Faulkner, Twain, Kipling, Whitman, Rushdie . . . and Coyne! Well cut off my legs and call me Shorty, WEIT has made Newsweek’s list of 50 Books For Our Times (it’s on page 2).
What to Read Now. And Why
We know it’s insane. We know people will ask why on earth we think that an 1875 British satirical novel is the book you need to read right now—or, for that matter, why it even made the cut. The fact is, no one needs another best-of list telling you how great The Great Gatsby is. What we do need, in a world with precious little time to read (and think), is to know which books—new or old, fiction or nonfiction—open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways. Which is why we’d like you to sit down with Anthony Trollope, and these 49 other remarkably trenchant voices.
WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
by Jerry A. CoyneEven innocent bystanders in the culture wars should understand the evidence that supports evolution, and this book by a leading evolutionary biologist presents it clearly but not pedantically.
I can’t help but be chuffed to see WEIT included on a list with Leaves of Grass, Huckleberry Finn, Midnight’s Children, and Kim. That’s the good news, and I suppose I’m especially pleased to hold this up to those accommodationists who proclaim that I’ve hurt the pro-evolution cause more than have the IDers or other creationists (take that, Michael Ruse!).
Yes, that’s the good news. The bad news is that there appears to be only one other pure-science book on the list, Lee Smolin’s terrific The Trouble With Physics. You’d think that on a list of 50 books — not just new books but books in print — they’d find a couple other science books to tout. What about Richard Rhodes’s The Making of The Atomic Bomb? Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene? Steve Pinker’s The Language Instinct? Given the overweening importance of science in modern culture, and the number of really good science books out there, I would like to have seen, say, at least eight or nine on the list. The two cultures persist!
p.s. Now might be a good time to order a copy or three for your intellectually hungry but evolution-ignorant friends . . . .
Congratulations, Jerry. You are there along with Walt Whitman and Mary Shelley. Unfortunetly, there is that nonsense at number 10, a fiction about a god about a fiction bible.
I’ve heard “God: A Biography” is rather outstanding, actually. It was recommended to me by a fellow non-believer.
The book is outstanding. It approaches the bible as a book of literature and tracks how the character “God” morphs throughout the different texts. Won the Pulitzer.
Congrats, Jerry. WEIT a solid, logical choice, and yet certainly you have every reason to be greatly flattered and gratified. May the selection contribute mightly to the book’s endurance and influence.
Hot diggity friggin’ damn! Some sanity out there! CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Kudos!
Will be picking up a copy for my damn self this weekend!
There’s no Shubin, so I guess you’ve won.
Wow, they do care about science. I wouldn’t have expected it, even though the issue continues to undermine science.
I’d say less congratulations for making the list than congratulations for writing it not knowing that it would make such a list.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Alas, I have no friends who are ignorant of evolution.
But I might just buy 3 copies for those of my friends who like an intelligent read, rather than sit down and have their minds drained by vapid ‘reality’ shows on the goggle-box.
Just finished WEIT and agree that it is worthy of any must read list. So far I have given a copy to two fundies. One returned it (claimed he already read it -that was BS) and the other has been curiously silent. Perhaps a Coyne induced convert to reality?
I’d flip a coin to decide between that and “dumped in the trash after reading the title”.
I’ll bet Richard Dawkins is steamed that that this list came out before his own evidence for evolution book was published.
Nah. He’s delighted for a comrade in arms, you can count on it. Dawkins’s book will complement Jerry’s, not compete with it.
RD’s comment on the back cover of my copy of WEIT pretty much confirms that.
I think WEIT totally deserves to sit with illustrious company, though I agree there are other science books equally deserving. I’d also like to see “Consciousness Explained” included in such a list.
Oh by the way: the importance of science in our culture is *overweening*? Really? So everything you’ve written so far has been some kind of glorious anti-Poe and only now the mask slips? Say it isn’t so, Dr Coyne!
Congratulations. One thing though: science books require far more effort to read than, say, fiction books and many people read to relax when they are dead tired.
I don’t have any anti-evolution friends left. I lost her the last time I sent her books …
Should get one for myself, though.
