People pick up a lot of that “obsolete” material from background discussions. Personally, I think it’s a good idea to read Darwin. But I’m not going to condemn biologists who choose not to read it.
I have read books on science as well, mostly in the field of physics. The books I read tend to focus on communicating the scientific consensus because I am curious about the science in other fields. Books are a great way of getting introduced to the science in a field, as long as the person who writes it is competent. I have read a few books by Michio Kaku and Steven Weinberg, to name a few. Kaku and Weinberg even describe a bit of their own experiences and philosophies in the books which I found interesting. I’m not against books.
It is one thing to write a synopsis of the scientific consensus and quite a different thing to write a book that claims to overthrow or modify the scientific consensus. There’s a difference between the two.
To his credit, Shapiro has written review articles that have been published in peer reviewed journals. That is the proper venue to communicate with the scientific community. Most scientists disagree with Shapiro, but at least he is starting the discussion within the scientific community.
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It’s really interesting how both of you have written thousands of words over a few days arguing about whether anyone has a duty to read Turner’s book, or you have the duty to summarize its arguments. (I think during that precious time arguing the book could have been read instead 
)
This seems to capture one fundamental difference between scientists and humanists: for the former, the ideas seem to matter more than the exact original expression, while in the latter the original text is always important. (Yes, I understand your protests about @T_aquaticus seemingly irrationally preferring papers over books, but my point is more general than that.) This is why people rarely assign the original works of Einstein or Newton in physics classes (or Darwin in biology), but it’s common to assign Plato or Kant in philosophy class.
It brings to mind one interesting remark from one of my physics professors: he said that he doesn’t like to read novels, “great” books, or any subject from which one would benefit from going back to the original texts. As a scientist, he felt that something was only worth reading about if the ideas could be completely abstracted from the original book - that if it was a good enough idea, then anyone should be able to express it adequately and completely in their own words.
Some if my colleagues in the humanities see rising importance to articles. Some of the best ideas do not require a book, and will be much more read in article form.
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If the hypothesis that a revived (albeit highly qualified) version of vitalism could be helpful not only to understanding life but to evolutionary theory itself, written by someone with a Ph.D. in physiology and many published peer-reviewed articles (as well as two earlier books), doesn’t in itself interest you as a biologist, not even enough to read the dozen or so free pages available on Amazon, then I don’t think any more detailed account from me would be of any use.
I wonder. Behe’s two books seem to have had an impact on the scientific community – of a sort, though perhaps not the sort you mean. After loudly expressing the notion that “ID is not science at all, but religion, and therefore we scientists don’t have to pay attention to it”, scores of biologists and other scientists have gone on to write detailed refutations of many of Behe’s arguments, which indicates that even though ID is supposedly “not even wrong” because it’s not science at all, it is in their mind actually science – bad science, refuted science, along the lines of refuted theories (which were scientific, but wrong) such as the theory of phlogiston or the luminiferous ether.
I have a filing folder, quite thick, full of printed-out refutations of The Edge of Evolution alone. The same pile-up of reactions occurred after Dembski’s early books, and later with Meyer’s books. Blog after blog written by scientists condemned ID, whole websites frequented by scientists, such as TSZ and Panda’s Thumb, sprang into existence to bash ID, scientist after scientist (Eugenie Scott, Ken Miller, Kevin Padian, Arthur Hunt, Steve Matheson, etc.), in some cases reducing their teaching and research time, went “on the road” to university campuses and other venues to refute ID; and a few years back, at the major US scientific conference on Evolution, attended by something like 2,000 scientists, the people running the conference gave Ken Miller an award for his defense of standard evolutionary science – in large part for his attacks on ID. And after the ID people stuck their neck out with their books, to take the brunt of the initial reaction, many non-ID-supporting scientists who have had criticisms of Darwinian theory (such as Turner and Shapiro and some of the Altenberg folks) seem to have been emboldened to air their criticisms more freely, and the scientific community is starting to react to them.
