PZ Myers. 2004 Jul 21. Book browsing. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/book_browsing/>. Accessed 2008 Dec 04.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Book browsing
...and goofing off when I should be tidying upIt's been quiet here at Pharyngula today because I've been a bit swamped with various chores that have to be done before I take off for the Society for Developmental Biology meetings in Calgary, and they've all got to be done by tomorrow. I dragged the kids in to the lab this morning and cruelly forced them to help clean up my messes there; it was mainly tidying up kipple and making sure all the fish tanks were clean and happy and ready to be neglected for a few days.
Now I'm in my office trying to stash away books and papers. I cannot resist books, and they accumulate, and I have the terrible habit of constantly pulling them off the shelf and reading a bit and then plopping it down on the nearest flat surface with a post-it or ten stuck here and there as bookmarks. And then there's all the papers that need to be filed away...
...so anyway, I need a moment to procrastinate, so here I am. This past weekend I hit up a used bookstore in St. Cloud (root of the problem, I know) and came away with a couple of treasures I was just now perusing before tucking away on a shelf.
The first is a copy of Smith's Evolution of Chordate Structure from 1960. It's nicely illustrated, and the basics of anatomy and embryology really haven't changed much in the 44 years since it was current. One thing that I noted is a few comments on Haeckel. I'm often told by creationists that they were taught Haeckelian concepts of evolution and development when they went to high school or college, which always has seemed highly unlikely to me. Back in the 1970's, when I was in college, I was taught with absolutely no ambiguity that Haeckel's laws were false. We can push that date back to the 1960's now, since Smith's book also says the same thing, that Haeckel's laws were not true.
The most widely accepted of the ill-fated forerunners of Garstang's principle was Haeckel's (1874) "biogenetic law", a brilliant aphorism ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") known to every student of biology for 75 years. The concept of Haeckel was that successive developmental stages of any animal duplicate the adult stages of that animal's ancestors, in the same succession. Ample evidence now available shows that Haeckel's "law," as stated and generally understood, is simply not literally true, and that literal acceptance has been and continues to be most deceptively misleading.
It's odd how a clever phrase can perpetuate itself independent of the truth of its meaning. It's as if biologists everywhere have been saying, "'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' is false", and students everywhere heard "'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' is false" and the sense of what biologists were saying was simply ignored.
The other treasure is a book I've only heard about indirectly, largely from the work of creationists. I mentioned it a while back while I was gnawing over a creationist editorial in the Pioneer Press:
Let's have students discuss Peters' claim that "we share 98 percent of our genes … with chimpanzees." Let's put Peters' claim alongside the statement of evolutionist William Fix that "[Similar] organs are now known to be produced by totally different gene complexes in the different species. The concept of homology [similarity] in terms of similar genes handed on from a common ancestor has broken down."
This obscure book by the "evolutionist" William Fix is a common appliance in the creationist list of quotes. Well, I finally found a copy of his The Bone Peddlers, and I'm going to have to correct the creationist claim that he is an evolutionist. He's a crank. The whole book is your typical anti-evolutionist screed, except for the end, where it starts getting truly weird (even weirder? Differently weird? There just isn't an adequate relative scale for measuring this stuff). He's a believer in something called psychogenesis—that is, that there are psychic powers that have been shaping humanity. He cites as evidence Kathryn Kuhlman and Oral Roberts, the faith healers, and thinks the psychic investigators JB Rhine and Russel Targ were hot stuff. And then there's Uri Geller and Rupert Sheldrake and Charles Tart, out-of-body experiences and reincarnation...but you get the idea. Very flaky. Very 80's New Age pseudoscience-y bullpuckey. He argues for the "celestial origin of the first human beings", claiming that we flew here from other planets, and that for a long time people flitted back and forth, giving rise to ancient stories of gods born to humans and divine ascensions and returns. The author apparently wrote several other books along these lines, Star Maps and Pyramid Odyssey; the example of this one in my hands is sufficient that I won't be seeking them out. I'd shelve this book next to Velikovsky and Von Daniken, if I had them, but I'll have to settle for stashing it on my kook science shelf next to Behe and Wells and Dembski.
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Paul wrote:
It's odd how a clever phrase can perpetuate itself independent of the truth of its meaning.
Yeah, ain't it the truth...
"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense
Except in the Light of Evolution" T. Dobzhansky#: Posted by Charlie Wagner on 07/21 at 04:17 PM -
Calgary.......
Santorini. Greek food. North of downtown on Centre Street. But don't tell me how good it was, PZ. I'm at least 230 miles from even bad Greek food.#: Posted by on 07/21 at 05:35 PM -
Has Orestes closed down? It used to be the place to go for Greek food in Calgary. Well, twenty years ago.
Not much in the way of eating places around the U of C campus, although there is sort of a Food Fair affair over at the student union. One of my students got poisoned over there last semester, though, so I'm not sure if I'd recommend it. If you have any special requirements, PZ, let me know and I'll have a look around.#: Posted by on 07/21 at 06:01 PM -
I don't know, I always think that anyone who has Uri Geller on their side must be right. After all those spoons didn't just bend themselves.
Oh, wait..... -
Have you ever read any of Charles Tart's "research"? Geller is just a con artist, but Tart...wow. Quite possibly the most incompetent person to ever pretend to be a scientist.
I'll remember those names, Santorini and Orestes, and look 'em up. Greek sounds like a good plan for some evening. -
I have the terrible habit of constantly pulling them off the shelf and reading a bit and then plopping it down on the nearest flat surface with a post-it or ten stuck here and there as bookmarks.
My housekey once went missing for days. Eventually I gave up looking for it and decided to read a bit of The Measure of All Things, which I had put down a few days ago. I opened the book, and out fell my impromptu bookmark...
#: Posted by on 07/21 at 09:28 PM -
I've got a copy of von Daniken's nonsense, if you really want it.
(After all, I can't throw a book away --- that's as bad as burning them --- but it's such crap...)#: Posted by on 07/22 at 12:48 PM -
Alister Hardy (originator of the ongoing "aquatic ape" theory) was also a believer that psychic forces (specifically telepathy) had played a role in the evolution of humans at least. Interestingly, although he spent some of his later career and and much of his retirement on this idea, his "aquatic ape" followers tend to push that aspect of his life (a key idea he'd been playing with in one form or another for much of his lfe) under the nearest rug.
Alister Hardy considered a lot of dubious work as validation of of psychic phenomena, including the Soal/Shackleton experiments, which he considered a terrific success -- (the results were fraudalently altered) and he later spent a time as president of the Society for Physical Research. Now Hardy was definitely a very good scientist in his field, which gives yet another example (like Fred Hoyle) of being very careful of accepting someone's work or word because they are good scientists.