Friday, January 31, 2014

"If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, violence and sheer ignorance as religion is, you'd resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a mafia wife for the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the millions of their fellow followers." -- Bill Maher

Please look at the photo of the Boston Marathon atrocities in the previous post (Islam). I could have labeled that post "theism" because all theists are responsible for what happened that terrible day. All theists believe in the same magical being those terrorists believe in. All theists are part of the problem. All theists are what Mr. Maher calls "enablers". They all help make religious violence possible.

The never ending violence is only part of the problem. There is the suppression of human rights (especially women's rights), the inability of religious assholes to mind their own fucking business, the stupidity, the brainwashing, their war against science education, and their war against human progress.

Do you think you're a moderate theist? What is so fucking moderate about believing there's a magical being hiding in some other galaxy? Your god fairy fantasy is the most anti-science and most anti-reality idea ever invented. And your god bullshit is what made that Boston photo possible.

In the photo there is a very young woman wearing a blue shirt. Both her legs are completely gone, including the feet, the knees, and her entire thighs. Blood is pouring out of both stumps. A first responder is checking her neck to see if she's still alive. She is either dead or her life is completely ruined.

This horrible photo is what religion is all about. The violence, the stupidity, the bullshit fantasies, it's all there in the photo and every theist is responsible for it.

All this for what? So you fucking cowardly theists can have your magical being and your magical heaven and all your other magical bullshit. You fucking assholes don't care about the violence and the other stuff. You just want to be able to deny reality because you're too fucking stupid to grow up and because reality makes you cry.

If you're a theist (or an equally retarded agnostic) then get off my planet you worthless piece of crap.

From a Letter to the Editor in today's January 31, 2014 New York Times at How We View and Experience Faith:

A secular person is much more likely to feel anger or frustration not because of what the fundamentalist religious person believes, but because of what religious beliefs drive that person to do. Suicide bombings, denying civil rights, exporting fear and loathing to other countries, bombing abortion clinics, “honor killings,” elimination of accurate science in education — these are examples of toxic behaviors with broad impact that have been justified by religious faith.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Idiot America's idiot problem is much worse than I thought. There is no hope.


I have frequently written about Idiot America's Christian War Against Science Education. The Christian assholes are winning. A large percentage of America's science teachers are science deniers, and taxpayers pay their salaries. In their biology classrooms they are teaching magical creationism instead of evolution, and they're getting away with it. In some states it's legal what they're doing. In other states they are not allowed to teach magical bullshit but they teach it anyway and nobody complains because the students are fucking idiots.

My state, Florida, is one of the worst anti-science states, despite our new public school science standards that make evolution one of the big ideas of science.

Rational people need to fight back. We need to take these fucking morons to court. The alternative is to do nothing and let Idiot America become as backward as the Muslim theocracies. Oh wait, that's already happened.

Please notice that the states on the map that have no green or orange or red dots, those states have the same problem. For example in Minnesota (which is near the North Pole) 25% of their public school biology teachers illegally teach magical creationism and they get away with it.

There is no hope.

Creationism 'alive and well' in Minnesota biology classes

On Evolution, Biology Teachers Stray From Lesson Plan

Texas Public Schools Are Teaching Creationism

Map: Publicly Funded Schools That Are Allowed to Teach Creationism.

Instead of wasting your time here you can learn a few things at the John Hawks website: Seven things about evolution

Seven things about evolution

Monday, January 27, 2014

"There is no way that an ape just gave birth to a human one day."

It's impossible to make this stuff up. A Christian fucktard actually did write "There is no way that an ape just gave birth to a human one day." The idiot was not joking.

Of course we could say this happens every day because humans are apes but most definitely the fucktard was talking about our ancient ape ancestors who lived millions of years ago.

The uneducated moron was trying to explain why his god fairy is real. For the heck of it I tried to communicate with him. Here it is:

This is a bit pointless because your brain damage is incurable. 

"
There is no way that an ape just gave birth to a human one day."

