This has been a great year for ID. Yes, yes, some moaning minnies think otherwise, but I don't have any time for Mr Negative! Nor does Ms O'Leary, who helpfully reminds us of the explosion of recent work in ID. Her post, (which is an extract from the complete year in review on one of her blogs - I lose track of them all! ) tells us that just a few years ago, you could have reeled off the seminal ID masterworks from memory; now, however, "you need a library shelving cart and a budget to match" just to keep up with the controversy! It's a long post, and it certainly looks like an awful lot has been going on in ID's annus mirabilis, so let's look in some detail at her "Thoughts on recent books on the intelligent design controversy: Some ways to spend your holiday cash."
The first six paragraphs actually survey the ID research published in the past, both in books and, of course, in the much-less-old-materialist-media DVD format. Not quite on-topic, especially given the rapid rate of development in ID - who would want to spend their holiday cash on an ID book five or ten years old? It just wouldn't be current!
But now I'm being picky. Let's move on to the new stuff:
| Quote | Mike Behe's publisher, Free Press, has put out a tenth anniversary edition of Darwin's Black Box, featuring an Afterword, in which Behe reflects on the uproar that followed the 1996 publication and addresses some of his critics:
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... although the cultural dynamic is still playing itself out, a decade after the publication of Darwin's Black Box is stronger than ever. Despite the enormous progress of biochemistry in the intervening years, despite hundreds of probing commentaries in periodicals as diverse as The New York Times, Nature , Christianity Today , Philosophy of Science, and Chronicle of Higher Education, despite implacable opposition from some scientists at the highest levels, the book's argument for design stands.
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For a book that was supposed to sink out of sight amd catcalls, DBB did pretty well for Free Press (a Simon and Schuster division). Apparently, Behe is publishing a new book with Free Press in 2007, answering his critics in more detail. So contrary to rumors I have heard, FP is still interested in ID titles. (And they'd be fools not to be.) |
Weeell, that's a little sneaky. Behe's book is actually unchanged from ten years ago - and the afterword doesn't even address any of the scientific arguments made against irreducible complexity. So, I'm afraid this one can't count as a new ID publication.
| Quote | Recently, I created something of a flap over at the American Scientific Affiliation public list (which provides a wonderful window into the views and character of scientists who are anti-ID and - for the most part - also profess some state of Christianity). A number of people with time on their hands have expressed annoyance that I said that their poster child, genome mapper Francis Collins, is an intellectual lightweight, at least to judge from his recent book, The Language of God. I had previously only hinted at that. Collins' anti-ID take on the ID controversy sounds shallow and derivative, but that is certainly not the reason I regard him as a lightweight. After all, the ID controversy is not germane to his book, the key subject of which is his personal conversion to Christianity. In any event, I have spoken well of scientists such as Alister McGrath and Simon Conway Morris who are anti-ID but whose books certainly do not come across as lightweight.
No, the reason I think you should give Collins only to people who need to be reassured that a scientist can indeed be a Christian - but are not expected to think too hard about what that might actually mean - are
(1) He should have said way less about ID and found much more space for some questions directly relevant to his position, like the problem of patenting and commercialization of human gene sequences, a problem which caused his atheist predecessor Watson to walk out on principle. There is room here for a detailed ethical approach, one that will take us into the next few decades.
(2) As I noted elsewhere, he seems not to grasp that finding testable gene sequences, as he did for cystic fibrosis, mainly results in the abortion of babies who end up in the Medical Waste bucket because they are personally rejected by their parents for not having the right genes. Obviously, Collins has the right to do the research, but if he is going to walk away from a detailed examination of that issue and sing folk songs about making CF "history" instead, I cannot advise taking him very seriously. In other words, he talks about all kinds of issues, including origin of life and the universe, but not much about the issues that are germane to his position as a Christian physician and genome mapper.
