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Comment by Joseph P on April 13, 2018 at 11:14am

No problem, Randall.  The stuff in that book summary sounded suspiciously like the ad hominem arguments that creationists try to slime Darwin with, because they think that if they can show that Darwin was a mean person, all of his scientific work is disproven.  It made me immediately suspicious of this guy's intentions and intellectual rigor.

Some creationists don't seem to get that evolutionary theory is based more upon the 150-something years following the publication of Darwin's book, rather than being based directly upon Darwin's work.  I've talked to creationists who actually think that research into evolution is done by studying Origin in greater depth, trying to glean new insight from Darwin's book.  They don't understand how scientific research works, on a fundamental level.

I doubt that most of them are quite that stupid, but they're definitely out there.

Comment by Plinius on April 13, 2018 at 10:52am

Happy reading Randall, you won't regret it.

Comment by Randall Smith on April 13, 2018 at 6:46am

Thanks, Joseph, for the information. As I said, the Wilson book is controversial and full of misleading statements.

Chris, I'll check for The Lunar Men, on your recommendation.

Comment by Joseph P on April 1, 2018 at 2:03pm

Oh, here we go.  I just did a little digging.  Do you mean the one covered in this article, in The Guardian?  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/30/charles-darwin-victor...

That article was the second item in the list, when I did a search for A.N. Wilson, following his Wikipedia article.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._N._Wilson#Critiques_of_Wilson's_work:

Wilson's biography Charles Darwin, Victorian Mythmaker, (2017), was criticised by John van Wyhe in the New Scientist for confusing Darwin's theory of natural selection with Lamarckism at one point, as well as other scientific, historical and editorial errors. Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian wrote it is "cheap attempt to ruffle feathers", with a dubious grasp of science and attempted character assassination. In The Evening Standard, Adrian Woolfson says that "..while for the greater part a lucid, elegantly written and thought-provoking social and intellectual history" Wilson's "speculations on evolutionary theory," produce a book that is "fatally flawed, mischievous, and ultimately misleading". Steve Jones, an emeritus of University College London, commented in The Sunday Times: "In the classic mould of the contrarian, he despises anything said by mainstream biology in favour of marginal and sometimes preposterous theories." The geneticist and former editor of Nature, Adam Rutherford, called the book "deranged" and said Wilson "would fail GCSE biology catastrophically.

Comment by Joseph P on April 1, 2018 at 1:55pm

Does anyone really think that Darwin came up with biological evolution completely on his own?  His contribution is the synthesis of Natural Selection as the driving mechanism ... or as we know now, ONE of the driving mechanisms.

And sure, he made plenty of errors, which have since been cleared up by later scientists.  Who is this A.N. Wilson guy, and to which book are you referring?

Comment by Plinius on April 1, 2018 at 8:42am

Plagiarize is perhaps a little strong. Charles' grandfather Erasmus Darwin and his friends among others were already debating evolution, and Alfred Russell Wallace was working on it at the same time as Charles - you could say that the time to work out evolution was there. Many people were sleeping in church but groups of others formed hotbeds in which ideas grew. A very interesting book about this time is The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow. A must-read, I think. 

Writing good English is difficult today, I hope I make sense.

Comment by Randall Smith on April 1, 2018 at 7:37am

Sadly, one of my heroes has been vanquished.

According to A.N. Wilson, Charles Darwin has been exposed as a fraud (subtitle: "Victorian Mythmaker"). Wilson convincingly argues that not only did Darwin plagiarize previous exponents of evolution, but he presented many errors in his writings. The bottom line is, he did not "discover" evolution.

Yes, his The Origin of Species  (1859) exposed the evolutionary idea, and changed the minds of the educated world. Yes, Darwin was one of the greatest naturalists who ever lived. But, as Wilson declares, "Darwin was wrong".

You'll have to read the book to make your own decision.

Comment by Bertold Brautigan on December 21, 2017 at 10:59am

I'm totally addicted to Crais' novels; it's an automatic purchase every time a new one comes out. He has a whole string of them with a regular character named Elvis Cole who's the quintessential LA detective.

Comment by Randall Smith on December 16, 2017 at 7:40am

Just finished a true story book called The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston. Within the last 5 years an ancient civilization was discovered in the Mosquitia area of Honduras. For years, there were rumors of a mysterious "White City" buried in the jungle. New techniques (lidar) indicated that the rumors were true. The discoveries were written about in National Geographic back in 2015. (I missed it.) 

Since my daughter and her family lives in Honduras, and I plan to visit them and go to the ruins of Copan this spring, the book was especially interesting to me.  

Comment by Randall Smith on December 1, 2017 at 7:15am

Spud, mentioning Louisa May Alcott reminds me of when I went to Concord, Mass a few years ago. I saw the homes and graves of several of the great "authors"--Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, etc. I couldn't help but think about the card game.

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