Ed Anyone read Forbidden History by J Douglas Kenyon

[BadBoy]

I was having a conversation with my Niece about evolution and she said has recently had doubts about the fact of evolution after reading she Douglas Kenyons book Forbidden History : Extraterrestrial Intervention, Prehistoric Technologies, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

Has anyone read this book and if so why would it cause an otherwise bright individual to question evolution.

Im interested and I was thinking of getting a copy but dont want to waste my time reading garbage either.

 

[Dancing David]

Sounds like racism to me.

 

[Bikewer]

Get a copy. It's likely to be amusing.

 

[Soapy Sam]

I was having a conversation with my Niece about evolution and she said has recently had doubts about the fact of evolution after reading she Douglas Kenyons book Forbidden History : Extraterrestrial Intervention, Prehistoric Technologies, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

Has anyone read this book and if so why would it cause an otherwise bright individual to question evolution.

Im interested and I was thinking of getting a copy but dont want to waste my time reading garbage either.

Your niece is thinking. You can't have doubts unless you think.
Sounds like she has some duff data though.
Evolution is NOT intuitively obvious. Hard to imagine, for example, how natural selection can create a tiger's striped coat.
Why are the dark hairs in stripes? That couldn't happen by chance and then be "selected for".
And indeed it couldn't.
It's a result of a timing glitch during embryonic development, as are all stripe / spot patterns. The final result - the adult animal- either benefits from the pattern, or does not. If it does, it tends to have more offspring, who share the (gene controlled) ability to produce melanin and the (if you like epigenetic) tendency to time the switching on or off of melanin controlling genes in the same way. "Nature" never set out to produce striped cats. Striped cats happened as a result of embryological timing and the environment selected some to survive.

Buy your niece "The Selfish Gene" and a book on epigenetics appropriate to her age & level, would be my suggestion.

 

[BadBoy]

Thanks for all your feed back, I guess I need to get a copy and read it. Unfortunately she couldn't be more specific about the arguments made.

 

[BadBoy]

ok, so I found a review of the book, but someone who is obviously biased. However he says:

Forbidden History, edited by J. Douglas Kenyon, tells the whole story, and far more, for Doug Kenyon happened to be one of those editors of genius whose finger was on the pulse of the intellectual revolution of the period, and who commissioned articles that covered the whole story from the explosive debut of Immanuel Velikovsky to Graham Hancock’s exploration of the underwater architecture of Yonaguni. The result is a fascinating chronicle of history in the process of happening. It feels at times like being in the Place de la Bastille on the day the French Revolution broke out.

Before launching into its major contentions, Forbidden History fires a few opening salvos with Will Hart’s review of The Facts of Life: Shattering the Myth of Darwinism, by Richard Milton. Milton is a science journalist, whose book Alternative Science sits by my bedside. It considers some of the notions the modern science has condemned, like cold fusion, telepathy and bioenergy, and mounts a vigorous defense. His other book The Facts of Life is not anti-Darwin, but it is anti the kind of rigid modern Darwinism that reduces nature to a mindless machine. Milton does an excellent destructive job on Richard Dawkins, and offers an interesting analysis of the half-forgotten ‘vitalist’ Hans Dreisch, whose ideas turn out to be much sounder than the Neo-Darwinists allow. Like Goethe, Milton sees nature as a living force, capable of self-repair and evolution. And as someone who acquired his first notion of evolution from Bernard Shaw (a name I hardly dare breathe outside the pages of Atlantis Rising), I am delighted to see Milton taken as seriously as he deserves.

http://www.dailygrail.com/Reviews/2005/8/FORBIDDEN-HISTORY-J-Douglas-Kenyon-ed

Looks like I'm stumbling into the world of pseudo science.

PS: Does anyone know how to change the OP, I misspelled "forbidden" and the guys name is "J. Douglas Kenyon" so I completely screwed it up.

 

[BadBoy]

looks like he's an "Atlantis" buff. Theres nothing on Wiki about him, though he is referenced from places.

Looks like this guy is so obviously a peddler of pseudoscience that I dont think its worth pursuing. There doesn't seem to be any critical analysis of his books though. Is there woo that's so bad that no one bothers to debunk it?

 

[BravesFan]

there's a great example of evolution in action over a rather short time frame in industrial England (Birmingham I think) where the excessive coal soot caused a certain species of moth to go from grey to black in ten years. Then after the coal soot lowered as other power supplies were discovered, they went back to being grey. I will try and find you a link to use, gimme a minute to find it on google....................

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution


edit to say it was a few decades not ten years as I stated earlier

 

[zooterkin]

PS: Does anyone know how to change the OP, I misspelled "forbidden" and the guys name is "J. Douglas Kenyon" so I completely screwed it up.

Report the post (click on the little triangle with the '!' sign), and, in the report box, request the mod team to fix the subject.

