He said books are usually not very helpful to scientists. Joshua most certainly did not state that books are not helpful to the laity. Please read Futuyma, you’ll learn a good bit about the up-to-the-minute theory as of December 2015. 
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Thanks Chris, will do!! @Chris_Falter
No, biology meetings are in no way the same. Biologists give talks. Only the most incompetent (or not fluent in English) give a talk by reading anything.
You are confusing the humanities with the sciences.
To some extent. The important thing that you are ignoring is the chance to see data before they are published, but that’s because you generally ignore the importance of evidence.
Probably.
Joshua and I, unlike you, don’t make claims about what other people have or haven’t read, as you have done with Francis Collins.
Books in general are usually a waste of time for working biologists to read.
Only the slower-moving ones.
Can you even name a major book in stem-cell biology, to take it out of evolution, for example?
Sure, but only IF it should happen. So can you name one?
No, you are denying it, because you are still trumpeting books, even over review articles.
Typically, we do so because we have already known what is in the books for more than a decade. So it would be far more dangerous to pretend that books are as important as you claim them to be.
If I hear a speaker reading anything, I usually leave the talk. Again, your complete lack of familiarity with biology is showing.
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On the contrary, the QRB article was the first appearance in Behe of the theme that is developed in his new book. But of course, not having read either, you wouldn’t know that.
And please read Wagner, whose book Futuyma gives a 5-star rating. 
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Yup. I made a throwaway side-remark alluding to an old discussion about books and articles, and a couple of people here have made a federal case out of it. But of course, they are both people who apparently don’t like reading books. 
I feel so unlearned. What is Wagner’s first name, and what is the title of his book?
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Gunter Wagner. This link will take you to a list of his publications. I am not sure which of the books listed Eddie is referring to. It is curious that Eddie is so positive about Wagner, given that the field Wagner works in is one of those that breaks down the barriers one might see in macroevolutionary processes, by providing clear biochemical rationales by which large morphological change may be effected. While some may disagree, there aren’t any Darwin-shattering ideas in this field.
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HOLY DAMN!! AN I.D. CREATIONIST PUBLISHED ONE WHOLE ARTICLE IN A REAL JOURNAL! STOP THE PRESSES !!
Who cares? Behe went and published some inconsequential review of trivial significance that was able to make its way thru the peer review process.
He then writes a book where the tries to expand that idea into an argument that parts of the evolutionary process required magical spells to be cast by an invisible sorcerer, or whatever he thinks happened (He never actually says.) A book which is now being pointed at and laughed at by the few members of the scientific community who are not simply ignoring it altogether.
That is exactly an illustration of what I was discussing: How ID Creationist books try to sell claims to their supporters that would not pass muster in the peer review process.
No. Says the man who was there, who is one of the world’s foremost experts on evolutionary biology, and who you were just praising because of all the books he apparently reads: Douglas Futuyma.
His name is Gunter Wagner. He is an evolutionary biologist at Yale. He is not to be confused with Andreas Wagner, an evolutionary biologist located in Europe, I believe. (Though both are critical of the classical neo-Darwinian synthesis.)
Here was the post, from the Bayesian thread, which unintentionally led to this pointless discussion about books and articles:
EddieEdward RobinsonReligious Studies and Natural Theology
How did this turn into a discussion on the competence of Futuyma? I made no personal or professional attack on Futuyma. In fact, I’m predisposed to like Futuyma, because he reads lots of books on evolutionary theory. Most of the people here appear to have read nothing but articles on it.
Further, since people here are saying that the new wave of evolutionary biologists, whose concerns have been raised at the Royal Society meeting, at Altenberg, and in other places (see the Third Way group), are making a big fuss about a bunch of stuff that is already known to evolutionary theory, here is a statement BY FUTUYMA about one of the Altenberg group, Gunter P. Wagner:
“Wagner’s contributions to the conceptual growth of developmental evolutionary biology are unrivalled. Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation shows the sweep of his creative and rigorous thinking. This is one of the most exciting books in evolutionary biology I have read in a long time.” —Douglas J. Futuyma, coeditor of The Princeton Guide to Evolution
Note the words “unrivalled,” “creative,” “rigorous.” Are these the words of Discovery? Of Answers in Genesis? No, they are the words of Futuyma!
