand years, and we're currently overdue.  What happens during these catastrophes illustrates the fact that Thomas shoulda stuck with UFO research, or at least paid better attention during ninth grade Earth Science class, because the first thing that jumps out at me is that he does not understand the difference between the Earth's rotational axis and its magnetic poles.  This leads him to conclude that when the magnetic poles flip -- something that happens around every three hundred thousand years, not six thousand, so he's off by a factor of fifty, but who's counting -- it somehow affects the rotational axis, throwing continents and oceans around like a washing machine on spin cycle.  

The results are hella scary.  Thomas writes:

In a fraction of a day all vestiges of civilization are gone, and the great cities — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, New York — are nothing but legends.  Barely a stone is left where millions walked just a few hours before...  Winds with the force of a thousand armies will shred everything in sight with a supersonic bombardment, as a Pacific tsunami drowns Los Angeles and San Francisco as if they were but grains of sand...  Calamity will overtake the entire North American continent within three hours, as an earthquake simultaneously creates massive cracks in the ground that allow magma to rise to the surface.

So I think we all can agree that this would be bad.  By the time it's all over -- in seven days, he says -- everything will be rearranged, with Antarctica at the equator (melting its huge ice caps), and the Bay of Bengal at what is now the North Pole.

By now you may be wondering what historical cataclysms "every six thousand years" he's basing this on.  I know I was.  You ready?

The Flood of Noah, and six thousand years before that, something about Adam and Eve.  (You might have guessed the latter based on the book's title; I have to admit by that point I'd already forgotten it, so this got an all-new eyeroll from me.)

Scholars of the Bible might be objecting by now that the Book of Genesis doesn't describe any kind of worldwide catastrophe centering around Adam and Eve, just some malarkey about a serpent and an apple and whatnot, and their being the ancestors of all humanity despite supposedly being the first people and having only sons.  But Thomas seems sufficiently detached from reality that this is only a minor quibble compared to some of the other stuff he says.

Despite the fact that the claim is (in a word) ridiculous, I've already seen three videos on TikTok that seem to treat the whole thing as deadly serious, with the fact that three-quarters of the original manuscript is still classified being used as evidence that the CIA is "hiding something" and "they're trying to prevent mass panic."

Trust me, the only people out there panicking over this are ones who see messages from God on their grilled cheese sandwiches.  And it hardly bears pointing out that you can't use pages you've never seen as proof of anything, given that by default we don't know what's in them.

Sometimes absence of evidence really is evidence of absence.

In any case, I wouldn't lose any sleep over this.  But I will appeal to the conspiracy theorists: can you please try and give me better material to work with?  Because this one was kind of bottom-of-the-barrel.  Time to step up your game, folks.  It's positively making me pine for the good old days of HAARP and Nibiru and the Annunaki and "Birds Aren't Real."

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A case of the willies

The topic for today's post comes from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia via a source I don't even look at any more, namely The Daily Mail Fail.

I avoid sources like this for the most part for two reasons -- first, they're low-hanging fruit, as skeptic-fodder goes, because whatever actual information they include is usually sensationalized, exaggerated, or outright wrong.  Second, I have no particular desire to send readers to those sites and boost their hit-counters.  They get enough ad revenue from their regular readers as it is; I would really rather not add to it.

So when a frequent contributor of topics for this blog sent me the link, I was reluctant to click on it, much less write about it.  But when I read the title of the article, I just couldn't help myself.

Because the title is, "God Made Eve from Adam's Penis, Not His Rib, Claims Religious Academic."

The gist of the story is that Ziony Zevit, professor of biblical studies at American Jewish University in BelAir, California, has come up with the idea that the Hebrew word "tsela" -- ordinarily translated as "rib" in the creation story -- instead "refers to limbs sticking out sideways from an upright human body."

So why the penis?  Why not, for example, the arm, which in most guys sticks out way more sideways than our penises do?  Two reasons, says Professor Zevit:  first, the number of bones in the arms and legs, not to mention the number of ribs, is the same in men and women, and you'd expect men to have one less bone somewhere if god had snitched one of 'em to make Eve.  Second, humans are among the few mammals that lack a baculum, a bone that reinforces the penis, which is why dogs (for example) so seldom need Viagra.

So anyhow.  After I recovered from nearly injuring myself laughing over this, I thought, "Okay, let me check my sources, here.  It is, after all, The Daily Fail.  They probably are misrepresenting Professor Zevit, or possibly even making it all up."

Hugo van der Goes, The Fall of Adam (1470) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But even stopped clocks are right twice a day, as my dad used to say.  This time The Daily Fail actually got it right.  Zevit did indeed make that claim, pretty much as outlined above, and his entire argument (if I can dignify it by that term) appeared in the September/October issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

If you're amused so far, wait until you hear the reaction from the readers of the journal.

"I write to express my disappointment with your magazine. I wish to cancel my subscription," wrote Sue Glaze of Maryland.  'That is plainly not a Bible teaching. I do not need and will not read articles that damage my faith or attempts to cause me to doubt what I know is the truth from the Bible."

Another reader, Reverend Randall Krabill, was equally outraged.  "How does Ziony Zevit's article have anything to do with Biblical archaeology?  I have never purchased a tabloid magazine in my life -- and I have no intention of ever doing so.  I certainly didn't realize that was what I was doing when I subscribed to BAR."

