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Macros: why they're evil

I've gotten both some comments and some e-mail from people in response to my mini-rant about Erlang's macros. I started replying in comments, but it got long enough that I thought it made sense to promote it up to a top-level post. It's not really an Erlang issue, but a general language issue, and my opinions concerning it end up getting into some programming language design and philosophy issues. If, like me, you think that things like that are fun, then read on! I'll start at the absolute beginning. What's a macro? A macro is a meta-structure in a language which defines a translation of…

The Political Brain

This post was initially published on September 16, 2004. It takes a critical look at some UCLA studies on brain responses of partisan voters exposed to images of Bush and Kerry: Using M.R.I.'s to See Politics on the Brain The researchers do not claim to have figured out either party's brain yet, since they have not finished this experiment. But they have already noticed intriguing patterns in how Democrats and Republicans look at candidates. They have tested 11 subjects and say they need to test twice that many to confirm the trend. The Political Brain Do liberals ''think'' with their…

Book Review: "The First Scientific Proof of God:"

As I mentioned a while back, I was loaned the Library of Congress discard of George Shollenberger's book. Since he's made such a big deal about how unfair I've been by not reading and considering his argument, I've actually forced myself to read it. (See what I'm willing to do for you, my faithful readers?) It's worse than I expected. Based on reading George's writing before, I was expecting something bad, very bad. This is beyond mere badness: this is "please oh please stab my eyes out with a rusty steak-knife so that I don't need to read anymore of it" bad. After reading this book, I'm…

Nicholas Wade flails at the philosophy of science

Nicholas Wade has a very peculiar review of Richard Dawkins' book, The Greatest Show on Earth, in the NY Times Review of Books. It's strange because it is a positive review which strongly agrees with Dawkins' position on the central importance of the theory of evolution in biology in the first half…but the second half is a jaw-droppingly stupid attack on a small point in the book. Wade has a very absolutist and wrong view of the definitions of some terms, and he goes on and on, whining about a topic that he doesn't understand himself. There is one point on which I believe Dawkins gets tripped…

The Political Brain

This post was initially published on September 16, 2004. It takes a critical look at some UCLA studies on brain responses of partisan voters exposed to images of Bush and Kerry: Using M.R.I.'s to See Politics on the Brain The researchers do not claim to have figured out either party's brain yet, since they have not finished this experiment. But they have already noticed intriguing patterns in how Democrats and Republicans look at candidates. They have tested 11 subjects and say they need to test twice that many to confirm the trend. The Political Brain Do liberals ''think'' with their…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

Small Scattered Fragments Do Not a Dwarf Make: Biological and Archaeological Data Indicate that Prehistoric Inhabitants of Palau Were Normal Sized: Current archaeological evidence from Palau in western Micronesia indicates that the archipelago was settled around 3000-3300 BP by normal sized populations; contrary to recent claims, they did not succumb to insular dwarfism. Previous and ongoing archaeological research of both human burial and occupation sites throughout the Palauan archipelago during the last 50 years has produced a robust data set to test hypotheses regarding initial…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Four out of seven PLoS journals published new articles last night - here are the ones that caught my eye. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Do Decapod Crustaceans Have Nociceptors for Extreme pH?: Nociception is the physiological detection of noxious stimuli. Because of its obvious…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 26 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Development and Field Evaluation of a Synthetic Mosquito Lure That Is More Attractive than Humans: Disease transmitting mosquitoes locate humans and other blood hosts by identifying their characteristic…

On the Variability of Parenting Ability

(Some of my kids watching sheep mothering their babies) Over the last decade a whole lot of babies have been born on my farm or brought home to it. We have had calves, chicks, kids (goat), kids (human), ducklings, goslings, kits and lambs. One of the most fascinating revelations of this is just how variable the instinct for parenting is among animals. Among closely related goats, for example, we have had among our best mothers, and our single worst one, a doe so dim that she would stand there screaming for her baby but refuse to move any closer to the baby who was screaming just as…

Should There be a Category 6 for Hurricanes?

