{"id":9848,"date":"2011-05-29T11:39:30","date_gmt":"2011-05-29T11:39:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2011\/05\/29\/monkeys-on-our-backs-by-richar\/"},"modified":"2011-05-29T11:39:30","modified_gmt":"2011-05-29T11:39:30","slug":"monkeys-on-our-backs-by-richar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/29\/monkeys-on-our-backs-by-richar\/","title":{"rendered":"“Monkeys on our backs” by Richard Tokumei will not even make good toilet paper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Tokumei has written a book that is so bad he is ashamed to put his own name on it. “Richard Tokumei” is the pen name of a ‘writer\/editor in Southern California [with] degrees in Humanities and Phychology from the University of California Berkeley” and he has produced a book designed to anger everyone who hears of it in order to create needless sensation and thus, sell copies. Which, once people get their hands on, will make rather low quality toilet paper.
\n
\nMonkeys On Our Backs: Why Conservatives and Liberals Are Both Wrong About Evolution<\/a>\"\" includes an inexplicable mix of “correct” statements about evolution and how to think about evolution along with misuses, abuses, and misunderstandings of evolution that those very statements guard against. “Tokumei” warns against the naturalistic fallacy, but uses it as the basis for his arguments whenever convenient. He repeats statements made by evolutionary biologists that make it clear that evolution is not teleological or goal directed, but assumes it is, and requires goal directness for important parts of his arguments to work. He presents the entirety of evolutionary or biological models, research, discussion, and data regarding human behavior as a simplified and naive “Pinkeresque” view, and this allows him to indicate why liberals hate Evolution. He also presents evolution, or more accurately, Darwinism, using the exact model pushed these days by the Discovery Institute<\/a> as a straw man for disdain by conservatives. “Tokumei” makes the very annoying statement that Evolution is pretty easy to understand and then proceeds to misunderstand, sometimes willfully sometimes not, it would appear, the process. He hates socialism with utter disdain and never fails to link the term with Liberal policies and ‘prove’ that these policies are evil. Despite the thinly veiled attempt to paint this book as an even-handed fact-based critique of both the left and the right, it is only an attack on the left, with the critique of the right having little more strength than a piece of used toilet paper left to languish in an unflushed toilet. Which is where this book belongs.<\/p>\n

I didn’t like it.<\/p>\n

But Satoshi Kanazawa did, I assume, because he wrote the forward! Go figure!<\/p>\n

In case you are wondering, Tokumei has very few anagrams. Try letter substitution if you want to identify him that way. Waste of time, though. Off hand, the following results could signify: Andrews, Baldwin, Bismark, and Codfish. The book appears to be self published.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Tokumei has written a book that is so bad he is ashamed to put his own name on it. “Richard Tokumei” is the pen name of a ‘writer\/editor in Southern California [with] degrees in Humanities and Phychology from the University of California Berkeley” and he has produced a book designed to anger everyone who … Continue reading “Monkeys on our backs” by Richard Tokumei will not even make good toilet paper<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[181,95,40,209,51,2799,33],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-2yQ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9848"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}