Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #461843 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-25
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Synopsis
Philosopher David Stove concludes in his hilarious and razor-sharp inquiry that Darwin's theory of evolution is a ridiculous slander on human beings. But wait! Stove is no creationist nor a proponent of so-called intelligent design. He is a theological skeptic who admits Darwin's great genius and acknowledges that the theory of natural selection is the most successful biological theory in history. But Stove also thinks that it is also one of the most overblown and gives a penetrating inventory of what he regards as the unbelievable claims of Darwinism. "Darwinian Fairytales" is a must-read book for people who want to really understand the issues behind the most hotly debated scientific controversy of our time.

Customer Reviews

Contrarian
David Stove was a well known Australian contrarian opposing intellectual fashions such as feminism, Marxism and, in the final years before his suicide in 1994, Darwinism. Stove's strength - his wit and ability to draw out the absurdity in the prevailing paradigms of the intellectual world - are well set out in Darwinian Fairytales. He draws attention to the intellectual environment within which Darwin lived, the influence on the Origins of Species of the flawed ideas of Thomas Malthus on population, the political objective of Darwin's works and the failure of Darwinists to confront the dilemmas inherent in the application of evolution by natural selection and adaption to humankind.

The political context of the Origins, both prior to publication and, in the long term, to the development of the pseudo-science of Eugenics reflected the pomposity of the Victorian intelligentsia who believed they led the world, carrying Social Darwinism and "enlightenment" to foreign climes as a "favoured race".

Although he professed no religion himself Stove placed Darwinism in the category of a secular religion. "Genetics has merely provided the new religionists with the precise locality of their gods, on the chromosomes of the sex cells." However, the moral and intellectual arrogance, bordering on madness, of the new Darwinist socio-biological priesthood in the era of post-modernist deconstruction leaves them as vulnerable to attack as their monotheist religious predecessors.

Darwinism, he concludes, is irrelevant to human life. It does not describe or explain it. Darwin knew it, Huxley knew it and modern day Darwinists know it too but have deserted science for pseudo-science and the advocacy of atheism, suppressing truth in the process.

This book would have received five star status had not Stove's polemics and wordiness got in the way of a straightforward read. Nonetheless it is an excellent book which should be read as a corrective to the mythical world of Dawkins's meme which has perpetuated the errors of Darwin and Malthus for a century and a half and produced countless deaths of those considered not fit to survive.

A victory of altruism over selfishness
I enjoyed this book. Well written, sharp, and very logical. Devastating dissection of the notion of "selfishness" as applied to genes. Very clear demonstration of how altruism is a fact in the world, and not a problem or error.

This book is a very significant challenge to Darwinism and its offshoot, "sociobiology." It exposes a severe mismatch between the predictions of evolutionary theory and life as it actually is.

Well worth reading

Reproductive words
I've read several works challenging Darwinism and Evolution. This book is a collection of essays and therefore there is a lot of repetition throughout with the same arguments repeated over and over again. This became very tedious and made me wonder whether the writing was mimicking the replication of the alleged selfish genes that the Author challenges. The author also had an annoying habit of using a whole paragraph to write what could be stated in a sentance.

The strong point of the book was the blunt criticisms of Dawkins.