You don't understand anything about the science you don't like. It took six million years, which is an extremely vast amount of time, for our ancient ape ancestors to develop into modern human apes. We didn't go from hairy tree dweller to people in one generation. That would be ridiculously impossible. We're you joking or serious?

And by the way we know we share an ancestor with the other modern ape species thanks to comparative genomics, also known as comparing DNA sequences of human apes and chimpanzee apes. This is the strongest and most powerful evidence in science and evolution has tons of it. Denying our evolutionary relationship with the other ape species is as ridiculous as pretending the Earth orbits the Sun.

"
Also how do you explain miracles?"

That's easy. Miracles are bullshit because magic is not real.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."

The preacher man sells eternal life. You drop dead then you live forever. The customers are fucking idiots. And there's millions of them. Especially here in Idiot America.

How can this fantasy be eradicated? Can stupid be fixed? Can cowards grow up? Is there no hope for this idiot country?

Hello Christian scum. You assholes need to stay away from children because child abuse is wrong.

Christian morons, here in the 21st century we have something called "reality". According to this idea only real stuff is accepted as the truth. Fantasies, especially your moronic cowardly childish ridiculous fantasies, are not the truth here in reality.

Never mind Christian fucktards. We will just have to wait for you feeble-minded cowards to drop dead. And since you're so certain there will be a magical second life for you, why don't you drop dead right now. Nobody will miss you pathetic lunatics.

Idiot America has many problems including a Christian fucktard problem and even worse we have a wimpy atheist problem.

Idiot America has a serious never-ending Christian War Against Science Education problem.

Our Christian fucktards are constantly trying to get laws passed to dumb down the teaching of evolution, and always they lose in court. But that's only a small part of the problem.

Our Christian assholes are constantly harassing and threatening biology teachers, a problem which was thoroughly explained by the New York Times which I copy and pasted to These cowardly Christian assholes harassed, threatened, and yelled at an elderly female biology teacher.

The brainwashed Christian students have been known to actually cry when the subject is evolution. I'm not making this up. When the crybabies are not crying they are harassing the biology teacher. It's pathetic.

There's another problem and this one is very strange. Christian assholes brainwash their children to believe evolution is evil. I'm not making this up. So when their children take their first biology class (which should be in First Grade Age Six but in Idiot America it's usually in high school age 15) the parents fear the brainwashing will be all for nothing. So they instruct their children to tell their biology teachers they will not show up for class when the subject is evolution. The correct response is "Tell your parents you would have to skip the entire two semesters because I'm going to be teaching evolution every single day. And if you do that you will fail and you will not be allowed to graduate from high school." and if the teacher is competent (only 28% of American biology teachers are qualified to teach evolution which is another disgraceful problem) that's pretty much exactly what they would say.

All the bullshit I just wrote about is terrible but even worse is America's atheist wimps. At another website a Christian fucktard (all Christians are fucking idiots) asked "Atheists, if Christian parents don't want their children in the classroom when evolution is being taught would you be okay with that, or would you want their children to be kept in the classroom by force, against the parents' will?"

The atheist wimps showed off their wimpiness with this wimpy bullshit:

"That is their choice. If parents choose to deprive their children of an education, that is not my business."

"Their kids' loss. Not mine."

"No I wouldn't force them to, it's unethical to me."

And winning first prize for most wimpy atheist fucktard who is too fucking stupid to understand evolution is part of every lesson:

"In all honesty, it's the parents choice to have them learn the material or not. If it offends them it's their right to, if they wish, take them out for that section of the class. As an atheist, I see no harm in parents barring subjects from their children. As the others have said above, it is an important part of the science curriculum; however, the kids shouldn't be forced to learn about evolution."

The fucking moronic wimp who wrote that is no better than the bible thumpers and terrorists.

Fortunately there were some normal people (real atheists) who wrote:

"Force them. It's not their fault their parents are idiots."