So I wouldn’t say that the ID folks’ use of the “book” medium has failed to get the attention of the scientific community. Indeed, it has probably generated more reaction than if they had published their ideas exclusively in peer-reviewed journals. Meyer’s article in the peer-reviewed Smithsonian journal only generated a fraction of the interest that his books did, and Dembski’s books in information theory and evolution generated a lot more reaction from scientists than his and his colleagues’ articles along similar lines published in peer-reviewed engineering journals have. From the point of view of public relations, the strategy of making extensive use of books to get the scientists to comment on ID in public view has been very successful.
I am just confused why you think this is so important and useful, and yet you refuse to discuss it.
In my estimation, it was the creationist movement as a whole that grabbed the attention of the scientific community. There was a renewed effort to force evolution out of schools and to force creationism into schools in the guise of Intelligent Design. The books were the place to find the arguments that creationists were making since they really didn’t have original research (i.e. methods and experiments) they could publish in peer reviewed journals.
Shapiro and the EES community are actually engaging the scientific community with original research and review articles in peer reviewed journals. They may also write books, but scientists tend to focus on the articles. EES scientists are also attending scientific conferences which is another standard scientific arena for discussing theories and ideas.
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Joshua, articles have always been important as a measure of academic merit in the humanities. A typical humanities scholar’s c.v. has almost always included many more articles than books. A senior scholar in Biblical studies or Philosophy or Literary Criticism or French history might well have 100-200 articles, and maybe only 5 or 10 books (though sometimes the book count can get up higher). Very few humanities scholars have been granted tenure without first having published a significant number of articles in refereed journals. (I’m speaking here of mainstream universities; the case may be different at small liberal arts colleges where the emphasis is almost wholly on teaching undergrads, but even there tenure usually requires some article publication.)
What is different in the humanities as compared with the natural sciences, or at least, with the representation of natural sciences I’m seeing in some writers on the internet, is that there isn’t any subtle or not-so-subtle sneering at books as if they are somehow substandard in quality compared with articles. Indeed, a book generally requires immensely more work than an article, and a book typically shows much more synthetic power than an article, because a book ties together five or ten years of a scholar’s research in a field, taking all the little itty-bitty pieces (say, of studies of aspects of the French Revolution) that the scholar has published, and building them into a new and more coherent structure (say, a book with a new interpretation of the French Revolution overall) which is deemed of great value by many scholars in that field.
So biologists like Shapiro and McClintock may publish many articles containing reports of detailed empirical research on genomic changes in bacteria, and those reports are useful to scientists in the field; but then Shapiro publishes his book Evolution, which synthesizes much of that research work, trying to show that the previous work has an overall trajectory of significance for understanding evolution, i.e., points to a new way of looking at evolution. Such a book is not a denial of the value of all the earlier articles; rather, it is an affirmation of their value, but it sets them in a broader context. There is nothing wrong with this. Indeed, what were the 1940s scientific books by the founders of the Modern Synthesis (Gaylord Simpson, Mayr, Dobzhansky, Julian Huxley) but attempts to set forth a new broad synthesis regarding evolutionary mechanism, making use of the empirical and theoretical studies those authors had published during the previous years? What was Darwin’s book, but a synthesis of years of observational study, private experiments on plant and pigeon breeding by Darwin, etc. The idea that a book is somehow an embarrassment to a scientist, whereas articles are something to be proud of, just doesn’t hold water.
It should be obvious why a book that purports to revive a form of vitalism, if convincing, would be important and useful to the study of evolution, and of life in general. If I were a biologist with a focus on evolutionary theory, I would automatically be interested in such a book; I would want to find out if the author’s ideas had any merit. So I would read what the author had to say. At the very least I would read enough of the book, say, the first 50 or 100 pages, before making any judgment on the value of the book. And I would not have first heard about the book from a non-scientist writing on a blog site; I would always have my eyes peeled for interesting new books on such subjects.
