The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins has some definite strengths. It is clear and easy to understand. It is written with a great deal of vigor. Some atheists will doubtless enjoy his take-no-prisoners criticisms of religion. It is funny in places. I laughed a great deal when reading it. Some of the humor seems to be intentional. In discussing an experiment to study the effects of prayer for heart patients he imagines a Bob Newhart style dialogue between God and a patient in the control group who is showing no improvement. The patient asks, "Why has God put me in the placebo group?” and “Couldn't He help me anyway?" God apparently is a bureaucratic type whose hands are tied by the experimental rules.
Moving on… Dawkins likes science. It works. It has given us cars, planes, computers etc. He would presumably agree that some of its creations are pretty awful. Things like nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and cell phones. He particularly likes the fact that he is a scientist, being a college professor with a PhD and all. This, he assumes gives him the ability to speak with great authority.
He is mistaken. Like any the practitioners of any profession, some scientists are excellent, many more are fair, and too many are semi-competent to incompetent. It's not the position or degrees that determine excellence, its achievement. Einstein tried everything to get hired to teach science or work in a laboratory. He finally had to settle for a job as a clerk (third class) in a patent office. This only changed after he published four earthshaking papers in 1905. Many inventors who contributed so much to technological marvels had no advanced degrees. To skim only the top layers I'll mention a few, ignoring the countless engineers, technicians, and mechanics who contributed. Blaise Pascal had no formal schooling; Henry Beuleh with 90 plus inventions had no high school diploma; Maxine Faget, space capsule designer had only a bachelors degree; Robert Fulton had no high school diploma; George Eastman had no high school diploma; Eli Whitney had no college, Henry Ford no high school diploma, Luther Burbank elementary school only, Alexander Graham Bell no college degree, electron microscope inventor James Hilliar only a bachelor’s degree, Samuel Morse a bachelor’s degree, Marconi no formal education, Louis Tessla, probably the world's greatest inventor, no college degree, neither of the Wright brothers finished high school, Thomas Edison no high school diploma. There is a much longer list of people who made important contributions the development of radio, television, computers etc. that had no college degree. Dawkins' contribution is that he popularized the notion of the "selfish gene". This is the idea that the real actors are not humans, but their genes use bodies for their own propagation, sort of like the alien pods in the movie The Body Snatchers. Dawkins didn't come up with this uplifting idea, but acted as its publicist.
The thesis of the book, or course, is that people who believe in God are deluded. Like believing in the tooth fairy, it is incredibly stupid. Dawkins characterizes it as a symptom of mental illness on page 59. I wonder what he thinks of scientists such as Copernicus, Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, Galileo, Kepler, Leibnitz, Kant, Linnaeus, Lyle, Pasteur, Maxwell, Faraday, Kelvin, Mendel etc, if all believers are delusional. Poor deluded Newton actually wrote more on the subject of theology than he did on science. That acute thinker and epitome of mental health, Richard Dawkins, would presumably point out that these people were all prior to the 20th century. They would have lacked knowledge of the scientific advances of the 20th and 21st century that demonstrates how ludicrous the belief in God is. This is the tack taken by a number of atheists. Leaving aside the temporal snobbery of such a view, I still wonder precisely which scientific discoveries over the last 100 or so years have demonstrated that God doesn't exist. Maybe it's the big bang theory that does it.
The discovery that the universe is expanding, with its implication that it had a beginning was unsettling to some people. Hoyle, Bondi, and Gold came up with a steady state theory as an alternative that would avoid the necessity of a beginning. Hoyle later said that a major motivation for coming up with this theory was that the three of them, atheists all, were disturbed by the theological implications of the big bang theory. The steady state hypothesis was quite popular for a while until it collided with the evidence and sank like a rock. It was quickly replaced by the oscillating universe with much the same motivation; the oscillating universe suffered the same fate. The latest move by the religious skeptics (frequently skeptical only of adverse views) was to postulate multiple universes. Our universe could then have a beginning, but only as a child of the eternal multiverse. This idea has two big advantages. First it does double duty as a way around that other noxious discovery that the constants of nature must be constrained to extremely small parameters for life to develop, making it look like someone tinkered with them. Second the multiverse postulate avoids the possibility of an embarrassing refutation by factual evidence. It would be impossible to prove that there aren't a large or infinite number of universes, all with different physical constants, wandering around in other dimensions, which does away with the necessity of a Tinkerer. The big bang and fine tuning discoveries seem if anything to support the idea of a God.
