About the Author
Jen McCreight (it rhymes with "write") is a geeky, nerdy, atheist feminist who managed to escape Indiana for Seattle.
Email: jen (at) thejenome (dot) com
Jen McCreight (it rhymes with "write") is a geeky, nerdy, atheist feminist who managed to escape Indiana for Seattle.
38 comments
SpaceGhoti says:
May 3, 2012
Don’t bother me with facts. I know what I know!
Pete Knight says:
May 3, 2012
“Thousands of years of cultivation, that sounds illogical.”
That sounds like willful ignorance!
Molly says:
May 3, 2012
Tide comes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication.
James C. says:
May 3, 2012
1. Apple goes in, juice comes out. Can’t explain that.
2. They’ve gone so deep down the rabbit hole that artificial selection is anathema. I wonder how far their silliness will go?
Brownian says:
May 3, 2012
Liar. Whatever Frank Clabough does when xe bites into an apple, it isn’t described by the word ‘think’.
Eskeptrical Engineer says:
May 3, 2012
So how does he explain all the different varieties of apples, many of which were named for people? God was just bored?
Desert Son, OM says:
May 3, 2012
Possible answers:
a) Apple trees
b) The store
c) The farmer’s market just down the road
d) Not from around here, that’s fer sure! The soil’s lousy!
e) Their stamens and pistils
Still learning,
Robert
Maki says:
May 3, 2012
I think about artificial selection when I bite into an apple that isn’t small, sour, and inconsistent in flavor and color. Then I thank the farmers who spent all that time grafting cultivars onto rootstock so that we can have our favorite varieties on demand and not subject to the apple’s natural heterozygote tendencies.
keithb says:
May 3, 2012
I wonder if he thanks God for corn on the cob?
Gregory in Seattle says:
May 3, 2012
When did wild poodles roam the earth? Proof that the miracle of God’s creation is still ongoing!
Or something.
Ginger Ball Z says:
May 3, 2012
Fucking apples, how do they work?
Rawnaeris says:
May 3, 2012
You win teh Internetz.
Timothy Brannan says:
May 3, 2012
I had a pithy comment to make on this, but in the end I just don’t get how stupid this guy is.
What’s next? Thanking god for building the iPhone because it fits so well in our hands?
Desert Son, OM says:
May 3, 2012
Seems to me the whole “you can’t just throw all the parts of a 747 together in a box and shake it up and get a working jet out of it without a designer!” creationist ploy is essentially a variant of what you just described.
Still learning,
Robert
Alyson Miers says:
May 3, 2012
Well, we did have the ridiculous freakshow that is the Phelps family expecting us to believe that we have God to thank for Apple products because God puppeteered Steve Jobs to create that amazing stuff.
This is while they were threatening to protest at Steve Jobs’s funeral.
So…thanking God for the iPhone has already happened.
Sili says:
May 3, 2012
Well, some people do seem to think that Steve Jobs is God Almighty.
I don’t know how the explain the lack of resurrection, though.
Azkyroth, Former Growing Toaster Oven says:
May 3, 2012
Apple certainly does the “you shall have no other before me” thing.
Adam says:
May 3, 2012
Umm… I’m a little surprised that, as a religious person, Frank sees the apple in such a positive light. I would have thought the lowly apple might have SOME problematic issues attached to it…something about ‘forbidden fruit’, ‘temptation’, Adam & Eve etc. etc. LOL!
sqlrob says:
May 3, 2012
When a boy apple loves a girl apple very much…
Forbidden Snowflake says:
May 3, 2012
Actually, since the Bible in no way implies that the ‘forbidden fruit’ is an apple, he has no reason to see apples in a negative light.
Adam says:
May 3, 2012
Aha! I bow to your superior bible wrangling and admit to deriving my knowledge in this area to popular culture and ex-post-facto artistic works. Carry on with the apple lovin’ Frank! Haha
Lori says:
May 3, 2012
“illogical”
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
timberwoof says:
May 3, 2012
Thank you for the link. That took me on a nice Wikipedia excursion into territory entirely unfamiliar to me: cultivars, triploids, polyploids!
