I’m afraid it’s too late; the damage has already been done to Mr. Molinist’s fragile mind. (The highlighting does it every time.) Mr. Molinist definitely needs to be monitored just in case an agent slips him another highlighted book. The best option for him at this point is some kind of re-education camp. And highlighters should be banned and existing supplies confiscated.
@Beaglelady, I just hate it when my breakfast cereal ends up in my lap and milk burns the inside of my nose. (Please warn me next time!)
As to the re-education camp, I almost made a nomination for the role of Commandant but it felt far too close to Godwin’s law for my tender sensibilities.
I am torn. I’m dealing with deadlines…and yet, as with Gaper’s Block, I just can’t bring myself to turn away. It’s way too riveting.
As much as I’m thoroughly entertained, I finally had to beg my assistant:
Please! No more emails with the subject field: “You’ve just GOTTA read this one!”
Amazing indeed.
1 Like
With all due respect, Professor, how many emails have YOU sent to me with the SUBJECT line: “You’ve just GOTTA read this one!”? 
I don’t think anybody is saying that. There’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek as well as meta-messages on this thread which can be hard for everyone to catch. It is one of the weaknesses and ambiguities of the written word. (And unless emoticons become mandatory by law, I think that this will always be a problem.)
I’ll never forget the response one of my favorite professors would give when someone told him he that he absolutely HAD to read some “important” book. He would go into his unintentional Professor Kingsfield impersonation and say, “Admission to my reading list is a privilege, not a right.”
I think that my professor would also agree with me that “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” In other words: If I find some author’s book filled with amateurish nonsense and a waste of my time, I’m not required to give him one more chance to waste several hours of my life. Again.
I don’t have time to read every book which comes along. Especially when the title is silly. Again.
This was long ago, and I don’t have any names, but…there once was a music reviewer who wrote a very unfavorable review of a composer’s work. So the composer wrote back, “I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. Your review is in front of me. It will soon be behind me.”
1 Like
Since it appears that with the exception of Humeandroid, and Eddie, none of the commenters on this thread have any interest in a serious discussion of Denton’s book or our review of it (which is the topic of this thread) I propose we end this thread here. I cannot close it, but I strongly suggest no further comments be made. Thank you.
Dear Sy,
Thank you very much for the discussion of the book. You have convinced me to read it, no mean feat that. Perhaps we will have the chance to discuss Denton’s ideas sometime soon. I appreciate your tone and approach, and I think you have ideas of your own that we could discuss fruitfully (while disagreeing, I am sure).
As one of those who has read Denton’s book (“Still”, not the first one), I guess I should say something. I very much agree (and of course Sy and I say so in our review) that the title is terrible, obviously intended to appeal to evolution-denying creationists. But if these creationists actually read the book, they will not be happy, because Denton affirms what most of them really want to reject: that all life, including us humans, descends from a common ancestor through a process he prefers to call “common descent with variation” rather than evolution. What he claims is in crisis - and what he sometimes calls Darwinism or Darwinian evolution and sometimes simply evolution - is the overly dominant role given to natural selection (the slow, bit-by-bit accumulation of adaptive traits that he calls panadaptationism) in the neo-Darwinian synthesis. So he discusses quite thoroughly current literature on evo-devo, epigenetics, convergence, gene duplication and transposons - everything where support for either saltation or form-directed structuralism can be found. It’s all punctuated, as we said, with hyperbolic pronouncements on the doom all this spells for “evolution” (and several rants about the injustice of Richard Owen’s statue in London’s Natural History Museum being replaced by Darwin’s - of whom Denton appears to be distinctly unfond), but it’s a valuable resource for those I believe it was intended for: creationists who have trouble coming to terms with any of this evolution stuff, but are willing to look beyond the young-earth Creation Museum level.
Thank you for the review of this book. I just got to reading it. I am afraid that ID and the variations of genetic variations are not my field of interest, although I like to try to keep up to date when possible.
From what you say Denton takes a positive position in the discussion of evolution. I would like to know more about why so many are uneasy about the standard theory.
Also you said that your article would be in the March issue of a journal and March is around the corner.
Thanks again.
So I just deleted more posts than I’ve ever done in one batch, affecting a lot of people. But as Sy points out in the post above, it was already going off-topic before 80 more responses were added. And these posts quickly devolved into unproductive and ungracious behavior. If anyone wants to discuss anything related to these topics, may I remind you that the Forum allows for users to create new threads. And hopefully, on those threads, the rules of the Forum will be better followed.
I’m going to create a pinned post on the main page to discuss some of what happened here in more detail.