A number of discoveries about the nature of atoms and sub atomic particles would seem to support theism, though indirectly. Philosophic materialism, the handmaiden of atheism, was first written about by the epicureans who postulated that the only things that exist are atoms and the void. Further they said that atoms are tiny indivisible particles (atom meant indivisible) that when packed tightly together formed all solid objects and when loosely packed made air. This was a bedrock materialist premise prior to the 20th century. One obvious advantage to the theory was its simplicity in describing what it means to exist. Entities like mind spirit etc. were thought to be imaginary due to to their lack of hard physicality. Then it was discovered that the particles in the atom occupied 1 part in 10,000 of the space. Compress the atoms in the human body to where they are all contiguous and it would be the size of a speck of dust. The hardness is produced by force fields. It was also discovered that matter can be transformed into energy (E=MC2). Matter is really congealed energy. This doesn't prove materialism is false, but it robs it of its major intuitive support. Another discovery that undermines materialism is quantum entanglement. One particle can influence another at any arbitrary distance. This is called non-locality, and cannot take place if materialism is true.
I could go on, but I think it's safe to say that scientific discoveries do not reduce the likelihood of God's existence. Dawkins seems to come from a strange and rather bitter place, which makes it seem that he has some psychological problems, especially in connection to religion. He is highly critical of not only the religious fundamentalists, but also the liberals. He is also quite critical of agnostics. "Don't give me that I don't know stuff; you do know that the likelyhood of God’s existence is vanishingly small. Don't be agnostic; be something." He's still not done. He even criticizes some of his fellow atheists for being insufficiently hostile to the believers. Far from being the quintessential objective scientist, the man has issues.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Friday, January 09, 2009
The Darwin Conspiracy
The Darwin Conspiracy - Origins of a Scientific Crime; by Roy Davies
Reviewed by Carl Grant
The Darwin Conspiracy, by Roy Davies, examines the way that Darwin came to a theory of descent with modification by natural selection. Davies claims that Darwin plagiarized major ideas from Alfred Russell Wallace. My own reaction to the claim is strongly colored by my thoughts on the subject when I first heard the story of Wallace's involvement in the theory of evolution. Darwin said that he received a manuscript from Wallace that precisely duplicated his own theory, and that the subsections even corresponded to his own chapter headings. Of course I knew of a few cases where claims to the same theory or invention were made by two parties at about the same time. The invention of calculus claimed by both Newton and Leibnitz comes to mind. In that case as in others there was an acrimonious dispute in which one party or both claimed theft. The coincidence invites suspicion and usually cannot be fully resolved. The disputants in the Newton/Leibnitz affair continued the argument throughout their lives, though most historians seem to assume that the discovery was made independently. In the case of Darwin/Wallace I was more than somewhat surprised by the way people, including Wallace blandly accepted Darwin's claim. This claim seems to be several orders of magnitude more coincidental even than is usual among co-discovery cases. So, are we to believe that Wallace just happened to send the copy of his manuscript to the one person on the planet who had a duplicate of his theory? If it were possible to find out the truth for sure, I would bet big money, giving considerable odds on plagiarism versus coincidence. I started looking into the matter to see if there were considerations in favor of Darwin's honesty or vice versa.
Dealing first with the considerations that made me suspicious of Darwin's version, I vaguely remembered that Darwin was accused failing to mention the contributions of prior authors to evolutionary theory. A number of people pointed out that in the first edition of On The Origin Of Species he continuously referred to evolution as "my theory". There was also no mention of even well known predecessors such as Lamarck, Buffon, Blyth, Chambers, or his own great grandfather Erasmus Darwin. Samuel Butler was particularly strong in his criticism of Darwin's proprietary approach to the subject of evolution. Darwin, to his credit corrected this to some extent in later editions. A number of later writers virtually accuse Darwin of plagiarism. The eminent and respected geneticist C. D. Darlington wrote "Darwin was able to put over his ideas not so much because of his scientific integrity, but because of his opportunism, his equivocation, and his lack of historical sense. Though his admirers will not like to believe it, he accomplished his revolution by personal weakness and strategic talent rather than scientific virtue. ... he used a flexible strategy which is not to be reconciled with even average intellectual integrity."
