Honors for Monkey Girl

Just got word that Monkey Girl received honorable mention in the 2008 Silver Gavel Awards from the American Bar Association. The award recognizes "outstanding efforts to foster public understanding of the law." First place was Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, so I'm in fine company. Thanks, ABA!

LA Times Festival of Books

I'll be on the Moments that Defined America panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Sunday, April 27, 10:30 am, at UCLA's Haines Hall (festival map here). Also on the panel are authors Douglas Brinkley (The Great Deluge), Michael Eric Dyson (April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King's Death and How it Changed America), and Bruce Watson (Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind). The panel moderator will be Elizabeth Taylor, book editor of the Chicago Tribune. 

We'll all be signing books afterward, but if you miss me then, come on and visit between 1 and 2 pm at the Angel City Press booth, where I'll be joining some of the other authors to sign My California, the bestselling anthology of travel and adventure essays edited by Donna Wares, the proceeds of which go to the California Arts Council to support writing and arts programs for children.

Talk Radio Evolution.... on Talk Radio!

I just finished discussing evolution, intelligent design and Monkey Girl on Tropical Currents on the NPR affiliate in Miami, Florida, one of the evolution war’s latest hotspots. (Florida just put the word “evolution” in its teaching standards for the first time – a mere 83 years after the Scopes Monkey Trial.) The show was pretty hot, too, given that I learned, five minutes before air time, that it was not a simple interview but a point-counter-point with Mark Mathis, the producer of a new ID promotional film called, Expelled, which apparently paints ID proponents and evolution critics as Galileo-like martyrs of science.

This put me in the position of having to rebut live the very thing I’ve been writing about – the cartoon version of evolutionary theory I call “Talk Radio Evolution.” This is the phony straw-man used by creationists and ID proponents to paint a false portrait of mainstream science as some far-out, atheistic, immoral fairy tale that says life arose through random chance, that man abruptly appeared where monkeys once stood, and that scientists are closed-minded, dogmatic liars conspiring to poison young minds and to drive the heroic “ID theorists” out of academia.

 I’ll put up a link to the audio once it’s posted, but the short of it was, I responded:

• Intelligent Design was shown to be a religious idea, not science, in the landmark Kitzmiller vs. Dover case I examine in Monkey Girl.
• Evolution was shown in that same case to be well-supported and critically important science, and that it had been observed in the laboratory, the fossil record, through genome analysis, and in computer simulations -- none of which can be said about ID.
  
• Such supernatural explanations for life and nature as ID may be fine for church and dinner-table discussions, but not public school science classes.
  
• Even the star of the ID movement, biochemist Michael Behe, admitted that for Intelligent Design to be considered science, the very notion of a scientific theory would need to be redefined so broadly that astrology would qualify as science as well.

The very cordial host of the show, Joseph Cooper, asked Mr. Mathis if he thought allowing ID into public school classrooms would open the door to other fringe ideas, such as holocaust denial. Where do we draw the line? Mathis had no good answer.

This is the same fellow who PZ Myers over at Pharygula says interviewed him for a more even-handed sounding film called Crossroads, which apparently evolved into was re- designed as Expelled.

My one regret is that I didn’t have a chance to toss in a mention of Ambulocetus, the “walking whale,” when Mr. Mathis was asserting a lack of proof of one species evolving into another. So I've shared a nice shot of one here, courtesy of Kevin Padian’s presentation in the Kitzmiller case.

Monkey Girl Book Lotto Winners

Wow, what a great response to the Monkey Girl book lotto over at CaliforniaAuthors.com! Thanks to everyone who entered, and to the winners, Cheryl Shepherd-Adams and Janice Theriot, who should be getting their signed copies of the new Monkey Girl paperback any minute.

Free Books! Monkey Girl Book Lotto

To kick off the new paperback edition of Monkey Girl, officially out February 19, CaliforniaAuthors.com is sponsoring a Book Lotto, and they're giving away two autographed copies of my book. Now you've got no excuse not to delve into this story of a modern-day Scopes Monkey Trial and America's seemingly endless conflict between science and faith. 

The drawing is Friday, and it's free. So click on over to the West Coast's leading literary site, CaliforniaAuthors.com, and enter to win your copy of Monkey Girl.

Monkey Girl Paperbacks Are Here!