Should there be a Category 6, or even a Category 7, to classify extra bit tropical cyclones like Haiyan? Some tropical cyclones labeled Category 5 are much stronger than others. It has been suggested that we would be smart to extend the system to have a Category 6 and maybe even a Category 7 to allow the additional severity of these storms to be indicated when they are being spoken of in the news or by officials in charge of scaring people into doing the right thing, like running away or staying indoors. There is resistance to this proposal that comes from two mostly distinct places. One is…

Chance and regularity in the development of the fly eye

What has always attracted me to developmental biology is the ability to see the unfolding of pattern—simplicity becomes complexity in a process made up of small steps, comprehensible physical and chemical interactions that build a series of states leading to a mostly robust conclusion. It's a bit like Conway's Game of Life in reverse, where we see the patterns and can manipulate them to some degree, but we don't know the underlying rules, and that's our job—to puzzle out how it all works. Another fascinating aspect of development is that all the intricate, precise steps are carried out…

World Open, Part Two

As happy as I was to salvage the half point in my fourth round game, I was still pretty down about missing that fork. I decided a nice meal would cheer me up. So I hopped on the Metro and went into DC, to have dinner at one of my favorite restaurants, Tono Sushi, conveniently located across the street from the Woodley Park stop on the red line. It worked! I felt much better, shrugged off my three bad games in a row and showed up for round five ready for a fight. But it was not to be. Fifteen minutes after go time my opponent was nowhere to be found. The rules say that you get an hour…

Cincinnati, Part Two

Thursday morning started bright and early, since the first talk was at eight. It goes against my grain to be out of bed at that hour, but sometimes in life you just have to make sacrifices. I was at the big meeting room by 7:45. Got to schmooze with some of the big shots, like Genie Scott and Ken Miller: Keith Miller (no relation to Ken), a geologist at Kansas State University was there. I met him a few times during my post-doc at K-State, so it was nice to see him again. My fellow Panda's Thumbers Richard Hoppe and Art Hunt were there as well. The morning's session was called, “…

Pavlovian-Instrumental Transfer in Humans

In behavioral neuroscience, we use a lot of animal models. We assume that these animal models have features that are the same or similar to features of humans. However, it is always reassuring when someone gets around to proving that this assumption is accurate. Talmi et al., publishing in the Journal of Neuroscience, show that a well-documented type of learning called Pavlovian-Instrumental Transfer (PIT) occurs in humans under identical experimental conditions to those we use to test animals. Background In order to understand this paper, I need to define some terms that you come across in…

Neurocriminology in prohibition-era New York

NEW York City in the 1920s and '30s was a hotbed of criminal activity. Prohibition laws banning the production, sale and distribution of alcohol had been introduced, but instead of reducing crime, they had the opposite effect. Gangsters organized themselves and seized control of the alcohol distribution racket, smuggling first cheap rum from the Caribbean, then French champagne and English gin, into the country. Speakeasies sprang up in every neighbourhood, and numbered more than 100,000 by 1925. When prohibition was abolished in 1933, the gangsters took to other activities, such as drug…

To Bee

To sequence the human genome, scientists established a network of laboratories, equipped with robots that could analyze DNA day and night. Once they began to finish up the human genome a few years ago, they began to wonder what species to sequence next. With millions of species to choose from, they could only pick a handful that would give the biggest bang for the buck. Squabbling ensued, with different coalitions of scientists lobbied for different species. Some argued successfully for medically important species, such as the mosquito that carries malaria. Others made the case for…

Getting along vs. fixing the problem.

There's been a marked difference of opinion between two of my fellow ScienceBloggers about what ought to be done about the "pipeline problem" in physics. Chad suggests that there may be a substantial problem with high school level physics instruction, given that "[e]ven if high school classes are 50/50 [female to male], the first college physics class is already 25/75". I take it that the worry about what's happening in the high school physics classroom isn't going to spark much controversy in these parts. (However, I do recall hearing, when I was still in high school, that at some colleges…

What not to do to a public university in the face of a budget shortfall.