"Waaah I'm not going to take math, for religious reasons! Give me a break, you lying babies. If students refuse to learn biology, they should and WILL get a big fat F for failure. Put that on your permanent record."

One nice thing about all these Christian crybabies, this shows that evolution really is killing the Christian Death Cult. The Christian assholes know this and that explains their desperate war against science education, a war they most certainly will lose eventually.

Deists are fucking idiots. From wikipedia: "Deism is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to determine the existence of a Creator, accompanied with the rejection of revelation and authority as a source of religious knowledge."

Deists think they're a big fucking deal because even though they're stupid enough to believe in a magical being, they are not stupid enough to believe the other god-soaked bullshit.

I'm not impressed. If they believed the Easter Bunny was real I would be equally not impressed.

The deist fucktards remind me of the agnostic fucktards who also think they're a big fucking deal, even though only a fucking idiot wouldn't be able to figure out whether or not magical beings are real.

Deists, what's their fucking problem? Do they think the universe wouldn't exist without their creator's magic wand?

Deists and agnostics are equal to the bible thumpers and terrorists. Equally insane and equally part of the problem. They have my contempt.

Charles Darwin was the first person to discover the most important mechanism of evolution, natural selection. One of his friends said "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!"

Charles Darwin, the father of modern biology and the man who killed god.

Darwin got a lot of things right including the idea that the development of people (aka human apes) was not inevitable.


"Darwin did not believe that evolution follows a predetermined direction or that it has an inevitable goal.  His explanation that evolution occurs as a result of natural selection implied that chance plays a major role.  He understood that it is a matter of luck whether any individuals in a population have variations that will allow them to survive and reproduce.  If no such variations exist, the population rapidly goes extinct because it cannot adapt to a changing environment.  Unlike Lamarck, Darwin did not believe that evolution inevitably produces more complex life forms and that the ultimate result of this process is humans.  These were shocking, revolutionary ideas even for scientists who accepted evolution."

The variations (aka mutations) are "a matter of luck" but of course the natural selection of what works is not chance.

"Chance alone cannot explain the marvelous fit between individuals and their environment. And it doesn't. True, the raw materials for evolution--the variations between individuals--are indeed produced by chance mutations. These mutations occur willy-nilly, regardless of whether they are good or bad for the individual. But it is the filtering of that variation by natural selection that produces adaptations, and natural selection is manifestly not random. It is a powerful molding force, accumulating genes that have a greater chance of being passed on to others, and in so doing making individuals even better able to cope with their environment. It is, then, the unique combination of mutation and selection--chance and lawfulness--that tells us how organisms become adapted."
-- Jerry Coyne, University of Chicago biologist, author of Why Evolution is True

1966

A Catholic Fucktard wrote "The portrayal of the Roman Catholic Church as being anti-science is deplorably false." then the fucking idiot wrote "If a Catholic, acting in good faith and intellectual honesty, truly believed that the stars and planets did develop over time, this still ultimately must be attributed to God and his plan."

This bullshit is typical for all religious cults that pretend they're moderate, as if there's something moderate about invoking a magical being to make natural processes possible.

Catholic assholes and all other religious scum who think they are pro-science, there's nothing scientific about your god fairy or any of your other ridiculous fantasies. The choice is reality or your bullshit. You can't have both.

If you're interested in reading what fucking retards write to justify their death cult, you can see the rest of the Catholic Fucktard's bullshit at Catholicism and Evolution which also has links to websites about Muslim scum and their fear of science.

I frequently read bullshit from Catholics who say the pope loves evolution but I noticed Catholics deny the established truth of evolution just as much as the Christian fundamentalists deny it. In any case "this still ultimately must be attributed to God and his plan" is not accepting evolution. It's polluting evolution with bullshit.

This blog, by the way, is extremely anti-religion. The owner of this blog has extreme contempt for the fucking idiots who believe in supernatural bullshit and even more contempt for the wimpy atheists and agnostic scum who suck up to religious stupidity. Since 9/11/2001 the time for being nice is over with. Religion is destroying this planet and it must be completely eradicated.

