The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

There are no more excuses. None.

The defining characteristic of all arguments with creationists is how damned ignorant they are. I’m sure many scientists have been stupefied into stunned silence when they first encounter these people; these advocated of creationism are typically loud and certain and have invested much time and effort into apologetics, but when you sit down and try to have a serious discussion with them, you quickly discover that their knowledge of basic biology is nonexistent. It’s worse than that. We’re used to freshmen entering our classes who don’t know much about the basics, and we can deal with that; these, though, are people with negative knowledge, whose brains are so packed with raging falsehoods that we have to struggle to overcome an unfamiliar hurdle.

For example, last year I got into a radio debate with a Discovery Institute creationist, Geoffrey Simmons. He had written a whole book for creationists arguing that there are no transitional fossils…yet he had never heard of any of the major fossil discoveries in the whale series, and seemed to have gleaned all of his understanding from a garbled misreading of a short Scientific American article.

It’s infuriating. You want to argue against evolution? Then you’d better have some elementary understanding of what evolution actually says. We’ve got the same phenomenon going on right now in one of the comment threads, where a particularly obtuse creationist, Sean Pitman, is raving about the inadequacy of natural selection. I wouldn’t mind, except that he’s a freaking idiot. This goes on day after day — creationists are mired in a pit of ignorance so deep and so black that it takes incredible patience to lead people out of it (and also, some rhetorical boot-stomping against the fools who are trying to drag others even deeper into the darkness).

I have no illusions that we’ll suddenly see a blossoming of enlightenment, but we now have tools to help us, a whole series of recent books that cover the basics. Everyone should read at least one of these, especially if you’re one of those clowns who wants to argue that there is no evidence for evolution. Read and understand, please; we’ve already got enough idiots who claim to have read them and didn’t grasp anything in them.

Read Donald Prothero’s Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Or Sean Carrol’s The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Or Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Or Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). These are all eminently readable, and are aimed at an audience that knows next to nothing about biology — they will quickly pull you up to a level at which you can at least ask intelligent questions. We even use Carroll’s book here at UMM in our freshman biology course, with the idea that it will introduce them to the concepts they should have gotten in high school, but most didn’t.

Now we have another entry in this collection: Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll).

READ IT.

Maybe you already know everything Dawkins writes about in this book, if you’ve got a degree in biology and have done a fair amount of reading in the field; there really aren’t any radical surprises here, just a lovely review of familiar facts. You should read it anyway. Realize that this is the level that you have to operate on if you want to discuss the science of evolution with the public. What this (and the other books I mentioned above) is is a primer on how to communicate the ideas of science to a wider audience. It’s an overview and a synthesis, and it takes each piece of evidence and makes them part of a narrative. This is science plus storytelling — it’s what you have to do.

Or maybe you’re a high school student who is interested in science, but all you’re aware of is that the dumbed-down curriculum in your school has stripped out all of the important content from your courses. Or maybe you’ve got a teacher who is promoting creationism in subtle or not-so-subtle ways in the classroom. Get this book: it will give you the preparation for college that the conservatives on your local school board want to deny you. It’ll also make you ten times smarter than your creationist science teacher, which always feels good.

Hey, and when you graduate, give that science teacher a copy as a parting gift. Or perhaps as a gift to the next class.

Or maybe you’re just a sensible layman who’d like to know more about this subject, but really don’t want to have to get a Master’s degree to understand what the author is talking about. You want something you can read on a quiet Sunday morning, before the football game starts. You want to learn, but you’re not about to invest a lot of sweat in the effort. This is your book. It touches lightly on a lot of lines of evidence, and explains them clearly. You too can become informed painlessly, and for a low, low price!

Like I said, there are no more excuses. If you want to argue for or against evolution, cretins like Ken Ham or Ray Comfort or Carl Baugh or Eric Hovind or any of the thousands of other wandering ranters against the Enlightenment are about to face a big problem: more and more of the people in their audiences are going to have read these books, and are going to be prepared to call them on their bullshit. The enemy of ignorance is education, and the creationists know that; it’s why there is so much effort by the religious conservatives to destroy public education. These are books that provide an end-run around the current deficiencies in science education in this one area, and what they ought to do is help people question the wanna-be theocrats. If they lie about evolution, if they are so transparently wrong about this one subject, maybe more people will wake up to the anti-science agenda so many are peddling in this country.