Another pastor, Don Brubacher agreed, calling the claim "outlandish," and supporting his opinion by going right to the top.  "As Jesus scathingly said: 'You blind guides! You strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.' (Matthew 23:24)."

This last comment is even funnier when you realize that people like Brubacher and his ilk have no problem accepting talking snakes, or a 600-year-old Israeli man rescuing kangaroos from Australia prior to a worldwide flood, but there is no way they'll accept that god made women from a piece of Adam's willy.

Of course, pretty soon the other biblical academics started to weigh in, and most of them were equally unimpressed.  Alan Hooker, a blogger on the topic of the Old Testament, pointed out a possible problem with Zevit's claim:

Firstly, the Hebrew text of Genesis 2:21 does not support the authors’ thesis. It reads, “Then Yahweh of the gods caused a trance to fall upon the man (Adam), and while he slept, he took ahat missalotayv…”  The phrase ahat (lit. “one of”) missalotayv (“from his tselas”) implies that whatever Yahweh took from man, there was more than one of them to begin with.  The construct form of ahad (one) coupled with the plural of tsela lends more weight to the traditional idea that this is a rib bone, and not the baculum.

Can't argue with that.  Most guys are equipped with only one wang, not to mention zero wang-bones (to use the technical terminology).  So Hooker may be on to something, there.

Of course, given that I am starting from the standpoint of not believing any of it, the whole argument strikes me as ridiculous.  They're taking a Bronze Age fairy tale, and trying to use scientific evidence to sort out how the fairy tale can actually be true.  But as usual, that leaves the most mystifying thing of all unsolved -- how, if Eve was made from any part of Adam, she (and every other woman since then) has two X chromosomes, while Adam presumably had an X and a Y.

Oh, wait.  "God works in mysterious ways."  Never mind.

So anyhow, that's today's episode of "How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?"  The whole thing leaves me with the general feeling anyone participating on either the pro-rib or pro-penis side of the argument is, in a word, insane.  Me, I'm done thinking about it, and in fact I think I need to go read some Richard Dawkins just to restore order to the universe.

Adam and Eve and Chris Hemsworth

Coming hard on the heels of my post a week ago about how even the blondest, bluest-eyed of us descends from dark-skinned, brown-eyed Africans, we have a group of young-earth creationists who are going through mental gyrations to determine what skin color Adam and Eve had.

I have to admit that it always struck me as odd, even when I was a teenager and fairly naïve about pretty much everything, that Adam and Eve were always pictured as white-skinned Caucasians.  They lived in the Middle East, right?

Antonio Molinari, Adam and Eve (ca. 1700) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Of course, the same thing might well be said about a more recent religious figure from the same tradition:

Is it just me, or is Jesus's expression in this portrait saying, "Bitch, please"?

So anyway, maybe it's time for people to recognize that all of the people in the bible were most likely dark-skinned and dark-eyed, and that Jesus probably looked more like Saddam Hussein than he did like Chris Hemsworth.

But anyway.  Now we have a bunch of people twisting themselves into knots to solve the question about Adam and Eve's skin color.  Which is funny from a number of standpoints, the first and foremost of which is that they're wasting time trying to figure out what a couple of people who never existed looked like.

Let's start with Sierra Rayne, over at American Thinker, who says that this is actually an important question for the religious to resolve.  "Within the context of the current war on the Judeo-Christian faith," she writes, "the discussion is far from esoteric, necessitating a consistent interpretation within the community."  She solves the conundrum thusly:

(A)ll of the children from a couple will have skin colors lighter than the darkest parent's skin color.  Tracing this reasoning back to Adam and Eve, it would then suggest that either Adam or Eve had a skin color darker than the darkest human skin color that current exists anywhere on the planet.

I guess if you're starting out from the standpoint that gene mutations never occur, this might have some degree of reason behind it.  But as I point out repeatedly in my Critical Thinking classes, if you're constructing a logical argument, and one of your premises is false, you can prove damn near anything.

Then we have the piece over at Apologetics Press that makes the following bizarre statement:

Thus, starting with any two parents who were heterozygous (i.e., middle-brown in color), extreme racial colors (black and white, to name only two examples) could be produced in such a way that races would have permanently different colors.  Of course, it also is possible to produce a middle-brown race that will have a fixed middle-brown color.  If the original middle-brown parents produce offspring of either AAbb or aaBB, and these offspring marry only others their own color, avoiding intermarriage with those not of their own genetic makeup, their descendants will be a fixed middle-brown color.

And they back it up with a Punnett square, so it must be true:

 Of course, this conveniently ignores the fact that there are way more than two gene loci that control skin color, that genes can mutate, and (of course) human populations evolve through natural selection just like every other species on Earth.

But I suppose that if they want to argue over what Adam and Eve looked like, at least it's less time that they'll have to devote to insisting that the bible be used as a science textbook in public schools.  And after all, in a previous generation, the religious argued over how many angels could stand on the head of a pin, so such silliness is hardly unprecedented.

It'd be nice, however, if they'd realize another principle of critical thinking, namely that you're not supposed to assume your conclusion and then fish around for support for it after the fact.