Tails of Evolution: Unnatural Selections, a story collection by Stan Rice, story three. Lord Bob and Sir Dick

Stan Rice has published a collection of short stories, Tails of Evolution.  Rice is also the author of the Encyclopedia of Evolution, Life of Earth, and popular articles about evolution. Here is Rice’s summary from Kindle:

            What you don’t know about evolution can kill you.

In these stories, Stan Rice introduces us to people who would never have imagined that evolution had any impact on their lives. A young fundamentalist Christian woman, out of place at a university, discovers that love can evolve. A creationist discovers half-fish half-amphibians in a swamp in Oklahoma. Two young Englishmen find themselves actors on the stage of Darwinian sexual selection. A fundamentalist bases his faith on hearing a devil bird. A young preacher finds a hidden city that is based on Darwinism. A food scientist discovers a tribe of Homo ergaster pre-humans in the cliffs of Madagascar. Darwin meets Lincoln, who was born on the same day in 1809. And a young man discovers that love is the most combustible thing in the universe.

Bob and Dick are two British students who are wildly enthusiastic about science, especially natural history. Bob puts down Dick for his failure to understand nature—especially evolution—as well as Bob does. They form a secret club—which meets in an old shed at Charles Darwin’s childhood home in Shrewsbury—in which they become Lord Bob and Sir Dick (based, the author says, on Lord Bob May and Sir Richard Dawkins, both leaders in evolutionary science). They find a bottle of flammable chemical in the shed.

Into this intellectual competition comes mate competition in the form of Betsy, a red-haired Irish girl who becomes Lady Elizabeth in the club. That is, as an evolutionary scientist like Rice would explain, natural selection and sexual selection are both at work. Bob is prevailing to gain Betsy’s interest, especially after he discovers them making love in the shed. As Dick, crazed by lust, considers what he might do, he quietly removes the stopper from the chemical bottle. A fire, caused by a Nazi bomb, makes the decision for him.

Tails of Evolution: Unnatural Selections, a story collection by Stan Rice, story two. Fish Fry

Stan Rice has published a collection of short stories, Tails of Evolution. Rice is also the author of the Encyclopedia of Evolution, Life of Earth, and popular articles about evolution. Here is Rice’s summary from Kindle:

            What you don’t know about evolution can kill you.

In these stories, Stan Rice introduces us to people who would never have imagined that evolution had any impact on their lives. A young fundamentalist Christian woman, out of place at a university, discovers that love can evolve. A creationist discovers half-fish half-amphibians in a swamp in Oklahoma. Two young Englishmen find themselves actors on the stage of Darwinian sexual selection. A fundamentalist bases his faith on hearing a devil bird. A young preacher finds a hidden city that is based on Darwinism. A food scientist discovers a tribe of Homo ergaster pre-humans in the cliffs of Madagascar. Darwin meets Lincoln, who was born on the same day in 1809. And a young man discovers that love is the most combustible thing in the universe.

Dr. Fishbein is a creationist who runs a Creationist Evidences museum, to which homeschool fundamentalist moms bring their piles of children. The museum is not well-funded, but a rich Christian investor has come to visit his museum. Fishbein proposes a whole new, and lavish, museum which the investor funds. Fishbein has a particular problem with the evolutionary assertion that amphibians evolved from fishes, and that fossils intermediate between the two have been discovered.

The new museum site is a swamp that turns out to be a remnant from what most scientists (but not those who believe in the Flood of Noah) consider to be hundreds of millions of years old. While planning a big fish fry to dedicate the new building, he discovers something that lives in the swamp that discombobulates his whole belief system. What is it? Nobody ever finds out, because the people who come to the “fish” fry eat the evidence.

Tails of Evolution: Unnatural Selections, a story collection by Stan Rice, story one. The Descent of Man

Stan Rice has published a collection of short stories, Tails of Evolution. Rice is also the author of the Encyclopedia of Evolution, Life of Earth, and popular articles about evolution. Here is Rice’s summary from Kindle: 

            What you don’t know about evolution can kill you.