You knew the California budget shortfall was going to have an impact on higher education in the state. But maybe you didn't know that the pain will not be distributed evenly. Last weekend, John Engell, a colleague of mine from San Jose State University (and currently chair of the Department of English & Comparative Literature), examined the pain that may be visited on our university in an opinion piece he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News: Almost no one knows that this fall, San Jose State University will absorb one-third of all student enrollment cuts in the 23-campus California…

Placebo effects in surgery

Although I'm a translational researcher, I'm also a surgeon. That was my first and primary training and only later did I decide to get my PhD during my residency, when the opportunity to do so with a decent stipend presented itself. From my perspective, clinical research in surgery is difficult, arguably more difficult than it is for other medical modalities, at least in some ways. For instance, in surgery, it usually very difficult to do a double-blind placebo-controlled trial. For one thing, doing "sham" surgery on patients in the placebo arm is ethically dicey, and it's very hard to…

Suspicion of vaccines among those who should know better

I realize I repeat this a lot, but it bears repeating a lot. Vaccines are, without a doubt, one of the greatest advances in health care devised by the human mind. Arguably, vaccination campaigns have saved more lives and prevented more suffering and death than pretty much any other medical preventative intervention ever invented. I realize that I tick off antivaccinationists when I say that, but I don't care. Actually, I do care. I kind of like ticking off antivaccinationists using science. You didn't think I've been blogging for seven years purely out of a sense of duty to humanity, science…

Homeopathy and "plausibility bias" versus science

One of the things that distinguishes evidence-based medicine (EBM) and science-based medicine (SBM) is how the latter takes into account prior probability that a therapy is likely to work when considering clinical trials. My favorite example to demonstrate this difference, because it's so stark and obvious, is homeopathy. Homeopathy, as regular readers of this blog no doubt know by now, is a mystical, magical system of medicine based on two principles. The first is the law of similars, commonly phrased as "like cures like"; i.e., the way to treat symptoms is to use a smaller amount of…

R.I.P. David Servan-Schreiber

One of the very first themes I started hammering on in this blog, dating back to its very inception, is the analysis of alternative medicine cancer testimonials. One reason was (and is) that I take care of cancer patients and do research into developing new treatments for a living. Another reason is that, to the average lay person, most of whom don't have much of an understanding of cancer, alternative medicine cancer testimonials can sound extremely convincing. For example, if you didn't know that breast cancer can have a highly variable course spreading out over years, Kim Tinkham's claim…

The anti-vaccine movement as a religion with Andrew Wakefield as its prophet?

Several of you have been sending me this; so I would be remiss not to note that there is a rather lengthy profile of Generation Rescue's favorite "martyred" anti-vaccine hero, disgraced and discredited British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, in this weekend's New York Times Magazine entitled The Crash and Burn of an Autism Guru. By and large, it's not bad, but what caught my attention wasn't so much the story of Andrew Wakefield, with which I have, sadly, become intimately familiar, or the usual self-pitying, self-serving excuses and denials of Wakefield himself. Rather, it's what the…

Attenborough's Flying Monsters 3D Is Going To Be Good

How does David Attenborough crawl through a marshy Cycad forest toward an exposed rocky ledge overlooking a vast plain of grazing dinosaurs, drawing ever closer to a nesting colony of Quetzalcoatlus Pterodactlyoids (known in the business as "Flying Giraffes") camera crew in tow, nearly out of breath, turning to the camera and speaking of how his adrenalin is surging as he can feel the breeze caused by wingbeats of one of the larger males taking off down an historically ancient Pterosaur runway, and noting a few interesting facts about their physical adaptations to flight and their behavior…

Abraham's law: Bad medicine has made bad law

There hasn't been much news in the last two or three months about Abraham Cherrix, the 16-year-old with Hodgkin's lymphoma who rejected conventional chemotherapy, first in favor of the quackery known as Hoxsey therapy and then for the ministrations of a radiation oncologist in Mississippi named Dr. Arnold Smith, who combines non-woo (low dose radiation therapy) with woo (a form of "immunotherapy" involving "belly plaques" that has no evidence showing efficacy, not "more innovative techniques, such as immunotherapy, which uses medications and supplements to boost the immune system," as the…

Say it ain't so, Dr. Pho! Credulity towards alternative medicine on KevinMD

Say it ain't so, Dr. Pho! Back when I first started blogging over six years ago, one of the first medical blogs I came across was KevinMD, the weblog of one Dr. Kevin Pho. Back then, of course, Dr. Pho's blog wasn't anywhere near the medblogging juggernaut that it is now, a part of Medpage Today. Indeed, Kevin was one of my early influences, although, as you can see, I never managed to get the whole brevity in writing thing down. Or the whole commercial savvy thing, either. Or the team blogging thing, either. Respectful Insolence was and remains a one man operation (or one Plexiglass box of…

The most massive scientific fraud ever?

