The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts us all at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World

by David Robert Grimes

On the fringes of devout religiosity unconcerned with objective fact, falsehoods persist with wild abandon. In 2007, evangelists Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron dumbfounded the scientific community when they insisted evolution must be wrong because no one had found the fossilised skeleton of a hybrid like the croco-duck, holding aloft a poorly photoshopped crocodile-duck hybrid. As attempts to undermine evolutionary theory go, this must rank among the stupidest imaginable, lending weight to Russell’s dictum on the fundamental inaccuracy of ‘a stupid man’s report of what a clever man says’. The great evolutionary biologist and science writer Richard Dawkins’s exasperated reply to such foolishness was understandable and perfectly cutting – in correspondence with me he said: ‘If your understanding of evolution is so warped that you think we should expect to see a fronkey and a croco-duck, you should also wax sarcastic about the absence of a doggypotamus and an elephanzee . . . plus a billion other misshapen chimeras, every living species combined with every other living species.’

The famous crocko-duck