Monday, February 26, 2007
Fair-minded
Monkey Girl, Ed Humes book about the Dover intelligent design trial, has come under attack from the Discovery Institute for being "partisan."
However, readers of the book who have no axe to grind tell a different story. Here's Christine Rosen reviewing the book in the Washington Post:
However, readers of the book who have no axe to grind tell a different story. Here's Christine Rosen reviewing the book in the Washington Post:
Although his own sympathies clearly are with the defenders of evolutionary theory, Humes makes a strenuous effort to be fair-minded. He offers a sympathetic portrait of Michael Behe, the Lehigh University biochemist well known for his work on ID and the defense's star expert witness. School board member Bill Buckingham, the driving force behind the ID policy, could easily have come across as an ignorant fundamentalist bully. In Humes's hands, he is a more complex and pitiable figure -- a stubborn, intolerant man who was also in chronic pain and struggling to overcome an addiction to OxyContin but who felt that what he was doing was good for the schoolchildren of Dover.
