Why BioLogos—and accommodationism—can’t win

January 17, 2011 • 5:40 am

The main mission of BioLogos is to convert evangelical Christians from evolution-deniers to evolution-accepters.  That’s also the goal of many accommodationists, though the smarter ones, recognizing the futility of confronting Biblical literalists, concentrate on more liberal Christians.

And the primary tactic in this mission is to convince evangelicals that their theology is simply wrong: “proper Christianity,” so the argument goes, doesn’t really depend on a literal reading of the Bible.  Adam and Eve, Noah, and much of the rest (but not Jesus and his miracles!) were simply metaphors, fictional characters always intended to represent spiritual rather than material truths. Genesis, too, is just a metaphor, so Darwin was right after all.  This is how BioLogos, the National Center for Science Education, the National Academy of Sciences, and other accommodationist organizations operate.  And that’s why, over the past few months, BioLogos has spent so much time in a ludicrous discussion of Adam and Eve.  They’re trying to convince literalists that although science tells us a pair of Ur-humans didn’t really exist, they could still stand for something.

But anybody who knows evangelical Christians—and BioLogos certainly should—must see that this is hogwash. These efforts are doomed because the faith of most of those Christians absolutely depends on Biblical literalism.  (Granted, even literalists, when pressed, engage in a bit of “interpretation”.)  And if you see Adam and Eve as fictional, well, then other stuff could be fictional too—and where would it all end? The Rock of Ages starts to look like an ice cube.  To keep their faith, evangelicals must defend the redoubt of literalism.

This is absolutely clear from the piece that Baptist bigwig Albert Mohler published last week in The Christian Post: “Why the creation-evolution debate is so important.”  Mohler was responding to a manifesto written by BioLogos president Darrel Falk, in which, weirdly enough, Falk claims that God himself is helping BioLogos vanquish those pesky evolution-deniers.  I can barely bring myself to re-post Falks’s final paragraph:

I am convinced, however, that God was at work in our midst in the year of our Lord, 2010. I sensed God’s Spirit all the time, and I’ll bet members of the other groups did too—even those who, so far as I see it, clearly have it wrong. It is true there are enormous challenges, but perhaps they seem greater than they really are. Perhaps, they almost seem overwhelming at times because we tend to look into the future through our own all-too-human lenses. If God really has created through an evolutionary mechanism and if God chooses to use BioLogos and other groups to help the Church come to grips with this issue, then these three huge challenges will begin to melt away as God’s Spirit enables us to look to him and not to ourselves. To the extent that we can do that, and to the extent that we can really forgive each other for our trespasses, then truly the Kingdom will be his Kingdom and not ours. With that our kingdoms will begin to melt away in the very face of the glory of God. May that be so, and may the year, 2011, truly be the year of our Lord.

What a statement from an organization of scientists!  But Mohler will have none of it.  First of all, he rejects BioLogos‘s respect for scientific truth as simple scientism!  LOL! BioLogos is hoist with its own petard!:

[Falk’s words]: Scientific knowledge is not deeply flawed and we cannot allow ourselves to be led down this pathway any longer.

[Mohler]:  That is nothing less than a manifesto for scientism. Science, as a form of knowledge, is here granted a status that can only be described as infallible. The dangers of this proposal are only intensified when we recognize that “scientific knowledge” is not even a stable intellectual construct. Nevertheless, these words do reveal why BioLogos pushes its agenda with such intensity.

And Mohler, pwning Falk completely, asserts that fundamentalists simply aren’t going to swallow a metaphorical approach to scripture:

So, Dr. Falk sees the task as that of convincing us that evangelical theology “doesn’t depend” upon affirmations about the age of the earth or the historicity of Adam as “made directly from dust”—but Falk envisions this task as lasting decades “before it will be convincing to all.” With all due respect, I think he will need a longer calendar. Most frustratingly, Dr. Falk’s statement does not acknowledge the fact that the arguments published by BioLogos go far beyond even these important concerns. Articles at BioLogos go so far as to suggest that the Apostle Paul was simply wrong to believe that Adam was an historical person. A recent BioLogos essay argues that Adam and Eve were likely “a couple of Neolithic farmers in the Near East” to whom God revealed himself “in a special way.” There is a consistent denial of any possibility that Adam and Eve are the genetic parents of the entire human race. The BioLogos approach also denies the historical nature of the Fall, with all of its cosmic consequences. BioLogos has published explicit calls to deny the inerrancy of the Bible. The concerns do not stop here.