On Sunday I’ll visit the farmers’ market and see if there are any interesting varieties of apples to be had.
mrevan says:
May 3, 2012
Also: Apple users, much like Christians, don’t actually read before clicking “I agree.” Seriously. I could very well have signed over the movie rights to my next bowel movement when I last updated, for all I know.
boilerbugle says:
May 3, 2012
I love learning new things! I had no idea that apples had been cultivated for so long.
Samantha Vimes says:
May 4, 2012
Me, too. Any link to the Pfft! of all Knowledge means I’ll be reading for a while.
David Hart says:
May 4, 2012
I remember in one of Richard Dawkins’ books, I think it was Climbing Mount Improbable, that he describes a lecturer talking about figs, who thought that the ‘real’ fruit of the tree of knowledge was the fig … Dawkins brings it up in order to contrast it with all the amazing weird stuff we now know about figs that are cooler than the Genesis myth.
Pete Knight says:
May 4, 2012
Savage packs of poodles roaming the savannah all those thousands (Six or less!) of years ago eh!
Otranreg says:
May 4, 2012
No, because it won’t squirt in your eye.
AJ Milne says:
May 4, 2012
… whereas a bearded guy pointing and going ‘Zot!’ with his finger, thereby poofing apples into existence, that sounds eminently sensible*.
I’m curious, tho’. I wonder. Which cultivar did Yahweh do?
Or did he maybe do ’em all, one by one?
Zot! Royal Gala! Zot! Granny Smith! Zot! Golden Spire! Zot! Northern Spy! Zot! Spartan! Zot! Idared!
(Blows smoke from tip of finger.)
You’ll note McIntoshes aren’t on this list. That’s ‘cos the devil did those.
(*/Of course it does. It’s way more reasonable than this crazy ‘cultivation theory’ of yours. God had to make apples! How else could the talking snake have had one handy to tempt Eve?)
Reginald Selkirk says:
May 4, 2012
Remarkable Kazak Apples
Reginald Selkirk says:
May 4, 2012
Kazakhstan the home of the apple
Reginald Selkirk says:
May 4, 2012
The Fatherland of Apples
E.A. Blair says:
May 4, 2012
I just recently read something that said that apple trees couldn’t grow in the climate of the Middle East during biblical times. This was in reference to the mention of apples in the Song of Solomon. I’d give a link, but I didn’t bookmark the page. Mention was also made that the fruit of knowledge referred to in Genesis was probably not an apple.
chris says:
May 5, 2012
Oh good grief. Most of the apples used in the 19th century ended up as cider, and were not actually good for eating. When a sport (random apple from a seed) turned out to actually taste good it is reproduced by cloning (grafts).
A local group is trying to find ways to identify apples because there are so many different varieties growing in just our area. I was at a function where a one of their members was an expert in identifying apples (retired professor from either UC Davis or WSU), and he explained that the fruit from a tree was a rogue sport (grown from a seed). It did not taste or keep very well, but the tree could be grafted with better cultivars. Here is and example of the apple identification program:
http://www.seattletreefruitsociety.com/apple-list.php
Anyone who claims a god provided us with tasty fruit has never tried growing any, must less walked through a nursery that sells fruit trees. They are often often grafted, and the root stock can send up suckers. The same goes for roses (which are related to apples).
Larry says:
May 6, 2012
I wonder how they react to Mendel. I mean really the fact that you have dog breeding and shows about it would be enough to show them that evolution works, or wait is it that only “lesser” species can be so manipulated?
No one tell them about strawberries…
atheist says:
May 7, 2012
Oh my fucking gawd did he actually say that?!
Dan M. says:
May 9, 2012
Not a 747, but an approximation of a watch; turns out that once you have variation and selection, you get evolved properties even then:
“Evolution IS a Blind Watchmaker” http://youtu.be/mcAq9bmCeR0