Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is one of a series of books promoting "Intelligent Design" from the Discovery Institute, and unlike some other recent entries to the field it contains no claim to novel insights -- it is more a survey of the field, and, as the name suggests, is far more about the negation of evolutionary theory than it is about the supposed merit of ID. One of the most interesting aspects of it is that it shows a somewhat unusual attitude toward the author's potential readers. Some authors, e.g., Meyer, seek to snow their readers by misusing and quote-mining a huge number of references, on the supposition that these will not be consulted. Others, e.g., Axe, explicitly appeal to the reader's non-expertise, imploring him not to give in to the views of experts. Bethell employs those sorts of tactics in smaller measure, but in addition, takes a rather daring tack. Bethell's approach is quite plainly based upon a contempt for his reader's general learning and intelligence which is exceeded by very few of ID's detractors. As much as ID's proponents complain that they are not taken seriously, and that their followers are derided as fools, I have seldom seen a book which assumes that a person interested in ID is as poorly informed about basic biology or as generally witless as this book does. A good example of this is his Chapter 9, which deals with homology. He makes some quite bizarre statements here which no literate reader could possibly believe to be true. He tells us, relying on a 1971 quote from deBeer, that the search for homologous genes has been given up as hopeless. He then informs us that we have practically no idea what the relationship between an organism's genotype and its phenotype is, and cites Lewontin's writings from the 1970s to that effect. And -- I kid you not -- he does not update these views at all for his reader. Instead, he goes BACK another century and starts complaining about Ernst Haeckel's embryo drawings, leaving the reader with the impression that (1) embryology tells us nothing useful about evolution, (2) homologies seen in embryos and in adults are irrelevant to evolution because they cannot be tied to anything in the genome, and (3) that how organisms are constructed by their genes remains to this day a wholly inscrutable mystery. Now, when Bethell says these sorts of things, it is plain that he has had a look at his potential audience and judged them to be a pack of ignorant rubes. As most readers of this review will of course already know, the modern study of evolutionary development, or "evo-devo," answers all three of these positions with a very definite "no." Any statement of the case for ID made to a literate reader would have to deal with evo-devo's contributions to our knowledge; it would have to come to grips with what is now a highly detailed picture of the relationship between genotype and phenotype, illuminated by insights from embryology and physiology, and account for the evidence in terms of ID. Bethell cannot, so he takes the extraordinary dodge of only relying upon sources that are too old to have had the insights of evo-devo to employ. If he cannot deal with evo-devo, he will ignore it; but ignoring it, of course, does not make it go away. Let's be clear on this: citing nothing newer than 1974, while giving your reader the impression that what you are citing reflects the current state of knowledge in evolutionary development is bizarre. It is like citing a medieval alchemist on atomic theory and asserting that we still really know nothing other about atoms other than that if we can find the Philosopher's Stone, we should be able to transmute base metals into gold. This is a fast-moving field. And this is hardly the only case of this in Bethell's book -- again, and again, and again, he relies upon old sources. He spends a great deal of time on a symposium held at the centennial of Origin of Species, and on a 1966 symposium at the Wistar Institute, and very little on the current state of the science. Anyone who understands a bit about the current state of the science can readily appreciate why this is. Dishonesty is of course not uncommon in ID writing, and so Bethell's clumsy and transparent attempt to avoid evo-devo, by itself, is no shocker. But Bethell truly must have judged his audience to be profoundly, deeply ignorant of biology, or he could never pursue this sort of dodge. As a Discovery Institute fellow he likely knows his audience very well; is he right to suppose that they are this ignorant? He may be; but if he is, it does not speak well for the intellectual health of the ID hypothesis. There are more examples to be had -- indeed, the book is very wide-ranging and rarely gets more than ankle-deep into any particular subject before moving along, so cataloguing them all would be quite a chore. But it is fair to say that no literate reader could be impressed with anything in this volume; it is a sop for faith, not a science book. I will touch upon a few more of these strange approaches taken by Bethell, but it is well to remember that it tends to take ten paragraphs to rebut one paragraph of inaccuracies. A thorough rebuttal to Bethell is not going to be found in a book review, but rather in a careful study of what actual scientists, studying actual biology, have actually found. There are many good books available, some of which I will cite further along. On homology, he further claims that any homologies which ARE observed in nature are fully accountable for under ID theory, and hence cannot be evidence for evolution. Whether he is merely in error or dishonest, in this case, is harder to say, but he is, in any event, obviously wrong. The problem is that if a designer is using common elements from a toolkit to produce things, he will use them as needed, not in accordance with descent. So we should find homologies not in a grand nested hierarchy, as we do find them in