The Bible reveals Adam to be an historical human being, the first human being, and the father of all humanity. Adam is included in biblical genealogies, including the genealogy of Jesus Christ. If the arguments offered thus far by BioLogos for resolving the “theological challenges” associated with “evolutionary creation” are any indication of what is likely to come in the future, Dr. Falk and his colleagues will wait a very long time indeed for evangelicals to join their club.

LOL again!  Do you have to be an Einstein to see the problem?

Finally, Mohler states flatly:

I am willing to accept the authority of science on any number of issues. I am fundamentally agnostic about a host of other scientific concerns—but not where the fundamental truth of the Gospel and the clear teachings of the Bible are at stake.

And that sentence, dear readers, explains why the BioLogos mission is doomed.  I predict BioLogos‘s downfall—or at least a considerable downsizing—in the next year or two.  They can chug along with their Adam-and-Eveing, perhaps helped by the big name of ex-president Francis Collins, but there will come a time when they see that it’s all futile.

Before you can get rid of creationism, you have to get rid of religion—or at least that huge swath of religion that sees scripture as the literal word of God.  And you can’t solve the problem by telling the faithful that their theology simply needs some tweaking.

h/t:  Scott

Evolutionary psychology for the masses

January 16, 2011 • 8:11 am

UPDATE: Over at Pharnygula, P.Z. has his own take (negative) on Bering’s paper and the lax standards of evolutionary psychology.  P.Z. notes that the “adaptive” results of the handgrip study cited by Bering have not in fact been replicated by other investigators.   That calls the results into question, something that Bering conveniently omits from his piece.

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In the past week I’ve read two “pop” articles on evolutionary psychology.  One, “Social Animal,” in the latest New Yorker, is by New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks.  It’s apparently an extract from an eponymous upcoming book.  The piece is cleverly framed: it’s the account of a first date by two fictional people, “Harold” and “Erica,” in which all of their conversation, their gestures, and their subsequent courtship and marriage are couched in terms of evolutionary psychology, with Brooks describing the research backing up the story.  Here’s an example:

As Erica and Harold semi-embraced, they took in each other’s pheromones. Smell is a surprisingly powerful sense in these situations. People who lose their sense of smell eventually suffer greater emotional deterioration than people who lose their vision. In one experiment conducted at the Monell Center, in Philadelphia, researchers asked men and women to tape gauze pads under their arms and then watch either a horror movie or a comedy. Research subjects, presumably well compensated, then sniffed the pads. They could somehow tell, at rates higher than chance, which pads had the smell of laughter and which pads had the smell of fear, and women were much better at this test than men.

And so on.  It’s engaging, but how solid are these results, and how much does a study of “fear” and “laughter” really have to do with Erica and Harold’s goodbye hug? The whole article is of this tenor, and I worry that one-off results were being presented as solid findings of evolutionary psychology—uncontestable results of science.
As far as I can see, Brooks has no formal scientific training (he has a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Chicago), nor any experience as a science journalist.  Does he have the expertise to judge which of these claims are solid, and which mere speculations? There is not a hint in the entire article that the “science” behind Harold’s Dinner with Erica might be tentative or simply speculative.  It’s a cute piece, but an irresponsible one—the fantasy of a journalist who himself has fallen uncritically in love with evolutionary psychology.  You can bet your sweet tuchus that had Carl Zimmer written something like this, it would have included a lot more bet-hedging.  But then it wouldn’t have been published in The New Yorker.

A bit more distressing is a piece in the January 13 Slate, “Darwin’s Rape Whistle“, by Jesse Bering, who should know better. Bering is a psychologist at Queen’s University Belfast, a writer for Scientific American, and author of the forthcoming book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life. (He’s also funded by the Templeton Foundation). The subtitle of Bering’s piece is “Have Women Evolved to Protect Themselves from Sexual Assault?”, and you know what the answer is going to be without reading the piece. If it were “no,” the piece wouldn’t have appeared anywhere—so popular are Darwinian explanations of modern human behavior.

Bering’s piece begins by highlighting Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s idea (described in their book A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion) that the human brain contains an evolved “rape module”: a neuronal circuit that impels men to subdue and copulate with women when they can get away with it.  The idea is that this would have been adaptive in our ancestors, giving disenfranchised males a way to spread their genes when they couldn’t do so through the usual route of pair-bonding.