 

[BadBoy]

thanks

 

[BadBoy]

there's a great example of evolution in action over a rather short time frame in industrial England (Birmingham I think) where the excessive coal soot caused a certain species of moth to go from grey to black in ten years. Then after the coal soot lowered as other power supplies were discovered, they went back to being grey. I will try and find you a link to use, gimme a minute to find it on google....................

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution


edit to say it was a few decades not ten years as I stated earlier

I heard of that. I think its part of the sticky thread on evolution. Thanks

 

[Cayvmann]

I heard of that. I think its part of the sticky thread on evolution. Thanks

There's an excellent video on Khan Academy that uses the moths as an example: http://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/v/introduction-to-evolution-and-natural-selection

 

[Beerina]

I'd give her this, The Bermuda Triangle Mystery -- Solved! by Larry Kusche.


He was a librarian who got so sick of people coming in for UFO-type books that he wrote his own, where he goes into great detail of all the Bermuda Triangle cases and finds...not much. He also analyzes the hype that Bermuda Triangle book authors distort and overlook in each case.



I would hand it out first, ahead of Flim Flam! or any of Randi's books, or The Demon-Haunted World.


Those are good follow-up to this, which is a classic, magnificent introduction to skepticism and good analysis.

 

[SonOfLaertes]

...

"Prehistoric Technologies, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization"
...

Yeah, I would start with the above before tackling evolutionary theory. If there is any "ancient civilizations couldn't have built that" nonsense in this book, simply show her some of the Science Channel/Nat Geo shows where ordinary human ingenuity accomplishes all of the things that these people argue can't be done without extraterrestrial help.

Prime the pump, as they say. Then tackle evolution.

 

[CORed]

I'd give her this, The Bermuda Triangle Mystery -- Solved! by Larry Kusche.


He was a librarian who got so sick of people coming in for UFO-type books that he wrote his own, where he goes into great detail of all the Bermuda Triangle cases and finds...not much. He also analyzes the hype that Bermuda Triangle book authors distort and overlook in each case.



I would hand it out first, ahead of Flim Flam! or any of Randi's books, or The Demon-Haunted World.


Those are good follow-up to this, which is a classic, magnificent introduction to skepticism and good analysis.

NOVA (The PBS series) did an excellent debunking of the Bermuda triangle several years ago. I'm not sure if they used Kusche's book as a source or not. They looked at at military, police and coast guard records on several incidents, including Flight 19. and found planes crashed, boats sank, etc. No trace was found because that's pretty much normal when a plane crashes or a boat sinks in the middle of the ocean. Flight 19 was especially interesting, as there was a detailed record of radio conversations. The military squadron of planes (this was during WWII) got lost, ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. IIRC, some time after that show broadcast, they found the planes on the bottom of the ocean. They also concluded that most of the authors woo books on the Bermuda Triangle plagiarized stories from earlier books and apparently didn't look at original sources.

 

[BadBoy]

I found some of the book available on Google
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DBDe-vhGTR0C&lpg=PA4&ots=CIEiUrXjQE&dq=debunk%20Forbidden%20History%20by%20J%20Douglas%20Kenyon&pg=PP7#v=twopage&q&f=false

Some of the chapters:

Darwin's Demise: On the Futile search for missing links
Will Hart

In Defense of Catastrophes: Pioneering Geologist Robert Schoch challenges the conventional wisdom on Natural History
William P Eigles

The case for the Flood, exposing the Scientific Myth of the Ice Age
Peter Bros

 

[BadBoy]

ok, so Kenyon is an editor of Atlantis Rising. A piece of pseudo science garbage rag.

The bumf at the end of the book about the author and articles in the book says the articles have been chosen from "The Journal Atlantis Rising", which is just a magazine. The whole thing is a bunch of popularized garbage. Ah well. Its all so full of bull its not even worth debunking.

 

[GT/CS]

I'm about half way through this awful book. I can tolerate only a few pages at a time before I get disgusted and start yelling at it.

He's a fan of Hapgood and Schoch so that may tell you something about his beliefs.

In a nutshell he claims that around 10,000bce years ago the plates shifted and made a mess of the world, including creating the global flood. He also claims there was no ice age at that time. That's all I've been able to get through so far, and at the rate I'm going it'll take months to finish this mess of a book.

 

[CapelDodger]

The whole thing is a bunch of popularized garbage. Ah well. Its all so full of bull its not even worth debunking.

You could perhaps take your niece through a couple of things in the book, showing the specific errors and your general aproach to such material. Point out the warning signs : lone genius sees astonishing truth, conspiracies conceal said truth, astonishing truth is all-embracing and explains Everything, yadda yadda.

Make it clear it's not silly to take such stuff seriously when young, in fact it's a good thing to look outside the box, but that growing up is about learning better. (I have to think that : I was quite struck by Chariots Of The Gods when I was 11 )