Three months ago yesterday, Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt was released. While the book is still being largely ignored by the mainstream press, there’s a huge buzz among readers in the real world. At Amazon.com, the book passed the 300 reviews mark yesterday, and over 70% of them are 5-star ratings.
To put this in perspective, consider Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker. Originally published in 1986, the paperback edition from W. W. Norton & Company currently has 416 customer reviews on Amazon. And a 30th Anniversary edition of his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, published in 2006, currently has 238 reviews. Francis Collins’s 2007 book The Language of God has 501 customer reviews at the moment, and a new book by Douglas Erwin and James Valentine, The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity, has amassed 8 reviews on Amazon since it was published in January 2013.
Darwin’s Doubt is also holding its own in the Amazon rankings as well. It’s currently rated #1 in both Organic Evolution and Paleontology, as well as #574 in Books (overall).
Obviously, a book’s performance on Amazon.com is only part of the story, but it does hint at the level of interest a book is getting from the general public. And judging from reader reviews so far, people are glad this book has come along: a well-researched, well-presented analysis of the Cambrian explosion and a strong, positive case for intelligent design as the theory that best explains this unique event in the history of life on earth.
Read the latest reviews and, if you haven’t already, add your own!