Icons of Evolution - Aren't you done with that yet??

You know, I was feeling pretty bad for taking so long in my report on Jonathan Wells' book, "Icons of Evolution."

But I found something out last week that made me feel better about it.

Wells has come out with another book called, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design." Like me, other people decided that they wanted to report on it. Unlike me, the actual people doing the reporting are a crack team of honest to IPU scientists!

And completely unlike me, they broke up the book by chapter, and assigned a scientist to review each chapter depending on that scientist's specialty. That's right, an expert on the subject of each chapter rebuts that chapter.

If you want to see their progress, check it out at Panda's Thumb. It's a sticky on the main page there. (I won't deep link to the article because it changes as progress is made.)


I've been working weeks on my report (with about a two month 'break' during that time where a lot of personal stuff happened.) I've finished several chapter outlines, and slowly writing now. So there's really no need for me to feel like I'm moving too slow when it takes a team of scientific experts weeks to thoroughly demolish Wells' latest work.

And believe me, it's not like Wells is so subtle that it requires effort to see where he's gone wrong - the problem lies in that he can construct one sentence that contains multiple errors, exaggerations, and red herrings. In that same sentence, he'll sometimes add a heap of conspiracy theory. In some cases, he writes whole paragraphs (or even pages!) that are not only NOT connected to the theme of the current chapter, but have no information content at all!

It takes a long time to figure out how to untangle this knotted mass of illogical verbiage. But I'm working at it.

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