That recent D’Souza article is a rich vein of lunacy that I have to tap once more. D’Souza has additional tools to woo conservatives in his toolbox: how about the naturalistic fallacy?
Who do you think the brilliant minds at the Discovery Institute would recruit to review Sean Carroll’s new book, The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)? Somebody with some knowledge of biology, perhaps, some faint whiff of respectable biological credentials, who might be able to actually assess (and in the DI’s case, cunningly distort) the science in the book? They’ve got so many legitimate scientists to choose from!
So of course, the duty falls on Casey Luskin’s slender, slippery, snake-like shoulders.
Oh, man, it is an awful review. It goes on for a tedious 15 pages, carps on Darwin and Darwinism 47 times, and right from the starting gate is one long whine that Carroll is preaching Darwinism as a religion (here’s a wonderfully representative example of the kind of evidence Luskin uses: Carroll ‘interestingly always capitalizes the term “Nature”‘ [emphasis in original]. Damned by a convention of the English1 language!), all in the most plodding prose. These are words that must be read in a nasal monotone for their full impact, I suspect.
In case you haven’t been following the vivisections of Wells’ horrid book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, I thought I’d mention that there’s more online at the Panda’s Thumb. Wells’ book is a collection of anti-science propaganda, brought to us by those friendly frauds at the Discovery Institute and Regnery Publishing, and the crew at The Panda’s Thumb are slowly working their way through it, documenting the falsehoods, the distortions, the poor scholarship, and the generally atrocious crapitude of the book. It’s great fun!
The critiques of Chapter 3 (developmental biology), Chapter 9 (the genetic code and information), and Chapter 16 (American Lysenkoism, and this chapter was such a mess of lies that it spawned two additional posts: the distortions of the Ohio situation and Wells’ legal dishonesty are treated separately) went up early, but now various contributors have stuck the knife in Chapter 7 (who needs evolution?), Chapter 10 (irreducible complexity), and Chapter 15 (the war on Christianity). There are only about ten more stalls to muck out in this Augean stable. They’ll be done eventually, but one thing is certain: the fellows of the Discovery Institute will have spewed out more crap by the time it’s done.
The ongoing dissection of Wells’ The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design continues, with two new disembowelments on display.
Andrea Bottaro rips up Chapter 9, “The Secret of Life”. In this one, Wells makes the tired old argument that only intelligent agents can create information, therefore informational macromolecules must have been created by intelligent agent(s). It’s also got a sharp, succinct critique of the Sternberg affair, in which Stephen Meyer smuggled an ID paper into Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. (Don’t ask what those two subjects were doing together in this chapter. Wells is not big on logical organization.)
Mark Perakh takes on Chapter 16, “American Lysenkoism”. You can guess the subject from the title: the Darwinists are persecuting the proponents of heterodoxy, confining them to the gulags of right-wing think tanks, like the Discovery Institute, and not allowing them to be represented in the universities. Yeah, right. We also don’t let flat-earthers get professorships in geology.
Expect more in the near future. We divvied up the chapters a few weeks ago, and everyone is working through them at their own pace (for the record, mine was ready to go a week and a half ago, and I held off to give a few people a chance to catch up—doesn’t everyone whip out a few thousand words in a few hours?), and they’re getting released as they’re done. When they’re all organized, it’s going to represent a very substantial rebuttal of some extraordinarily shoddy scholarship.
One of the things all of us are noting that may not get communicated well in the rebuttals is how much is wrong in each of Wells’ chapters. We’d have to write a whole book for each chapter just to explain all of his foolish errors and dishonest cheats, and what we’ve all been electing to do (by necessity!) is to focus on just a few examples and shred those. This is a book that would be slashed to bits by competent reviewers—I have a growing sense of amazement that it got published at all. But then, all I need to do is note that it was put out by Regnery, where incompetence and lies are a prerequisite for publication.
He’s planning to debate Jonathan Wells…on Fox radio. I guess we can only hope the host, Alan Colmes, is a little less passive than Flatow was in the Mooney/Bethell debate, but we can guarantee that Wells is as ignorant and foolish as Bethell.
I am going to have to turn my attention soon to Wells’ new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), but for two things: 1) The New Semester! Is! Flying! into my Face! for the next few weeks, and 2) Wells is a tawdry slug of a writer, who just thumps out lie after lie about the state of modern biology, and since he supposedly was trained in developmental biology, he really pisses me off with his poor scholarship.
For example, here’s his description of chapter 3 of his new book (this will look familiar: he’s clearly rehashing his old, much debunked book, Icons of Evolution.)