According to the astronomer Fred Hoyle in the book Evolution from Space "Darwin was a voracious reader of others work...it was not in his character to make a return for what he received...the evidence does not permit any other conclusion except that the omissions were deliberate." Biologist Loren Eisely in his book Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X, documents a number of examples where Darwin claimed as his own ideas previously published by Edward Blyth. According to Eisely "quite substantial portions of Darwin's writing were nearly word for word identical between Darwin and Blyth." He also shows that Darwin’s own notes demonstrate that he was very familiar with Blyth's work. Eisely hypothesizes that Darwin forgot where the material came from and thought the ideas were his own, when many years later he incorporated them in his own work.
Another example from the new book by Davies, involves the Harvard scholar Dov Ospovat. He discovered a box in the university library of Cambridge containing a mass of notes spanning Darwin's life that had largely been ignored by Darwin scholars. He found that well into the 1850's Darwin continued to believe that organisms were perfectly adapted to their environment and only became extinct or exhibited variations when geological forces changed the world in which they operated. Davies says, "Ospovat found a note indicating that Darwin had suddenly recognized a system for the division of labor in the animal world and was convinced that at that moment the elements of Darwin's theory fell into place. The date of that note seemingly meant nothing to Osvopat, but it was written three weeks after the publication of Wallace's paper, which involved the very concept on which Darwin drew...he concluded that Darwin's claim that he had understood natural selection almost twenty years before Wallace was false."
Another area that supports the plagiarism thesis has to do with Darwin's correspondence. In his letters Darwin employed copious flattering of the addressees. However, in many cases his references to the same people were quite negative in letters addressed to others. In connection to Wallace he was invariably positive in his statements. In letters to Wallace Darwin frequently referred to Wallace's scientific abilities, but his published compliments invariably referred to personal qualities; Wallace was generous, open minded, amiable, etc.
When Sherlock Holmes brings up the curious incident of the dog that didn’t bark, Dr. Watson exclaims "The dog did nothing during the night!" Holmes replies "That's the curious incident." In reading through Darwin's correspondence I noticed an interesting pattern in the letters missing from those Darwin received during the critical period both before and after the time he said he received Wallace's manuscript. All of Wallace's letters are missing. We know that Wallace sent many because they are referenced in Darwin's letters to Wallace. The same thing can be said for a number of letters sent to Darwin by Charles Lyle and Joseph Hooker on the question of what to do about Darwin's priority.
Another item in Davies’ book is the issue of when Darwin received Wallace's manuscript. Darwin said in one place that he received it on June 18, 1858, and in another place June 21, 1858. It's more difficult to believe that Darwin was mistaken about the actual date of the manuscripts reception than that he forgot the date he earlier claimed. Davies managed to run down the postal receipt for the package from the English postal service which shows a much earlier date for the package's arrival. Finally there is the fact that Darwin claims his theory was fully developed for twenty years before he actually got around to publishing it. This is surprisingly foolish behavior for someone who was obviously concerned about priority and had published numerous unrelated works in the interim.
There are a number of considerations in favor of Darwin's version of events. It should be noted that Wallace himself did not question Darwin's version. In fact he even named a book Darwinism. Wallace was evidently an extremely trusting person. He never questioned Darwin's version, even from the beginning. He seemed barely capable of entertaining doubts about anyone's honesty. In later years when he was attending spiritualist séances, he felt he had witnessed psychical phenomenon in large measure because he couldn't believe that these nice people would deceive him. Even if Darwin's version of the situation was true, he was still lucky to have such an unsuspicious person to deal with.
Another question that might be asked is: why did Darwin pass Wallace's paper along? If he wanted to steal the ideas, wouldn't he simply have tossed the manuscript out after publishing its contents himself? The answer here is that Darwin was too canny a strategist to make that mistake. Even Wallace would have realized what had happened when he found out. Not knowing Wallace very well, Darwin would assume that there would be some nasty accusations when this happened. Even then, Darwin had a very strong reputation within the scientific community. Why risk blemishing it? Furthermore, Darwin had no way of knowing to whom else Wallace had sent his manuscript or if he might have already published it. If he were to be accused of plagiarism, his reputation would be worse than blemished; it would be destroyed.