Science as it is practiced today relies on a fair measure of trust. Part of the reason is that the culture of science values openness, hypothesis testing, and vigorous debate. The general assumption is that most scientists are honest and, although we all generally try to present our data in the most favorable light possible, we do not blatantly lie about it or make it up. Of course, we are also all human, and none of us is immune to the temptation to leave out that inconvenient bit of data that doesn't fit with our hypothesis or to cherry pick the absolutely best-looking blot for use in our…

Tying up loose ends from 2009: Deepak Chopra versus Michael Shermer

Over the holidays, I stayed at home for a combination of some relaxation and some grant writing. (I know, weird.) As I was perusing some of the links I saved during that time, it occurs to me that I totally forgot about one particularly amazing bit of hilarity, courtesy of our old "friend" Deepak Chopra. Given that it was over a week ago, it's probably not worth going into the full Orac mode on it any more, old news and all, but I couldn't let it go completely unremarked upon because it's just so amazingly, hysterically funny. Appearing two days after Christmas, Chopra's post was entitled Woo…

Politically Based Medicine at the WHO

The New York Times reports: Dr. Kochi said the most substantive change in the W.H.O.'s guidelines on the use of insecticides would extend the reach of the strategy. Until now, the agency had recommended indoor spraying of insecticides in areas of seasonal or episodic transmission of malaria, but it now also advocates it where continuous, intense transmission of the disease causes the most deaths. Dr. Kochi's new policies and abrasive style have stirred the small world of malaria experts. Dr. Allan Schapira, a senior member of the W.H.O. malaria team who most recently oversaw its approach to…

If it's "natural," it must be better. It just has to be.

My dear readers, I beg your indulgence for the moment. I had been planning on doing something a bit more serious than what I've been up to lately. Believe it or not, NaturalNews.com pointed me to a study that's actually pretty interesting. It even challenges to some extend existing results. Of course, Mike Adams' minion's interpretation of the study was so wrong as to be not even wrong, as they say (so what else is new?). But therein lies the entertainment value with the educational value. Sometimes, however, something happens, and a followup to something I've written before is demanded. It…

The Computer and the Consciousness

Here is another philosophy paper of mine, which I find to be increasingly relevant, all the time. It describes how a computer might soon have a consciousness equivalent or surpassing the human consciousness: philosophy with a bit of AI theory mingled with a touch of neuroscience. When I got the paper back from my philosophy instructor, it had a perfect score and hardly any marks. I balked. (I'm one of those self-critical perfectionist types--it couldn't have been 100% without an editor!) When I approached him about it, he told me it was one of the best arguments he had heard on the subject,…

The Hurricane Lantern Effect

This is for all your nascent researchers about to head off to remote places to engage in your very first fieldwork, and for all you eco-tourists or educational travelers about to embark on a trip through strange lands afar. A Repost When I was preparing to start my graduate research in Africa, I was already very experienced in fieldwork, but all of it was in the United States, and although there is cultural variation across the land even in old New England and New York, the work I was planning was at a field site in Africa originally selected precisely because of its extreme remoteness.…

Deepak Chopra continues his woo-ful whining

Last week, everyone's favorite woo-meister, the man whose woo is so strong that I even coined a term for it way back in the early mists of time (at least as far as this blog is concerned), was woo-fully whining about all those allegedly nasty skeptics on Wikipedia. Yes, Deepak Chopra was clutching his pearls and getting all huffy because, according to him, a group of skeptics known as the Guerilla Skeptics was actually applying science and reason to the Wikipedia entry for his good buddy Rupert Sheldrake. The only problem was, he totally missed the target in that the Guerilla Skeptics…