Thornhill and Palmer’s book was controversial, with many critics claiming that the authors were trying to excuse or justify rape.  Bering takes after these critics, properly noting that “‘adaptive'”does not mean ‘justifiable’,” but rather only mechanistically viable.”  But what he doesn’t mention is that there were strong scientific critiques of the “rape module” idea as well.  I produced two of them myself, a long one in The New Republic and a short one with Andrew Berry in Nature, pointing out not only scientific weaknesses in the evolutionary scenario but Thornhill and Palmer’s unsavory fiddling with statistics, distorting what the primary data on sexual assault really said.  Bering doesn’t mention the scientific controversy, noting only that “it’s debatable that a rape module lurks in the male brain.”

Bering also asserts without question that even the shape of the human penis testifies to pervasive sexual coercion in our ancestors:

In fact, the distinctive, mushroom-capped shape of the human penis is designed to perform the specialized function of removing competitors’ sperm, which indicates an ancestral history of females having sex with multiple males within a 24-hr period.

Note that there is no reservation here, no claim that “there are data supporting this theory but it may be wrong.”  Just a simple factual claim about what science has found. But, as Bering described in Scientific American, the original study used dildos inserted into “realistic latex vagina[s] sold as a masturbation pal for lonely straight men” that had been filled with an artificial substance cooked up to mimic sperm.  This bizarre experiment leaves considerable doubt about why the human penis is shaped like it is!  Yet Bering has no such doubts.  His journalistic certainty in the face of experimental doubt is a hallmark of much reportage on evolutionary psychology. It certainly characterizes David Brooks’s piece as well.

Bering goes on to the centerpiece of his article, the notion of a “rape arms race” that has given human females genetic tools to withstand rape. And by “genetic tools,” I don’t just mean the willingness and desire of women to fight off sexual assault. No, women have specific psychological and physiological modules that supposedly evolved in our ancestors as “anti-rape” tools.  Bering sees four of these:

  1. When threatened by sexual assault, ovulating women display a measurable increase in physical strength.
  2. Ovulating women overestimate strange males’ probability of being rapists.
  3. Ovulating women play it safe by avoiding situations that place them at increased risk of being raped.
  4. Women become more racist when they’re ovulating.

The “increased racism” module is supposed to have evolved to prevent mixing with outgroups; as Bering says:

In this case, skin color serves as a convenient marker of group identity. (The authors concede that people of different skin colors came into contact with one another only in recent times, evolutionarily speaking, but propose that any physical trait that serves to demarcate an out-group member would be processed by ovulating females as a sort of “hazard heuristic.”)

There is, as far as I can see, exactly one study supporting each of these four points, with at least two of them based on surveys of undergraduates at single American colleges.  Here’s Bering’s summary of the data supporting handgrip strength:

In 2002, SUNY-Albany psychologists Sandra Petralia and Gordon Gallup had 192 female undergraduate students read a story about either a female character being stalked by a suspicious male stranger in a parking lot (ending with: “As she inserts the key into her car door she feels his cold hand on her shoulder …”) or a similar story in which the female character is surrounded by happy people on a warm summer’s day (ending with: “She starts her car, adjusts the stereo, and as she pulls out of the parking lot those nearby can hear her music blasting”). The researchers measured the handgrip strength of each participant before and after she read the story, and compared the scores. Petralia and Gallup also knew from the results of a urine-based ovulation test kit where in their reproductive cycles each participant was, so the researchers could differentiate among women in the menstrual, follicular, ovulatory, and luteal phases. A fifth group consisted of those women who were on contraceptives at the time of the study. The results were unambiguous: Only the ovulating women who read the sexual assault scenario exhibited an increase in handgrip strength. Ovulating women who read the control passage and nonovulatory women who read the sexual assault material grasped with the same intensity as before.

Well, one can debate whether reading a story about rape is the same thing as being sexually assaulted, or whether a marginal increase in handgrip strength would have been sufficient in our ancestors to fight off a rapist.  But the important part of these studies is that they were apparently one-offs—they have not, as far as I know, been replicated by other researchers.  Do we accept single results, based on surveys of American undergraduates at a single university, as characterizing all modern women?

As we know, many studies in science, when repeated, fail to replicate the initial results.  Think of all the reports of single genes for homosexuality, depression, and other behavioral traits that fell apart when researchers tested those results on other groups of people!  And if an author did an initial study (not a replication) of handgrip strength that didn’t show the relationship with ovulation, would that even be publishable? I think not.

I suggest, then, that the results of evolutionary psychology often reflect ascertainment bias. If you find a result that comports with the idea that a trait is “adaptive,” it gets published. If you don’t, it doesn’t.  That leads to the literature being filled with positive results, and gives the public a false idea of the strength of scientific data supporting the evolutionary roots of human behavior.