Dawkins’ new book is very much a grenade thrown right at the heart of the creationists. The God Delusion was a kind of wake-up slap to shake people into attention, and now The Greatest Show on Earth follows on to pound them into the ground with a fusillade of evidence backed up by sound theoretical explanations. It’s all beautifully explained, too, a kind of elegant overview of the various lines of evidence supporting evolutionary theory, with much of the discussion informed by an awareness of the kinds of denial creationists typically make.

Read it, please, please, please.

We need a vocal and informed group of activists in this country who understand the science, but we can’t demand that they all go to grad school. This book and others like it will help us build the intellectual foundation and the network of well-versed literate elites who can can address the rot at the root.

Cruel, cruel tease

If you’re like me, you are eagerly awaiting the release of Dawkins’ next book,
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and you’ve probably already put in your preorder at Amazon. It’s kind of like the anticipatory excitement for the Harry Potter books, only for hardcore geeks.

To whet your appetite, there is a short extract from chapter one available online. And alas, you have to wait until 22 September for the whole thing. We’ll have it read by the 23rd, right?

Want more? Here’s an excerpt from chapter two.

Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style

You know, I think communicating science is an extremely important enterprise, one that I think scientists need to work at more. That interface with the general public is poorly cobbled together and we often seem to be working in completely different directions, producing a lot of, well, chafing, where the citizenry is off supporting some lunacy like creationism or homeopathy and pissing us off, and we’re grumpily tossing off thunderbolts of scorn and pissing them off…and unfortunately, we do not have the benefit of the automatic deference given to such scoundrels as the clergy. I suppose we could aspire to indoctrinate the public into believing in our infallibility and saintliness, but it seems to me that learning how to communicate better would be easier. Not easy, of course, but at least achievable.

While I admit that scientists need to improve their communication skills, you may have noticed that I tend to be scathing in my reviews of pundits who try to tell us how to be better communicators. Too often they seem to have no understanding of how scientists actually think; they’re outsiders who don’t seem to understand our perspective while telling us to bow to the whims of non-scientists. They’re also fond of dispensing generic advice, like “get more education in communication!”, without actually telling us any specifics. It gets rather infuriating after a while.

And then there’s Randy Olson.

He can be very annoying, and even infuriating, too: his movies, Sizzle and Flock of Dodos, generate some interesting reactions from scientists, where “interesting” covers a range of emotions from bafflement to outrage. But the reasons he annoys are different from the way the communications experts and framers and media folk are exasperating: in his case, it’s because he actually is a real scientist, one who left the ivory tower to try and succeed in the fantasy land of Hollywood. He has more credibility and a more informed view of both sides of the argument, so his criticisms have a little more bite to them. He’s also a weird chimera, a kind of crocoduck of the science and media worlds, so he freaks us out a little bit.

Randy has a new book out, Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s another of that genre that nags scientists to be better communicators, but it’s a productive kind of nag. He tells us exactly what the public finds annoying about us, and is specific about what we should do differently.

It’s a short book with chapters with simple commandments: don’t be so cerebral, don’t be so literal minded, don’t be such a poor storyteller, and don’t be so unlikeable, and each chapter is illustrated with stories from his experiences in the transition from science to movie making (See? He’s practicing what he preaches, by trying to be a good storyteller.) There is plenty of material here to convince any empiricist that we need to change our attitudes.

For example, he gives the case of the Pew Oceans Commission report, a major scientific policy report that should have fired people up to protect our coastal resources. Most of you probably haven’t heard about it — I hadn’t — because scientists sunk a huge amount of effort into it, and then plunked it down on desks in Washington DC…and left it to speak for itself. They invested a grand total of 3% of their budget in marketing. Randy reports that one of the staff members said, at the completion of the study, that “I’m not sure we’ve even got enough money for coffee at the press conference.” Compare that to a movie that was released at about the same time as the report, Napoleon Dynamite: 96% of the budget was marketing. You’ve probably heard of Napoleon Dynamite. It doesn’t matter if you liked it or not…it raked in the cash at the box office.

There are lessons worth learning throughout the book; one of them is one I’ve known for a long time, that science is at odds with popular culture because it is largely an exercise in constant criticism, and people hate being criticized. We encourage a culture of negativity, because it works for us…which means, of course, that I can’t simply let the book slide by with a happy two thumbs up. I must be such a scientist. One of the things Randy seems to be oblivious to is the fact that character and personality are an essential part of the style element he is endorsing, and scientists can capitalize on their particular, peculiar, aggravating set of common characteristics. He tells his story of being the scientific dufus in the company of artists; the guy who takes things too literally, who has strange stories, who can obsess over odd stuff that no one else cares about, and who has enough character that his friends can talk about “being a Randy” and everyone knows exactly what they’re talking about. He writes as if this was a problem, and I can sympathize with some of his embarrassing moments…but it was a strength. He sounds like he was one of the interesting people in his group.

