Review: Martin Gardner's logic impeccable, as usual, in 'Adam and Eve'

"Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?"
By Martin Gardner
W.W. Norton
Nonfiction/Science
333 pages

In this story: Voice of reason Willing to listen RELATED SITES

By Robert Beveridge
Special to CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- Here's a theory for the Intelligent Design folks -- those people who theorize that the cosmos is intelligently designed to be compatible for life.

Twenty years ago or so, the postulate was proposed to me that humor must be accompanied by denigration. No one laughs unless someone or something is being made fun of. I've been trying to disprove this theory for two decades now, and I've yet to come up with a single exception to the rule.

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Evolution and faith

All of evolution happens for a reason, right? There's some divine being up there meddling around in things to make sure of that. I propose the existence of a gene with two possible settings. The first setting modifies the bearer's personality to be receptive to things that will make others laugh at them. The second setting modifies the bearer's personality to seek out and expose those folks who have the gene on the first setting.

The latter, of course, we know as comics. The former fall into so many camps and categories we can't enumerate them here.

Martin Gardner, very much a comic, does his best to give us as thorough a cross-section as possible in three hundred pages in his newest collection of Skeptical Inquirer articles, however. Everyone from Intelligent Design proponents to Bible Code believers to senators attempting to get the government to hire psychics to protect the environment gets a roasting here.

Gardner has been the voice of reason in America for half a century or so now, and he shows no signs whatsoever of slowing down. Of course, the advent of the digital age has given manipulators that many more ways to try and con the gullible, and so as Gardner gets older, his job's possibilities seem to be expanding at an exponential rate.

What Gardner does doesn't seem too hard at first glance. Take a strong base of applied science, add two or three shakes of dry wit, pour liberally atop anyone who uses bad science, sleight-of-hand statistics, or the mystery of faith as a reason for their basis of belief (or non-belief, in the cases of such as the Creationists). And when looked at in only that way, it's not all that hard.

Martin Gardner, a pragmatic voice in America for decades, is still going strong with observations in "Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?"

Where the tough part rears its head is in the gray areas where Gardner is forced to use the same kind of argument to attack his adversaries as they're using to promote their beliefs. This usually happens in the case of bad-science statistics. When Gardner sets about demolishing Temple University's Center for Frontier Studies, for example, we are told

"Its periodical, Frontier Perspectives, issued twice a year, has grown to more than eighty pages. ...

"Reading through its pages I could hardly believe my eyes. I had expected the magazine to be concerned with such outstanding frontiers as superstring theory, the nature of dark matter, the genetic origins of altruism, how organic molecules fold so rapidly, speculations about a 'multiverse' in which endless universes, each with a unique set of laws, explode into reality, or supercomputers operating with quantum mechanics.

"The 'frontiers' covered in this particular journal are nothing of the sort. They are reports on research so far removed from reputable science that it is no wonder academic journals refuse such papers. ... In 'Is Dead Matter Aware of Its Environment?' Peter Greneau argues that all particles of matter are aware of all other particles regardless of how far away they are. He thinks Newton's physics is superior to Einstein's and likens the blindness of establishment scientists today to the blindness of those Italian professors who refused to accept Galileo's experiment of dropping two different weights form the Tower of Pisa. Greneau is unaware that this experiment was never performed.

"Roger Taylor favorably reviews a self-published book...titled 'Waves in Dark Matter' ..."

A bit of sleight-of-hand there, looking for superstring theory in one paragraph and then discounting the awareness theory (which is a portion of some superstring theories) a few paragraphs later, or looking for dark matter research and then discounting a book on it.

The vast majority of readers, I suspect, are going to be out of their depths in attempting to sort all this out. Gardner, however, spends so much of his time grounded in hard science that when he jaunts off looking for the cutting-edge stuff, the reader is lulled into a sense of complacency. He, at least, knows what he's talking about, or so his candidness throughout this book leads us to believe. And therefore we're willing to listen when he says that some of superstring theory makes sense and some doesn't.

Arthur C. Clarke, in a blurb on the back cover, says "I wish (this book) could be made compulsory reading in every high school -- and in Congress." Amen. Mr. Gardner has once again handed us a handbook for use in combating the laughability gene. Like his other books dealing with subjects along these lines, I expect his logic will be well, and often, used by everyone who reads it.

Notes on Martin Gardner
The Martin Gardner Page
Skeptical Inquirer

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