Guerilla librarianship

by - 12:59 PM

My friend Kim tipped me to the blog postat The Guardian which links us to this blog on Biologists Helping Bookstores. He thinks that Michael Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution should be placed in a new area:

I flip a copy and read the back. Here's the beginning of the first quote from the back cover: "Until the past decade and the genomics revolution, Darwin's theory rested on indirect evidence and reasonable speculation..." (Dr. Philip Skell, Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, at Pennsylvania State University, and member of the National Academy of Sciences). That's not true! I am emboldened by this bare-faced lie from this well-respected elderly chemist, pick up all four copies, and stroll upstairs.
Now, I aim for accuracy in my recategorization, and I was still slightly mad at the lies on the back cover (read the "Editorial Reviews" at Amazon for a sampling), so I sought out the most appropriate section of the store:
Behe's lie-covered volume now rightly resides in the Religious Fiction section. A job well done.

I think this is probably a good idea. Given the reviews of The Edge of Evolution by Ken Miller (from Nature which requires a subscription: "Yet, at the heart of his antidarwinian calculus are numbers not merely incorrect, but so spectacularly wrong that this badly designed argument collapses under its own weight."), Richard Dawkins ("I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe’s second book as by his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him."), and Jerry Coyne:

What has Behe now found to resurrect his campaign for ID? It's rather pathetic, really. Basically, he now admits that almost the entire edifice of evolutionary theory is true: evolution, natural selection, common ancestry. His one novel claim is that the genetic variation that fuels natural selection--mutation--is produced not by random changes in DNA, as evolutionists maintain, but by an Intelligent Designer. That is, he sees God as the Great Mutator.

...each of which drag Behe's assertions through the sieve of current scientific thinking. We can see that Behe is once again making arguments from ignorance in order to set up a false inference to the best explanation that ends up being a god of the gaps. It's a big non sequitur once again; a concatenation of logical fallacies.
I've used this blogger's tactic twice now with the textbook from that was front and center in the Dover Trial, Of Pandas and People, another notable anti-science book by moving Pandas to religious fiction. I also wrote to Barnes and Noble about it.

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