Nevertheless, Bering, who apparently has never seen a Darwinian explanation he doesn’t like, finds all this very convincing:

I don’t know about you, but I’m riveted, and convinced, by much of the logic in this anti-rape area. And researchers are just getting started.

Well, pardon me if I’m not quite so convinced.  It takes more than a small study on American college women at a single school to convince me that a behavior is an evolved adaptation to prevent rape.

Now I don’t oppose evolutionary psychology on principle. The evolutionary source of our behavior is a fascinating topic, and I’m convinced that the genetic influences are far stronger than, say, posited by anti-determinists like Dick Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Steve Gould.  Evolved adaptations are particularly likely to be found in sexual behavior, which is intimately connected with the real object of selection: the currency of reproduction.  I’m far closer in my views on this topic to Steve Pinker than to Steve Gould.  And there are many good studies in the field, so I don’t mean to tar the whole endeavor.

But, for crying out loud, let’s have the journalists and scientists show a little more responsibility when reporting on evolutionary psychology.  If there are problems with a study, describe them.  If an idea is pure speculation, say it.  If there are other explanations for a phenomenon, give them.  Let’s not gull the public into claiming that we understand something with near certainty when we don’t.   These lax reportorial standards, pervasive in evolutionary psychology, seem to be much tighter in other areas of science, like physics or molecular biology.  And this despite the enormous difficulty of demonstrating that any human behavior is an evolved adaptation.

Every time I write a piece like this, one that’s critical of evolutionary psychology, I get emails from its practitioners, chewing me out for being so hard on their field.  And my response is always the same: I’ll stop being so hard on your field when you guys start being more critical yourselves.  If you policed your own discipline better, I wouldn’t have to.

But since humans are so fascinated by scientific explanations of their own behavior, and so impatient with uncertainty and doubt, there’s not much incentive for the field to clean itself up.

Weekend fortification

January 15, 2011 • 9:36 am

All the talk about beer last week made me thirsty, as did a post on umeshu, Japanese plum wine, by our resident Japanese culture correspondent, Yokahamama.  So, during my biweekly visit to the Purveyor of Alcohol, I picked up the following for this weekend:


I needn’t tell many readers of this website about Samuel Smith, a British brewery whose products are all first rate.  Oatmeal Stout is one of my favorites (Imperial Stout is equally awesome).

Umeshu is a big deal in Japan, and is served in a variety of ways.  As Y. notes in her post (you can see it in the background), it’s made from ume (Prunus mume), a fruit more closely related to apricots than plums. The wine is made by steeping ume fruits for a long time—a year or even more—in a mixture of alcohol (shochu) and sugar.  The Choya brand of umeshu has a good reputation.  It’s only about 12 bucks for the container, and the 500-ml bottle contains 6 ume fruit.  It’s not clear whether I should eat them afterwards—advice is conflicting.  The wide mouth allows extraction of plums.

Here’s a YouTube video showing how umeshu is made.  I’ll report back on the flavor. It’s a sweet wine, suitable for after dinner or as an aperitif, but I like those.  This is a highly LOLzy video because there’s a French poodle who attentively watches the process:

Caturday felid: biznss kitteh at the onsen

January 15, 2011 • 6:05 am

Last week we had a cultural analysis (thanks to reader and blogger Yokohamamama) of the “bzness kitteh” video used as an ad by the Japanese travel agency Jalan.  There are four of these ads, all featuring the Japanese bobtail cat Nyaran engaged in business or pleasure travel.  Only fifteen seconds long, the videos are nonetheless packed with insights into Japanese life and culture.  But without a translator we’re clueless.

This week we have the second commercial, called “Having a Spa Day,” which is kindly analyzed again by Y. She adds her take on onsen (Japanese hot springs).

First watch the video, then read Y.’s analysis:

Analysis:

Here’s Nyaran at the hot spring:

Watashi wa Nyaran.  Kyou wa hyoubanonsen ni kitan da yo!
(I am Nyaran.  I’ve come to a famous/popular hot spring resort today)

Kyou wa sassoku! (Today, I’ll go straight to the bath! sassoku=directly, immediately, promptly, at once)

Un?  Koko wa onna na nyo ka?!  Shitsureishimashita!
(Huh?  It’s all women in here?!  Excuse me!  shitsurei=rude)

Chikara ga nukeru.  Shiawase.  (I can relax.  Happy)

He’s come to a popular hot spring resort—an expensive one, by the looks of it.  The kind where a kimono-clad woman from the front desk comes to greet you and take up your luggage for you (his is so small, she’s carrying it on a tray—a nice, wooden carved one from Kamakura, from what I can see.  It’s always preferable not to touch other people’s things directly, and you usually excuse yourself before you do touch someone’s things if you have to).

