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Mario Livio definitely does not pick on someone smaller than he. Indeed, when he decided to write about what he considers scientific blunders, he went after Darwin, Kelvin, Pauling, Hoyle, and Einstein.

The full title of his latest book is Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein – Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe, which is more of an abstract than a title. It would be incorrect to claim that Livio has not laid a glove on any of his subjects, but neither, it seems to me, are all of the errors “colossal.” Still, the book was well worth reading and contains excellent introductory material for those who are not experts in the subjects and even for those who are. The organization of the book is also interesting in that every chapter relates in some way to evolution, whether of life or the earth or the universe, and the transitions from scientist to scientist are relatively seamless.

My first reaction when I received this splendid book was, “Wow! Great pictures!” Not to mention high-quality printing, paper, and layout. At 22 x 28 cm, the book is not exactly a coffee-table book, but neither does it feel like a textbook. And no wonder: It is published by a publisher, Vivays Publishing, which apparently specializes in art, architecture, and interior design, with, now, several science titles.

You could probably get by by looking at the pictures, which range from DNA to diatoms to Darwin to Darrow to dinosaurs, and reading the occasional caption. That would be a mistake, though; the text is clear and concise and, as the title promises, explores evolution.

Afarensis, a blogger on (mostly) paleontology, has started a series of posts reviewing the Disco ‘Tute’s “Science and Human Origins.” Recall that Paul McBride also did a chapter by chapter review that hammered the book a few months ago.

Erythropsidium – a protist with a simple eye, or ocellus. Figure 2.2 of Evolution’s Witness. Image © F.J.R. “Max” Taylor, Ph.D.

Who knew? A single-celled organism has a camera eye with a lens. A certain fish has two corneas and controls the intensity of light on its retina by injecting pigmented particles between them. Other animals can shield their rods (the receptors for low intensity) during the day. A conch can grow a wholly new eye. A flatfish has both eyes on the same side of its head, but starts life with bilateral symmetry. A sea snake has a light sensor in its tail to ensure that the tail is hidden under a rock. Some birds cram their corneas through their irises in order to focus on nearby objects under water. The woodcock can see behind its own head - in stereo. Some animals have two foveas in each eye, one for peripheral vision and one for binocular vision.

Jason Rosenhouse moved from the east coast to Kansas for a postdoc. He had studied a bit about creationism while a graduate student at Dartmouth, so it would be an exaggeration to say that he was surprised to learn that not everyone in Kansas was a liberal Democrat (even by today’s standard of liberalism). Nevertheless, for reasons that are not made completely clear, he humored his inner anthropologist and attended a handful of creationist conferences over a period of several years. The result is the splendid book Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line, which both shows creationists as regular people, just like scientists, and also takes them seriously, without condescension or sarcasm.

Not that Rosenhouse cuts them any slack. He gets up to the microphone and asks pointed questions, and he is completely open about who he is and what he believes. He mingles with the conference attendees and is impressed by how very pleasant they are; he is pleasant in return, except for one apparently unfortunate interaction with Ken Ham. Nevertheless, however pleasant the creationists may be, Rosenhouse makes clear that he and his interlocutors are always talking past each other, and his critiques have virtually no effect - except occasionally, when he sees a young student listening intently and thinks he may have planted some seeds of doubt.

“Science and Human Origins” (Amazon; Barnes&Noble) is a slim book recently published by the Disco ‘Tute’s house press. It’s by Ann Gauger and Douglas Axe, members of the Disco Tute’s Biologic Institute, along with Casey Luskin. The book is blurbed thusly:

In this provocative book, three scientists challenge the claim that undirected natural selection is capable of building a human being, critically assess fossil and genetic evidence that human beings share a common ancestor with apes, and debunk recent claims that the human race could not have started from an original couple.

In other words, down with common descent, and while we’re at it, a literal Adam and Eve could have been the ancestors of the whole human species.

And by three scientists? Ah, yes, I momentarily forgot that Casey Luskin got a Master’s in Earth Science before he went off to law school and then got a job with the Disco ‘Tute, where he is now listed as “Research Coordinator” (and is there called an attorney rather than a scientist). Once again, one detects a touch of inflationary credentialism.