The last argument in favor of Darwin has to do with the only hard evidence I know of to support Darwin's claim. He produced a letter to Asa Gray, the well known American scientist, dated some months before the earliest possible arrival of Wallace's manuscript. The letter contained an outline of the theory and was published along with Wallace's paper at the Linnaean Society meeting later that year. This seemed like a very strong point that at first contradicted the plagiarism idea. After thinking it through, I don’t believe it is conclusive. The problem is that I have not been able to find any unambiguous confirmation, or for that matter any confirmation, from Gray that he received the letter from Darwin, let alone receiving it in a time frame that would authenticate Darwin. What's more, in the only two letters I found from Gray to Darwin dated between September 5, 1857(the date on Darwin's letter) and July of 1858, there is no mention of Darwin's brand new theory. Since Gray was asked to read it and comment it is astounding that Gray doesn't refer to it at all. Assuming for arguments sake that Darwin wrote the letter after receiving Wallace's paper and simple pre-dated it, there are at least two things he might have done. One, he didn't mail it. Darwin might have reasoned that Gray might never find out about the letter or its significance. I've never seen any reference to this letter in any of Gray's correspondence, even though I've looked for it in books of both his and Darwin's letters. Given his location across an ocean, even if he did find out, it would be months or even years after the crucial time period. Even then would he make it public? The worst case scenario would still leave the argument that it was lost in the mail—suspicious, but not conclusive. Darwin’s supporters, many of whom would swallow a porcupine if Darwin's name was attached, would give him the benefit of the doubt. A second possibility might be that Darwin sent the letter with its earlier date in June of 58. Here the possibilities include Gray not noticing the date or assuming the letter was delayed in the mail. If he did notice it and eventually realize its possible significance, it is unlikely that he would mount a public campaign or even know what to think of it.
The letter to Gray could actually be viewed as further circumstantial evidence against Darwin. His theory remained unpublished and none of his correspondence reveals his ideas to any of a long list of possible recipients. Why not Lyle, Hooker, Henslow, Huxley, or even Wallace. Instead Darwin sends the only copy to someone he met once casually, and with whom he had shared only a couple of letters. Of course, if you are looking for a way to run a con, then Gray is an excellent choice. He is an influential American. Being well known will give more weight to the letter, while being on another continent means his information will be greatly delayed and sketchy. Is Davies right? I think he was. Is it important? Only if you think justice is important. Wallace was a first rate scientist, as well as a first rate human being. His magnanimous trust led him into error, probably as a result of his own complete honesty. He contributed mightily to the theory of evolution. Not only is there his application of the principle of natural selection to evolution, but he had some great insights on sexual selection and mimicry. He did great work on the distribution of species. Finally, he was one of the first to argue for what was later referred to as continental drift. Even if Davies and I are wrong about the Darwin conspiracy, Wallace deserves much more credit than he ever got.
Davies' book is book is now going for $99.00 used at Amazon. For a book out-of-print six months after publication, this seems an inordinate demand. http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Conspiracy-Roy-Davies/dp/0952310953
The book is supposedly available from Amazon.co.uk for about £20. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Darwin-Conspiracy-Origins-Scientific-Crime/dp/0952310953/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231520274&sr=8-1
Reviewed by Carl Grant
The Darwin Conspiracy, by Roy Davies, examines the way that Darwin came to a theory of descent with modification by natural selection. Davies claims that Darwin plagiarized major ideas from Alfred Russell Wallace. My own reaction to the claim is strongly colored by my thoughts on the subject when I first heard the story of Wallace's involvement in the theory of evolution. Darwin said that he received a manuscript from Wallace that precisely duplicated his own theory, and that the subsections even corresponded to his own chapter headings. Of course I knew of a few cases where claims to the same theory or invention were made by two parties at about the same time. The invention of calculus claimed by both Newton and Leibnitz comes to mind. In that case as in others there was an acrimonious dispute in which one party or both claimed theft. The coincidence invites suspicion and usually cannot be fully resolved. The disputants in the Newton/Leibnitz affair continued the argument throughout their lives, though most historians seem to assume that the discovery was made independently. In the case of Darwin/Wallace I was more than somewhat surprised by the way people, including Wallace blandly accepted Darwin's claim. This claim seems to be several orders of magnitude more coincidental even than is usual among co-discovery cases. So, are we to believe that Wallace just happened to send the copy of his manuscript to the one person on the planet who had a duplicate of his theory? If it were possible to find out the truth for sure, I would bet big money, giving considerable odds on plagiarism versus coincidence. I started looking into the matter to see if there were considerations in favor of Darwin's honesty or vice versa.
