Skip to main content

Dissent over Descent – Steve Fuller **

I was delighted when this book thumped down on the ever-growing review pile, as its timing couldn’t have been better. I had just started a short series of posts on my blog covering the debate between intelligent design and evolution. As someone had kindly sent me some material on intelligent design, I wanted to take a step back from my prejudices and try to take an open-minded view purely on the facts as they were presented from both sides of the argument.

 As this book is subtitle ‘intelligent design’s challenge to darwinism’ I thought I had the ideal prompt for my summing up (though I was a little concerned by that word ‘darwinism’ which only tends to be used by creationists as a kind of insult to evolution to force it into a similar position to a belief system).

 Unfortunately, after reading the book I was really no more the wiser. I am told Steve Fuller is a sociologist of science (whatever that is), but the book comes across as philosophy of science of the dullest kind. It is almost as if the author sets out to put the reader to sleep, the approach is so unhelpful to understanding what is being said.

 Furthermore, as often seems to be the case where there is an element of post-modernism about a piece of writing, it is almost impossible to be sure just what conclusions one is supposed to draw from reading this book. I think, but I’m not all sure, that the author’s conclusion is that both intelligent design and evolution are science, in that they try to offer an explanation for the existence of something, but that they are both bad science, because neither can offer any useful predictions about a specific species etc. So I got nothing useful here, apart from reinforcing my prejudices about philosophy of science – but that’s a whole new debate which I will leave to another day.

 All in all, a huge disappointment.
Hardback:  

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Just looking at the subtitle of this book, what exactly is the nature of the ‘challenge’ that Fuller thinks intelligent design makes to Darwinism? Well, it’s not really a scientific challenge, since he seems to believe that if you understand both theories broadly enough, they can explain the stuff of life equally well. However, where they differ, as the dust jacket says, is in their ‘intellectual roots’ and their ‘political prospects’. Fuller shows that both run a lot deeper than other books on this topic have stressed.








All told, this is a book about what the dispute says about the nature of science itself. Fuller argues this point on many different levels. Readers will find some of these disorientating mainly because he seems to revel in taking the reader off his guard. For example, Fuller doesn’t think Darwin should be counted as a scientist because when he rejected intelligent design he also rejected the idea that there was a grand unified theory of everything waiting for science to know.








A recurrent theme in the book is that almost everyone has a distorted view of science because they misunderstand the history of science. Fuller doesn’t think there’s anything especially ‘Darwinian’ about the history of genetics and molecular biology in the 20th century. You could be a creationist and pretty much accept the lot – and apparently some do. He ends the book by encouraging intelligent design people to take back some of this history as their own, especially when they teach their views.








Fuller is very much a philosopher telling scientists their business but what he has to say is interesting even if not completely plausible.








Community Review by Bill Sysmeck.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more