I first encountered PS a few years ago, when some comments were made here in relation to a review I’d written of Robert Shedinger’s mind-roastingly shallow book, The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms. Shedinger subsequently became one of those DI hangers-on, writing bizarre pieces for their blog and making hilarious arguments about such things as the theory of sexual selection being “heteronormative.” It seems that to Shedinger, contra Dobzhansky, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of postmodernist claptrap.
After his string of embarrassing gaffes in his first book (e.g., his remark that “imagined scenarios, not documented evidence” are all that support the evolution of mammalian ear ossicles from ancestral jaw bones), most of them unforced errors that resulted from his credulous trust in the things various DI personalities told him, one might have expected the man to skulk off quietly and wish he hadn’t tried to speak to topics on which he clearly neither knew nor was interested in learning anything.
Ah, but his friends at the DI have taught him more than pseudo-biology. They have taught him the rhetorical arts of creationist advocacy. And so Shedinger has decided that, incapable as he is at writing about actual biology, he’ll join in another DI stunt: the “let’s disparage Darwin” routine. His new book is “Darwin’s Bluff,” about Darwin’s unfinished work on evolution.
I haven’t quite finished the book, which came out only yesterday. But it really is quite impressive how little he actually found to work with. As Darwin-disparagement goes, this is small beer indeed. A great deal of ink is wasted on such things as Darwin being maybe a hypochondriac and maybe a malingerer. A great deal more is wasted on the idea that he was egotistic and eager to show off. More is wasted on claims that he may have been obstinate from time to time. Still more seems to be devoted to the idea that Darwin isn’t allowed to have developed his ideas in parallel with one another, but should have arrived at them in some sort of very specific sequence of a type that would be satisfactory to Robert Shedinger. And so on, and so on. I would say it is dreary and formulaic, but, honestly, it almost reads like a parody of Darwin-disparagement works: the condemnations are so thin and insubstantial that they have the effect of “praising with faint damn.”
We are all familiar with cargo-cult science. Since intellectual endeavor requires very little in the way of physical equipment, one might have thought there would never be such a thing as cargo-cult intellectualism. But this seems to be the stuff: all the outer appearance of thought, with none of the actual thinking inside. Wicker, such as the original cargo cults use, would be an improvement, but alas, there is not even a bit of interesting basketwork in the mix.
Is there an upside? Well, apart from various little shots here and there that clearly are meant to appeal to the hard-core fans of the DI, the one good thing one can say is that Shedinger does seem to have realized that he knows nothing about science and that the less he says about it, the better. What occurs neither to him nor to those DI fans, of course, is that if Darwin had been in the habit of fricasseeing babies, it would make no difference to the fact that evolution is the only game in town when it comes to understanding the origins of living diversity. Shedinger, of course, comes somewhat short of the fricassee allegation and merely seems to think that Darwin was the sort of person Shedinger would avoid at parties.
Is it pathetic? Yes. The question is: does its irrelevance mitigate, or aggravate, the pathos?
Amazon review to follow soon…
