"Monkey Girl" and Dover decision are duds

The book "Monkey Girl," a book mainly about the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, is off to a very slow start on its Amazon.com website. Nearly two months after the book was released (release date was Jan 30), only 14 Amazon.com customer reviews have come in. That is not a very good start for what has been touted as a definitive book about the so-called "trial of the century." The book has received reviews in several prominent publications (the reviews were mostly favorable -- an exception was a review in the Wall Street Journal) and appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times' Sunday Book Review. It looks like Monkey Girl will never come anywhere near, say, the 897 Amazon.com customer reviews so far for Ann Coulter's Godless: the Church of Liberalism" (release date of June 6, 2006 and contains a large section about the evolution controversy), or the 666 Amazon.com customer reviews so far for Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (release date of Sept. 18, 2006). Also, the numbers of comments about the customer reviews and the numbers of responses to the question "Was this review helpful to you?" are comparatively low for Monkey Girl. BTW, what is probably the only other released book that deals specifically or mainly with the Dover case, the Discovery Institute's Traipsing into Evolution (release date of Mar. 10, 2006), now has only 25 Amazon.com customer reviews, but IMO this book was probably not mainly intended to be popular but was probably mainly intended to serve mainly as a scholarly rebuttal of the Dover decision.

The low interest in Amazon.com's Monkey Girl website probably reflects a probable loss of interest in the Dover case itself. The Darwinists continue to boast about their Dover "victory" and the "Dover trap", but the fact is that the Dover opinion is now not worth the paper that it is printed on. Even good unappealed federal district court decisions have limited precedential value, but the Dover decision is not a good one. The Dover decision has been completely discredited. Of the law journal articles and other expert legal opinions regarding the case that have come to my attention, most are critical of the Dover opinion, particularly regarding Judge Jones' decision to rule on the scientific merits of intelligent design. Judges' opinions cite a lot of law journal articles and judges are more likely to cite law journals than Darwinist blogs. Also, the Discovery Institute revealed that the Dover opinion's ID-as-science section was virtually entirely copied from the plaintiffs' opening post-trial brief while ignoring the defendants' opening post-trial brief and the plaintiffs' and defendants' answering post-trial briefs. And opponents of the decision have not yet fully exploited Jones' great faux pas in a Dickinson College commencement speech: his show of great hostility towards organized religions by saying that they are not "true" religions. I think that Judge Jones' fifteen minutes of fame are up -- he is still on the lecture circuit talking about "judicial independence" but I never see him in the news anymore. It now appears likely that a bill barring or capping attorney fee awards in establishment clause cases will soon be passed, and that would put an end to the "Dover trap." The "Scopes II" trial, like the original, is coming to be seen as nothing more than a media circus.
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