nature, but distributed without regard to any apparent nested hierarchy. Placental, marsupial, and monotreme anteaters ought, by the ID way of reckoning, to have homologous genes for structures and functions particular to their adaptation to their shared specialized diet. What we find, however, is that while monotremes and marsupials and placentals have many homologous genes and structures and functions, these are the ones common to mammals as a whole, not to the specialized adaptations of a particular lifestyle. Specializations shared by members of these separate groups, while they may be superficially convergent, are not based upon homology. Bethell does discuss nested hierarchies, but as is typical for ID writings, he relies upon minor disagreements between morphological and genetic inferences about descent (and, within the genetic field, older studies, as these were more problematic and used more limited data sets) to suggest that there are no nested hierarchies. But here, no practicing biologist agrees with Bethell -- not even Michael Behe. One of his favorite rhetorical devices, throughout the book, is to cite something for a proposition which nobody thinks it demonstrates, point out that it doesn't demonstrate that point, and declare victory. This treatment reaches such things as the peppered moths not demonstrating the origin of genetic novelty, bacterial antibiotic resistance not demonstrating how abiogenesis occurred, changes in populations due to short-term changes in environment not demonstrating how speciation occurred, and the like. It's clever as a form of rhetoric, but unpersuasive as a mode of reasoning in biology, and it once again demonstrates Bethell's contempt for his readers: he supposes they simply do not know enough about any of these subjects, or what these phenomena are evidence for, to notice. In addition to failing to even mention evo-devo work, Bethell manages to object to the idea of evolution creating new species without ever even mentioning the primary explanation of speciation, the allopatric speciation model. It is fair to say that if he had, it would have been unhelpful to his arguments -- so, like all modern evo-devo work, it finds no place in this book. At one point he touches upon the therapsids, the group which includes the ancestors of mammals. His understanding of phylogeny, in this context, is quite badly confused and confusing. The problem, of course, is this: merely demonstrating that Bethell is able to make phylogenetic concepts confusing does not demonstrate that they are wrong. It only demonstrates that Bethell either does not understand them or does not wish to accurately describe them. His stumbling-about with cladistics is likewise just awful to read, and his various remarks about inferences concerning ancestry range from the obviously true to the obviously false; better, if you want to understand these matters, to read a real science book on them. Like most ID writers, he likewise badly misunderstands Gould's "punctuated equilibria." Since the proper understanding of "punk eek" requires a proper understanding of the unmentioned-by-Bethell allopatric speciation model and its implications for what the fossil record ought to show, it's unlikely that his readers will understand it any better than he does. His descriptions of the fossil evidence are likewise hilariously short of the mark. He's happy to give a poor analysis of the place of Archaeopteryx in the dinosaur/bird transition, but doesn't even mention the many, many dino-bird fossils which have been found since, mostly in very recent times. He also pays a short visit to the Cambrian Explosion, which he likewise bungles badly. What is a real shame is that while he does, for a change, cite a recent work, Erwin and Valentine's excellent volume The Cambrian Explosion, he completely misdescribes their conclusions: "They agree that no one has found the missing fossils or plausibly suggested how the new body plans arose so quickly." That's a stunningly false description of this excellent book, which in fact offers considerable insight into the meaning of such things as the trace fossils and sclerites we have from pre-Cambrian and early Cambrian creatures and into the evolutionary, developmental, environmental, ecological and genetic processes which Erwin and Valentine identify as the drivers of the Explosion. There is so very, very much more to criticize in this book. It is full of falsehoods, out-of-date information, out-of-context quotes, attempts to whip Bethell's readers up into a culture-war lather, and tactical omissions of the very information which would cause a reader to say, "well, what about THAT?" There simply is not space to address them all here. But the remedy to this very poor book is not, ultimately, a critique of the book. A person who would like to actually understand evolutionary theory and the evidence for it can draw upon many, many excellent books on the subject by specialists who have taken the time to render their fields intelligible to the ordinary reader. Even if, for philosophical or religious reasons, you do not feel that you wish to "believe" in evolutionary theory, there can be no possible harm in understanding evolutionary theory upon its own terms, rather than through this sort of distorted lens. To that end, some recommendations: these are personal favorites but there are of course many more. On evo-devo: Sean Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful and The Making of the Fittest; On systematics, taxonomy, and the breadth and general physiology of living things: Colin Tudge, The Variety of Life. On general evolutionary theory and the descent, physiology, ecology and diversity of vertebrates: Christine M. Janis, Vertebrate Life On the Cambrian Explosion (with a warning that this volume is rather technical, but very worthwhile to the reader who is determined to take it in): Erwin and Valentine, The Cambrian Explosion