---------------------------------------

One more thing.

The Catholic Fucktard wrote "To Catholics, the universe is not the result of purely random events that have no direction and operate without the hand of God. A universe without God is purely materialistic and secular, this is a position the church rejects. It does not oppose evolution, but it opposes the argument that evolution disproves the existence of God, or makes Him irrelevant."

I'm betting the asshole who wrote this bullshit is an evolution denier. He apparently thinks natural selection is purely random.

He fears evolution. It's obvious. He knows his Catholic Death Cult is bullshit and he knows it's going extinct. And he knows the facts of evolution are killing it.

The hand of god? The magical hand of god? How fucking stupid can you Catholic scum get? Is your Magic Jeebus Man constantly waving his magic wand to make the universe work?

Your "God" with the male sex organs (they call their fairy "Him" with a capital H) has been repeatedly shown to have never done anything. This is the 21st century. We know things these days. Your fairy is obsolete and it's always been ridiculous. If you want to live in this century you're going to have to throw out your Dark Ages fantasies. If you're too cowardly to grow up then go fuck yourself. We don't need you fucking morons.

Religious assholes defend their childish moronic fantasies with brainwashing, dishonesty, censorship, violence, and their never ending war against science education. But can bullshit last forever? I don't think so.

All religions will go extinct eventually. Religious scum can't save their cults because reality always wins.

"There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."
-- Stephen Hawking

The Magic Jeebus Man was an uneducated moron. The Christian Death Cult is ridiculous. Christians are stupid fucking assholes who brainwash children. Christians are cowardly fucktards who are willing to believe in any bullshit that makes them feel good.

Every single Christian fantasy is ridiculous. Christians believe in Christian bullshit because they're just plain stupid.

There are no moderate Christians because there's nothing moderate about being a fucking idiot.

"Jeebus died for your sins." What the fuck is that suppose to mean? What fucking sins? Sin is a bullshit word for fucking idiots. Christian assholes must think everyone is born evil therefore a magical preacher man (Jeebus) had to get himself executed so a magical being in the sky would be able to magically send these evil people to a magical paradise as long as they sucked up to Jeebus. As if any of this bullshit makes sense.

Christian assholes should be locked up to prevent them from spreading their disease.

Every religious school in the world must be destroyed because child abuse is wrong.

Millions of students never learn anything because their teachers are god-soaked idiots. There is no excuse for this child abuse. All religious schools must be banned and all religious people must not be allowed to teach anything.

It's not fair to students to get stuck with an insane teacher who thinks there's a magical being hiding somewhere in the universe. It's not fair to students to be taught the ridiculous fantasies of religion are real.

All religious ideas are against reality, against science, and against common sense. Religious teachers teach students how to be stupid and stay stupid. They suck out all their curiosity which is what makes scientific progress possible. This child abuse must not be tolerated.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

The reason why I have so much contempt for agnostic idiots.

Agnostics have a lot of problems. They're full of crap. They're stupid assholes. And most important they are wrong.

Is supernatural magic real or not? Agnostics are so fucking stupid they can't figure it out.

The problem is the people who blow themselves up (Muslim scum) and the Bible thumpers who are constantly trying to dumb down science education (Christian assholes), they all love you agnostic retards. It's because you make them feel good about their ridiculous god fantasy.

Look at what's going on in Syria right now. The never ending out of control atrocities. That's a religious problem. Look at what's going in Texas right now where it's virtually impossible for students to learn anything about science. That's a religious problem.

All religions need to be completely eradicated. You agnostic morons are just getting in the way. You agnostic fucktards just make things worse with your childish "We can't know there's no magical god fairies and magical Easter Bunnies."

What we have here, agnostic scum, is a failure to grow up.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Religious indoctrination is child abuse. The child abusers belong in prison.

