Is Any Scientist Really Inviolate? Not In The Least! Look At History!

Funny post from something called 'The Institute on Religion and Public Life': "St. Charles Darwin".  The basis is that no one is allowed to criticize Charles Darwin because . . . he's Charles Darwin.  The author is reacting to the many critical reviews of A. N. Wilson, Charles Darwin, Victorian Mythmaker.  Actually critical is an understatement.  In response to those reviews, the author of this piece believes that 'committed evolutionists' are outraged about the biography simple because Wilson attacked Darwin.

Well, to a point; she's half right.  People are outraged at the 'biography', but not because Darwin is raised on some inviolate pedestal, but because it is completely contradicted by every other biography, Darwin's own letters, and the writings of people who actual knew Darwin.  Why wouldn't we be outraged at an obvious hatchet job!  Like many things written about Darwin by Creationists, it's basically a hit piece, and many of the reviewers called it such.

One, of the many things the author of this piece fails to acknowledge is how science actually works.  If something was discovered that offered a better scientific explanation of how life evolved on this planet, Darwin would go the way of Lamarck.  That's how science works, and you can dig for a few minutes and find long lists of scientists who were tops in their field at one point and now, no one knows their name.  But the workings of actual science is something rarely recognized by creationists, like this author and Wilson himself.

I've written a little about this pseudo-biography before: "Whats Wrong with This Picture -- A Review of a Review of a Book We Haven't Read Yet?" in which we discussed how the DI reviewed a review of a book they haven't even read yet.  I haven't read the book either, and probably won't.  But something about this particular post simply tickled me.

Let me see if I can lay it out for you.  The author, Charlotte Allen, tries to make the case that the only reason some people are more than a little outraged about Wilson's 'biography' is because he attacked Darwin.   She completed missed the point that the many of the reviews detail the  areas where Wilson got things wrong, creating things that never happened, and offered his negative opinion as if it was fact.

"Wilson appears to have hit upon a rich seam of cliches in his five years of research for his book,"("Some still attack Darwin and evolution. How can science fight back?")

If you look at the Amazon listing you will see 24 reviews.  Only 6 of them are 5-Star and if you look at the links for these 5-star reviewers, you see the the religious and/or political leanings that explain the ratings. None of them identified the things that made it a top review, they are simply happy that Wilson is bashing Darwin -- regardless of the truthfulness of what he is saying.  There was one 3-star review and the rest were 1-star that make up 75% of the reviews.  If you look at those 1-star reviews you will see a litany of things Wilson got wrong, disregarded, or just plain invented.

Those are the reasons for the outrage, but that doesn't even get lip service from Allen.  Looking at Wilson's own prejudices and his history of such less-than-factual biographies, you will see even more how and why this book was written.  But does Allen do any of that?  No, her only point was claiming that Darwin is:
"a holy saint who must not be criticized".  Here is her closing:

"A. N. Wilson may have written a bad, unfair, inaccurate, and error-ridden biography of Charles Darwin. But he has homed in on something real and obviously troubling to Darwin’s disciples: the vulnerability of Darwin’s personality and his theories."

This would be true if the biography wasn't a flawed piece of poor scholarship and obviously done for the express purpose of denigrating Darwin and his science for religious reasons.  Don't believe me, do a little research on AN Wilson, in fact here is the critique from Wikipedia on Wilson's page (the underlines are mine):

"Wilson's biography Charles Darwin, Victorian Mythmaker, (2017), has been criticised by John van Wyhe in the New Scientist for confusing Darwin's theory of natural selection with Lamarckism at one point, as well as other scientific, historical and editorial errors.  Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian wrote it is "cheap attempt to ruffle feathers", with a dubious grasp of science and attempted character assassination. In The Evening Standard, Adrian Woolfson says that "..while for the greater part a lucid, elegantly written and thought-provoking social and intellectual history" Wilson's "speculations on evolutionary theory," produce a book that is "fatally flawed, mischievous, and ultimately misleading".  Steve Jones, an emeritus of University College London, commented in The Sunday Times: "In the classic mould of the contrarian, he despises anything said by mainstream biology in favour of marginal and sometimes preposterous theories." The geneticist and former editor of Nature, Adam Rutherford, called the book "deranged" and said Wilson "would fail GCSE biology catastrophically."" (Wikipedia:  AN Wilson)

Here is the funniest part.  Allen claims that the whole reason people are outraged at the biography is because of Darwin's status, while ignoring the obvious flaws. Rather than do a little homework and realize how 'bad, unfair, inaccurate, and error-ridden' it is, she dismisses all that to rationalize her own prejudice.