Raging Bullsh*t, part 3: Antivaccine celebrity Robert De Niro says he's teaming up with Harvey Weinstein to make a vaccine documentary

Sigh. Here we go again. Robert De Niro is letting his antivaccine freak flag fly again, this time even higher than usual, by revealing that in the wake of the antivaccine debacle at his Tribeca Film Festival he is going to make his very own documentary about vaccines. It’s the continuation of a process that, depressingly, revealed Robert De Niro to be perhaps the biggest A-list antivaccine celebrity out there. First, a bit of background to bring newbies up to speed. A couple of months ago, science-based medicine advocates were scratching their heads over news that the Tribeca Film Festival…

One more time: Vaccine refusal endangers everyone, not just the unvaccinated

One of the more frequent claims of antivaccine activists often comes in the form of a disingenuous question. Well, maybe it's not entirely disingenuous, given that many antivaccinationists seem to believe premise behind it. The question usually takes a form something like, "If your child is vaccinated, why are you worried about my children? They don't pose any danger to you." Of course, the premise behind that question is, ironically, one that conflicts with many of the beliefs behind antivaccinationism, in particular the belief that vaccines are ineffective. Yet, the premise behind this…

Gravity, Weightlessness, and Apparent Weight

In my classes, I like to bring up the question: *Why do astronauts float around in space?* The most common response to this question is that they float around because there is no gravity in space. Some people take this a small step further and say that there is no gravity in space because there is no air in space. This is why they claim there is no gravity on the moon (even though there is - more on this later). I like to start off with the concept of gravity. Gravity is an attractive force between any two objects with mass. Your pencil and your dog both have mass so there is a force pulling…

Vaccination for H1N1 "swine" flu: Do The Atlantic, Shannon Brownlee, and Jeanne Lenzer matter?

I had meant to address this topic last week, but the whole Suzanne Somers thing bubbled up and overwhelmed my blogging attention. Regular readers of this blog probably realize that I tend to live and die as a blogger by the maxim that if some is good more must be better. So I clobbered the topic with three posts in rapid succession. Now that that's out of the way, I can address topics that readers have been bugging me about sending to me. At or near the top of the list has to be a biased and poorly framed article that appeared in The Atlantic this month. I tell ya, I've been a subscriber to…

A contemptible pseudoscientific scam

Grrr. I was sent a link to these lying, sleazebag scammers at mygeneprofile.com, and it's the kind of thing that pisses me off. What you'll find there is a long video where the lowlife in a suit talks about how your children have in-built genetic biases ("from God", no less), and how if you want them to be truly happy and successful, you should tailor their upbringing to maximize their genetic potential. And he blathers on about how they will do a genetic test to determine whether your child has genes for science or art. It's a complete lie. There is no such test. There can be no such test.…

A Pithy Answer to David Brooks Question of Whither Conservatism

David Brooks wonders why the GOP is in shambles. Bush voter in 2000 and 2004 and conservative John Cole has a very succinct answer: For starters, people got tired of being associated with these drooling retards. Let's elaborate further: Then, when they realized that these drooling retards had ideological allies running the show in the Bush administration and then began to experience their idiotic policies, they moved from disgusted to outright hostile. ....Seriously- what does the current Republican party stand for? Permanent war, fear, the nanny state, big spending, torture, execution on…

Greenwald Asks and the Mad Biologist Answers

Glenn Greenwald asks: One of the more baffling aspects of "political journalism" in the United States is the mind-numbing obsession which most of the political press has with "horse race" analysis. ...the major newsweeklies -- or view any of the cable news shows [are] filled with the analysts who think they are the super-sophisticated insider political types and virtually all they ever do, literally, is prattle on in the most speculative and gossipy manner about which presidential candidates are winning and losing. Aside from all the other obvious critiques made of this practice, the…

Shame on Italy

This is absurd. The Italian National Research Council is sponsoring the publication of a creationist book, titled Evolutionism: The Decline of an Hypothesis. Right away, from the title alone, you can tell that the book has problems: evolution is not a theory in decline, no matter how much the creationists declare it so, but is guiding a thriving research program. The contents are something else, too: apparently, it declares that dinosaurs went extinct just 40,000 years ago, and that radiometric dating is wrong. Wow. It's not just a creationist book, but a young earth creationist book. Right…