At Catholic school (I endured 9 years of it, Kindergarten thru 8th grade) the brainwashing is intense. A big part of that child abuse was "The Catholic Church is the One True Religion" which is an idea I heard a few thousand times. Their logic (the ugly fat nuns) was the Catholic Church is older than the other Christian cults, therefore it is real and the newer cults are false. 

Some people grow up and throw out the ridiculous bullshit. Other people never grow up. Those other people are called Bible thumpers and terrorists.

What happens when two ridiculous cults decide to get violent because the other cult is wrong? A good example is what's going on in Syria right now.

All the trillions of dollars spent on religious wars and spent on defending a country from future religious attacks, maybe there could be some better use for that cash. Like for example scientific progress. Or science education. Or just give it all to me.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

One more time: The reasons why the god fairy fantasy is bullshit, as I explained to a Christian idiot.

Science has made gods unnecessary, and the whole god idea is childish and ridiculous.

"Christians have Jesus and miracles as evidence that God is real."

Christians have their wishful thinking and nothing else. Atheists have all of reality.

I don't think you people have any idea how moronic your god fantasy is. A magical being hiding somewhere in the universe magically creating stuff? The Easter Bunny is more plausible.

There are wimpy atheists who say they have a lack of belief in gods. The wimps are not real atheists. I'm 100% certain magical god beings and magical rabbits are not real.

A belief in a god is a serious mental illness. An inability to be 100% certain god fairies are not real is also a mental illness. These two diseases are called theism and agnosticism. People who have these mental health problems need psychiatric help. Or they could just grow up.

Interesting video about Magnus Carlsen, the World Chess Champion from Norway, who makes 1.5 million dollars a year.

Monday, January 20, 2014

This video is about child abuse. The victims look like they're about six years old. The child abusers are professional Christian assholes. They belong in prison.

Hey Muslim scum, if you want to blow yourself up for Allah you better get in line now because that line already has a few thousand lunatics in it.

Today's news is the same as the news every other day. Several suicide bombers blew themselves up to destroy property and murder people. Several. Not one. Several idiots blew themselves up. How many? They haven't figured that out yet.

And guess what fucked up religion these lunatics belong to.

Were they Christians? Were they Catholics? Were they Mormons? Were they Jews?

They most certainly were not atheists.

Muslim morons, why do you fucktards blow yourselves up? What's the point? Isn't a big part of being successful being able to make it thru an entire day without wearing a suicide vest? Normal people can do it. Even religious idiots can do it if they're not Muslims.

I suggest you Muslim retards have a serious mental health problem. It's just not normal to blow yourselves up like you do every single day. The idea is to stay alive.

You fucking assholes for Mohammed need to understand you don't have a magical soul that magically flies to a magical paradise after you blow yourself up into thousands of pieces. Also, it's not very nice to murder women and children. Also, it's not nice to murder guys. This whole suicide bombing thing is very bad for your reputation because some people are so angry they want to wipe you scum off the face of the Earth.

So please Muslim Fucktards, try to grow up and stop being uncivilized fucking idiots.

Today's news: The attack involved a car bomb, explosive vests and gunfire against the base and extensively damaged drones and helicopters that were on the airstrip. Local media outlet TOLO news reported that one of the bombers was believed to be female, citing Afghan authorities.

Idiot America is going to get the fuck out of that fucked up worthless country later this year. It's about fucking time. We wasted countless lives and a trillion dollars and we accomplished nothing. The Taliban are going to win because the Afghans are too fucking cowardly to defend their country.

There will be burkas and no human rights. Afghans deserve what they're going to get because they thought they could depend on Americans to defend their dirt-bag country forever. Fuck off Afghanistan. Solve your own fucking problems.

President Fucktard Obama actually did something right. Thank you Mr. President.

In my younger days I often wondered why I could go to a store and buy a six pack of beer but not be able to do that when I wanted to buy the special substance. Why was it against the law to sell and purchase marijuana?

I bet President Obama wondered the same thing because he was seriously into getting stoned.