There are usually lots of things to do at a hot spring—and many people go relax in their own room first for a bit.  There’s always a teapot, cups, and loose green tea on the kotatsu (low table—some have heaters attached underneath for keeping warm in the winter), and generally a snack, too—o-sembe or manjuu, or such.  At an expensive-looking place like this, probably a pretty delicious snack. )  Rooms have TVs, and these days there’s also usually a big-screen TV in the common room.  There’s usually ping-pong, go, shogi (chess), karaoke, sometimes playstation for kids (but it depends on where you go).

He decides to forgo all that and heads straight for the bath.  He trots right back to the outdoor pool (you can see the stools and baskets behind him, where you put your clothes and yukata.  A Yukata is a lightweight cotton robe that crosses over and is the same shape as a kimono, but those are made of silk).  He has his little bath towel around his neck.  Men put theirs around their waists, but that would be hard for Nyaran…  It looks like spring because it’s green and it looks like there are tsutsuji (azaleas) blooming—which means Golden Week (April 29-May5), high tourist season.

But…this is the women’s bath!  A-ra-ra!  Excuse me!*  And we see him make for the men’s bath (the blue noren curtains say 男湯= otokoyu = men’s bath).  He dries off naturally in front of the fan after he’s soaked.  They didn’t show him washing, but if you’ve never been to a Japanese hot spring, Rule Number One is:  Wash well with soap and rinse off *outside* the bath.  When you think you’re clean, wash again.  And rinse.  And *then* you can get in the hot water and soak.  Rule Number Two is:  Don’t forget to take off the toilet slippers after you’re done in the WC…  )

I love Japanese onsen more than anything—no ugly bedspreads, no jarring colors, no bad art on the walls.  A room with practically nothing in it, and an enormous cavern-like room dedicated to getting as clean as the day you were born.  If cleanliness is next to godliness, then it’s no wonder Christianity never took off in Japan.  Why go to church when you can go to an onsen?

We’re not the only primate that uses onsen. You’ve probably heard of the Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) who have also learned to soak in the hot springs. They’ve been doing this for several generations, and it’s a prime example of cultural transmission in other primates.  Here’s a wonderful BBC video (click on the “Watch on YouTube” line) showing the monkeys soaking.  They seem to enjoy it as much as humans do! And the scenes near the end of baby macaques leaping into the pool are adorable.

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*JAC:  I think Nyaran went in there on purpose: to look up the women’s towels!  As we’ll see next week, he suffers from loneliness.

h/t: Yokohamamama.

January footwear

January 14, 2011 • 11:50 am

This morning I got a nasty comment (now in the trash) from a Jesus-lover, chewing me out for criticizing Francis Collins, for being a lousy teacher, and for putting boots and cats on this website.  That prompted this post.

A snowy day is not necessarily the best day to wear these boots, but I step gingerly, avoiding puddles and salt strewn on the sidewalk.  These are full alligator boots by J. B. Hill of El Paso.

The skins on the shafts are cleverly pieced to make the scales on the back look like the side seam normally present on a boot:

Oh, and here’s the cat: a Japanese cat dyed to resemble a pig:

Hospital bill!

January 14, 2011 • 7:45 am

A while back I had surgery for a chronic sinus condition, and reported on it here.  I had what was called a balloon sinusplasty, which is the equivalent of an angioplasty, but up the nose.  They insert a balloon catheter up the schnoz and, when positioned properly, it’s inflated, moving the bones back into their correct position.  I opted for that instead of the usual cutting because it was less invasive and less traumatic to the system.

As surgeries go, it was a minor procedure. It took only a few hours and I was out of the hospital that day, within an hour after waking up.  And all went well: I’m fine now.

But the bill came yesterday.  I’m putting it up just so you can see what these things cost in America.  The cost of just the surgery was $32,094.84.  That doesn’t include the pre-operative and post-operative visits, the fees for the awesome anesthesiologist, nor the two MRIs I had to produce scans to help guide the surgeon.  All told, the total bill would be close to forty thousand dollars.

Part 1:

Four thousand bucks for a balloon! (To be fair, I’m sure it was a pretty fancy balloon, all sterile and stuff.)

