Darwin’s Doubt Will Debut at #7 on New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Bestseller List

_{Salvador Cordova

July 2, 2013

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Judging the success of an idea in reaching and convincing a large audience is a tricky business. In putting your case to the public in books and articles, are you making progress, just holding steady, or losing ground to competitors? What you want is a solid, unambiguous metric. Hmm, as a measure of success in getting a particular argument before a large chunk of the thoughtful, book-reading public, how does a spot on the New York Times bestseller list sound? That would do nicely. And in fact it is just what we are very pleased to report. As careful readers will already have discerned from the headline, Stephen Meyer’s new book, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, will debut this coming Sunday in the #7 place on the New York Times hardback nonfiction list. See it here. The Times even has a remarkably accurate summary of what’s in the book — something to which we’re not entirely accustomed when dealing with the media:

DARWIN’S DOUBT, by Stephen C. Meyer. (HarperOne.) The theory of intelligent design best explains the appearance of animals in the fossil record without apparent ancestors.

That is referring to the geologically sudden eruption of complex animal life in the Cambrian explosion, about 530 million years ago, a thread that Meyer pulls in the first third of the book and that results in the conclusive unraveling of Darwinian theory in the final two-thirds. –

What’s big news is the book is categorized by the NY Times as NON-fiction.

Darwin’s Doubt
[ scordova is helping out with the news desk for a few days for Denyse O’Leary]

