Books must be read

Some of you have noticed I’ve irked Stuart Pivar with my review of his old book, Lifecode, and as he’s been quick to tell me, he has made substantial revisions in his new version, which has the same name. Anyway, he has left comments

here,

here,

here,

here, and

here, and I’ve got a mailbox full of his frantic hallooing, some of which claims I “have transcended the barrier separating protected commentary from libel.” (Now, now, Stuart — threatening reviewers with lawsuits is not a good way to get a positive review, and also tends to compromise what good reviews you do get. I’ll pretend it wasn’t said.)

He promised to ship me a new copy by the next day last Friday; I’m sorry to say it isn’t here yet, but no fault of Stuart’s — I coulda told him the stagecoach from Sauk Center only comes to Morris twicet a week, and it ain’t never on a Sunday, and the driver always gets drunk in Glenwood on a Saturday night. I’m sure it’ll be here tomorrow, though, and I’ll be sure to read it as soon as possible with the same critical diligence as the last one and put up a new review.

Stuart also threatened promised to send copies to all of my biology colleagues here at UMM. I’m sure they will be thrilled.

Alas, though, all these incoming books remind me that I have a stack sent to me by publishers pending review, and I’ve got about eight at once that I’m trying to read, one for each tentacle, and I’ve got to do something to diminish the pile. I have set myself a goal therefore: this is going to be Book Review Week. I am going to finish at least one a day and put up a review here — five books in five days. I think I can do it if I just get disciplined and apply both eyes to one book at a time until it’s absorbed, and there are a couple that aren’t too weighty and should be readily digestible.

Lifecode Mk II will be one of them, I promise.

Lifecode

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I’ve been reading a strange book by Stuart Pivar, LifeCode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which purports to advance a new idea in structuralism and self-organization, in competition with Darwinian principles. I am thoroughly unconvinced, and am unimpressed with the unscientific and fabulously concocted imagery of the book.

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Behe’s The Edge of Evolution, part II

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.

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“Explore Evolution”—displacing good science with ‘dumbed-down’ creationism

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.

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Behe’s Edge of Evolution, part Ia

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.

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Behe’s Edge of Evolution, part I

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.

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Brain melting…

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.

Return of the Son of the Bride of Haeckel

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?

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Punctuated Equilibrium in a new (sorta) book

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.