Part 2, with total (click to enlarge):

Look at all those drugs! It looks like Michael Jackson’s pharmacopeia, with some of the same stuff.  $1400 for ketamine, and $76 for cocaine, which I wasn’t even awake to experience.

Now I didn’t have to pay all that: my university has a good insurance plan, and I paid about 5% of the total cost.  That’s still a bite, but it was a bargain given the cost of medical care in the U.S.

But think of all the people without insurance!  Many of them have to pay either the full cost or a substantial portion of that cost.  People who have no money usually get treated for free—though I don’t know if they’d be allowed to have a sinus operation.  It’s the people with some money, but who can’t afford insurance (or don’t have it provided by their job) who get screwed.  And if you have to pay forty grand for a sinus operation, imagine what it would cost for something more serious, like heart surgery.

That’s why many Americans get bankrupted by medical costs, and why some have to choose between medical treatment and food.  Some folks even lose their homes because they can’t afford both a mortgage and medical care.

I don’t know what the solution is to exponentially increasing medical costs.  But I do know that all Americans need health insurance, and I see good medical care as a right, not a privilege.  Other countries have done it; why not America?  One reason, of course, is the Republicans, who care more about tax breaks for the rich than medical care for the poor.  At this moment they’re vowing to overturn Obama’s health-care bill.  They pretend that they just have to “fix” the bill, but in reality they could give a hoot if poor people went without medical care.

Maybe if people were faced with bills like this one, and had no insurance to cover the costs, they’d see why we need affordable medical care for all Americans, or mandatory insurance.  Obama’s on the right track, and his opponents on this issue are simply callous and uncaring.  I for one would gladly pay more taxes if it would provide medical care to those who weren’t as fortunate.

Jazz week: trumpet. Day 5, Bunny Berigan

January 14, 2011 • 6:32 am

This is the wild card, and I’m gonna take it in the neck for writing about this guy.  But hey, it’s my website and I want to put up one of my favorite jazz songs—and trumpet solos.

True, Bunny Berigan wasn’t as important in the history of jazz as some trumpeters I’ve omitted (Chet Baker comes to mind). But he wasn’t a slouch, either!  And ever since I listened to I Can’t Get Started on one of my parents’ “oldies” LPs, I’ve loved that song.  (Bunny is probably the first jazzman I ever heard.)  Don’t get all grumpy because I’ve left off your favorite trumpeter; just tout him in a comment.

Rowland Bernard Berigan, known as “Bunny” (1908-1942), had a short life, for he couldn’t stay off the sauce.  Had he lived, and not been such an alcoholic, I think he’d rank much higher in the trumpet pantheon.  Berigan worked with Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman’s bands in the thirties, and then, forming his own band, produced one remarkable—and popular—song.

That song is I Can’t Get Started, recorded in 1937.  It became his theme song for the five remaining years of his life.  You may have heard it, as it’s one of those standards that gets replayed in movies.  And it has some blazing trumpet work by Berigan at the beginning and end (and okay vocals in the middle).  Wikipedia describes it like this:

“I Can’t Get Started” is the plaintive song of a man who has achieved and won everything he could hope for, except the attention of the woman he desires. It is most exceptional in that Gershwin’s lyrics break the mold for ballads: it is topical and totally dated to the headlines of the 1930’s.

The melody, true to the theme of the lyrics, starts out at a low pitch and rarely goes very far up. A moving melody line carries the descriptive lines of text, however, until it comes to the bridge, where the text turns more emotional. There the song, changing to a minor key with long held notes, borders on despondency. This song deserves on its merits to be the success which it eventually, slowly, became. . .

. . . Berigan’s recording on trumpet is a virtuoso work that defines the range of the instrument, starting in the basement and climbing finally to the stratosphere. In addition to his range, Berigan displays here a mastery of expression, of emotional nuance, beyond what most trumpet players can only dream of: he takes the song all the way from despondence to victory.

I love the dated references in the lyrics: “I’ve been consulted by Franklin D.; Greta Garbo has had me to tea. . ” etc.  Here it is:

The Bunster also played solo trumpet solo (beginning at 1:37) on another big-band favorite of mine, Marie, by Tommy Dorsey:

Finally, here is one of the few video clips of Teh Bunneh, Until Today with the Freddie Rich band. Note that Berigan’s name is spelled wrong in the title.  It’s thirties white big-band singing, a bit schlocky, but it’s Bunny in the flesh, with a nice solo beginning at 0:51.

So ends Jazz Trumpet Week. It’s been fun, and some time down the line we’ll take up the sax.  Now that will be a hard one!