We now have two states, Colorado and Washington state, where anyone can go to a marijuana store and buy high quality marijuana. The taxes are too high and there is a ridiculous limit on how much can be purchased. Also, there is not enough competition yet so the stores are charging too much. A friend from Colorado said many people continue to buy the stuff illegally (not from the stores) to save money.

But the future looks good. Our government in Florida needs to do the same thing because it would attract more tourists which is the most important business we have.

Mr. President, thanks again for helping make this free country really free. It is an outrage that the government has in the past arrested people for buying or selling this stuff even though it's a basic human right to use it. A government that is out of control is a government that needs to be destroyed. Fortunately our president is doing the right thing and I highly recommend this news article about him at Obama: Pot is not more dangerous than alcohol.

This fucking idiot is still one of the nine judges on the United States Supreme Court: In his dissent, Scalia threw the creationists a small bone: The people of Louisiana were entitled, he wrote, “to have whatever evidence there may be against evolution presented in their schools.”

January 19, 2014, also known as yesterday: Creationism’s Latest Trojan Horse Edges Toward Virginia Schools

In Idiot America we have science deniers who are governors of states, other state politicians, school boards, the United States Senate and also the House of Representatives, candidates for the President of the United States, and we have at least one creationist fucktard on the United States Supreme Court.

We have all these Christian assholes in our government because most of America's voters are Christian assholes.

Please click the link. It's a good story about the history of the Christian War Against Science Education which continues today in Virginia, not to mention the entire Deep South and several states up north.

The problem is our Christian scum want to force biology teachers to lie to their students about science. They never give up no matter how many times they lose in court, and despite the fact biology teachers always refuse to cooperate.

Except of course the 72% of American biology teachers who are incompetent and who should have been fired a long time ago because they know nothing about evolution or even worse they illegally teach magical creationism (and the fucktard students don't complain).

What a fucking idiot country this is.

In Idiot America there is an unlimited supply of Christian stupid. We have tons of it.

At another website I answered the question "What is the fundamental problem with the doctrine of eternal torment?"

The life after death fantasy (heaven/hell) has the disadvantage of being bullshit.

Also, the eternal torture stuff is not very nice. The people who believe in it are equal to terrorists.

A terrorist wrote "The fundamental problem is people don't like it. For the godless, they become angry at the thought they are sinners and that they will have to account to God for their words and deeds on the day of judgment."

How exactly is it possible to dislike something that isn't real? How is it possible to be angry about bullsh!t? And why do you think a normal person would give a crap about your imaginary god monster?

You Christian terrorists are way beyond insane not to mention extremely stupid.

-----------------------------------------------------

Another person wrote this answer about the hell fantasy:

1. It's bullshit.
2. It damages children psychologically.
3. It scares people into believing more bullshit.
4. It teaches people to act and believe out of fear, not out of rationality.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Should a normal person have a debate with a fucking idiot about reality?

As many people already know, on February 4, 2014 Bill Nye (science educator) and Ken Fucktard Ham (insane child abusing asshole) will be debating each other about the established truth of evolution and the ridiculous idiocy of magical creation out of nothing.

Should Bill Nye also debate a flat-earther?

There are many reasons this is wrong which were thoroughly discussed at Jerry Coyne's blog. I agree with those reasons but I am sort of looking forward to watching the YouTube video.

It will be painful to listen to Ken Fucktard Ham because his stupid burns. He really is a fucking asshole and he really does abuse children every chance he gets. For example Ken Ham has convinced thousands of his victims (who he calls "boys and girls") Tyrannosaurus rex lived peaceably with human apes five thousand years ago. I am not making this up. If anyone belongs in prison for child abuse it should be this fucking retard for Jeebus.

But it will be interesting to listen to Mr. Nye talk about why the future of this country depends on students being scientifically literate instead of being drooling morons who believe in anti-science bullshit.