In these stories, Stan Rice introduces us to people who would never have imagined that evolution had any impact on their lives. A young fundamentalist Christian woman, out of place at a university, discovers that love can evolve. A creationist discovers half-fish half-amphibians in a swamp in Oklahoma. Two young Englishmen find themselves actors on the stage of Darwinian sexual selection. A fundamentalist bases his faith on hearing a devil bird. A young preacher finds a hidden city that is based on Darwinism. A food scientist discovers a tribe of Homo ergaster pre-humans in the cliffs of Madagascar. Darwin meets Lincoln, who was born on the same day in 1809. And a young man discovers that love is the most combustible thing in the universe.

Every writer who deals with evolution should have a short story titled The Descent of Man, which is the title of Darwin’s famous book specifically about human evolution. This was the first story in the collection by the artist formerly known as T. Coraghessan Boyle.

Everyone has heard about the combat between creationists and evolutionary scientists. Many people vaguely sympathize with one or the other, but may also think, what difference does it make?

And Rice does not use this story as a way of attacking your beliefs, one way or the other. Even if he did, this story would probably not change your mind. Instead, he uses the story as an opportunity to look empathetically into the lives of a young fundamentalist woman (Naomi) and a young man (Hunter). Naomi’s extreme fundamentalist viewpoint really bothers, but also fascinates, Hunter. She even uses scripture to “prove” that women have one more rib than men, because God made Eve out of Adam’s rib. (Even if this were true, why would the missing rib have been transmitted genetically through all of human history?) This belief is surprisingly common even among educators.

But it is not just Naomi’s beliefs that puzzle him. Hunter also finds her attractive, something he tries to resist. Naomi keeps reality out of her mind by constantly muttering prayers under her breath. She refuses to make friends when she goes to the big university because she is convinced they are all out to destroy her faith. But she is amazed to discover that Hunter treats her with serious respect. When he proposes that she subject her belief to experimental confirmation—by counting ribs on male bodies—she finds herself trapped by honesty; she has to say yes. She has thereby allowed Hunter into an intimacy of friendship. Hunter also discombobulates her beliefs about non-believers when he shows totally unnecessary kindness to her.

Naomi also knows that small religious groups like hers have genetic mutations show up frequently in their bodies, not just because the professor said so, but based on the people she knows in her church.

When Naomi discovers that the male students in the sample have the same number of ribs as she, Hunter makes an astonishing discovery by working his way into her clothes. What is it? Let’s just say that this is the explanation for the title of the book.

Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell: A Novel by Stan Rice, part six. Recurring Prototypes

 

Stan Rice as just published another novel, Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell. It is based on Mark Twain’s classic book about Captain Stormfield’s visit to Heaven. Here is the author’s description from Amazon:

Billy Stormfield, descendant of Captain Stormfield in Mark Twain’s book, wakes up in Hell. He meets Mark Twain, who takes him on a tour. All the interesting people are in Hell: Moses, Karl Marx (who is funny only when he quotes Groucho), Joe the Cherokee, the Apostle Andrew, and Pope Francis, because they were all what the fundamentalists called communists; Noah, because he was an environmentalist; General Douglas McArthur, because he forgave the Japanese rather than slaughtering them as the Old Testament commanded; and of course Charles Darwin. Thomas Jefferson, united at last with Sally Hemings, tells them how biologically stupid racism and oppression are. The only people in Heaven are the white supremacists and the jihadists, who spend all their time killing each other over and over forever. The young white supremacist Stonewall escapes to Hell, where he meets and loves the Black history teacher Philomena.

Between Heaven and Hell, Jesus eternally suffers the way Job did, dogs licking his wounds. With His friend the Prophet Mo, He watched His mother Mary helping people sneak into Heaven. Together with the crew from Hell, and led by the school girl Malala, Jesus and Mo storm the assembly in Heaven, kicking Henry VIII and Donald Trump (who look almost alike) down to Earth. Stonewall and Philomena celebrate their wedding feast.

There are two important figures in Rice’s novel who seem to be almost the same person. They could be considered historical prototypes. One of them is King Henry VIII of England, and the other is Donald Trump. Not only do they talk and act alike, with similar delusions of total power, but they even look alike.

In another Rice novel reviewed in this blog, a third person also closely resembles Donald Trump. He is Andrew Jackson, the president who instigated the Trail of Tears. Not only in behavior and delusions, but even in appearance, Jackson and Trump (who has a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office) are nearly alike, especially in their disdain for Native Americans.

In Rice’s novel, it does not end well for either Trump or Henry.

