Michael Behe's new book "The Edge of Evolution" is hot!

Michael Behe's new book on intelligent design, "The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism," is really smoking. The publisher's official release date was June 5; the first customer reviews came into the book's Amazon.com website on June 3, only 10 days ago, and already there are 20 customer reviews. Three of the customer reviews have over 100 responses to the question, "Was this review helpful to you?", and the same reviews have 25-53 comments apiece. Many of the customer reviews were quite long. Some reviews outside of Amazon.com are posted here, here, and here.

Behe popularized the term "irreducible complexity," wrote the iconic book "Darwin's Black Box," and was an expert witness for the defendants in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case.

Not to belittle the book, but I think that there has been so much emphasis on ID that there is now almost a "contrived dualism" where Darwinism and ID are often considered to be the only two scientific (or pseudoscientific) possibilities. There are also non-ID criticisms of evolution, e.g., criticisms concerning co-evolution, the propagation of beneficial mutations in sexual reproduction, and chromosome counts. None of these three criticisms question the effectiveness of the Darwinian mechanisms of natural selection and random mutations. This blog has a post label titled "non-ID criticisms of evolution," shown below and in the sidebars of the home and archive pages -- clicking on a post label will bring up a list of the articles in the form in which they appear on the home and archive pages.

I probably will not order a copy of the book because ID is not one of my primary interests. However, I will try to learn more about the book by reading book reviews and also excerpts from the book if they are posted online.

BTW, I have begun to notice that it seems that I am the only one who gets criticized for commenting about a book without having read the entire book. It seems that others who have not read an entire book are free to comment on reviews and sections of that book without getting criticized. For example, in a Panda's Thumb article that commented about Behe's new book, Nick Matzke said, "I don’t have a full review of the book and I won’t for a bit since I am working on other things." I presume that many people who criticize me for commenting about a book without having read all of it hypocritically do the same thing themselves. This criticism of me is just an ad hominem attack.

I do entirely read many of the things that I comment on. I just can't spread myself too thin by doing that for everything.
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