Darwin's Bluff: Shedinger's Folly

[AllenWitmerMiller (Semi-Expired Professor & Minister.)]

@Puck_Mendelssohn

You know, back in '82 when I was just off to law school, we were all living in fear of Professor Kingsfield.

Interesting coincidence. It was in 1982 that I achieved full faculty status as Assistant Professor of Computer Science. (No more “Lecturer” titles.) I’d like to think that my students appreciated my various brands of schtick, including my traditional opening speech in a third year course sequence (Analysis of Algorithms I & II) aimed at majors heading into I.T. as professionals: “You come in here with a skull full of mush. You leave thinking like a software engineer.”

The Paper Chase skulls full of mush

@Puck_Mendelssohn

“What does ‘nugatory’ mean?”
“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t want to be rendered it.”

And nugatory is not to be confused with nougatory, a level of culinary hell where one is dumped into a blender of honey and vanilla and the LIQUEFY and HIGH buttons are pushed.

[Puck_Mendelssohn]

Sadly, I think that in many cases the following exchange would be appropriate:

Kingsfield: “You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.”
Student: “So, no change, then.”

[Tim]

@Puck_Mendelssohn

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.

You are correct. This is the real author, courtesy of the DI blurb:

This Neil Thomas seems to have negligible profile beyond ID promotion of his book, and those interested in the Arthurian Mythos.

[RonSewell (RonS)]

@chuckdarwin

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.

DI’s David Berlinski belongs on the nomination list for gratuitous verbosity.

[AllenWitmerMiller (Semi-Expired Professor & Minister.)]

@RonSewell

DI’s David Berlinski belongs on the nomination list for gratuitous verbosity.

Coincidentally, “Gratuitous Verbosity” was the name of Berlinski’s punk band in the 1970’s.

[chuckdarwin]

I thought it was the filling in a three musketeers candy bar….

[Tim]

Sounds more like an appropriate name for a Prog Rock band to me. I’d expect a Punk Rock band to be called “Gratuitous Profanity” (or more likely just plain “F@ck Off!”).

[AllenWitmerMiller (Semi-Expired Professor & Minister.)]

@Tim

I’d expect a Punk Rock band to be called “Gratuitous Profanity”

Point well taken! (Of course, Berlinski has never been known for putting accurate titles on his creative works of art and fiction.)

[Puck_Mendelssohn]

In a funny side-note: I was taking a look to see if there had been other recent reviews of Shedinger’s book, and while I found very little of any interest there, it seems that he has some notoriety as having attracted one of the most scathing reviews in Biblical scholarship.

https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv6n2prpetersen

The concluding paragraph:

One could go on. Everyone has lapses of judgment; everyone makes mistakes—even Homer nodded. But that is not the issue. Here the errors are so frequent and so fundamental that this volume can contribute nothing to scholarship. What it says that is true has already been said elsewhere, with greater clarity and perspective. What it says that is new is almost always wrong, plagued—as we have shown above—with philological, logical, and methodological errors, and a gross insensitivity to things historical (both within the discipline, as well as the transmission-history of texts). Reading this book fills one with dismay and despair. It is shocking that a work which does not rise to the level of a master’s thesis should be approved as a doctoral dissertation; how it found its way into print is unfathomable. One shudders to think of the damage it will do when, in the future, it is cited by the ignorant and the unsuspecting as “demonstrating” what it has not.

Golly.

[Tim]

@Puck_Mendelssohn

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.

Could part of this be due to the fact that the DI’s ID operation is the Center for Science and Culture, whose co-founder, John G West, has his main focus in the cultural/political side of things? As the ‘scientific’ side of ID has been flaming out, could we be seeing greater emphasis on the cultural side of it – less ‘evolution is bad science’ and more ‘evolution is bad for human society’? I would think that Shedinger and Thomas would fit in more comfortably with the latter than the former.

[Puck_Mendelssohn]

I do think that they’ve pivoted a bit toward explicit culture-war. It’s always really only been about the culture war anyhow; the importance of the pseudoscientific parts of the literature has always been to impress members of the cargo cult: “yes, we have planes and radios, and no, don’t look at them too closely.” It may be that a few of them are actually cranks who believe in some part of the underlying nonsense; Behe seems like a candidate for that. But even Behe has never actually tried to put IDC to the test; the failure to try to do any real scientific work by any of the handful of qualified people suggests that even if they think the conclusions are right, they have no idea of any way that could possibly be demonstrated.

It seems to me that there has never been, on their part, any genuine attempt to appeal to the scientific community. Why would anyone write Darwin’s Doubt, for example, if he had any hope of bringing scientists over to his side? The IDC literature is positively destructive in that regard.