Which of the guys posting here as “experts” on evolution have had their writings on evolution called “unrivalled” or “creative” or “rigorous” by Futuyma? Yet Wagner’s book arises out of the same set of concerns about evolutionary theory that drove the Altenberg meeting.
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LOL. Those ““unrivaled”, “creative”, and “rigorous” writings, many years ago, are parts of a larger body of work that, long before Behe’s EoE was published, made the EoE irrelevant when it comes to evolutionary mechanisms.
I still don’t understand Eddie’s point, but if @Eddie is promoting a field that contradicts EoE and also Darwin Devolves, then he deserves some credit here.
Just saying’ …
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I never claimed that Wagner supported ID. The point was that doubts about the adequacy of the classical neo-Darwinian synthesis can lead to good work in evolutionary theory. Futuyma’s praise of Wagner confirms that.
That doesn’t mean that all criticisms of current evolutionary theory are good, or that every paper read at the Royal Society meeting was good. I never made any such claim. But it is good for scientists to get together now and then and clear the air about where theory currently stands, and what objections to it might be worthy of investigation, especially when the theory seems to be under attack by a number of the scientific community’s members (some Third Way people, some Altenberg people, etc.). Faisal Ali, who isn’t an evolutionary biologist, but a psychiatrist, has said the whole Royal Society conference was a waste of time, but I don’t believe that the organizers would have invested the time and effort to bring so many evolutionary biologists together if they thought the whole exercise was a waste of time – and presumably they know more about the state of evolutionary theory than Faisal Ali does.
The whole point is that the mechanisms Wagner and others are pointing to are already a part of the modern theory of evolution. That’s what the Royal Society meeting demonstrated. It seems that “classical neo-Darwnian synthesis”, by your definition, is something science updated a long time ago. It’s as if you are trying to convince physicists that classical Newtonian physics can’t explain all of our observations. Physicists already know this.
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Or as if you see me on the side of the road with a map spread out on the hood and pull over to bellow, "You can’t use that! Don’t you know the earth is round?
If they haven’t scheduled another one, that strongly suggests that the conference itself convinced the organizers that it was a waste of time.
You’re grasping at straws.
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“Concerns” is definitely not the correct term to be used. “Excitement”, “opportunities”, “synthesis” are much better ones to describe the state of the field then, and today.
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Here is a snippet from Gunter Wagner’s homepage at Yale:
That looks like standard mutations and selection. Can you explain why this doesn’t fit into the modern theory of evolution?
In another section, Wagner talks about the potential importance of transposable elements may play a key role, but even Wagner admits that this is a 38 year old idea:
Perhaps you could point to something in Wagner’s research that you think involves something outside of the modern theory of evolution because I’m just not seeing it.
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But if that was so obvious beforehand, then why would the officers of the Royal Society go to all the trouble to host a conference of that kind? Surely there were questions that needed discussing. No one organizes a major conference on whether modern evolutionary theory needs serious updating if it is painfully obvious to everyone that it doesn’t.
You don’t find societies of civil engineers holding major conferences on whether all the dams in the world are going to collapse because the theory of dam-building may have been seriously flawed. There must have been some reason why the theme of the conference was at least plausibly important, or the conference would never have been held.
Which doesn’t explain why they organized the first one. Would they have held a whole conference if the only person out of step, was, say, Shapiro? I can’t imagine they would have gone to all the work to deal with the objections of one man. Obviously more than a handful of people were making rumblings about the current state of evolutionary theory, or the conference would never have been held. Perhaps, since you seem to have implicitly declared yourself an expert on evolutionary theory, you can tell us what those rumblings were, and why the conference organizers were persuaded they at least deserved a hearing.
To prove that point to the EES crowd. Noble made a big to-do about a paper that clearly concluded natural selection was the mechanism of change. Futuyma thought EES, as presented, was little more than a layer of aesthetics on the modern theory.
It didn’t sound like a major conference. I count just 24 talks, which is extremely tiny.
I have attended meetings like the ASM general conference. That is a major conference. There are over 4,000 abstracts submitted for this years conference, and there are usually 7,000 to 8,000 attendees. Compare that to just 24 abstracts for the Royal Society meeting. Major? No. That is a very small meeting. I think you have made the meeting a lot bigger in your head than it was in reality.
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