EO Wilson’s wonderful book for other people

I have mixed feelings about EO Wilson’s book, The Creation(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s wonderfully well written, it’s on a subject I care about and that Wilson is clearly passionate about, and it’s trying to straighten out religious people on an important matter, but it’s also written directly to an audience of which I am not a part. I found myself alienated by the style, and despite my appreciation of his effort, simply wasn’t able to finish the book. I’m going to have to try and wade through those last few chapters sometime, though, when I’m feeling charitable enough to be able to cope with being addressed as a Baptist minister.

Still, though, I agree that Wilson deserves to be awarded a Green Book Award for The Creation—we can’t afford to wait for all the Baptists to commit apostasy before we draft them to support biodiversity. Let’s hope he wins many more, and especially let’s hope more religious organizations start acknowledging his ideas!

Monkey Girl

Oh, but I am dragging this morning. Have you ever done that thing where you start reading a book and you don’t want to put it down, and eventually you realize it’s late and you need to get some sleep, so you go to bed but you can’t sleep anyway so you get up and finish the whole book? And then you get a couple hours of sleep before you have to get up again? And your whole day is like trudging through molasses afterwards? That’s me.

The book is Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Edward Humes, and from the title I think you can guess why I’d find it engrossing. But it’s more than just a copacetic subject, though: this book reads like a novel. Even though I knew how it would turn out, I had to keep going.

It begins with a few science teachers in Dover, Pennsylvania trying to get the school board to approve the purchase of new textbooks and ends with the community trying to resolve the aftermath of Judge Jones’ decision—it’s a retelling of the key events in the Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover School District, et al. court case, with a few brief digressions to visit places like Kansas. Seriously, it reads like a courtroom thriller, with a ‘crime’ at the beginning, the gradual build-up as events spiral out of everyone’s control, culminating in a courtroom drama complete with revelatory rhetoric, Perry Mason-like traps set in the cross-examination, and last-minute discoveries of crucial pieces of information…and then, finally, a resoundingly unambiguous resolution, a complete victory for the good guys. This could be a movie.

The story has ‘villains’, too, but they aren’t quite as black and evil as you’d expect in a work of fiction—writing an accurate account of a historical event, as Humes has done, usually doesn’t give you much choice in your bad guys. They’re all human and trying to do what they think is honestly right. Unfortunately for them, the overriding message is that the trouble-makers here, the various bad actors in this drama, may be piously sincere, but they’re also astoundingly ignorant. Buckingham, Bonsell, Geesey, Dembski, and most of all, Behe emerge as grossly uninformed clowns who stroll out onto the stage of the courtroom to do the most entertaining pratfalls. The book ought to be mandatory reading for schoolboards across the nation, as a cautionary tale: the bottom line is that the Dover school board members who launched their district on this expensive, damaging journey were completely unqualified to have any say at all in science education, and worse, were completely incurious about trying to find out anything about this theory of evolution they were critizing, or most damaging of all, even about this Intelligent Design idea they were trying to peddle. Like the stories in most crime dramas, what eventually trips up the bad guys is their stupid mistakes, and the clever sleuthing of the heroes.

Oh, yes, there are heroes: the most obvious are Barbara Forrest, who gave meticulous testimony that demolished the creationist case; Nick Matzke, the eager young rascal who dug up the most damning pieces of evidence; and Eric Rothschild, who eviscerated the witnesses for the creationists, exposing their dishonesty and foolishness on the stand. There is a huge amount of sympathy for the people of Dover, in particular the teachers and parents who were watching this farce consume their hometown in a feast of mockery and laughter and waste.

We also meet lots of other characters. The prologue opens with the Reverend Jim Grove, Burt Humburg and Kent Hovind pop up near the end, Irigonegaray and Calvert square off, and Bill O’Reilly and George W. Bush speak up. The blogs even make an appearance; Red State Rabble does a cameo, as does the Panda’s Thumb, and I even appear as a fierce and furious “one-man wrecking crew” offstage. (That was a bit discombobulating. Imagine reading fixedly through a John Grisham novel at 1am and unexpectedly encountering your name in an aside. Really, it broke my attention for a moment and gave me a weirdly meta sensation. You probably won’t have that problem.)

I knew there was a first-rate dramatic story in the Dover trial, and Edward Humes has written it. Now I’m just waiting for the movie.