And I may well discuss the book at some point, when I have finished reading it. I have read only about 2/3 of it at the moment, and I would not want to misrepresent the author based on only a partial reading. (As so many scientists have misrepresented Behe, Dembski, Meyer etc. based on only partial readings, and in some cases on no reading at all, but only on secondhand summaries.) But I have read enough to ascertain that the author has done some serious homework in the history of evolutionary thought, that he has based his ideas on his own previously published empirical research, that he has consulted the work of many other current biologists, etc. That doesn’t make the author correct – and I never actually said that his thesis was correct – but it makes him a serious, responsible scientist. To say that one will consider his ideas only if he first publishes them in the form of tiny little technical studies in journals is to be rather narrow-minded about the delivery format, in my opinion. But as I have said, I have seen this attitude even in some humanities and social science scholars. They aren’t the scholars with whom I typically fraternize.
I will be interested to hear what you have to say if you have the time and willingness to discuss the book.
I don’t think peer reviewed articles are as limiting as you think. You may want to check out one of James Shapiro’s review articles before judging them to harshly:
Not always, but they usually are far below the standards of articles. This isn’t sneering, it is just a fact.
In the Humanities its different, but scientific work right now is not coming forward in book, for the most part.
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I have served on campus wide personnel committees. I have been involved in the evaluation of faculty in the humanities and in the sciences. I understand very well why books have a greater importance in the humanities and articles have a greater importance in the sciences. It has everything to do with the differences between the sciences and the humanities.
Describing decisions by scientists as “subtle or not-so-subtle sneering at books” is not helpful and not even accurate.
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But it is a handy example of not-so-subtle sneering.
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It probably is the case that Turner’s thesis could be abstracted from his book – but I am not a biologist and don’t want to take the responsibility for doing that – at least, not until I’ve read the whole book. And even then, my experience of these internet debate forums on origins is that if someone doesn’t like what they hear when an ID person or creationist summarizes a book, they condemn the book and refuse to read it – when in some cases the person summarizing the book is doing it ineptly, and therefore turns people off a good book. I’m of the view that Turner can express his ideas better than I can, and that it is likely that something will be lost in translation if I try to give a precis of the book that has any meat to it.
Beyond, this practical consideration, it is a simply a fact that when someone is trying to re-orient members of his academic discipline, to give them a new way of looking at a subject matter, it takes more time to do that than it does to get them to accept a new experimental result that falls easily within the methods and conceptions of their science that they are comfortable with. I don’t need much time to explain that knocking out a certain gene in a fruit fly produces a missing pair of legs, or the like; I can explain that in a 15-page article. But to explain homeostasis in a new way (and part of Turner’s thesis is that the typical current view of homeostasis is not adequate for the needs of modern biology), to explain the difference between the “vitalism” that was rightly abandoned by modern science and a “vitalism” which contains an essentially true idea about life, and to explain how our conception of evolution is crippled by an inadequate conception of life itself, requires the consideration of many things that would not normally be discussed in a typical scientific article, which by its nature is meant to convey only one focused point.
The point then, is that sometimes, in science as in other subjects, a lengthy exposition is necessary to convey a subtle and complex argument. I don’t consider it a virtue of modern scientists if their attention span is such that they are unable to concentrate long enough to master a subtle and complex argument relevant to the future of their field, and have patience enough for only 10-to-20-page journal articles.
I’d suppose he was immune to art. The Spark’s Notes summary of “The Sun Also Rises” is really not as good as the original. I’ve heard it suggested that if we had to preserve specific works from destruction, then art, music and literature should be saved because our knowledge of physics and chemistry can be recovered.
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It’s rather amusing to think of that guy reading his monthly copy of “Literary Digest for Physicists.”
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day/”
Stupid bloke compares this bird to a day
Wasn’t it Paul Dirac who was famous for considering literature a waste of time? As one colleague said, “There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.”
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Your answer is completely unresponsive to my many examples of books that have contributed importantly to modern biological science, such as the books by Darwin and by the founders of the Modern Synthesis. You are speaking in broad generalities (as others here are doing) about books vs. journals, and avoiding the concrete fact that scientific books are often very well researched (indeed, frequently drawing upon research already published by the author in the peer-reviewed journals!) and offer a larger synthesis that the typical research article, by its very nature, cannot offer.