Fortunately for me, I’m spared the chore of reading and critiquing the book. Paul McBride, a Ph.D. candidate in vertebrate macroecology/evolution in New Zealand who writes Still Monkeys, bit the bullet and did a chapter by chapter (all five chapters) review of the book. The book doesn’t come out looking good (is anyone surprised?). I’m going to shamelessly piggyback on McBride’s review. I’ll link to his individual chapter reviews, adding some commentary, below the fold.

If you want to publish a book with a vanity press and no editorial assistance, you had better know what you are doing. Charles M. Woolf, an emeritus professor of zoology at Arizona State University, unfortunately does not know what he is doing. His book, Darwin, Darwinism, and Uncertainty, is a series of three more or less unrelated essays. The first is a biography of Darwin and attempts to show that Darwin was a believing member of the Church of England until the ascent of Darwin to agnosticism later in his life; hence, “Darwinism” and theism are not necessarily incompatible. The second and least important essay is called “Theories for the creation of the universe,” but it concerns mostly the origin of complex, self-replicating molecules, and I found much of it very difficult to understand.

The subtitle of this book is “Confessions of a religious paleontologist,” but you will find only one confession: that the author, Robert Asher, believes in God. More on that later.

The heart of the book is 8 chapters that irrefutably demonstrate descent with modification. I found much of the book compelling, but also fairly difficult and much more detailed than I thought appropriate for a lay audience. A number of times, Asher uses a term that is obviously well known to biologists, but known to me only vaguely if at all – and I have been a fellow traveler in biology for approximately a decade. Pseudogene, for example, appears, undefined, in the very last sentence of the chapter that describes the evolution of whales from terrestrial to marine animals. I looked it up in the index and found that it is defined, implicitly at best, 50 pages later.

The following article is a draft of a review by Paul R. Gross of Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us about Development and Evolution, by Mark S. Blumberg. The review will be published in Reviews of the National Center for Science Education.

An important subtext of Freaks of Nature, by the developmentalist Mark S. Blumberg, is the central importance, indeed the necessity, of monsters. To appreciate them is important, the argument goes, not only for progress in developmental biology, but also for solving the most challenging contemporary problems of evolutionary mechanism. A concomitant of this subtext is pleadings for an unmistakably more positive view, at least within those two sciences, of monsters and – as per the title – freaks of nature.

[Review of Shapiro, James A. Evolution: A View from the 21^st Century. FT Press Science, ISBN: 0-13-278093-3, $34.99 Publisher’s site]

Over the years there have been many books that purport to “radically revise” or “supplant” Darwinian evolutionary biology; they come with predictable regularity. Usually they are of three kinds: something is wrong with natural selection, something is wrong with inheritance, or something is wrong with phylogeny. This book, by geneticist James A. Shapiro, exemplifies all three.

Editor’s Note: We are giving away copies of The Way of the Panda in our photography contest.

What is a panda? Ever since the French naturalist-priest Armand David “discovered” the panda in 1869, this question has fascinated people the world over. In The Way of the Panda: The Curious History of China’s Political Animal (Amazon), Henry Nicholls explores the development of natural history knowledge about the panda as well as how politics and popularization shape science. The panda’s distinctive markings, scarcity, and relative mystery have made it useful as a symbol, and few other animals are as closely identified with a particular nation. In other words, a panda bear is often not just a panda bear.

Written in three parts, The Way of the Panda covers a lot of ground from bringing pandas into the consciousness of the world outside China to the future of pandas and people. It sometimes wanders a bit from its focus on pandas, such as when the reader learns about a hullabaloo raised over the remains of a beloved London Zoo gorilla. Overall, though, it seems to be a thorough history of pandas and what we’ve made of them.

As was reported on PT and elsewhere, Chris Rodda recently decided to make a pdf of her book Liars for Jesus available for download free. Just today, the National Academies Press announced that it would make available pdf’s of nearly all its books, also free for download. NAP is the publisher of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council.