So I end up feeling a bit torn. He’s telling us “Don’t be such a scientist”, and it’s true that there are many occasions when the scientific attitude can generate unnecessary obstacles to accomplishing our goals. At the same time, though, I want to say “Do be such a scientist”, because it’s part of our identity and it makes us stand out as unusual and, like Randy, interesting, even if it sometimes does make us a bit abrasive. But, you know, some of us revel in our abrasiveness; it’s fun.

It’s definitely a book worth reading, even if what I’m saying is that a better title would be “Be Conscious of When You Are Being Such a Scientist and Modulate Your Behavior According to the Situation”. But then I’m being such a scientist, and his choice of a title is a bit snappier. Probably more marketable, too.

You can find more about the book on the official website.

Another review of Unscientific America

As is his habit, Jason Rosenhouse has begun a long review of Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s book. It won’t be giving too much away to say that he gives it a “Mixed, but generally negative” review. I know M&K will only present the positive side on their site (as I’m only going to emphasize the negative), but overall I think “Mixed, but generally negative” is the growing consensus about their book.

I know Mooney has the ability to put together a solid story, as he showed in The Republican War on Science and Storm World — it’s too bad he chose to go the shallow and substanceless route in this book. I hope he does better in his next.

Unscientific America: it’s personal!

I feel obligated to reply to Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s latest complaint, but I can’t really get motivated. Their argument has become so absurd and so petty that it seems a waste of time anymore.

All they’ve done is confessed that they are on a personal vendetta: they are very upset with me, they admit that my existence is a central reason that they left the scienceblogs network, and you can just feel the roiling resentment that people dare to criticize them, persistently and at length…and it’s all my fault.

I did not address their scapegoating of PZ Myers and Pharyngula in my reviews of the book because it was a palpably strange bit of personal antagonism on their part, and I confined my disagreement to the poverty of their other arguments. It is interesting to see my assessment of the anti-me sentiment now confirmed. It’s unfortunate, too. Their book is very thin on ideas and evidence, and it detracts from it further that they spend two chapters whining about people who have annoyed them. It’s unprofessional, and it reveals their own poor comprehension of how the web works. This petulant bravado, for example, is simply unreal.

For too long, people in the science blogosphere have tiptoed around Myers. After all, he can send a lot of angry commenters your way. And he, and they, are unrelenting in their criticisms, their attacks, and so on. Just read our threads over the last week—it’s all there, the vast majority from people who have not read our book and do not seem inclined to do so.

But we’re not afraid of Myers or his commenters. They can leave hundreds of posts on our blog-we readily allow it—but our book will be read by a different and far more open-minded audience. It’s already happening. And that audience will largely agree that Myers’ communion wafer desecration was offensive and counterproductive, and that more generally, he epitomizes the current problems with the communication of science on the Internet.

I have not noticed any tip-toeing around me at all — it is simply bizarre to argue that people are afraid to criticize me because something horrible might happen: they might get criticized back. That’s all I’ve got, after all: I do not have clout in government or science funding agencies, I do not have an army of ninjas, people can howl all they want about me — and they do! — and all that will happen at worst is they’ll get a brief flood of traffic and a bunch of comments on their blog. This is something most bloggers want. To claim bravery because they aren’t intimidated by the possibility that I might link to their articles is damned silly. And I have read over the last week’s worth of comments on their blog: it’s a bunch of people on the internet arguing over both sides, and many of the angriest (and dumbest) are Mooney’s own defenders.

They really don’t get it. I have no power except as a focus for a lot of like-minded people; if I were to vanish, those people would still exist, and would still be hammering at the foolishness that Mooney and Kirshenbaum emit. There is a growing minority in this country, this Unscientific America that Mooney and Kirshenbaum write about, which is fed up with the false privilege granted to religion, that wants science to have a more prominent role, that is willing to be outspoken and critical, and that is more than a little exasperated with the tepid apologists for the status quo who believe that making nice with the Unscientific part of America is the solution. That minority wants a voice, and they will have it whether I’m part of it or not. They are also our only hope for changing Unscientific America. Ultimately, the only way we can get a Scientific America is by challenging and criticizing the proponents of anti-science and un-science…and all the Colgate twins can do is protest in horror at anyone who wants to rock the boat.

