Great bathroom reading?

I have mixed feelings about this: a first-edition copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species has been discovered, which is, of course, great — I do wish I had the pocket change to drop £60,000 to buy it for myself.

The weird part is that it was found in the guest bathroom of an old house in Oxford. Apparently, someone thought the Origin was perfect light, occasional reading for visitors attending to certain private physiological functions, which is nice, if a little trivializing. It’s a bit odd, though, that they put the book there and no one seems to have bothered to notice it for 150 years. I am really curious to know what other books were on that toilet shelf — I’m imagining guests ducking into the bathroom for a few minutes of managing the necessaries, scanning the shelf for a little light reading to pass the time, and skipping over the rare and valuable antique Darwin volume to read…what? A couple of scrolls of the lost plays of Aeschylus, the handwritten manuscript copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and a copy of the Arzhang, the mysterious holy book of the Manicheans? Or was it a yellowed copy of the Daily Mall, a couple of dog-eared editions of the Readers’ Digest, and last week’s TV Guide? This must have been a very curious and neglected bookshelf!

Ray Comfort is a parasite

In this case, it’s unintentional, though. His mangled version of Darwin’s Origin is currently the #1 result of searches for the Origin on Amazon. It’s not there honestly, though: it’s because Amazon’s indexing system has a deep flaw. It doesn’t seem to actually track which edition is the most popular…it just gladly gives Comfort’s edition full credit with every other edition of the same book. This also means that the star rating for the Comfort edition is elevated; he’s getting a leg up by appropriating all the reviews for all the other editions.

Here’s a video to explain the situation.

Amazon needs to fix this, and fix it soon. Otherwise, I predict, every single lousy creationist out there is going to grab any out-of-copyright, reputable science book out there and come out with their own edition by slapping a dishonest foreword on it, and get a free ride on the reputation of the original authors.

I’ll also add that if Ray Comfort has the tiniest scrap of integrity in his itty-bitty body, he’ll be leading the charge to demand that Amazon give credit where it is due and sort out their scrambled ratings system.

Dawkins’ book is for fence-sitters AND non-fence-sitters!

The latest online edition of Seed Magazine (you all know it’s gone to an all-digital format, right? You should be reading it regularly) has an interview with Richard Dawkins on his new book — it focuses on the potential for the new book to persuade people to accept the idea of evolution.

I think it does a good job of that, too. They asked me to write a little commentary on the book, and I think it has even wider possibilities. It’s so readable and clear, I want some of those die-hard creationist fanatics to read it. Really read it, and understand it. I don’t expect them to be converted at all — they’ve drunk too much kool-aid to be cured — but jebus, I’d like to see some challenging arguments from the creationist camp, rather than these rehashed exercises in idiocy they always drag out. If they want to argue against evolution, that’s fine…but please, argue against evolution, not these freakish fever dreams of crocoducks and linearity and Hitler in a lab coat.

PZ Myers

Also…they’ve made me an icon! I wish I were that good looking.

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.