Not science, but a tract to comfort those who want to believe.
More on Intelligent Design from its chief proponent, who trots out even more minutiae on the “irreducible complexities” of cells and their parts previously discussed in Darwin’s Black Box (1996).
There are some additions and subtractions. Now Behe (Biological Sciences/Lehigh Univ.) readily concedes evolutionary modification through descent. Species were not created separately as creationists hold, he writes; DNA evidence indicates descent from a common ancestor. He also admits that random mutation can account for some useful genetic changes, such as the development of the sickle-cell trait to protect against malaria and the malarial parasite’s evolved resistance to chloroquine. But he denigrates these changes as essentially weakening genomes. If random mutation is so good, Behe goes on to ask, why hasn’t the malaria parasite developed defenses against sickling? This question ignores the fact that the organism as it exists right now is enormously successful. The text repeatedly casts Darwinian randomness as powerless or trivial in the face of the dizzying probabilities required (at least according to Behe) to generate the bacterial flagellum, a cell’s cilium, assorted protein-protein interactions and all the critical developmental events that transform egg into baby. The author agrees that there are ways in which genomes can change more than one nucleotide at a time, but ignores Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibria or such events as the incorporation of a bacterium into a primordial cell. Nor does Behe adduce any experiments that could be performed to demonstrate Intelligent Design. What we have is a sophisticated version of William Paley’s watch needing a watchmaker, with the author quoting respected scientists on the wonders of nature that have led some to invoke the anthropic principle or the existence of “multiverses.” Behe opts for a designer—not necessarily God, though for him, as a Roman Catholic, it is.
Not science, but a tract to comfort those who want to believe.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-9620-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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