This isn’t a problem with the communication of science on the internet, it is a strength. We have a platform from which we, with many voices, can roar. Use it, don’t muffle it.

Ultimately, though, the problem with their book, the one they’ve avoided despite the fact that I brought it up in my review, reiterated it in my response to their ‘rebuttal’, which Jerry Coyne discussed briefly, and that Ophelia Benson skewered with some pointed questions, is that they are thin on substance. Bellyaching about me personally is entertaining and has brought them some short-lived blog traffic, but all that is is a distraction from what ought to be the topic of conversation: how do we get the public to think scientifically and become better informed about real world matters, and make decisions rationally? I push one obvious strategy: the erosion of a major source of delusional, sloppy thinking, religion. I do not pretend that this is the only useful strategy, however. What Mooney and Kirshenbaum could have done was provide a practical alternative, with details and specific suggestions that we could then productively wrangle over. They have not. That’s the most obvious deficiency of their responses so far (other than their frequent distortions of what others and they themselves say), a strange reluctance to actually discuss what is in their book. I’ve already spilled the beans about their Grand Solution, so they might as well try to talk about it.

I predict that they won’t.

Unscientific America: still useless

Mooney is at it again, scrabbling madly to refute my criticisms. It’s another ho-hum effort.

He claims he did spend some effort criticizing the overt anti-science forces in our country — only it was in his previous book, not this one. No, that doesn’t rebut me at all: in a book that purports to be discussing problems and solutions to the science and society divide, there ought to be some effort made to prioritizing the issues, even if it means revisiting points made in other books. Unfortunately, the message here is that we have three problems: the bumbling scientists who don’t know how to communicate, and the malicious atheists, who are hurting the cause of science education, and the sell-out media. You don’t just get to pretend that your readers have all read your other books.

He then compounds the problem by answering my accusation that he did not deal with the root causes of the problem by simply saying “did too”. Maybe he doesn’t think religion is as serious a problem as I do…but judging this book by its content, he apparently doesn’t think it has anything to do with the unusual American disregard for science.

Further handwaving ensues in his defense of the media. Apparently, his own words that label factual accuracy as “mere”, is taken out of context — which he justifies by pointing out a comment by Dawkins that the natural world is fascinating, and doesn’t need human drama. As I said before, accuracy is not the enemy of drama, so this is a silly and pointless argument. Sure, make fun, entertaining, exciting movies. They just don’t need to be imbecilic to be good.

Ah, but the real kicker here, the one that clearly is annoying Mooney most, is my accusation of uselessness against his book, that it offers no solutions at all. He says there are, there are! He says it several times, in several ways!

There are solutions in each chapter of the main body of the book, broken down by sector-politics, media, entertainment, religion. And then there is the grand solution in Chapter 10-which emerged from our collaboration, and which we don’t think either of us would have come up with on our own. So far as we know, it really is new in its particular way of analyzing the academic pipeline and finding, in it, a solution to our problems at the science-society interface.

Alas, if you read his rebuttal, he won’t actually tell you what those solutions, or even that Grand Solution, are. It’s very strange; it’s as if he’s afraid that if he even briefly summarizes what his proposals are, you won’t need to buy his book, so they’ve got to be kept secret. His book is apparently like an M. Night Shyamalan movie — if you’re told what the little twist is before you go to see it, all you’ve got left is a rather slow moving, boring story that is plodding tediously towards the big reveal. Come on, grow up. If it’s a substantial idea, it’s the explanation and the details that make your book worth reading, not the one-liner gloss on your solution. You can give it away, it really won’t hurt your book sales. And if it does, that suggests right there that you aren’t offering much.

Well, I’m going to do it. I’m going to spill the beans. I am going to give you the Grand Solution that Mooney and Kirshenbaum present in chapter 10, the one that is so new that neither of them could have come up with it on their own.

Here it is. Ready?

Here’s a summary of chapter 10: seven pages laying out the many problems that face people who want to pursue a career in science, from uninspiring teachers in grade school to the fierce competition for university positions. All true, of course, nothing at all novel here. What is their solution, presented in the final three pages? Create more well-rounded scientists, more Renaissance scientists, more scientists with specific training in communications skills, so that when they don’t manage to land that academic position, they’re still prepared to go out into society and act as ambassadors for science.

