Darren Naish takes on ornithologist Alan Feduccia
Paleontologist Darren Naish recently reviewed Romancing the Birds and Dinosaurs by the contrarian ornithologist Alan Feduccia. Prof. Feduccia, an emeritus professor at the University of North Carolina, has for years denied the conventional wisdom that birds are descended from Mesozoic dinosaurs. According to my colleague Martin Neukamm,
["Romancing"] is like an all-out attack on the mainstream of evolutionary research; it even advanced to a kind of edification reading for creationism.
Dr. Naish, an author and consultant, describes himself as “associated” with the University of Southampton (UK), the BBC’s Natural History Unit, and the National Maritime Museum, Falmouth. His review, shall we say, was not entirely favorable. Here is one of the (admittedly more extreme) paragraphs that caught my eye:
... But try as I might to think of the author as a wise sage and friend of the reader, the fact is that RTBAD is cartoonishly overloaded with bias and dirty tricks. Whataboutism, intellectual dishonesty, erroneous repetition, strawmanning and naïve falsification appear throughout as the author aims to diminish positions he dislikes, the most vehement of his arguments representing nothing more than personal incredulity.
Mr. Neukamm and his colleague Andreas Beyer were allowed to translate the review into German, and you may find it here. Our thanks to Mr. Neukamm for the tip.