I had always thought that one of the main purposes of book reviews, and particularly expert book reviews was to tell us if a book is worth reading. When a consensus of the reviews is that the book is badly flawed, it would therefore be considered reasonable (and in no way a slight on our integrity) to avoid reading the book and accept the expert opinion (in this case that of academic historians) as prima facie evidence of the criticism.
Likewise it would generally be considered reasonable to take the tone of a book’s introduction as symptomatic of the book’s general tone, and reject a book on this basis. Yes, it is possible that the rest of the book follows a very different tone – but that inconsistency is likely to render the book more problematical, not less. Thus (without losing integrity) one can consider a poor introduction to be prima facie evidence of a poor book, and elect not to continue with it.
And will having read the book give us much more certainty? None of us on this thread have any particular depth of knowledge of European history. How, lacking a deep familiarity with the “rich primary material”, are we meant to determine for ourselves that Weikart is “selectively viewing his rich primary material”? How, lacking a deep familiarity with the “political, social, psychological, and economic factors” in question, can we determine if he is “ignoring political, social, psychological, and economic factors that may have played key roles in the post-Darwinian development of Nazi eugenics and racism”?
Also, we are expected to defer to Weikart simply because he is “an academically trained European historian”, but likewise accept the rejection of academics trained to a similar level, based on nothing more than a scurrilous ad hominem.
There seems to be a double-standard here.
And if we are talking “third-rate also-rans”, I would have to ask which prominent ID advocates have any substantial prominence for their academic pursuits, as opposed to their promotion of ID. Do we have any h-indices on prominent ID advocates? And how do they compare with those of ID’s more prominent critics? (Recent discussion of citation-counts on this thread got me thinking about empirical data on an academic’s prominence – noting of course that any such indices are, at best, an imperfect measure.)
Addendum:
Given that the topic of “Social Darwinism” has been raised several times on this thread, I would also note a quote that I recently gave on another thread demonstrating that Darwin explicitly rejected the viewpoint that would later be labeled “Social Darwinism”.