But, yes, I think there’s a bit of a pivot, and I think that this is partly because on the pseudoscience they’ve largely run out of new things to say. And they don’t need new things to say, if rube-fooling is the only mission. Anybody who’s become a fan of this stuff can rattle off a standard list of the things that evolutionary theory supposedly can’t cope with, and then wonder why all those evil “Darwinists” are so wedded to methodological naturalism.

With the early IDC writers, profound dishonesty is the principal characteristic of the whole group. But this newer crop, on the philosophical/literary/historical side, mostly seem like they are not very bright and may actually believe this stuff. They’ve got enough ability to read to enable them to grasp what the ID Creationists are saying, but not enough to evaluate it in the least. And people like this are enormously useful to the DI, because their existence says, “hey, we’ve got intellectuals over here, too.” As long as one doesn’t look very closely, that’s what it looks like, and that helps along the culture-war project.

[chuckdarwin]

There is an article today in EN by Shedinger on the Wilberforce-Huxley debate excerpted from the book…

[Puck_Mendelssohn]

Yeah, I saw that. It’s really a rather odd bit. It doesn’t really fit the book, because the whole thesis of the book is simply that Darwin couldn’t publish his “big book” because he never had evidence that would satisfy his detractors. Wilberforce versus Huxley, at an event from which Darwin was absent, doesn’t really bear on that. And he seems initially to be trying to say that it didn’t happen anything like the usual story, but there’s a very clear account of it from Huxley and, you know, who really cares? He seems to want to pretend that Soapy Sam understood biology better than he really did, and he seems to want to pretend that he didn’t make an ass of himself when, by all accounts, he did.

This does nothing to support Shedinger’s thesis, but it does suffer from the same irrelevancy. Who cares who won points in an oral debate over evolution in the 19th century? In another universe, Wilberforce could have mopped the floor with Huxley and that would mean Huxley’d had a bad day of debate, but it wouldn’t make biological evolution any less real than it is.

As a litigator, I am sure you see that very clearly. One can lose an argument where one is in the right. One can lose a whole case when one is in the right. Duane Gish can “win” a debate with a scientist, but does it change anything about how reality works?

But here is Shedinger’s entire problem, in a way. He is basically a postmodernist, and he thinks the text is all there is. He thinks of the evolution-versus-creationism thing as an argument about mere ideas, rather than as a thing to be settled by reference to evidence. And so to him it really IS important to say that Soapy Sam didn’t humiliate himself, that Darwin was motivated by crass personal ambition and biases, and that biologists ever since have been promoting this whole affair not because evolution is real but because it serves their “guild interests” to say so. It’s astonishingly shallow.

But, what can Shedinger do? Admitting that he hasn’t really got a leg to stand on won’t sell books. He has no ideas, insights or evidence to offer about biology. What he has is a way of trying to look clever by claiming that others are driven by slavish devotion to some sort of orthodoxy, while he is able to see clearly because he is not. Of course, what he really shows is slavish devotion to orthodoxy, and complete ignorance of the evidence: pseudointellectualism on stilts.

[Puck_Mendelssohn]

Ah, and now the angry retorts from credulous fools are starting to appear in the reviews for the book.

Bloviating,Bigoted Evolutionists Go Ape

Full disclosure > I received “Darwin’s Bluff” as an early-release gift, and not from Amazon. It is an easily readable and understandable compilation of FACTUAL, well-documented and annotated evidence to clearly support the author’s contentions. It’s as simple as that…the TRUTH is spread-out before you.

I will not go into all the evolution vs Intelligent Design vs theology machinations which SOME reviewers posted here in attempt, as they so frequently do, to shriek, flagellate and cast voluminous invectives upon anything contrary to their ingrained biases.

I only suggest that open-minded, rational minds avail themselves of Dr. Shedinger’s deeply-research work and come to your own conclusions.

And:

Great book!

Have any of the naysayer’s about this book actually read even a single book on Intelligent Design?

No, I didn’t think so.

On that last: oh, if only it were so! I have seen things nobody should have to see. Of course, the reviewer would know how much of this garbage I have actually read if he looked at my other Amazon reviews.

[Puck_Mendelssohn]

I think Amazon must be getting more aggressive about review contents. That “Bloviating, Bigoted” review above is gone, probably removed by Amazon, perhaps because someone complained (I didn’t!).

They’re very odd over there sometimes. If a review is removed, they’ll sometimes say nothing to the reviewer; other times they’ll send an e-mail suggesting that the review violated Amazon policy, though one can review the policies they cite backward and forward and find no violation. And they’ll never, never explain what part was deemed to be a policy violation.

[Dan_Eastwood]

@paulbraterman has his own review of Shedinger at Panda’s Thumb.

The difference between skepticism and denial; Darwin, Wilberforce, and the...

@Puck_Mendelssohn Paul seems to be having trouble getting his review accepted - you might be able to advise him there?