Not to be outdone, I have decided to make a pdf of my book No Sense of Obligation: Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe available for free download here.

After watching an episode of the Jon Stewart show, a frustrated Chris Rodda has decided to make her book Liars for Jesus available free as a pdf file. Ms. Rodda is senior research director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which I recently discussed here.

Those are two of the questions that Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer ask in their new book Evolution, Creationism, and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms. Their answers are not entirely comforting. The authors, who discussed some of their findings in Science the other day, analyze a number of well-known polls and also their own poll of biology teachers, which they conducted in 2007. They conclude that a substantial majority of Americans want creationism taught in public schools – not necessarily creationism alone, but creationism nonetheless. They also note that the number of citizens who support evolution alone is increasing at the expense of those who want both taught but not, presumably, those who want creationism alone taught. A myriad of court decisions, however, has ruled out teaching of creationism in any form. The nation is divided, as they put it, by religion, education, and place.

I read this fascinating book while I was on a freighter island-hopping in the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia. Vermeij explained clearly, for example, why islands have less biological diversity than continents, why some islands are characterized by giant tortoises or giant flightless birds, why the tropics have so many nasty poisonous creatures that you do not want to step on when you go snorkeling. I could probably tell you much more, but “island” is oddly not in the index.

The subtitle of the book is “How adaptation explains everything from seashells to civilization.” But I saw the book as more a description of nature from a systems point of view - how everything interacts with everything else, how causes are rarely simple but rather are multifaceted. The book is not, as you might have guessed, a defense of the primacy of adaptation against genetic drift (one entry in the index, page 6), and sociobiology or evolutionary psychology is barely mentioned (page 18). The book tells you how adaptation explains seashells (Vermeij’s specialty), but not civilization; not really.

NASA photo.

This article is so far off task that I thought of defining a new category, Way the Hell Off Topic, to complement Slightly Off Topic. But I want to alert anyone who may be interested in the publication of a new book, From Jars to the Stars, by Todd Neff, a book about Ball Aerospace and how they came to shoot a projectile at a comet – and hit it.

Looking for any last minute gifts for the Feast of Prof. Steve Steve (Dec. 26^th)? I highly recommend the two books put together this fall by ZooBorns. If you know anything about the ZooBorns website, you know that it is an overdose of cuteness. The books do not disappoint.

The book with the tiger on the cover is geared to children between the ages of 2–7. It is a large-format book, suitable for reading to young children. Although the text in the main body of the book is simple, the appendix has lots of information about the animals, including their conservation status.

The book with the fennec fox on the cover is for all ages and would make a good “stocking stuffer.” It covers more species and contains more pictures and information about the animals and zoos.

Amazon

Amazon

So if you like cute animals, zoos, and science, you can’t go wrong by picking up copies of both.

The subtitle of this book, by Baylor professors Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, is “What we say about God—& what that says about us.” The thesis of the book is, in essence, that classifying people according to their religious denomination (or lack thereof) tells you little about, for example, their politics or their views on science. Instead, Froese and Bader classify people according to the kind of God they believe in: authoritative, benevolent, critical, and distant (not to mention none).

Froese and Bader pose 2 questions, “To what extent does God interact with the world? To what extent does God judge the world?” As a result of interviews and surveys, they conclude that

I generally do not think authors should comment publicly on book reviews, but this spring I came across two reviews of a book that I coauthored, which had somewhat divergent viewpoints and were written by reviewers who were put out by our treatment of religion. Both reviewers, to some extent, project their own views onto us, but for very different reasons, and I thought that this interesting divergence called out for a brief response.

The book in question is Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails), by me and Paul Strode. A review in Science Education by Adam Shapiro, now a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, begins with this enigmatic niggling:

William Dembski in 2002 wrote

Building a design curriculum is educational in the broadest sense. It includes not just textbooks, but everything from research monographs for professors and graduate students to coloring books for preschoolers [emphasis added].

Mr. Dembski has apparently got his wish, though it would be a stretch to say that The Intelligent Design Coloring Book is (a) written for preschoolers or (b) quite what Mr. Dembski had in mind.