Publisher recalls book that misquotes Michael Behe
A report in Retraction Watch, University press removes book about intelligent design for misquoting ID proponent, reported, “New York University Press is pulling all copies of a book about intelligent design after the author falsely quoted another scholar in the work.” The book is Designer Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America, by C.W. Howell. I was slightly taken aback by the word falsely, where inaccurately might have held less baggage. At any rate, Retraction Watch says,
The misquote stemmed from a passage in a court ruling Howell “mistakenly” read as a direct quote from Behe and attributed as such, he told us. Howell writes about the intersection of faith and science, and serves as an academic director for the C.S. Lewis Foundation.
The book has been pulled from the market and does not appear on Amazon. The Press will presumably reissue the book after the error has been corrected. I consider that beyond principled: I consider the the misquotation a minor error (all books have errors, even mine). I would have treated it like an error in a published paper and simply issued an erratum, posted the erratum on the publisher’s and my web pages, and probably tried to get Amazon to follow suit.
Though not listed on Amazon, the book is still listed in Publishers Weekly, which gave it a favorable but not starred review. Curious, I looked it up and skimmed the Introduction. It is well and clearly written, and notes that the damage done by intelligent-design creationism is still with us:
While ID’s community of supporters is still active–especially on the internet–in the media and culture at large, it is generally perceived today as defunct, and virtually all prior scholarly work on intelligent design ends with the Dover case from 2005. But intelligent design did not disappear. This book makes the case that its legacy is far more significant than we might think. Even though it did fail to achieve its goal of remaking contemporary science, intelligent design both planted the seeds and nurtured the growth of extreme skepticism in the world of US conservatism, a trend that has continued to grow ever since, sprouting in contemporary antivaccine movements and climate change denialism, among other things. We are all grappling today with intelligent design’s legacy, even when we are not directly talking about its serious intellectual content and its highly technical scientific attacks on Darwin.
After observing that he is closest to a theistic evolutionist, Howell, a historian with a PhD from Duke University, says,
... I have tried my best to present ID in a critical but fair light–not to disprove it (or prove it) but simply to understand it and its supporters. It is my hope that this book will, to appropriate Darwin’s phrase about origins, “throw light” on a movement that exerted, and still does exert, great influence on life in the US and that it will help illuminate the beliefs, politics, and effects of ID such as they were and are in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
I will look forward to this book when it is finally reissued.