(3) Most damaging, he never properly addresses the "evolutionary psychology" challenge to his claims about religious experience and the nature of the human being, mainly because he seems not to have updated his knowledge base from when C.S. Lewis was writing in the mid-twentieth century. Those challenges can, of course, be addressed and refuted, but Collins does not seem to be the man to do it.
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Now, this is fascinating! Francis Collins must be a silly little man - after all, both O'Leary and PZ agree on that! But still, I'm stretching to see what this has to do with ID. So, I'm afraid it has to be nul points on that one too.
Skipping some more not-taking-Collins-seriously,
| Quote | | Earlier this year, I reviewed Norbert Smith's Passive Fear: Alternative to Fight or Flight, detailing Smith's research into the way many animals such as alligators may choose to neither fight nor flee a threat; they may simply reduce their metabolic rate. Animal lovers will find Smith's work of considerable interest, as it shows that much may be learned from moving a little off the broad highway of conventional ideas about animals, like "fight or flight." |
I confess I didn't know this book - but, from reviews I've just read, it does seem to be influenced by ID. Someone more elitist than I might note that this book was self-published, and is not really peer-reviewed or anything - but that's hardly in the spirit of the season. So, the score stands at 1.
| Quote | | "Annoy a godless liberal; buy this book!", says Ann Coulter of Jonathan Wells' new The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. The book is in many ways an update of Icons of Evolution (2000), but the furore was a story in itself. The cover is much more fun, and the book uses sidebars, of which I am a great fan. |
I like sidebars too, Denyse! They help you keep track of those difficult, you know, words. And this is quite definitely a major ID publication, so you're on the board with 2 points!! It puzzles me a little that you don't mention Ann's marvelous Godless - which was, after all, Bill Dembski's major publication this year.
| Quote | | In a recent book, Darwinian Conservatism, Larry Arnhart argues that American conservatives should embrace Darwinism as their salvation. John West, a Discovery Institute senior fellow, argues the contrary in Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest. It would be a great idea to read both books together. Personally, I think the answer depends on what you mean by "conservatism." Currently, there seem to be about four different conservative currents: family values conservatism, free market activism, libertarianism, and old-fashioned toryism. The latter three can probably at least support Darwinism, but the family values activists not only oppose it, they contribute heavily to the fray. So promoting faith in Darwinism would probably split a conservative movement and deprive it of most of its foot soldiers. |
3. You've got 3.
| Quote | | Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt, also Discovery Institute fellows, have written a book, A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature , that set me thinking about my school days. I used to think I was so lucky, studying classical literature instead of stocking shelves in the family business (as one of my brightest classmates had to rush back home to do, after his father suddenly dropped dead). contrary to the self-serving memoirs of Sixties radicals, in the mid-60s, many of us assumed we were lucky to be in school and that classical literature had something to teach us. Actually, it did and does, but you would never know that from current courses in chimp footprint art, creative profanity, or whatever. This book links ID ideas with art and literature, offering some interesting observations on Shakespeare. |
That stings a bit, because I happen to have a degree in chimp footprint art, and now teach Creative Profanity at a Research I university. I think that was a little uncalled for, Denyse. But still, a point is a point, so you've got 4.
| Quote | | Lastly, in Darwin Strikes Back, historian of science Thomas Woodward advances the thesis that the mid-decade is a crisis point and that the battle is shifting in favor of intelligent design. He is likely right about the crisis point. For one thing, ID is spreading to many countries worldwide. One difficulty for people attempting to assess the field and determine who is winning is that contemporary popular media are nearly useless as sources of information. |
OK, that's 5 publications. That would stretch many libraries' acquisition budgets, especially when they're also paying exorbitant prices for scientific journals (in evolutionary biology, for example). And the librarians would certainly be grateful if they had a shelving cart on hand, once they all started flooding into the library!
So, all you sourpusses out there, let's just remember what a terrific year this has been -- and hope that our friends on the ID side can provide us with as much prestigious new research in the new year! |
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