Political Irony

A few years ago, evangelist (and former child star) Kirk Cameron released a video attempting to prove that God exists and created the world just for us humans by pointing out that the common banana fits perfectly into the human hand. Watch it — it is short and (unintentionally) hilarious:

Of course, Cameron didn’t mention that the common banana sold in stores in the US (and the one in the video) are all of the same variety. This variety, called Cavendish, is (in the words of Snopes) a “sterile, seedless mutant”. What makes this even funnier is that the way humans monocrop these mutant bananas makes them especially susceptible to disease:

New plants are created from cuttings of existing ones, making them little more than clones of one another. Without the natural diversity resulting from sexual reproduction, bananas continue on generation after generation with the same genetic makeup. Their inability to mutate and adapt leaves them vulnerable to species-wide disaster, because what fells one of them will prove the undoing of every plant within that particular variety.

In fact, up until 1960 the common banana was a different variety, the Gros Michel (“Big Mike”), which was significantly better tasting and larger than the Cavendish. But the Gros Michel was completely wiped out by a root fungus. So if you extend Cameron’s logic, God allowed the banana that was best suited to humans to go extinct, or worse, humans killed off God’s perfect creation.

Even more ironically, despite the fact that Cameron doesn’t believe in evolution, the root fungus that wiped out the Gros Michel has evolved, and is now starting to attack the Cavendish, wiping out plantations in SE Asia and Australia. If it spreads to Central America, then the Cavendish will go the way of Big Mike and since there is no ready replacement, humans will not have tasty sweet bananas anymore. But not to worry, scientists are busy using genetic engineering to create a Franken-banana for our eating pleasure.

And as a side note, Cameron assumes that God created the banana for us to eat, but it is just as likely that humans evolved to make them better at eating bananas. After all, the Swahili word for banana is still used in Uganda as the word for “food”.

But all that is old news. Now, Cameron is back with an even crazier idea. In honor of the 150th anniversary of the publishing of Darwin’s seminal book on evolution, “The Origin of Species”, Cameron and Ray Comfort plan to distribute 50,000 100,000 copies of the book at US universities. Huh? The kicker is that this “very special” edition of the book includes a 50 page introduction explaining “Adolf Hitler’s undeniable connection” to the theory of evolution, as well as Darwin’s racism and “his disdain for women”.  The introduction also presents a “balanced view of Creationism”, and exposes the “many hoaxes” of evolution.

You can read the introduction here. Or better yet just watch this scathing (and not safe for work) video (from Romania of all places) attacking Cameron’s plan:

My favorite part is when she asks what Cameron would think if someone released a very special edition of the Bible, including a 50 page introduction covering Adolf Hitler’s undeniable connection with Christianity, along with a discussion of the Bible’s racism and disdain for women, and a list of all of the hoaxes and historical atrocities carried out in the name of Christianity (e.g., the Inquisition, the Crusades, Northern Ireland, etc.).

UPDATE: Apparently Cameron has removed the PDF of the introduction, and is rewriting it to make it more fair to atheists and evolution.