Puck made excuses for buying Neil Thomas’s book from Discovery Institute Press.
I was not blaming Puck for that – he does us all a favor by actually reading the book, and reporting here on it.
Puck also wrote
I wonder whether Thomas’s book is quite that bad. His arguments against “Darwinism” are pathetic, but he does have a lot of other material about the Victorians being intellectually ready for Darwin’s message. That part struck me as roughly correct (when I heard about it in interviews with him). But it is not as new as he implies. Is that part painful too?
Oh, understood – I said what I said not as an excuse but as a sort of explanation of how and why I go about all this. I didn’t in any way think you were criticizing me.
I have to say, this book is NOT as bad as his first book, Taking Leave of Darwin. That book was really an incoherent, distracted romp over hill and dale. I’m about 2/3 through this one, so haven’t seen all of it yet, but he does seem to have figured out how to stay on-topic.
As to understanding what sorts of philosophical considerations account for, as you say, “Victorians being intellectually ready” for this, I think he’s not too bad. I don’t see novel insights here, but in the broad sense he’s frequently not wrong. The difficulty so often is that because the book is meant to be a kind of assault upon “Darwinism,” he doesn’t just want to explain, but also to disparage at the same time. So it cannot be the true story of the intellectual history of the origins and rise of Darwin’s views, but always has to be talked about as an inferior set of views being favored against a superior one, and about how the narrow-minded prejudices of Victorians favored that inferior set of views, and that really compromises the telling.
In his working-through of all of this “philosophical underpinnings” schtick, there are odd bits. He seems to really despise the ancient “atomists,” and think that identifying Darwin with them is, therefore, a winning point. I cannot help but keep thinking, “you know, though, the big idea, the one the atomists were famous for and which the term ‘atomist’ therefore brings to mind? I think they sorta got that right and all these other philosophers had that one wrong.”
He also seems to wish to take certain prejudices AGAINST evolution and exalt them. He makes a bit of a fuss about “chance” in evolution, and seems to think that it’s just really obvious that any insertion of chance into evolutionary processes is enormously discrediting. I think nobody’s told him about genetic drift – he’d lose his mind at how horrific an idea that is! And he seems to have no nuanced sense of chance – either as sometimes merely being our shorthand for describing things where the proximate causes are unobserved and unimportant to some question we are presently examining or as something which, in the aggregate, behaves a good deal less capriciously than it may appear when one is looking at a single chance event. He does not appear to have any inclination to understanding the idea of emergent order. I suspect that population genetics would just seem like a huge folly to him.
I love intellectual history. I think that why we get ideas like evolution by natural selection at one time instead of another, and after some ideas and before others, is a fascinating topic, but one should go into it with a degree of objective detachment rather than with an urge to smear.
What’s sort of sad in the whole thing is that he really does not seem to grasp that whatever one feels about the philosophical soundness of an idea as expressed in the abstract, in practical terms it is that idea’s usefulness in organizing and correctly characterizing what we understand about the world which is important. He seems to think that if “Darwinism” originated from foundations which he doesn’t find sound, then all which follows therefrom is tainted. There’s nothing for it but to chuck Lucretius out the window, and start over again with Plato or Aristotle. But how an enzyme works, how the genetics of a population change, how a duck walks, how a mass extinction proceeds – these are, I think actually not dependent on whether we start with Plato or Lucretius. At the very worst, our manner of explaining or characterizing them may be influenced by those things, but there is a very strong sense in which facts, not ideas divorced from facts, point the way. But he seems to know very little of the factual foundations of biology, and instead just seems to have some rough ideas, informed mostly by the writings of other Discovery Institute personalities, about what biology is.
I think that in some very strong sense he does not think facts are important. He thinks that ideas are better than facts, and that it’s just best to stick with the ideas. As his background is all in rhetoric and literature, it has a bit of that “if the only tool you have is a hammer” business about it. But when I was a lawyer – very much a trade in the domain of rhetoric and its own specialized literature – one of the things I learned was that facts are important, and that when you have to get deep into a factual question, sometimes you need to sit down and learn from your expert witnesses rather than assuming that you already know everything you need to know.
Well, I’ve finished the book. It truly is not as bad as his first one, and there even are a few places where he says things about Darwin, the character of Darwin’s times, and the reasons both for receptiveness and for skepticism of Darwin’s views that are not unfair, and carries on being not-unfair for more than a page. My suspicion is that in that, there is very little original scholarship, as books covering those topics are readily available.
I find myself wondering whether this was originally written as a set of disconnected essays. While he does show a much-improved ability to stay on a topic, that topic changes so much from chapter to chapter, without any strong thematic development connecting the chapters, that it reads like several short works in one volume. The feeling that this is so is enhanced by the fact that, a couple of times, he practically repeats a whole paragraph from earlier in the book.
As for science itself, he barely seems to be interested in it. He accepts as true the claims of DI personalities that new discoveries have completely upended the entire paradigm – not just of evolutionary biology, but of an underlying belief in materialism itself. Comparisons to Marx remind me of the way that I used to see college professors, decades ago, put Marx, Freud and Darwin all in the same category as the great prophets of some sort of materialist/secularist wave. That always seemed a tad unfair to Darwin, since those other two often were more on flights of their own fancy than they were grounded in fact.
So, to the very limited extent that he tries to talk about biology in the 20th and 21st centuries, he judges the situation very badly, thinking that evolutionary biology either has collapsed or is in the process of collapsing. This approach helps him to argue that the criticisms of Darwin which Darwin’s contemporaries made should have been given more attention, and that they were right all along. And, in pursuit of a typical DI fetish, he advances Wallace as the fellow whose views on evolution ought to have been followed instead.
But there’s no recognition of the fact that neither Darwin nor Wallace in any meaningful sense dominate biology today. There’s no recognition of the fact that evolutionary biology is now more than a century-and-a-half on from the Origin, and that it is grounded in a spectacular amount of data and careful analysis. While he is seemingly no religious fundamentalist himself, he seems to have accepted implicitly their framing of biology as a prophet-led discipline wherein all biologists swear to uphold the dogmas of that prophet.
The “False Messiah” notion in the title isn’t really touched so much, it seems to me, in the book. He seems to think that many people regard evolutionary biology as creating a kind of alternative to religion. I’ve never known anyone who would fit that description.
I suppose nobody, perhaps, needs to worry about these DI piles *too* much, so long as the culture-war boulder doesn’t start rolling toward the barn. But one reason I like to write these reviews is that these days, praise for DI garbage in the Amazon reviews is near-unanimous.
I will never cease to marvel at how people, in these review spaces, take even the least significant books and elevate them to The Book That Is Going To Change Everything. Here we have an author who doesn’t know anything about biology. I dunno. I sort of suspect that if the whole evolutionary paradigm comes crashing down one day, it will not be a retired professor of German literature who does the job. And history teaches that yelling in German at the things that make you angry rarely ends well.
And current events teaches us that yelling in English at the things that make you angry rarely ends well. That’s why I will not be watching tonight’s TV broadcast of the State of the Union address.