Bill Nye will not be actually "debating" anyone because there is no debate. Evolution is fact. Everyone who isn't an American idiot knows this. What Mr. Nye will be doing is trying to educate people. The big question is "Can stupid be fixed?" Probably not but it would be interesting to watch Bill Nye attempt it.

Only in Idiot America would this debate be possible. This truly is an idiot country. Americans are fucking morons.

From The Encyclopedia of American Loons: Ken Ham: Diagnosis: A clod, crackpot and (unintentional) con artist; seriously deluded and influential in the manner of Kent Hovind; Ken Ham is perhaps the leading advocate of traditional creationism and naïve biblical literalism. A threat to reason, sanity, intelligence and rationality everywhere.

How long will it be before Idiot America throws out the bullshit of Genesis?

Gallup polls show that only 15% of Americans accept the established truth of evolution and accept it as a completely natural process (a god fairy had nothing to do with it).

This idea, evolution by natural selection without magic, has the advantage of being the strongest fact of science. But still here in Idiot America 85% of Americans either deny the whole thing or even worse think their fairy's magic wand is one of the mechanisms of evolution.

The thousands of evidences for evolution from comparative genomics, undeniable evidence that grows every day, have totally killed the magical creation fantasy. Since truth has a long history of defeating bullshit, America's science deniers will become virtually extinct eventually. The question is how long will it take? A hundred years? A thousand years?

I suggest it would help if this idea that we must suck up to everyone else's fantasies, that we should respect religious insanity, no matter how wrong it is, was thrown out. It's time to declare total war against stupidity. We need to stop being nice. We need to tell Christian assholes to fuck off and shut the fuck up about science education. We need to ridicule religion, all religion, including religion that pretends to be moderate. There is no moderate religion because there is nothing moderate about being a fucking idiot.

DNA evidence shows the common ancestor of New World monkeys and Old World monkeys lived 40 million years ago, long after South America and Africa became separated. So how did the ancestors of New World monkeys make the trip? ‘The Monkey’s Voyage,’ by Alan de Queiroz answers this question.