A great big box arrived at my doorstep today: the first shipment of the paperback edition of Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion & the Battle for America's Soul. The paperback arrives at a time of continuing controversy across the nation about the teaching of evolution, creationism and its close cousin, intelligent design. I'll be posting more about that shortly.

Meanwhile, here's a column I wrote for the LA Times that summarizes some of the key issues in Monkey Girl, and explains my own theory of Talk Radio Evolution. 

And here's a sampling of reviews of Monkey Girl, just to whet your appetite:

• Washington Post: Gripping... a talent for narrative and an eye for detail... As Edward Humes describes in this lively and thoughtful book, Dover - like Dayton, Tenn., during the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" - became a proving ground for clashing beliefs about the origins of life and constitutional questions about the separation of church and state.
• LA Times Book Review: Humes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has opened my eyes. I only wish I could close them again... Monkey Girl is full of vivid descriptions and interesting facts... Humes especially shines in his careful explication of the history of this larger fight over how human beings arose and what God's role - if any - was in their creation.
• Chicago Tribune: Why Americans continue to pit religion against science... is the question at the heart of Edward Humes' compelling Monkey Girl... Clearly based on exhaustive reporting that takes the reader from the hard benches of a Harrisburg, Pa., federal district courtroom to the kitchen tables of Dover families whose children were taunted as "monkey girls." ...Humes may be the most successful so far in making a complicated issue accessible and in putting human faces on both sides of the evolution divide.
• Seattle Times: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes tells the riveting story of how a sleepy Pennsylvania town became the focus for the biggest fight over the teaching of evolution in the public schools since the Scopes Monkey Trial itself. Humes does a terrific job of evenhandedly laying out the history... His writing is vivid, memorable and engaging, and a welcome breath of common sense in an area dominated by zealots and table pounding.
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Humes' fast-moving, richly detailed book reads like a suspense novel.
• Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: A must read for anyone who cares about science, education, and liberty.
• Judge John E. Jones III, Kitzmiller vs. Dover: Humes' remarkable and balanced narrative has captured the essence of this complex and emotional dispute. When discussing the trial I have frequently found myself saying that to truly understand it, you had to be there. Humes' compelling book accomplishes just that.
• Prof. PZ Myers, Pharyngula: This book reads like a novel. Even though I knew how it would turn out, I had to keep going... I knew there was a first-rate dramatic story in the Dover trial, and Edward Humes has written it. Now I'm just waiting for the movie.

The Belief Addiction

As much as I loved Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, I think he missed an important aspect of America's growing problem with reality. It isn't merely that we're weathering daily, politically motivated assaults on rationality, but that we as a people have become addicted to the comfort of false beliefs -- ranging from a belief that the Old Testament's literal account of creation is more credible than modern science, to the persistent belief that Republicans are stronger on national defense than Democrats.

(Pop Quiz: What party was in power when both World Wars were won, when the GI Bill was passed, when the Cuban Missile Crisis was defused, and when the Veterans Administration was transformed from a cruel joke to a model of excellence that strengthened our military? And what party's leaders opposed standing up to Hitler, opposed aiding our WW II allies, cut and run from Vietanam and Lebanon, destroyed the VA and reduced premier military hospitals to monuments of moldering neglect, and ignored dire warnings one month before 9-11 that Osama Bin Laden was preparing to attack the U.S.?)

At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a classic example of a belief widely held not because of evidence, but in spite of it. And the irrational, angry, defensive behavior of addiction all too well explains this penchant for magical thinking.

My new essay on our addiction to false beliefs -- and the dire fate that awaits us if the public and the media don't start waking up and smelling the bull -- is up at the Huffington Post. Here's a taste:

While our political press obsesses on Fred's trophy wife, John's haircut and Hillary's cleavage, a far more revealing political milestone has passed with barely a ripple: the moment when ten Republican candidates for president, during the first in their endless series of sort-of debates, were asked if they believed in evolution. Three would-be leaders of the free world raised their hands to say no.

The revelatory aspect of this has nothing to do with the evolution versus creationism debate per se... What's most important is the question itself: Do you believe in evolution? It is at once unintentionally illuminating and profoundly stupid, and the fact that a panel of elite journalists and ten major presidential candidates alike failed to recognize this should shock and worry us all... Americans too often prefer pleasing beliefs, even false ones, over knowledge, and we cling to them not with the tenacity of a warrior, but with the sick obsession of an addict....read more