Really, that’s it. All of it. That’s their solution.

How nice.

I’m all for it. I teach at a small liberal arts college, and there’s absolutely nothing new at all in the sentiment expressed by Mooney and Kirshenbaum. It’s actually something of a letdown and rather dismaying that they think it “really is new in its particular way of analyzing the academic pipeline”. Excuse me for being thoroughly un-dazzled, but I think they could have talked to any of a few hundred thousand academics and they would have told them the same thing.

It’s also a little insulting.

You know, the majority of my cohort that entered graduate school with me are not currently employed in academic positions. Mooney and Kirshenbaum know this, they outlined the general state of affairs in the first 7/10ths of this chapter. Yet, somehow, they aren’t sitting around panhandling for Thunderbird money down at the bus station — they are gainfully employed, and they are already smart, well-educated people with considerable depth and breadth to their knowledge and marketable skills, and no, none of them (as far as I know) are now anti-science cranks out there fighting the system. They already are ambassadors for science in our culture. They vote for pro-science candidates, they support public schools, and some of them even have jobs in government, industry, and communications where they are working in their own way to better the country…and many of them are certainly more effective at what they do than I am.

It’s very strange. Mooney and Kirshenbaum say their “solution” will “alleviate pressure by opening new pathways for pent-up scientific talent to filter out into society.” I had no idea that post-docs and graduate students who left the academic track were “pent-up” somewhere! I do hope someone lets them out of their cage soon.

Now there really is a problem, that all of you readers who have gone through grad school know. There is a lot of social pressure that is piled up on you to reinforce the notion of a hierarchy of science careers. The very topmost rung is the research professor at a Research I university, getting big grants and running a big lab with a team of grad students and post-docs; anything less is regarded as something of a failure. It can make it very hard to move on to something like these Renaissance jobs Mooney and Kirshenbaum want to promote. You can also see that same attitude resounding throughout the comment threads on their own site, where being, for instance, a teaching professor at a small liberal arts college or, oh no, a mere popularizer of science are the marks of a lesser being.

I think it would be absolutely wonderful if science students could also value the noble profession of teaching, or think that communicating well was a most excellent and useful skill that they could acquire by writing and speaking throughout graduate school. Or if they felt empowered to use their knowledge for public outreach in film-making, or in working as an activist for environmental causes, or finding a job in the pharmaceutical industry that would help establish new medicines. I know I felt that way, as did enough of my peers who went on to such professions. However, nothing in their book explains how to make such an attitude occur more frequently, or even why we should expect a major change in the culture if something that is already happening, Ph.D. students finding work outside of academia narrowly defined, should continue to happen.

So, bottom line, still useless. The fact that Mooney seems so determined to hide his Grand Solution from public attention testifies to the fact that he’s offering some mighty thin gruel in his book.

Oh, but I should mention where Mooney shines, just to be fair. He’s written a rather shallow book with negligible substance, but he has managed to get articles in Salon that tells us we need to “figure out where the real blocks to accepting science are” (but fails to tell us what they are) and another in Newsweek that claims that atheists are “hurting their own cause”. Perhaps self-promotion ought to be high on the list of their proposed Renaissance curriculum.

Coyne on Unscientific America

An important tip to book authors who want to decry the ability of others to engage a consensus: don’t alienate the literate, thinking part of your readership yourself. Mooney and Kirshenbaum make much of the fact that those wicked “New Atheists” are going to drive away support for science, a fact not in evidence, but they seem oblivious to the fact that their recommendation to hush up a significant element of the public voice of science is going to alienate us, and it’s working to bite them in the ass right now. In other words, Jerry Coyne’s review of their book is online.

I’ll start with my overall opinion of the book, which is that it is confused, tendentious, evanescent, and preachy.  It is a blog post blown up to book length.  Yes, there are some useful parts, in particular the emphasis on science communication and the need to reward those who are good at it. But these solutions are hardly new; indeed, I could find little in Unscientific America that has not been said, at length, elsewhere. And what is new—the accusation that scientists, in particular atheist-scientists, are largely responsible for scientific illiteracy—is asserted without proof.

I am still endlessly amazed at how proponents of congenial communication, like Mooney and Nisbet, manage to so consistently piss off the targets of their discussions while trying to appease the people who care least about good science.

