Give the Countess a happy word — she’s had her first novel accepted for publication. She’s going to have to let me have a copy to review.
It’s in the erotic romance genre, which suggests there will be lots of tentacles, mucus-slick chitin, and numerous eyes, so I’m sure I’ll be the perfect audience for it. Oh, wait — maybe not? What else could it be about?
Behe has written a very bad book, so poorly supported that I don’t want to waste a lot of time taking apart every sentence, but I did want to say a few words about chapter 9, where he takes on evo-devo. I waited a bit because I knew that Sean Carroll was writing a review of the book for Science, and I expected he’d go gunning for chapter 9, too—but no, he didn’t. I guess he felt as I do, that since Behe’s fatally flawed premise was exposed in the first few chapters, there was little point to addressing his incompetent nit-picks later in the book. After all, when the construction crew has built a foundation of tissue paper in a pool of quicksand, by the time you get around to criticizing the roofers for using graham crackers for shingles, you’re about out of outrage.
I’ll briefly note the best parts of Carroll’s review, though, and I’ll try to gather up a few tired shreds of indignation and exasperation to critique some of the more ridiculous canards of Behe’s evo-devo chapter.
The various ID blogs are all atwitter over the new textbook the Discovery Institute is going to be peddling, Explore Evolution. I’ve seen a copy, but I’m not going to give an extensive review just yet. I will say that it’s taking a slightly different tack to avoid the court challenges. It does not mention gods anywhere, of course, but it goes further: it doesn’t mention Intelligent Design, either. The book is entirely about finding fault with evolution, under the pretext of presenting the position of evolutionary biology (sort of) together with a critique. The biology part is shallow, useless, and often wrong, and the critiques are basically just warmed over creationist arguments.
What it actually is is Jonathan Wells’ Icons of Evolution rewritten and reworked as a textbook.
Let me add a quick addendum to the previous post. People aren’t appreciating yet how hard-core a designist Behe actually is; one comment mentions that “apparently God is directly responsible for the creation of drug-resistant malaria.”
No. The Designer, who must have godlike powers, specifically created malaria itself. The drug resistance is the one thing that evolved.
Here’s something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts. C-Eve’s children died in her arms because an intelligent agent deliberately made malaria, or at least something very similar to it.
Got that? Plasmodium falciparum was explicitly and intentionally constructed to infect, make ill, torment, and kill human beings. He goes farther than most YECs—the parasite was not simply a product of corruption at the Fall, it had to be carefully modified, built, and released to carry out its designed job of causing suffering.
I peeked.
I was reading Michael Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution, and I was several chapters into it. All he seemed to be saying was that evolution has limits, limits, limits, and those limits are so restrictive that you can’t get from there to here, and he was repeating it over and over, in this tediously chipper narrative voice. Behe insisted that he accepted common descent, though, and acknowledged all this evidence that, for instance, chimpanzees and humans are related by common descent, while saying that it was impossible for them to have evolved naturally from one to the other. So I was getting awfully curious to learn how they were linked by descent while evolution was impossible, and I jumped ahead to the end of the book.
I want you all to know that I finished Michael Behe’s drecky The Edge of Evolution, and that I really will have a review up soon. Although, actually, I suppose I could put up a review right now:
Sucks.
But you probably want details, don’t you? So give me a little time to whittle this thing into shape. The book is awful throughout, and I’m more than a little embarrassed for Behe, who has just committed a whole pile of common creationist errors. Inane errors. Some errors so stupid I have to believe he’s intentionally trying to fool someone.
The Discovery Institute is so relieved — they finally found a textbook that includes a reworked version of Haeckel’s figure. Casey Luskin is very excited. I’m a little disappointed, though: apparently, nobody at the Discovery Institute reads Pharyngula. I posted a quick summary in September of 2003 that went through several textbooks, and showed a couple of examples where redrawn versions of Haeckel’s diagram were used. More recently, I posted a fairly exhaustive survey by Patrick Frank of the use of that diagram since 1923, which showed that it was rare, and that the concept of recapitulation was uniformly criticized. Really, guys, the horse of recapitulationism is dead. Biologists riddled it with bullets in the 19th century, and have periodically kicked it a few times to be sure. For Intelligent Design creationists to show up over a century later and flog the crumbling bones of a long extinguished horse and crow victory is awfully silly.
So how can you still find any vestiges of Haeckel’s work in textbooks?
If you have a subscription to New Scientist, you can read my review of Stephen Jay Gould’s latest book. “He’s dead!” you might say, but he does have a new book on the way, titled Punctuated Equilibrium(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll).
Actually, it’s not new — it’s simply chapter 9 of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) extracted and published as a stand-alone book. It tells you something about Structure that this actually works well!
If you don’t subscribe to New Scientist, the gist of the review is that it’s an excellent book, it’s actually much more digestible on its own, and that if you want a solid, meaty summary of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, this is it. It’s not a light book, though—there’s both a great amount of supporting data presented, and some weighty considerations of the implications of the theory.
When I checked my mailbox this morning, I discovered a common sort of delivery, a pamphlet from a publisher listing their releases in a specific subject. What was unusual is the subject of the list from Random House: Evolutionary Theory & Intelligent Design. Bleh — that dignifies ID far too much, and I was feeling a bit peevish about the bogus category. Then I opened it up, and it’s even weirder. The section titled “Evolutionary Theory” lists books like David Sloan Wilson’s Evolution for Everyone, a selection of books by Darwin, Darwin’s Ghost by Steve Jones, etc., all perfectly respectable stuff.
There is no section titled “Intelligent Design.”
Instead, there’s a section called “Evolution and the debate over science and religion.” It contains dreck — McGrath and Unwin and Hamer, for instance — and notably, Rocks of Ages by SJ Gould (which in my opinion is the worst book he ever wrote, and is ridiculous from page one onwards), and the only actual ID book, Creation by Grant Jeffrey. The latter is amusing because the ad copy claims that it contains “new information that supports the theory of Intelligent Design”, but the subtitle is “Remarkable Evidence of God’s Design.” I thought ID wasn’t a religious theory?
I hate to encourage Random House in their unwarranted promotion of ID with evolutionary biology, but I may have to pick up a few of their titles, so I can add them to my Shelf of Wretchedness, where I keep my little collection of the bad guys’ work.
Romney was asked to name his favorite novel, and what does he say? Battlefield Earth, by L. Ron Hubbard — that monstrous lump of pulp with the absurd Mary Sue plot. Admittedly, it wasn’t as bad as the Eye of Argon, but still … maybe it’s just that someone who can swallow the goofy mythology of the Mormon church is a little more open to the goofy mythology of the Church of Scientology founder (or ghost-writer). I would have at least expected him to have slightly higher literary standards, though.
