A few years ago a retired professor of German literature by the name of Neil Thomas popped up and wrote the weird little book Taking Leave of Darwin, a strange and incoherent romp through Lucretius, Percy and Mary Shelley, and various other oddities in which he, without spending one minute actually talking about biology as such, purported to issue a devastating summary of what was wrong here: that Darwin was a doodyhead, who stole all his ideas from Lucretius, and may have smelled bad, as well.
Well, the Discovery Institute published that one, and it seems to have encouraged the fella, who now has a longer book, âFalse Messiah: Darwinism as the God that Failed.â It arrived on my desk at work today and early leafing-through suggests â I know that everyone here will be shocked to hear it â that the book may not be very good. Further notes, and review, to follow. The gist of it seems to be that âDarwinismâ has poisoned our culture and that only Wordsworth (yeah, I wish I were kidding, but no) can save us.
Or, as Wordsworth would have said, had anti-Darwin books been heavily stocked at Lake District Airbnbs of his day (which, prior to On the Origin of Species, they really were not):
One impulse from infernal books
may teach you more of man,
of moral weasels, and of schnooks,
than all the sages can.
I have commented on Neil Thomasâs idiocy at Pandaâs Thumb, here and here. From listening to interviews of him and reading the DIâs description of his views, he appears to have disproven Darwin by deciding that natural selection is invalid because it is tautological, and that natural selection can only conserve, not change. These are PRATTs (Points Refuted A Thousand Times).
He is mostly upset that science has become secular, hence his getting off the boat after Wordsworth. His explanations of why Victorians were ready for Darwin are generally OK, though not as much of a revelation as he implies. I urge you all to read the material on him at Science and Culture Today, as spending actual money on his books seems mascochistic.
I may be idiosyncratic in my viewpoint, but the first question this kerfuffle raised in my mind is âwhy a professor of German Literature âtaught Darwinism for Decadesâ?â (As the title of Andrew McDiarmidâs S&C piece suggests.)
Agree with it or disagree with it, what does âDarwinismâ have to do with German Literature?
It seems that this title has nothing to do with the articleâs contents, but is simply there to leave the false impression that Thomas has any idea whatsoever about what heâs talking about.
But, as the recently-departed @Lee_Merrillhas told us, the DI are âforthright and people of integrityâ, so there must be some other explanation.
It never ceases to amaze me the spin that DI keeps putting on these things.
That original DI article entitled âHe Taught Darwinism for Decades (Then Changed His Mind)â makes it sound like Neil Thomas was a biology prof or something.
But no, heâs just a German lit professor with an education in âClassical Studies and European Languageâ.
Poets tend to be highly regarded across cultures. In English society in the decades before Origin of Species, the moral problems of many species having gone extinct, as already revealed by geology cum paleontology, were explored in Victorian society, eg in Tennysonâs âIn Memoriam A.H.H.â Donât paint science into a reactionary corner where it claims scientists to be the know-it-all authorities on everything. That could lead to society labeling of scientists as False Prophets.
I agree. It is much more accurate to see them as authorities on everything regarding the physical world for which knowledge is possible, but who humbly accept and acknowledge the limits of their knowledge.
A bit of a tangent. Iâve seen alot of fuss in the media and at the DI about a bestseller from Europe: God, the Science, the Evidence by Bollore and Bonnassies. I purports to pull together all the evidence from philosophy and science for the existence of god. Iâve assumed its a less sophisticated version of Meyers but lately Iâve been tempted to take a look at it. Then it occured to me; isnât Puck supposed to do this so we dont have to ?
Indeed! I havenât gotten around to that one, but it does look like a stinker.
I justify it, in my own case, on the theory that my alerting people to just how atrocious these things are may cost them a few sales. Of course, I could be mistaken, and my contribution to the conversation may only be sparking the interest of those who figure that if someone like me hates a book, theyâd love it.
And âmasochisticâ is about right. There is never anything new under the sun in these books, and so a lot of the time these things are just a slog through a swamp. Fortunately, these are not deep thinkers, so the swamp muck is only a few inches deep, but the smell is hard to bear.
Iâve always loved Wordsworth, so seeing him slandered by association with ID Creationism offends me. So, no dissent from the high regard for an excellent poet, but not really a point in favor of Thomas.
Why would anyone do that, though? Iâve certainly never seen anyone do that here, though I do see creationists caterwauling about it all the time as though people ARE doing it. What is clear is that while biologists do not know everything, Thomas knows quite a lot less than they do, yet has chosen to favor us with his atrocious writing and ignorant pronouncements.
Iâm about a third of the way through the book and there are no real surprises. His writing so far is marginally less stilted than in his previous book, though I suspect itâll ramp up as I read on. His ignorance of biology is well displayed, and his weird obsession with the notion that evolutionary biology (he would say âDarwinismâ) is merely a set of ideas to be critiqued as ideas, rather than a set of well-evidenced observations about the real world, is in full flower. He really does not give a ratâs patootie whether anything in evolutionary biology appears to be actually true or not â he only seems to care whether his own subjective judgment of its philosophical soundness is a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. A thumbless man would get it right more often than he does.
Jay, I think your post obscures the relative strengths of poetry and science.
Put crudely, science tells us how the physical universe works, but cannot tell us how to feel about how the universe works, or how to integrate this understanding into our wider worldview.
Poetry on the other hand can provide an excellent forum for exploring how to accept what science tells us about the universe, and how to integrate it into our worldview, but it cannot independently tell us how the physical universe works.
Tennyson seems to acknowledge this division of labor, and to take the scientific understanding of the physical universe as part of the foundation of his exploration.
Thomas, on the other hand seeks to use literature from before Darwinâs time to impeach Darwin, and by implication modern Evolutionary Biology (in spite of the fact that the latter has developed sufficient evidence and analysis, that it remains solid independent of Darwin).
I cannot see any substantive equivalence between the two.
What I do find a bit odd is that even a true believer would, I should think, have a hard time finding much to like in a Neil Thomas book.
If you say to me that âICE is murdering people on the streets of America,â and I donât know anything about it at all, my reaction is to have a look. Is that happening? That seems like the main question, in such a case. But Neil Thomas would ask, âis the claim that ICE is murdering people on the streets of America philosophically more consonant with the views of Kierkegaard or Aristotle? And if the answer is Kierkegaard, does that not undermine the claim, when Kierkegaard is a poopyhead?â And then Thomas wouldnât bother going on to find out whether the claim was true, because his conclusion about its philosophical underpinnings is all he needs in order to judge the merits.
Now, I do know that â as we have lately witnessed with @lee_merrill â the thoughts of a creationist are seldom well ordered or insightful. But I would think that even a person with utter mush for brains would notice the problem with the idea that a question about whatâs happening in the real world can be answered purely through a consultation of the writings of Aristotle, Plato, or Wordsworth.
I guess that to the DI, it fills some sort of function like ânot only are our âscientistsâ better at science than real scientists are, but our philosophy is better, too!â But if I were going to be convinced of the reality of ID Creationism, it wouldnât be by mere philosophy; it would be evidence that would be important.
I think, that if you start out with a core assumption that âthere are good arguments against evolutionâ, it is highly probable that your perception of what constitutes a âgood argumentâ will end up sufficiently distorted by motivated reasoning, that any argument against evolution that does not explicitly and literally involve calling people âpoopyheadsâ will end up looking âgoodâ.
I think this highlights a key difference between creationists and non-creationists. Creationists, in my experience, donât seem to care about evidence. Or in at least some cases, donât understand what is meant by evidence.
