Knock us over with a paper clip.
Over at Evolution News & Views, Casey Luskin asks, could Nick Matzke even possibly have read Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt before writing a long essay trashing it?:
Now, Darwin’s Doubt runs to 413 pages, excluding endnotes and bibliography. Neither the book’s publisher, HarperOne, nor its author sent Matzke a prepublication review copy. Did Matzke in fact read its 400+ pages and then write his 9400+ word response — roughly 30 double-spaced pages — in little more than a day?
Perhaps, but a more likely hypothesis is that he wrote the lion’s share of the review before the book was released based upon what he presumed it would say. A reviewer who did receive a prepublication copy, University of Pittsburgh physicist David Snoke, writes:
A caution: this is a tome that took me two weeks to go through in evening reading, and I am familiar with the field. Like the classic tome Gödel, Escher, Bach, it simply can’t be gone through quickly. I was struck that the week it was released, within one day of shipping, there were already hostile reviews up on Amazon. Simply impossible that they could have read this book in one night.
Even if Snoke is wrong, and Matzke possesses a preternatural capacity to read and write at blinding speed, Matzke in his haste has made some significant errors — of commission and omission — in his representation and assessment of Meyer’s work.
Matzke misrepresents what Meyer actually says, going so far as to attribute quotes and arguments to him that nowhere appear in the book. More.
So? Darwinists have a special exemption from dealing in the actual arguments against their position.
Thus, noviewing, at a level that would disgrace an academic in any other field, is their unquestioned right.
See also: Good and bad reasons for rejecting ID
Note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified P.Z. Myers. Apologies for inadvertent misinformation.