This book begins with a small struggle in an arroyo near the southern tip of Baja California. It’s June 2000, and the author and his girlfriend, Tara, are trying to pull a snake from a hole. She’s gripping it by the neck. He’s reaching down the snake’s body trying to gain purchase. “The process is exhausting,” Alan de Queiroz writes, “not because it’s physically difficult, but because we’re fighting against the will of another being; with each pull I feel the snake resisting.”
Out comes a huge black garter snake, three and a half feet long. They pop her into a pillowcase, and de Queiroz takes her home to study. (He’s an evolutionary biologist who teaches at the University of Nevada.) De Queiroz knows that this particular species is found only at the southern tip of the peninsula and on mainland Mexico, which is 120 miles away across the Sea of Cortez. The question that intrigues him is this: How did that snake’s ancestors get across all that water?
De Queiroz and Tara are married now. Recently he hung a big map on their wall, “The World of Wild Animals.” Ostensibly, it’s for their children, he says, but he’s the only one who keeps looking at it. There’s a rhea in South America and an ostrich in Africa, staring at each other across the Atlantic. There’s also a mandrill in Central Africa and a South American capuchin doing the same. These birds are cousins; so are the monkeys, and so are tens of thousands of other species of animals and plants that are now separated by the world’s oceans. How did that happen? All of them have been forced apart at some point in the past by a process as implacable and incomprehensible as Alan and Tara must have seemed to that snake in the hole.
When I picked up this entertaining book, I thought I knew the answers to these questions. Charles Darwin did a beautiful if funky series of experiments at his country house in Kent, to explain how plants and animals might have crossed the oceans. In his day, the reigning explanation was supernatural: God put them there. Darwin’s thinking was more mundane. In the mid-1850s, he filled bottles with salt water, and added seeds and plants to find out how long they’d float, and whether they could soak in brine for months and still germinate. The seeds proved to be hardy and so did Darwin. “It is quite surprising that the Radishes shd have grown,” he wrote to a friend, “for the salt water was putrid to an extent, which I cd not have thought credible had I not smelt it myself.”
Darwin concluded that seeds could have floated across large bodies of water on the rafts and mats of vegetation that often drift out of the mouths of the world’s great rivers, and animals could have traveled with them on Darwin’s arks. In other smelly experiments he demonstrated that seeds could also have traveled across water in the gizzards of seabirds. Hatchling freshwater snails could have made the crossing clinging to the webs of ducks’ feet. And so on.
One generation after Darwin, a young explorer and meteorologist named Alfred Wegener reduced these mysteries still further. “Please look at a map of the world!” he wrote to his fiancée. “Does not the east coast of South America fit exactly with the west coast of Africa as if they had formerly been joined?” Other people had noticed that before, but Wegener made a study of it. He concluded, correctly, that our present continents must all once have been part of a single supercontinent, which has since come to be called Pangaea. When Pangaea broke up, innumerable species of plants and animals were slowly rafted apart by continental drift. In the 1960s, Wegener’s radical vision of the earth’s history was vindicated by the new science of plate tectonics.
By that time, what with Darwin’s arks and Wegener’s jigsaw puzzles, most scientists thought they understood the essential principles of biogeography, which is the study of the distributions of the world’s animals and plants.
That’s the way I thought things stood to this day, until I read “The Monkey’s Voyage.” But there was a peculiar episode in biogeography back in the 1950s and ’60s, a sort of mutiny on the Beagle. De Queiroz makes quite a tale of it. It seems a little gang of Young Turks in biogeography got so excited by plate tectonics that they concluded that continental drift explains everything. They threw Darwin overboard, and his stinking radishes with him. It was a ’60s thing. One of the revolutionaries, a passionate Italian botanist named Léon Croizat, wrote that Darwin was “a very unhappy thinker,” “congenitally not a thinker,” “essentially not a thinker,” “not born a thinker,” “anything but a thinker” (italics Croizat’s). Another hothead, a Swedish entomologist named Lars Brundin, an expert on midges, railed against the “negative, sterile and superficial” thinking of Darwin’s followers, “troubled biogeographers.”
Biogeography was in turmoil.
Fortunately, in the 1980s, DNA evidence resolved the controversy. Consider that black garter snake from the tip of Baja, for instance. Its DNA reveals that it parted from its family on the coast of the Mexican mainland a few hundred thousand years ago. But geologists know that the Sea of Cortez began forming millions of years ago. So the snakes couldn’t have been pulled apart because of plate tectonics. They must have drifted across the sea on one of Darwin’s arks.
It seems Darwin and Wegener were both right after all. DNA evidence proves that an amazing number of species got where they are today on precarious rides across bodies of water. The book’s centerpiece is the incredible journey of the New World monkeys. According to the best DNA estimates, monkeys crossed the Atlantic from Africa to South America roughly 40 million years ago. At that time, the continents were only about half as far apart as they are today. The shortest distance between them was probably only 900 miles. It’s likely that there were also a number of islands, now submerged, that might have offered a chance rest stop or two along the way. Given favorable winds and currents, a big raft of vegetation with trees growing out of it could have crossed the Atlantic in just a couple of weeks. “A raft from Africa reaches the South American shore, some exhausted monkeys amble off and, over millions of years, give rise to squirrel monkeys, howlers and capuchins, owl-eyed night monkeys, and baldheaded uakaris,” de Queiroz writes. It’s a wonderful story to contemplate, very high up on the ladder of unlikelihood, but it probably happened.
De Queiroz writes in a pleasant, relaxed style. If anything, his book’s organization is a little too relaxed for my taste, with charts, maps, photographs and sidebars defining technical terms scattered throughout, and big blocks of anecdotes in italics tacked on at the end of each chapter. It reads like an eclectic scrapbook, full of interesting bits from hither and yon. But then, that’s life.

THE MONKEY’S VOYAGE

How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life
By Alan de Queiroz
Illustrated. 360 pp. Basic Books. $27.99.