The Counter-Creationism Handbook comes to the masses!

Here’s some happy news for all you warriors against creationism: Mark Isaak’s Counter-Creationism Handbook(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), that wonderfully indispensable and entirely portable version of the Index to Creationist Claims, can now be purchased in paperback for less than $15. It was previously only available in a rather pricey but but extremely well bound edition. Next time you attend a talk by Ken Ham or Duane Gish or any of the common-as-dirt wandering creationists (or Kent Hovind, once they let him out of jail*), you’ll want a copy of this with you—teach them to fear the power of well-referenced and clear answers to their crazy objections.

*Say, do you think we ought to take up a collection and buy a copy for the prison library?

Ardea Skybreak teaches the controversy

Most books that teach the basics of evolutionary biology are fairly genteel in their treatment of creationism—they don’t endorse it, of course, but they either ignore it, or more frequently now, they segregate off a chapter to deal with the major claims. There are also whole books dedicated to combating creationist myths, of course, but they’re not usually the kind of book you pick up to get a tutorial in basic biology. In my hands I have an example of a book that does both, using the errors of creationism heavily to help explain and contrast the principles of evolutionary biology—it’s fascinating. This is what we should do if we were to “teach the controversy” in the classroom; it’s not what the other side wants, because teaching it honestly would mean the creationists would be the comic relief and endless whipping boy of the course, as they should be.

The book is The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Ardea Skybreak. It’s very good, but right up front I’ll mention its flaw, and one reason few scientists write books from this perspective: the frequent comparisons with creationism mean we’re also hoping the book will someday be hopelessly obsolete, if ever we can get those myths treated like the jokes they are. Scientists who are not engaged in the culture war are going to regard the book rather quizzically, since it does raise up nonsensical issues frequently; it really requires a peculiarly modern American context to make it all work. It’s one of those books that, the more it is read, the less relevant its approach would become.

But it does work in that context. Skybreak covers all the key concepts, but does so in a passionate, refreshingly aggressive way. She doesn’t hesitate to call a stupid idea stupid, and back up the charge with the evidence. If your interest in evolution isn’t simply academic, this is an excellent book to simultaneously inform and instruct, and supply the reasoning to deal with creationist foolishness. It’s also refreshing to see a book that isn’t timid about pointing out that fundamentalist religion is the source of the problem, and that isn’t afraid of offending creationists. It makes for an invigorating read, and I recommend it highly.

It’s not too late to order it for Christmas! It’s perfect for that person who wants to learn some solid biology, but also wants to be an activist for good science.

I do feel obligated to mention one thing that didn’t disturb me at all, but some readers might be concerned about. The book began as a series of articles in The Revolutionary Worker. There are a few hints of sympathy for socialist ideals in a few of the sidebars and endnotes, a sympathy I share (perhaps with significant reservations not held by the author), but otherwise, this is not an ideological work. Read it for the good science and the healthy slams against creationism without reservations about the source.

End of term textbook assessment

One of those things we professors have to struggle with every year is textbook decisions. Your standard science textbook is a strange thing: it’s a heavily distilled reference work that often boils all of the flavor out of a discipline in order to maximize the presentation of the essentials. What that typically means is that you get a book that is eminently useful, but isn’t the kind of thing you’d pick up to read for fun, and then we hand it to our undergraduate students, who may be in our class for only the vaguest of reasons, and tell them they must read it. Finally, of course, at the end of the semester most of the students take that expensive reference work down to the bookstore buy-back and get rid of it (not me, though! I’ve still got my undergraduate developmental biology text on my bookshelf).

The other thing that goes on is that as textbooks age, they get denser and denser. Gilbert’s Developmental Biology(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) is probably the best book in the field, and I certainly love my copy, but it’s also been accreting great stuff for years with many new editions. That’s good for me, but I worry that it may be too much for undergraduate students, most of whom want a general introduction and aren’t necessarily planning to go on to do anything specific in development. That’s why I went with Wolpert’s Principles of Development(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)—it’s good, but it’s also a little lighter and a little less intimidating than Gilbert’s.

The other thing I try to do is to toss in some supplemental reading: lighter fare with a narrower theme and, with any luck, a narrative and a more personal insight. That’s sometimes harder to find, but the advantage is that these are books you can imagine someone picking up at a bookstore and reading for enjoyment, so maybe even my students who go on to become doctors or dentists or lab techs or insurance salesmen might continue to browse the science shelf at the Barnes and Noble and keep up with the topic.

