Bananas

Together with some 2500 other people, I attended a lecture at the Christchurch Town Hall on Thursday evening by the celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins. His reception, which was described in the local newspaper as a "rock-star welcome," reminded me of that extended to another great iconoclast, Noam Chomsky, when he gave a talk here back in 1998. The difference was that while Chomsky spoke in front of an invited audience at Canterbury University, Dawkins lectured in front of a paying crowd, most of whom had bought tickets for $15 (although someone reportedly paid $132 for a ticket to the sold-out event on Trade Me).

People attending Thursday's lecture were greeted at the entrance to the Town Hall by a small group of Christians who were handing out free copies of Darwin's The Origin of Species. The catch was that this edition, published by Christian minister and evangelist Ray Comfort in 2009 after he discovered that the text was in the public domain and distributed at universities in the U.S., includes a "special introduction" penned by Comfort (although a section of it was alleged plagiarized from a text by Dr Stan Guffey, a biologist at the University of Tennessee) in which he seeks to discredit Darwin's work.

I haven't read the special introduction yet, but if Comfort's antics in this YouTube video are anything to go by, it's sure to be quite amusing. In the video, Comfort argues that the fact that bananas fit comfortably into our hands and mouths is proof that god designed them to be eaten by humans. There's so much wrong with this argument that it's hard to know where to begin in refuting it. But how about the fact that the modern banana depicted in the video is the result of years of human cultivation and propagation, one of the effects of which has been to remove the large seeds that once made the eating experience less enjoyable.

Incidentally, although he now lives in the U.S., Comfort was born in New Zealand, and began his preaching career in Christchurch.