Dealing first with the considerations that made me suspicious of Darwin's version, I vaguely remembered that Darwin was accused failing to mention the contributions of prior authors to evolutionary theory. A number of people pointed out that in the first edition of On The Origin Of Species he continuously referred to evolution as "my theory". There was also no mention of even well known predecessors such as Lamarck, Buffon, Blyth, Chambers, or his own great grandfather Erasmus Darwin. Samuel Butler was particularly strong in his criticism of Darwin's proprietary approach to the subject of evolution. Darwin, to his credit corrected this to some extent in later editions. A number of later writers virtually accuse Darwin of plagiarism. The eminent and respected geneticist C. D. Darlington wrote "Darwin was able to put over his ideas not so much because of his scientific integrity, but because of his opportunism, his equivocation, and his lack of historical sense. Though his admirers will not like to believe it, he accomplished his revolution by personal weakness and strategic talent rather than scientific virtue. ... he used a flexible strategy which is not to be reconciled with even average intellectual integrity."
According to the astronomer Fred Hoyle in the book Evolution from Space "Darwin was a voracious reader of others work...it was not in his character to make a return for what he received...the evidence does not permit any other conclusion except that the omissions were deliberate." Biologist Loren Eisely in his book Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X, documents a number of examples where Darwin claimed as his own ideas previously published by Edward Blyth. According to Eisely "quite substantial portions of Darwin's writing were nearly word for word identical between Darwin and Blyth." He also shows that Darwin’s own notes demonstrate that he was very familiar with Blyth's work. Eisely hypothesizes that Darwin forgot where the material came from and thought the ideas were his own, when many years later he incorporated them in his own work.
Another example from the new book by Davies, involves the Harvard scholar Dov Ospovat. He discovered a box in the university library of Cambridge containing a mass of notes spanning Darwin's life that had largely been ignored by Darwin scholars. He found that well into the 1850's Darwin continued to believe that organisms were perfectly adapted to their environment and only became extinct or exhibited variations when geological forces changed the world in which they operated. Davies says, "Ospovat found a note indicating that Darwin had suddenly recognized a system for the division of labor in the animal world and was convinced that at that moment the elements of Darwin's theory fell into place. The date of that note seemingly meant nothing to Osvopat, but it was written three weeks after the publication of Wallace's paper, which involved the very concept on which Darwin drew...he concluded that Darwin's claim that he had understood natural selection almost twenty years before Wallace was false."
Another area that supports the plagiarism thesis has to do with Darwin's correspondence. In his letters Darwin employed copious flattering of the addressees. However, in many cases his references to the same people were quite negative in letters addressed to others. In connection to Wallace he was invariably positive in his statements. In letters to Wallace Darwin frequently referred to Wallace's scientific abilities, but his published compliments invariably referred to personal qualities; Wallace was generous, open minded, amiable, etc.
When Sherlock Holmes brings up the curious incident of the dog that didn’t bark, Dr. Watson exclaims "The dog did nothing during the night!" Holmes replies "That's the curious incident." In reading through Darwin's correspondence I noticed an interesting pattern in the letters missing from those Darwin received during the critical period both before and after the time he said he received Wallace's manuscript. All of Wallace's letters are missing. We know that Wallace sent many because they are referenced in Darwin's letters to Wallace. The same thing can be said for a number of letters sent to Darwin by Charles Lyle and Joseph Hooker on the question of what to do about Darwin's priority.
Another item in Davies’ book is the issue of when Darwin received Wallace's manuscript. Darwin said in one place that he received it on June 18, 1858, and in another place June 21, 1858. It's more difficult to believe that Darwin was mistaken about the actual date of the manuscripts reception than that he forgot the date he earlier claimed. Davies managed to run down the postal receipt for the package from the English postal service which shows a much earlier date for the package's arrival. Finally there is the fact that Darwin claims his theory was fully developed for twenty years before he actually got around to publishing it. This is surprisingly foolish behavior for someone who was obviously concerned about priority and had published numerous unrelated works in the interim.