Comments

Congrats to Stephen Meyer’s on all the success of Darwin's Doubt! Great book. I'm re-reading it right now.julianbre_{July 3, 2013
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It probably did kill the NYT to say non fiction. Anyways this is a great summer gift to good guys everywhere. i'm YEC but love and love the success of intellectual criticisms of evolutionism from ID thinkers as indicated by the thoughtful reading public. Another volley into the sinking hull! A book so specific about details is not a easy sell. Well done! Any criticism of evolutionary presumptions works for the gain of truth. Even though the cambrian explosion stuff is still based on interpretations of fossils based on confidence in geological assumptions of when the fossils lived and died in time. Therefore it is not actually a biological scientific investigation but instead biological conclusions using biological data points. its okay to correct worst ideas but these fossils tell no tale of descent or process. They can be used to correct wrong ideas but only by the backdoor. Fossils are unrelated to biological investigation.Robert Byers_{July 2, 2013
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Joe, I don't find the book a fast read because it is essentially a giant literature review. It is definitely not a page turner. But it is methodical and covers all issues in detail, a couple of which I find somewhat confusing. So when most have read it I want to ask some questions. One chapter definitely needs some re-writing to make it clearer. I have been reading this stuff for 15 years so if there is something that isn't clear to me, it may not be clear to others who are new to the arguments.jerry_{July 2, 2013
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Hamilton, since you are concerned Darwin's Doubt is falsely misrepresenting the deep enigma inherent within the Cambrian Explosion of animal life on this planet some 530 million years ago, perhaps you could point out the exact factual scientific eras it makes. i.e. Is the enigma broadly recognized or not by leading paleontologists? Do neo-Darwinists have a plausible mechanism or not to explain the sudden appearance of all those different phyla in the fossil record? If you do hold that atheistic neo-Darwinists do have a plausible demonstrable mechanism (a 'scientific' mechanism), well then please do present your case from empirical evidence showing how stochastic processes of neo-Darwinism can generate functional information. I've been looking for several years high and low for such evidence and can find none that passes scrutiny. As far as I can tell, Darwinism is a big fraud that doesn't even qualify as a true science. Stephen Meyer - Functional Proteins And Information For Body Plans - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4050681 Dr. Stephen Meyer comments at the end of the preceding video,,, ‘Now one more problem as far as the generation of information. It turns out that you don’t only need information to build genes and proteins, it turns out to build Body-Plans you need higher levels of information; Higher order assembly instructions. DNA codes for the building of proteins, but proteins must be arranged into distinctive circuitry to form distinctive cell types. Cell types have to be arranged into tissues. Tissues have to be arranged into organs. Organs and tissues must be specifically arranged to generate whole new Body-Plans, distinctive arrangements of those body parts. We now know that DNA alone is not responsible for those higher orders of organization. DNA codes for proteins, but by itself it does not insure that proteins, cell types, tissues, organs, will all be arranged in the body. And what that means is that the Body-Plan morphogenesis, as it is called, depends upon information that is not encoded on DNA. Which means you can mutate DNA indefinitely. 80 million years, 100 million years, til the cows come home. It doesn’t matter, because in the best case you are just going to find a new protein some place out there in that vast combinatorial sequence space. You are not, by mutating DNA alone, going to generate higher order structures that are necessary to building a body plan. So what we can conclude from that is that the neo-Darwinian mechanism is grossly inadequate to explain the origin of information necessary to build new genes and proteins, and it is also grossly inadequate to explain the origination of novel biological form.’ - Stephen Meyer - (excerpt taken from Meyer/Sternberg vs. Shermer/Prothero debate - 2009) The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories - Stephen Meyer "Neo-Darwinism seeks to explain the origin of new information, form, and structure as a result of selection acting on randomly arising variation at a very low level within the biological hierarchy, mainly, within the genetic text. Yet the major morphological innovations depend on a specificity of arrangement at a much higher level of the organizational hierarchy, a level that DNA alone does not determine. Yet if DNA is not wholly responsible for body plan morphogenesis, then DNA sequences can mutate indefinitely, without regard to realistic probabilistic limits, and still not produce a new body plan. Thus, the mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations in DNA cannot in principle generate novel body plans, including those that first arose in the Cambrian explosion." http://eyedesignbook.com/ch6/eyech6-append-d.htmlbornagain77_{July 2, 2013
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And when proponents *do* finally attempt to generate legitimate science papers, and those papers get shot down in peer review for basic (and fatal) math errors, that’s not a good sign.
It's an even worse sign when bad stuff actually gets accepted that should have been rejected such as publications in a particular discipline similar to phrenology:
In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to physics than phrenology. Evolutionary Biologist Jerry Coyne
scordova_{July 2, 2013
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"Or books on Darwinian evolution. Don’t need to remind us of that either." True, but no one gets excited and claims it's an achievement when evolution passes the very low hurdle of getting filed in the non-fiction section. Some of us think it's somewhat more relevant when evolution passes the threshold of expert scientific review, something which ID utterly fails on. ID's high achievement is selling a "pop science" book to a generally scientifically illiterate audience. Congratulations, you reached 7th on the NYT nonfiction list... rather higher than the 21th place non-fiction best seller ranking achieved by "Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA". A book on the occult origins of NASA, the mystical organizations quietly dominating NASA carrying out secret agendas, ancient religions, and... of course... all the suppressed lunar discoveries. There must be something credible and legit there if it made the best seller list, right? A tip for everyone out there, when the number of pop-books on a supposedly scientific subject is greater than the number of scientific peer reviewed papers papers on that subject, that subject might be crackpot. And when proponents *do* finally attempt to generate legitimate science papers, and those papers get shot down in peer review for basic (and fatal) math errors, that's not a good sign.Hamilton_{July 2, 2013
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Need I remind you that Moon-hoax-conspiracy books and crystal-energy/pyramid-power books are also classified as non-fiction?
Or books on Darwinian evolution. Don't need to remind us of that either.scordova_{July 2, 2013
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"What’s big news is the book is categorized by the NY Times as NON-fiction." Need I remind you that Moon-hoax-conspiracy books and crystal-energy/pyramid-power books are also classified as non-fiction? So..... congratulations on that.Hamilton_{July 2, 2013
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semi OT: podcast - Dr. Neil Steiner: Comparing Natural and Human-Engineered Systems http://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/entry/2013-07-01T17_41_57-07_00 listen in as Casey Luskin talks with Dr. Neil Steiner, an engineer who works on computer and engineering research with the Information Sciences Institute at University of Southern California. Dr. Steiner offers his expertise to give unique insight into the debate over intelligent design and evolution, comparing natural biological systems to human designed technology.bornagain77_{July 2, 2013
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countercultural appetite for ID: "This success testifies to the growing audience for intelligent design and scientific criticism of Darwinian theory. All our previous books and films, especially Dr. Meyer's Signature in the Cell, have helped us to circumvent the mainstream media and develop what might be considered a countercultural appetite. We have always known that there is a public sympathy for our position, but now we see developing a really sizable population of readers who not only identify with ID, but also understand and support it. That audience follows the topic now and, obviously, has welcomed the new book." - See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/07/a_countercultur073991.html#sthash.WmaXargr.dpuf Has anybody heard from Matzke lately? Somebody needs to check on him, I don't think he will be taking this well at all.bornagain77_{July 2, 2013
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Darwin's Doubt - Interview with Stephen Meyer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZlPKbEa7Qk the Michael Medved Show welcomes Dr. Stephen Meyer to talk about his new bestselling book, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Listen in as Meyer and Medved discuss the mysteries of the Cambrian explosion and why this phenomenon continues to stump Darwinian evolutionists.bornagain77_{July 2, 2013
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Jerry, I am having problems staying focused! All the talk about fossils has me bored to death. I am just in chapter 4...Joe_{July 2, 2013
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Congratulations to Stephen Meyer and HarperOne.Upright BiPed_{July 2, 2013
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About 70% through. Meyer spends most of his time quoting the evolutionary biology literature. He uses their published results for a large percentage of his arguments. The debate in the future will be over the origin of alleles/proteins. Which is where it always should have beenjerry_{July 2, 2013
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Yet more evidence that ID thought has gained no traction and is dying off ... wait, what?William J Murray_{July 2, 2013
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