Artificial Intelligence--The End of Life as We Know It? Part two

How do you know that this blog essay is not being written by an AI bot? It would seem unlikely, since you are not paying to read this essay. It is a free service on my part. But let us use our imaginations a little. Maybe, by writing essays that over two million people have read, I am cultivating you as a market, so that you will like me, and if you see my name somewhere else (as on Amazon), you just might buy one of my books. These books, however, are very cheap. So, for me, the cost-to-benefit ratio would be very high: I have to work hard to write these essays, and the money I would get indirectly from you would be very small. Of course, since I am retired, my actual income is mostly unaffected by the sale of a few books.

But AI can write essays that sound like they come from an actual human being. AI could take a headline or a news article and write an essay based on it, using the style I have employed in the hundreds of essays already published on my blogs. At very little cost to myself (if I knew how to use AI, which I don’t) and no effort, I could generate a (very) small revenue stream.

That being said, the money a scammer could make off of authors would seem to be miniscule. Not worth it. But the costs are so low that a scammer could make a little money off of it, except for these two exceptions. First, if the author is savvy enough to know s/he is being parasitized by an AI; second, in those few cases where the scammer could make a lot of money. For every thousand authors who recognize the scam and invest no money in it, it takes only one naïve author sending in a thousand dollars to compensate for it.

And there are plenty of us authors who are naïve and idealistic. We love to hear someone (who may or may not be an AI) say intelligently good things about our previous writings. Not stupidly good things; I doubt that any writer would be taken in by an AI that says Your book is one of the bestest that I have ever read. But when the AI writes an entire paragraph that summarizes your book intelligently, this seems human. But it probably is not. AI is really good at making intelligent summaries.

Which brings me to my story: How I was very briefly duped by an AI which posed as the editor of a major publishing house. Too briefly for me to disclose any sensitive information. But the fact that I responded to the email at all, even if just to say I’ll let you know if something comes up, tagged me as a naïve author. The AI got all the information from my author website and used the special author email that is found only on that website. I am now part of the pool of authors available for the next step. Any subsequent emails I receive will be ignored. I will have lost no money. I spent a couple of hours feeling good that a major editor was interested in my work, but aside from this, I have been unaffected.

You probably think that I should have immediately recognized the email as a scam. But there are at least two reasons that my response was not totally stupid.

• First, publishers and agents have been impersonated by scammers in recent months, not just recent years. This is a new phenomenon. It is probably because the scammers would not make very much money off of writers. Every literary agency I have checked on has warned, in big bold letters, that scammers are imitating them. Publishers also. So, of course, I knew of this possibility. But…
• Second, the email came from the publisher’s legitimate domain, and had the correct name of the editor-in-chief. If the email had come from parasite&*()@gmail.com, I would have suspected it to be a scam. Even if it came from the editor’s correct name, @gmail.com, I would have suspected it. But the email came from the publisher’s domain, which means the scammer must have hacked into it. The agents and publishers all warn writers to not trust any emails unless they have the correct domain name. Well, this scam did. This is a serious problem, not for me, but for the publisher.

My agent warned me that this might be a scam. At least, I think it was my agent, unless the scammer read recent emails and imitated her. Of course, a scammer would not want an agent advising an author to ignore the email. I think.

Scammers targeting minor authors reminds me of thieves stealing from poor people. I saw one homeless man under the bridge in Tulsa stealing from the campsites of other homeless people. He saw me seeing him and yelled, “It’s a f—ing gold mine in here!” (I still do not know if Blogger.com will allow me to write the word out.) But, apparently, a scammer getting the equivalent of a few half-smoked cigarettes is worth it.

The IRS sent me a refund check, on paper, to my French address. The French bank teller where we had an account had no idea what United States Treasury was and why the check came from Philadelphia. Eventually they deposited the check. But suppose it was an elaborate scheme that was just imitating the United States Treasury. How would a French bank branch ever know, until the check, which looked very real, bounced?

The really disturbing thing about this incident is that it might very well indicate an impending collapse of our economy. If a scammer can imitate all the documents, and hack into the domains, of businesses, then nobody can trust anybody else at least online, or maybe in person. If the scammer can use a real domain name, and just slightly alter the recipient name (for instance, orderss@amazon.com), what could anyone do about it? Online business would collapse, until law enforcement tracked down all of the hundred thousand hackers.