There are a number of considerations in favor of Darwin's version of events. It should be noted that Wallace himself did not question Darwin's version. In fact he even named a book Darwinism. Wallace was evidently an extremely trusting person. He never questioned Darwin's version, even from the beginning. He seemed barely capable of entertaining doubts about anyone's honesty. In later years when he was attending spiritualist séances, he felt he had witnessed psychical phenomenon in large measure because he couldn't believe that these nice people would deceive him. Even if Darwin's version of the situation was true, he was still lucky to have such an unsuspicious person to deal with.
Another question that might be asked is: why did Darwin pass Wallace's paper along? If he wanted to steal the ideas, wouldn't he simply have tossed the manuscript out after publishing its contents himself? The answer here is that Darwin was too canny a strategist to make that mistake. Even Wallace would have realized what had happened when he found out. Not knowing Wallace very well, Darwin would assume that there would be some nasty accusations when this happened. Even then, Darwin had a very strong reputation within the scientific community. Why risk blemishing it? Furthermore, Darwin had no way of knowing to whom else Wallace had sent his manuscript or if he might have already published it. If he were to be accused of plagiarism, his reputation would be worse than blemished; it would be destroyed.
The last argument in favor of Darwin has to do with the only hard evidence I know of to support Darwin's claim. He produced a letter to Asa Gray, the well known American scientist, dated some months before the earliest possible arrival of Wallace's manuscript. The letter contained an outline of the theory and was published along with Wallace's paper at the Linnaean Society meeting later that year. This seemed like a very strong point that at first contradicted the plagiarism idea. After thinking it through, I don’t believe it is conclusive. The problem is that I have not been able to find any unambiguous confirmation, or for that matter any confirmation, from Gray that he received the letter from Darwin, let alone receiving it in a time frame that would authenticate Darwin. What's more, in the only two letters I found from Gray to Darwin dated between September 5, 1857(the date on Darwin's letter) and July of 1858, there is no mention of Darwin's brand new theory. Since Gray was asked to read it and comment it is astounding that Gray doesn't refer to it at all. Assuming for arguments sake that Darwin wrote the letter after receiving Wallace's paper and simple pre-dated it, there are at least two things he might have done. One, he didn't mail it. Darwin might have reasoned that Gray might never find out about the letter or its significance. I've never seen any reference to this letter in any of Gray's correspondence, even though I've looked for it in books of both his and Darwin's letters. Given his location across an ocean, even if he did find out, it would be months or even years after the crucial time period. Even then would he make it public? The worst case scenario would still leave the argument that it was lost in the mail—suspicious, but not conclusive. Darwin’s supporters, many of whom would swallow a porcupine if Darwin's name was attached, would give him the benefit of the doubt. A second possibility might be that Darwin sent the letter with its earlier date in June of 58. Here the possibilities include Gray not noticing the date or assuming the letter was delayed in the mail. If he did notice it and eventually realize its possible significance, it is unlikely that he would mount a public campaign or even know what to think of it.
The letter to Gray could actually be viewed as further circumstantial evidence against Darwin. His theory remained unpublished and none of his correspondence reveals his ideas to any of a long list of possible recipients. Why not Lyle, Hooker, Henslow, Huxley, or even Wallace. Instead Darwin sends the only copy to someone he met once casually, and with whom he had shared only a couple of letters. Of course, if you are looking for a way to run a con, then Gray is an excellent choice. He is an influential American. Being well known will give more weight to the letter, while being on another continent means his information will be greatly delayed and sketchy. Is Davies right? I think he was. Is it important? Only if you think justice is important. Wallace was a first rate scientist, as well as a first rate human being. His magnanimous trust led him into error, probably as a result of his own complete honesty. He contributed mightily to the theory of evolution. Not only is there his application of the principle of natural selection to evolution, but he had some great insights on sexual selection and mimicry. He did great work on the distribution of species. Finally, he was one of the first to argue for what was later referred to as continental drift. Even if Davies and I are wrong about the Darwin conspiracy, Wallace deserves much more credit than he ever got.
Davies' book is book is now going for $99.00 used at Amazon. For a book out-of-print six months after publication, this seems an inordinate demand. http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Conspiracy-Roy-Davies/dp/0952310953
The book is supposedly available from Amazon.co.uk for about £20. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Darwin-Conspiracy-Origins-Scientific-Crime/dp/0952310953/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231520274&sr=8-1
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