The comments on this topic reinforce my resistance to book lists. Which author or what book makes/does not make the list is always the main topic of conversation. Please note: The title od Newsweek’s article is “50 Books For Our Times,” not The 50 Books For Our Times.
Another objection to Newsweek’s list, as it is presented on line, is Newsweek’s promotion (paid?)of Amazon. Anyone who does not have a subscription and wants to read the latest issue of Newsweek will have to go to their local bookstore or newsstand to purchase it: however, for some reason, Newsweek encourages people to bypass their neighbourhood bookstores. Libraries too are great places to find books; there “intellectually hungry but evolution-ignorant” people will find all the books they want to read but can’t afford to buy.
Wo! Congratulations!
Good company on that page, too – Marjane Satrapi and John Lewis along with Rushdie.
The bad news is that there appears to be only one other pure-science book on the list,…
So The Botany of Desire isn’t a science book?
Kudos for WEIT being listed, but isn’t it odd that Coyne is recommending Steven Pinker’s “The Language Instinct”, which is strongly anchored in the tenets of evolutionary psychology?
Coyne makes his distaste for EP clear in the last chapter of WEIT, although his arguments are poor to say the least.
If anyone is interested, my graduate adviser Todd Shackelford and I have published a review of WEIT that deals with this very issue, while maintaining that the book is stellar overall: http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep07288294.pdf
What do you have in the way of a historical record of behavioral changes over time? A psychological “fossil record” if you will? Because that’s one very powerful way of studying evolution, as is done in paleontology in general and paleoanthropology in particular.
Or perhaps, do you have evidence of human behaviors whose known genetic bases are derived mutations or constellations of derived mutations that have been preserved by the action of natural selection? That would be spectacular! Traits with clearly divergent phenotypes between fruitflies and their relatives or between humans and their relatives that are well-understood genetically rarely clear that high bar, although they do occasionally (and quite often with controversy).
In fact, it would even be interesting to see what human traits have a derived genetic basis, irrespective of the action of natural selection. I was unaware that behavioral traits had been so thoroughly genetically characterized in humans as to connect the phenotypes to their causative genotypes. Do you care to share the references to such examples?
Because if the genetic basis of a trait is poorly understood, then we are unfortunately left with little more than the obvious: human behavior differs from other organisms and no doubt many of these traits have genetic bases that may or may not have been preserved by their influence on the survival of their bearers and/or sampling processes (demography and genetic drift). Any evolutionary claims without understanding the genetic basis of behavioral traits is only a collection of “plausible” tales, where “plausible” has so many degrees of freedom (due to our ignorance of the underlying genetics) that uncountable numbers of explanations compete.
Quite frankly, I can’t in good faith imagine telling laymen that the perspective that contemporary EP presents has any reliable evolutionary value given the rudimentary state of our knowledge of the genetic basis of complex behaviors. Any hypotheses that it would seem to imply or framework it would seem to erect would be so preliminary without genetic data so as to render them similar to “parlor games”.
In order to confront your review directly:
“Unless Coyne is willing to dismiss the variety of research methods used by the social and behavioral sciences, his argument that evolutionary psychological research is not rigorous enough “sinks without a trace.””
I posit that it is indeed possible claim that any research program that cannot investigate either history directly or both genotype and phenotype can be dismissed as a program that has anything meaningful to say about evolution beyond hypothesis generation.
This is not to say that EP is devoid of merit or that it must remain silent on evolution. Rather it is to say that EP is a field of study in its infancy that examines a very difficult topic which has, to date, provided very little in the way of a synthesis of genotype and phenotype. It is possible that, with ever increasing amounts of genetic data, and ever larger panels of phenotyped individuals with full genome sequence, that behaviorally relevant traits will indeed be characterized on a genetic and then on a molecular-mechanistic level sufficient to test the hypotheses from the idea mill that is EP. But this is far from certain, as the limitations of complex trait mapping is an active topic of research in the human genetics community, and so far unambiguous successes are hard to come by.
Currently, it would be a stretch to say that we understand the evolution of any trait (psychological or otherwise) for which we lack both a historical record and a genetic understanding. Where does this perspective leave EP?
Reginald has a point. I think “The Botany of Desire” and “Predictably Irrational” might both count as science books, though I have read neither and can’t be sure.