How to Publish Peer Reviewed Creationist 'Research'

Slate has the goods on the style manual for Answers Research Journal, which is "a professional, peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework." One problem with the Slate commentary: many peer-reviewed journals allow authors to suggest reviewers, provided there are no conflicts of interest. It's still pretty funny though: As an extra incentive to participate, those with "a reason for not wanting their biographical details publicized…

Ayala on Religion and Science

Francisco Ayala in the most recent edition of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science makes a good distinction between religion and science (italics mine): Science and religion concern different aspects of the human experience. Scientific explanations are based on evidence drawn from examining the natural world and rely exclusively on natural processes to account for natural phenomena. Scientific explanations are subject to empirical tests by means of observation and experimentation and are subject to the possibility of modification and rejection. Religious faith, in contrast, does…

Some Sunday Links

It's damn cold outside, so here are some links for you. Science first: ScienceBlogling Razib discusses the genetics and social construction of race. On the technology front, Europe has a better information technology infrastructure than the U.S. ScienceBlogling Darren tells us about soft-shell turtles. ScienceBlogling Greg Laden has a good roundup of all of the 'evolution is just a theory' debunkers. Here's an excellent piece about the agricultural economics of obesity. Once the rainy season starts in Iraq, get ready for the cholera epidemic. Other stuff: Jon Swift lays out the rules of…

The powerlessness of pink

Here's another odd pink phenomenon. This is a page from a Toys 'R Us catalog, illustrating some science toys, and note the odd distinctions being made. Both the telescope and the microscope come in special pink versions, just for the girl who is apparently more interested in getting an instrument that matches her nail polish than being functional, and note also (you may have to click through to see the larger image) that in every case the pink model is less powerful than the black and gray model. There is a message being sent here. Being feminine, being girly, means you belong in a separate…

The Politics of Water Consumption

Tom Engelhardt asks the question I've wondered about Atlanta's drought: what happens if there literally is no more water? Unfortunately, there don't appear to be any answers. The politics of a 'dry' Atlanta, or more accurately, a failed response to a 'dry' Atlanta, could really crack up the Republican coalition. One of the bulwarks of the Southern Republican base is conservative, white suburbs (and exurbs). What happens when they don't have water? FEMA rides to the rescue? [the Mad Biologist laughs himself silly] This essentially would be Katrina without the storm--and it would keep…

Fox News, always willing to defend bigotry with a poll

The theists are on a crusade to deny a legitimately elected city council member in Asheville, NC, his office because he is an atheist. His policies don't matter, his competence doesn't matter, the only issue being used to prevent Cecil Bothwell from taking his position is his disbelief in god, and that just isn't right. Fox News apparently think the rights of a minority should be determined by the prejudices of a majority, since they're running a poll on the issue. Given that it is Fox news, the results shouldn't be surprising…but they do need adjusting. Should Atheist Councilman Step Aside?…

Free the Influenza! (Genomes)

One of the most important things in science is the free exchange of information. This is all the more vital when the information deals directly with human health. In a recent Nature editorial, the hoarding of influenza genetic data was criticized: Genetic data are also lacking. When [H5N1] samples [collected from animals or human patients] are sequenced, the results are usually either restricted by governments or kept private to an old-boy network of researchers linked to the WHO, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FAO.... Many scientists and organizations are also…

More Obama bashing

Michael Moore wrote a friendly letter to Obama before his announcement to expand the war in Afghanistan. It's worth reading. Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you're doing it so you can "end the war") will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you've said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone -- and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout "tea bag!" Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate…

Hemant Mehta interviews Ray Comfort

And all I take away from it is that Comfort is as sleazy as I thought. You may have heard that he has retracted his banana argument; not true, as you'll discover, he's kind of waffled around objections to it, but he still thinks the banana is an argument against evolution. He also denies that he makes a lot of errors when talking about science. Comfort is the fellow who made this claim: Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this…