This year, I assigned Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and Zimmer’s At the Water’s Edge(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) as the supplemental reading (in past years, I’ve used Brown’s In the Beginning Was the Worm(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), but two is about the limit of what we can handle with discussing a few chapters a week; it might come back in the future). I’ve always felt a little bit of trepidation about using At the Water’s Edge, just because my course is on development, and I could imagine some student complaining that there’s an awful lot of paleontology and physiology in there—but personally, I think a broader integrative view is important, too.

Anyway, I asked my students their general opinion of the books this week, and I also asked them to post a brief comparison to the web. You can read them all here:

I was greatly relieved to learn that my students like the more popular science supplements. Carl will be relieve to learn that his book was the unanimous favorite of everyone in the class. Carroll’s book is good and more tightly focused on the subject matter of the course, but I think great writing wins every time.

Now next Fall I’ll be teaching a general neuroscience course. I’m thinking the two extra books I’ll be using are Soul Made Flesh(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) (Zimmer again! I’ll stick with a winner) and Weiner’s Time, Love, Memory(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll).

Genderification of Genre

Several of us here on scienceblogs have recently discussed the stereotypes of women who read science fiction. Syaffolee puts an interesting twist on it: what about men who read romance novels? She’s reporting on an article that says almost a quarter of the readers are men.

Nobody seems to be speculating on whether guys who read bodice-rippers are cuter than average.

There is an interesting idea there about the genre ghetto. I’ve read a few, years ago, and didn’t care for them much…and now I judge the whole genre by a fuzzy memory of a non-representative sample. Are there great authors I’m missing because I can’t get past the pink covers with bare-chested men on them?

Another genre I avoid is the cowboy novel (in my local library, cowboys and romance are probably the dominant forms of literature, too). I read some Louis L’Amour, also years ago, and was shocked at how bad the writing was, and haven’t gone back since.

Genre fiction seems to be a tool to lock in to a specific segment of the audience, but it’s also an effective way to lock out an even larger audience, because we’ve all got these biases.

Atheists and morality?

The Atheist Ethicist has written a book: A Better Place: Essays on Desire Utilitarianism.

When I was young I decided to try to leave the world better than it would have been if I had never lived. To do this, I had to know what ‘A Better Place’ actually was. Thus, I spent 12 years in college studying moral philosophy. This book contains a set of essays describing pieces of the answers I think I found. I argue that we cannot reliably find those answers in scripture, in subjective sentiment, or in evolved dispositions. In fact, those who look in these places for answers often leave the world worse than it would have otherwise been. Instead, I argue for ‘desire utilitarianism’ – the idea that morality involves using praise and condemnation to promote desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and to inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires. The details and my defense of those answers can be found inside this book. I hope that what you find inside will also inspire and help you, too, to try to make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been.

You can find a more detailed summary of the contents here—it looks interesting, but I have this intimidating stack of books I have to finish first, and my own mountain of writing to do. It’s on my list now, though! If anyone else has read it, let us know more about it; a rebuttal to the theist claim that there is no morality without god always benefits from another counterexample.

Grim Death awaits you, O my children

Any parents out there? I bet you know the children’s book, Goodnight Moon. I read it a few million times myself, with each kid as they came up through those preschool years, and I can still remember each page and how the little ones had to repeat each goodnight. Lance Mannion finds the strangest summary of the book, though—it’s a dark nihilist tract that portrays the inevitability of death.

Whoa. Heavy, man.

The other obsessive touchstone of my children’s early years was Pat the Bunny, where each page had a different texture glued on — a piece of sandpaper, a feather, some soft fluff — and the kids were supposed to touch it as we read it. I anxiously await the review that reveals this was actually naturalistic/materialist propaganda designed to inculcate the all-ness of the physical world into impressionable young minds.

I don’t remember much about my early reading habits, although I think Mike Mulligan’s Steam Shovel was in there, along with lots of Dr Seuss (One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish…oh no, he did warp my brain!) I know that once I got away from picture books, some of the earliest reading my father passed on to me were the Mars books by Burroughs, which perhaps explains my current fascination with many-limbed creatures and naked hotties who lay eggs.

Retroactive reinterpretation of kids’ books is fun!