A colleague shared a review by Professor Jason Rosenhouse of C. W. Howell’s book, Designer Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America, at the website of the National Center for Science Education. There are a few surreal aspects to it.
First, some may be surprised to learn that the NCSE is active enough now to maintain a website. It’s like waking up in the morning and saying, “Yeah, I had this weird dream that the NCSE was still kicking around and Jason Rosenhouse was reviewing Designer Science for them. Imagine that!”
Our Last Mention of Him
Rosenhouse is a mathematician and longtime ID critic, a name much less frequently heard by us now than in the past. In fact, our last mention of him was in Casey Luskin’s critical review of Designer Science here, “NYU Press Book Makes Fake Behe Quote a Linchpin of Its Case Against Intelligent Design.” About Dr. Howell’s fabricated and defamatory quote from Michael Behe, Dr. Luskin wrote:
But we should note that Howell isn’t alone in making this mistake, and he’s far from the first ID-critic to do it. In fact, there is quite a list of other ID critics who read Judge Jones’s ruling, apparently did not feel the need to fact-check it, and then falsely claimed that Behe said those words during the Dover trial. These include: Jason Rosenhouse, “Why is it Unconstitutional to Teach Intelligent Design?,” Skeptical Inquirer; Jerry Coyne, “The Great Mutator,” The New Republic (archived here); David E. Levin, “Review: The Edge of Evolution,” Reports of the National Center for Science Education; Mary Katherine Hackney, “In This Apple for Teacher an Apple from Eve — Reanalyzing the Intelligent Design Debate from a Curricular Perspective,” North Carolina Law Review; and of course Wikipedia. [Emphasis added.]
No Word of the Retraction
So Rosenhouse is in the same gallery of shame that Howell is, and that resulted in Howell’s book being yanked by the publisher, NYU Press, after the shoddy scholarship was pointed out to them. The second bizarre aspect of Rosenhouse’s review is that he makes no mention of this retraction, where the first edition was not only withdrawn but its inventory destroyed. That’s a rare step for an academic publisher to take. Either Rosenhouse is not aware of it, which hardly speaks well of his sagacity as a reviewer, or he chooses to pass over it in silence. Strange!
Last, his overall angle on the book is fully hallucinatory. He seems to think Howell is engaged in promoting intelligent design. He concludes:
Howell effectively has promoted a particular viewpoint. I think readers approaching the book from an evolutionary viewpoint will frequently find Howell’s account to be biased and frustrating. Understanding the cultural significance of “intelligent design” requires understanding their assertions and arguments, but it also requires understanding the reasons why scientists are so uniformly opposed to them. Howell does a good job of presenting the former, but not the latter. [Emphasis added.]
Not Once but Twice
What!? “Biased and frustrating,” yes… but in ID’s favor? That’s what the word “promote” means. Howell cites ID critics throughout, and the ax-grinding fake Behe quote is the book’s linchpin. Rosenhouse himself is cited including, not once but twice, his absurd statement that “ID is dead.” The assertion shapes one of the book’s main preoccupations — a “peculiar obsession,” as Casey Lukin observed. Luskin wrote here (“Steady and Consistent Growth: The Real Story of Intelligent Design”):
Although [Howell] frequently denies that ID is “dead,” he spends too much time thinking about that question, and frequently uses past-tense verbs to describe ID, presenting it as “defunct” (p. 7), and speaking of ID’s supposed “demise” (p. 8). That’s a plausible take only if you ignore a huge amount of what ID has been doing the past twenty years, which we saw previously is exactly what he does.
More recent than Rosenhouse’s comment — more on the mark, and from a far more distinguished scholar — is Oxford biologist Denis Noble’s statement that “neo-Darwinism is dead.”
Did Rosenhouse forget to look himself up in the index, like any normal reviewer would do on first opening the book? He has four entries there, pages 6, 117, 157, and 166. How many discussions of Jason Rosenhouse would have sufficed for him? For a non-hallucinating take on the whole subject, see our series about Designer Science here.