But let’s look at the big picture here. I said that there was an interesting new book out by a trained, published biologist (neither a creationist nor an ID supporter) in which a revived (but qualified) idea of vitalism is promoted as useful for evolutionary theory and for biological thought generally. The discussion was turned (not by me) to a discussion of why books aren’t important in science. But I wasn’t interested in defending book versus article per se; I was only trying to mention the core idea of the book, in case anyone was interested in reading it. But the core idea of the book – vitalism – is of course going to rub the majority of current biologists the wrong way, the moment they read the word, and so a prejudice against the book on the part of people like T. aquaticus, Glipsnort, Venema, etc. is going to be generated almost by Pavlovian reflex, before they have read even a short summary of the book. To combat that prejudice, and to show the reasonableness and empirical basis of his ideas, Turner has written the book.
I personally don’t care whether or not anyone here reads the book; I mentioned it because I thought the thesis and some of the arguments should be of interest to anyone who claims to have a major research focus on evolution. If no one wants to read it, fine. I know that if I were, say, a population geneticist, and that my research in biology took place almost entirely within the point of reference of population genetics, I would be interested in how someone from another field of biology – in this case, physiology – thinks about evolution. I’m the kind of person who distrusts the self-sufficiency of any single approach to any scientific question (or historical question, or philosophical question, etc.). I seek out multiple perspectives, rather than assume the self-sufficiency of the perspective I happen to have had professional success in employing. But I don’t expect anyone here to be like me. For most people in most fields of endeavor, whether scientific or otherwise, if the only tool they have is a hammer, the entire world is seen by them as a field of nails. My instinct in all endeavors, academic and non-academic, has always been not to interpret the whole world as a field of nails, but instead to go out and supplement my hammer with a saw, screwdriver, wrench, level, drill, etc., so that I can more richly and fully interpret what is actually out there to be seen in the world. I think that for someone like, say, Dennis Venema, whose writings on evolution at BioLogos over the past eight or nine years have been so extraordinarily “gene-focused”, the reading of a book by someone who thinks that understanding evolution, and life itself, requires a serious readjustment of our interpretive lenses (to consider the whole organism just as much as the gene), would be intellectually enriching. But I know from experience that one can lead a horse to water, but one can’t make him drink. So if no one here wants to read Turner’s book, so be it. It makes no difference to my job, my life, my income, or my happiness. The only loser in that outcome would be the people who will miss out on whatever biological illumination Turner’s book may have to offer.
Joshua:
Why do you suppose that a professor of evolutionary theory at Yale, Gunter Wagner, wrote his 2014 book, Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation, if (as he would presumably know, being an evolutionary biologist at one of the world’s leading scientific institutions) scientific books aren’t highly regarded and his book would likely be regarded as substandard? Why wouldn’t he spend his life publishing only articles on evolution, to make sure everyone took his thoughts on the subject seriously? Why risk a book presentation? No one here has explained this, or similar cases.
Thanks for clarifying this. We finally agree on this. Of course, it is only a side-point which never should have occupied so much discussion time, but it’s good we agree on at least something.
Books are common among a small proportion of scientists to present science to the public. This is almost always a controversial act in the field, that I myself will face when my book comes out. The vast majority of strong scientists never write book till they are retired. Anyone who does different starts at a deficit. It is not considered an academic contribution.
There are exceptions. If you go into the distant past it was different. We, however, are not in the distant past. Also textbooks are respected, though they are not at all the most up to date work.
So, in science, almost exclusively, books are for engaging the public, not for advancing the field.
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This discussion started with your questioning why some of us have not read Turner’s book. That Darwin, Mayr, Gould and several others have written important books does not persuade us that Turner has written an important book.
No, scientists do not automatically refuse to read books. But given how much there is to read, they are selective. And they will look at reviews in deciding whether to read a book.
They simply have not been persuaded that Turner’s book is worth their time.