One of Joshua’s comments on books (hard to find, because it was under the discussion on heat-seeking missiles and teleology!) was this one:
"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.”
[Technical aside for Joshua: It would save a LARGE amount of time if there were a proper internal search engine for this site. There are now hundreds of posts, and thousands of comments. I cannot always remember where a comment was made, or who said it, but I could find any comment almost instantly if I could search the whole body of posts by keyword – within the site, without having to go outside for a clumsy Google Search which nets too many hits. Can a search engine be added, so that one could look up phrases and terms such as “peer-reviewed articles” or “Futuyma” or “teleology” or “Gonzalez” and find all comments on Peaceful Science where these phrases occur?]
Note that Joshua writes, This is almost always a controversial act in the field. Picking up on that point, or making it independently (I thought it was T. aquaticus, but I now think it was someone else), someone on another thread (purporting to speak for scientific practice) said of Gonzalez that the problem was not so much the contents of his book on fine-tuning as that he wrote a book at all. The clear meaning in context was that Gonzalez or anyone applying for tenure would be a fool to write a book and should concentrate on producing only peer-reviewed articles. The same person, or another, said that books, regardless of their contents, would routinely be held against the author.
Now, back to Joshua’s comment. Yes, he put qualifications on the comment, which I appreciated. However, in the original discussion I pointed out to him that many books by scientists were not intended for the lay public, but to advance the field, e.g., Wagner’s book on Genes and Homology. I also pointed out to him or to T. aquaticus that Futuyma himself indicated that he read many books written by evolutionary theorists, which he would not do if he did not think that doing so was of professional value to him. If Futuyma, who ranks high on the scale of evolutionary theorists in the USA, thinks that books on evolutionary can advance the discussion in a field and are worth reading by professional evolutionary theorists like himself, then I think it’s reasonable to say that books by scientists are not merely a means to popularization but also a means of advancing the field.
True, Joshua did not use the phrase “career death.” I was summarizing the gist of several commenters who were saying on one of the threads that Gonzalez invited criticism merely by the act of publishing a book; and since he was up for tenure, then if the existence of any book by him endangered the possibility of getting tenure, then it posed the possibility of career death. So I don’t impute the phrase to Joshua or to any poster here in particular, but the message that came across clearly in several posts was that young scientists seeking tenure should stay away from writing books.
This is all I will say regarding the clarification of my meaning regarding the writing of books by scientists.
The point about writing books was a side-point to the more general point about popularizations of evolution being defective. And on that point Joshua and others have definitely and repeatedly said that the older neo-Darwinism is now theoretically outmoded and therefore ID is wasting time in attacking it. So my point remains: why does the ID attack on seem convincing to many of the lay public? In part it’s because the people ID are attacking do write out of the very conception of how evolution works that Joshua, T. aquaticus and others have said is outmoded. And they are not the only ones who have said this. Stuart Newman, an evolutionary theorist, has said the same thing regarding the popular conception of evolution as it was championed by Miller, etc. during the Dover trial.
I don’t myself find that the statements of MIller and Dawkins always misrepresent the field, but my point is that the plane on which Miller, Dawkins, Coyne, Venema, Falk, Giberson and others debate Behe, Dembski, Meyer, etc. is the plane of old-fashioned meat-and-potatoes neo-Darwinism, so if the ID folks are to be bashed for operating on that plane, so should the others. But we’ve already been over this ground. I’ll leave this point at that.