Amazon review – somewhat edited from the above – is now up:
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Regarding the bears and whales:
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Great read. And it takes me back to Amazon Forum threads of long ago. (How many years ago was that?) I wonder how Dr. Janis, Dr. Levin, et al are doing these days. I miss reading their posts.
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Excellent piece! I hadn’t seen that before. I have been surprised at how much the creationists love this particular passage, as it really is such a reasonable and inoffensive bit. And I keep seeing, again and again, people who really think it’s been offered as a phylogenetic hypothesis that whales evolved from bears rather than as an illustrative thought-example.
Ah, I do miss those threads! I think that what probably happened, after years of moderation of those by Amazon staff, is that The Orange Peril got elected and the amount of the hostility on political books got to be more than Amazon wanted to handle. But it was a shame that they just took out the axe and not only stopped comments, but also deleted (well, they are probably still there, hidden on some server or other) all of the existing comments.
I see Christine Janis from time to time, when I visit England or she visits Seattle; she’s well and enjoying life back in the mother country. Sat down with David Levin last April and toured his lab – he, too, is well and happy, though he’s lost most of his interest in debating creationists.
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And now appears to have been deleted.
It’s back now, with edits. Amazon’s behavior is sometimes a bit unpredictable.
What surprises me is that the usual flood of positive reviews from DI fans is absent. I’m not sure there’s as much enthusiasm for this stuff as there was a few years ago.
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I can see it fine here in Tucson
I can see it.
I found it easily. In fact it’s the only review. Six other people gave the book 5 stars, but none of them said anything. What could they say?
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Worked for me.
It actually did disappear for a while. Amazon has a lot of strange habits. They review all of these before they are posted to the site, but sometimes they’ll take down something that was previously approved. When that happens, a few edits to target the likeliest causes will usually suffice, and then it ordinarily stays up long-term.
Yeah, there’s not a lot to say. “I always knew Darwin was a poopyhead, but this proves it!” But usually that doesn’t stop 'em. There should be at least one review up there by now that says that this is finally the one book that will change everything.
DI seems to be running out of purportedly-substantive works, and a lot of the recent stuff is akin to this: historical/philosophical material written by people who are way out of their depth, with nothing in it that actually bears upon biological evolution. The last one of theirs I reviewed, I think, was Neil Thomas’s book “Taking Leave of Darwin,” a merry romp across Lucretius, Mary and Percy Shelley, and various other things, signifying nothing.
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Thank you, Puck, for another great review. I first ran across you on Amazon where you were reviewing Stephen Myers’ “God Hypothesis” travesty. It was only recently that I learned that you, like me, are a former litigator. (32 years for me) I think my favorite pan of yours’ is Neil Thomas’ “Leaving Darwin.” Just the ridiculous verbosity of Thomas’ book alone makes it an infamous (and instant) classic in the DI bookmobile. Keep up the good work; I look forward to more reviews of our heroes in Seattle…
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Interestingly on the Canadian (.ca) version of Amazon, none of the 5-star ratings show up. Just Puck’s 1 star review.
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It took me quite a while to work out which “Neil Thomas” this was – Wikipedia only lists a Canadian football player and an English Olympic gymnast of that name. Amazon listing him as a “University professor” doesn’t help much – as Google lists numerous university professors of that name.
I finally tracked down which Neil Thomas on this DI blurb for the book:
Neil Thomas is a Reader Emeritus in the University of Durham, England and a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association. He studied Classical Studies and European Languages at the universities of Oxford, Munich and Cardiff before taking up his post in the German section of the School of European Languages and Literatures at Durham University in 1976. There his teaching involved a broad spectrum of specialisms including Germanic philology, medieval literature, the literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment and modern German history and literature. He also taught modules on the propagandist use of the German language used both by the Nazis and by the functionaries of the old German Democratic Republic. He published over 40 articles in a number of refereed journals and a half dozen single-authored books, the last of which were Reading the Nibelungenlied (1995), Diu Crone and the Medieval Arthurian Cycle (2002) and Wirnt von Gravenberg’s ‘Wigalois’. Intertextuality and Interpretation (2005). He also edited a number of volumes including Myth and its Legacy in European Literature (1996) and German Studies at the Millennium (1999). He was the British Brach President of the International Arthurian Society (2002-5) and remains a member of a number of learned societies.
Based on this bio, I would have to agree with Puck that he appears to be “way out of [his] depth” (having no background or expertise remotely relevant to writing about Darwin). What makes this (somewhat) surprising is that the DI actually has an in-house Historian of Science in Michael Keas. Why doesn’t the DI get him to write about Darwin, instead of Thomas and Shedinger? Could it be that Keas couldn’t provide them with the polemic ‘product’ they desired without shredding his reputation as a Historian of Science? I’ve long noted that Creationist apologists with academic credentials seldom write within their fields of expertise.
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Yep. That trend certainly explains a lot.
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The ridiculous verbosity reminded me of some of the worst legal writing I used to see. It always seemed to me that the clever lawyers knew how to say complex things in one-syllable words, while the lousy ones knew how to say simple things in four-syllable words. Every now and then I’d run into something which was damned near impenetrable. The best American writing has always been clear and understandable: Twain, Mencken, and the like. I sometimes wish Mencken were still around to give these DI clowns a run for their money.
I think you’re ahead of Amazon on that one. They’ve got a picture of him on the page for Taking Leave of Darwin, which I am pretty sure is a picture of a different Neil Thomas, who is the author of some other books on Amazon but not this one.
Yeah, absolutely.
These two – Shedinger and Thomas – both suffer from a failure to understand the limits of their own disciplines. It’s all well and good to do lit-crit type work, trying to discern subtexts and themes and cultural biases and whatnot – I don’t find that very interesting in most cases, but some people do. The problem is that when the text is all you can analyze, your conclusions can apply only to the text itself. So, if, as Shedinger made out in his previous book, Darwin’s thoughts were motivated by Victorian triumphialism, or if, as Thomas suggested, Darwin was merely parroting Lucretius (!), those observations would at most tell you something about how he arrived at his views. They would tell you exactly nothing about the merits of those views.
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I remember the Howard Cosell rule (himself an erstwhile lawyer): Never use a one syllable word when a four syllable word is available…
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Ah, Howard Cosell. I wonder how he was as a lawyer. He certainly did have an interesting way of speaking.
I recall getting a preview of this in law school. People would misuse words which they thought made them sound more sophisticated (or, as the popular meme goes, “more photosynthesis”). One guy used to use “penultimate” as meaning “really, really ultimate,” for example.
But we had this one classmate who topped them all. Every sentence he spoke was an impenetrable thicket of great and imposing words. I figured that I would never be able to convey what this was like if I didn’t commit one to memory, so I made a point of memorizing what may have been the simplest and shortest sentence he ever spoke.
“That pertains to clarification of the context of the question I was about to propose.”
After ten years of careful thought, I realized it means, roughly: “I was going to ask you about that.” But, as I have said, this was among the simplest and shortest of his sentences. Most of them roamed and rambled over hill and dale, fording mighty streams of reason with the occasional six-syllable monstrosity. If they were declarative sentences the only thing you could say was, “uh huh,” and if they were questions, all you could do was wonder.
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Where is Professor Kingsfield when we need him?
You know, back in '82 when I was just off to law school, we were all living in fear of Professor Kingsfield. The reality was much softer. But the back-and-forth in classes was sometimes hilarious.
“What does ‘nugatory’ mean?”
“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t want to be rendered it.”
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