A couple of my anti-creationist pals, James Downard and Jackson Wheat, have released a new book, The Rocks Were There: Straight Science Answers to bent Creationist Questions, Volume 1. I expect it will be good, but I just ordered my copy 5 minutes ago, so I haven’t read it yet, and can’t actually review it.
That doesn’t stop the creationists, though: it has a single one-star review from a long-winded pseudoscientist named James V. Kohl. I’ve dealt with him before, he’s a crank. Don’t let his review stop you — we need more honest reviews to counter the nonsense kooks like Kohl throw around.
Is there a way we can write Reviews of Mr. Kohl’s Review? That sounds like fun.
@1 Apparently yes and I’m not the first one.
That self-flagellation of a review locked in my decision to buy the book.
Prepare to unleash the power of the Streisand Effect.
The rocks were there…I am stealing that for when I meet creationists on Disqus and Youtube.
Have just bought a Kindle copy. Streisand effect gathers pace.
Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately the book is not listed on any of my other favourite online sellers and I refuse to deal with Amazon because of issues with them refusing to handle overseas orders from their third party sellers. I did a Google search for other seller and got bombarded with offers of creationist claptrap from the Hamster. I’ll keep an eye out in the hope it gets listed elsewhere.
If you like the book, leave a positive Amazon review. At the moment it’s being bombed by a creationist.
@8 Done.
Jackson and I will both welcome all your comments here as you read the book. Because its dismantling the AiG Answers books (4 covered in the 2 volumes) there’s lots on the Flood Geology claptrap, but there’s plenty of biological stuff that’s right up your alley: antievo screwups on the Lenski LTEE (disclaimer, Lenski was an early supporter of my TIP project), Tomkins’ palaver on the chromosome 2 fusion, and a section on ORFan genes and the weird 2016 paper Paul Nelson wrote with Richard Buggs on it.
Kohl follows me on twitter and jumps in to lob the same gibberish he put in the bad Rocks review. I find him a fine foil to play off of, reminding that the papers he cites actually support evolution. Kohl may have gone especially ballistic because I gave him a heads up that he was mentioned in the book (page 368 Info Box), here’s that part as a teaser for those wondering how Jackson & I tackle matters with the Source Methods guns blazing, relating to the alleged creationist designed “information” in pheromones:
In 2013 Kohl contended he’d worked out the secrets of those pheromones. The following year, Andrew Jones penned a short but caustic comment on Kohl’s claims in the same journal, noting “Kohl demonstrates a blatant disregard for established nomenclature” and “shows significant comprehension issues within his own paper and in external discussions of references he believes support his model.” Jones concluded “It was a mistake to let such a sloppy review through to be published.”
Based on our disconcertingly frequent and singularly unproductive online interactions with Kohl, we can only concur.
Kohl’s predilection for citing technical papers that he somehow thinks support his specially parsed creationist position (but which don’t), was out in force in a series of posts assailing theistic evolution. Kohl has this thing about light (like citing Natalia Achkar et al. 2018 on light deprivation), and in 2017 regarding a 2015 abiogenesis paper by Bhavesh Patel et al., he contended: “They showed that a single set of light-activated reactions gave rise to most of life’s buildings blocks simultaneously. Simply put, that fact refutes every aspect of neo-Darwinian nonsense. It also eliminates consideration of any theories proposed by ‘big bang’ cosmologies.”
That’s right, Kohl thinks a paper showing how a host of organic components are generated naturally refutes an evolutionary model that welcomes exactly that happening. Kohl explained nothing further on how he performed that gymnastic conclusion jump, nor how any of Patel’s findings undermined “big bang” cosmology.
In a January 2020 Tweet spurt, just as we were finishing up this book, Kohl invoked Mart Krupovic et al. 2019 “Integrated mobile genetic elements in Thaumarchaeota” as evidence that Eugene Koonin (a coauthor of the paper) had “totally reversed his position on neo-Darwinian evolution to meet Darwin’s ‘conditions of life’.” Which Koonin clearly had not, in that or any other paper.
Thanks, rjdownward! I look forward to applying my decidedly uneducated eye to your book. I love a sharp read.
They were accomplished using an aluminum slider-bar mounted to a tripod that I could shoot the same image using controlled lighting with, generating each eye’s view. It was a fun hack. The images were a pain to post-work since I had to do clean-up on 2 images but maintain the same adjustments so that nothing would pop off the picture. Even small pixel changes can wreck the effect………………www.Fox120.com