Unscientific America, the gift that keeps on giving

Mooney and Kirshenbaum have been so stung by my criticisms of their book that they have launched a multi-part rebuttal to my review. Here’s my reply to their reply.

  1. We didn’t get personal, and we didn’t attack atheism in general! Hmmm. Here’s a sampling of what they do say: “Myers’ actions were incredibly destructive and unnecessary”. I “set the cause backward”. New Atheists believe that “religious faith should not be benignly tolerated”. The “New Atheists” are “nasty bullying”. They’re “shrill”. In last year’s voting for best science blog, I was the “devil’s choice”. Blogging brings out the “loud, angry, nasty, and profanity-spewing minority”. When he refers to Pharyngula, he refers to it as a “science” blog — in quotes. It’s the “most alienating” of the blogs.

    Sure, you can call it just “criticism”. But the peculiarity here is that the only people he targets are me particularly, and “New Atheists” in general. If you’re making an objective case for a genuine problem, just hammering on one example is peculiar. If I’m representative, you’d think he’d marshal lots of examples; if I’m an outlier, he’s building a case on an exception. Which is it?

    But the biggest problem here is the uselessness of the critique, that word I used before to summarize his whole book. He provides no solutions in chapter 8, other than a general complaint that the “New Atheists” are bad. What does he propose to do about Pharyngula? Shut it down? Others will take its place. He doesn’t seem capable of recognizing that it is popular because it fills a popular niche.

  2. Myers doesn’t grasp our point about Pluto! This is true. I don’t. I spelled out my complaints about this section in my previous review.

    Well, Chris and Sheril, what should the astronomers have done? Should they have had a binding referendum delivered to the public to get their say? Are there other scientific matters that should be decided by popular vote? (Let’s put the truth of evolutionary biology up for decision in a poll!) Should scientists take the time to explain with a little wit and humor and sound scientific reasoning why they made that decision? If so, they missed the boat: they should read Neil deGrasse Tyson’s The Pluto Files for exactly that. How about some discussion about exactly why they think that failed?

    Those questions have been ignored. The Pluto section of the book is available online, go ahead and look. You won’t find them saying anything about what ought to be done in the future, or where the astronomers went wrong. Again, useless.

  3. Myers fails to say what the point of the whole book was! Exactly. What is it? I said the first chapter was symptomatic, and it was. Mooney and Kirshenbaum grumble about those insensitive scientists and those uppity atheists, but their proposals are either absent or so general as to be pointless, like…let’s give more media training to scientists! I agree that would be a good idea, but it’s not going to resolve any of the issues they are so bitter about.

    Do they really think that will address their complaints? I’ve had no media training at all. Imagine how nuts it would drive Mooney if I were slick and polished and skilled at using a variety of media, because it wouldn’t change my message at all!

  4. Richard Dawkins is no Carl Sagan! Nope, he’s different. Woo hoo. So? That’s just the thing: we are not going to clone Carl Sagan, or raise him as a zombie. What we’re going to have is a collection of voices: a Dawkins, an Attenborough, a Tyson, a Suzuki, a Miller, and many others, all with different tones, different emphases. My objection here is that instead of diversity, Mooney and Kirshenbaum appear to want only one voice, and it’s got to be one that is conciliatory and deferential to religion and the public opinion in general.

Once again, I am unimpressed — they seem to think that I am a significant problem here, which misses the point. They’re supposedly writing about an American problem of a lack of scientific literacy. If they think I’m the root (or perhaps, the flower, even) of the problem, you can tell that they’re going off on the wrong track already.

But most importantly, they don’t answer the questions about the substance of their book. What next? Where are the answers in their book? If they really want to dig into the substance of the solutions they provide, they should try answering Ophelia Benson’s questions. I predict he won’t even try; they’re much harder.

Ultimately, this whole exchange illustrates the failure of Mooney/Kirshenbaum’s arguments. The demotion of Pluto, the rise of the “New Atheism”, PZ Myers, and blogging are all recent phenomena — they do not deal with the causes of the disconnect between society and science, and treating them is a distraction from dealing with the real problems. This book is more like a collection of poor rationalizations for complaining about stuff they don’t like than a serious and scholarly attempt to address a significant social problem. To useless, I must also add the adjective lightweight.

(I do have to wonder if they are going to feel compelled to make a reply to my reply to their reply to my review. And how are they going to cope with other critical reviews that will be coming down the pipeline? This could get fun!)