This is the cover art for Penguin’s 150th Anniversary Edition of On the Origin of Species, which was painted by Damien Hirst:
The painting sits firmly in the tradition of “still life” and is made up of objects I’ve come to imbue with my own meanings, some of them Darwinian in origin, and that I guess are seen in other areas of my work. The painting has an X-ray-like quality to it, as if it is revealing something about the structure of the objects painted.
I suppose the work, in a modest way, acknowledges Darwin’s analytical mind and his courage to believe in those ideas that questioned the very fabric of existence and belief in his time.
Even so, I think I prefer the Vintage Classics version:
Either way, a book cover is nothing without a bit of Wordart.
This is the first paragraph of the (self-published) anti-evolution book Evolution: A Monument to Human Stupidity:
I wouldn’t argue with that.
Link
Is Google making us stupid?
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but its changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and Id spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
This is exactly what is happening to me, and it’s probably ironic that I’m writing a post highlighting this article. Time to go read a book, I think…
Link
I’ve recently finished both Suckers by Rose Shapiro and Flat Earth by Christine Garwood, two books on alternative medicine and (unsurprisingly) the rejection of a spherical earth respectively. It’s interesting to compare them both: both sets of beliefs have been roundly rejected by science, and they both have long histories spanning thousands of years, but only alternative medicine now supports an industry worth billions of pounds, has gained the patronage of a future king and receives taxpayers money in order to fund its premises.
But if both flat earth theory and alternative medicine have been discarded by science, why is there this disparity between their public popularity? Nobody is going to die from insisting that the world is not a globe and that Australia can’t exist (with the exception of astronauts or Australians), which is not the case for a system of beliefs which attempts to cure cancer by recommending doing more than eating lots of fruit. As such, surely it is the beliefs in a flat earth which are more benign, and which as such should be tolerated in society?
But it’s the other way around: it seems that many people will choose to ignore science at the very moment that it becomes a matter of life and death for them to do so. And as such, writers like Shapiro may be doomed in their attempt to wean people of the irrational. It seems rationality is the last thing that people want when they want something (anything!) to make themselves feel healthy: their desire for something to be true outweighs any outside influence from science. Opposing scientific orthodoxy in the case of a flat earth doesn’t promise to cure all your ills without any pain (apart from to your wallet), so why rebel against the status quo?
Which might explain why some (in)famous flat-earthers, such as the Victorian Parallax, turned to medical quackery later in their career: perhaps they found the crowds that little bit more willing to believe in their theories, and so part with their cash.