Notice: Fredric Rice may have removed segments of the replies given to questions if they contained copyrighted materials. After a very short while, Scientology "experts" refused to answer questions and started cut-and-pasting copyrighted cult propaganda. Additionally I removed URLs in some of the replies, and left them in others. And it's also important to note that eventually the unfortunate "Greg Churilov" cultist was ejected from askme.com for his typical Scientological behavior.

FredricRice asked this question on 5/15/2000:

Greetings!

I have a question about L. Ron Hubbard's book "A History of Man." I suspect that only current Scientologists would be able to help me with this question but I'll toss it out for all the other experts, too, to see if they might know.

The book starts out with Hubbard writing, "This is a cold-blooded and factual account of your last sixty trillion years."

Since the age of the universe is something around 15 billion years, is it possible that this is a type-o and that the editor of "A History of Man" needs to fix it to read "million years" instead of "trillian years?"

I can't imagine that L. Ron Hubbard made such an obvious mistake in his cosmology but one never knows.

Thanks!

Phobos1 gave this response on 5/15/2000:

You don't need to imagine it. He did it.

Hubbard wrote a lot about lots of different subjects, but there were remarkably few about which he actually knew anything. One thing he WAS good at was thinking up ambitious titles for his books. "All About Radiation", "A History of Man", "Fundamentals of Thought" and so forth.

Anyway, there are countless examples of his general ignorance of science throughout HoM, from his placing bivalves in the direct lineage of Homo sapiens (and his relation of the shell's hinge to the vertebrate jaw) to the inclusion of Piltdown Man, there is no evidence that Hubbard had Clue #1 about natural history.

To be fair, he was first and foremost a Sci Fi writer. Not hard science fiction, but pulp Sci Fi. For that sort of writing, you don't need to know anything more than a couple of impressive sounding words. You allude to things your audience might have heard about in passing but knows nothing about, and basically just bluff your way through a ripping good yarn. It's fun, especially if the audience isn't particularly well-read about science (or if the science you're talking about is still in its infancy, so no one's the wiser), but it's not terribly serious.

Trouble was, he got away with bluffing too much. I think that when he started hanging around with Scientologists exclusively, the people he knew would believe everything he said, he simply stopped getting appropriate feedback from independent thinkers. In the forties, other SF writers would say, "Ron, that's crap." In the sixties and seventies, no such luck. So he started to believe his own practical jokes.

Add a big, well-funded vanity press into the mix, and you get nonsense like History of Man.

Further facts about this criminal empire may be found at Operation Clambake and FACTNet.

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