A quick look at our site traffic stats, and Eve's Bite is proving to be the most common search term that brings people here. And I haven't even done the review yet. I just mentioned it. But interesting to note that the book is raising interest out there, somewhere. Or are people just too cheap to go out and buy it? Go on - just buy the damn thing and read it. What, you want more? You want the truth? You can't handle the truth.
Tell you what. I'll ease you into it:
The book is written a bit like a series of blog posts. This was a bit off putting in the first few chapters, and I was wondering if it was going to alienate the target audience. Then I thought, who is the target audience? It was definitely going to antagonize Richard Dawkins should he read it - and, by evolutionary selection theory, all of the apes whose thoughts have been derived from Richard Dawkins. Whom, by the way, I am convinced, is an offshoot of the Fisk genus. Note the i is missing from the word genus. Now Dawkins would be quick to point out the i is not missing. The other letters were naturally selected. The letter i is simply a victim of Mendelian Inheritance. And if only Dawkins species knew at the time just how important that single letter could become if it hadn't have been naturally unselected by the Fisk Genus.
But using the predictive power of modern evolutionary synthesis, I suspect this book could be a calling cry to the another bunch of evolutionary dead-enders - the homosexual. Yes, no offence queer guys, but you just can't breed. In Darwinian terms, that's rather self correcting. Now, I know science is coming to the rescue, and there will be all sorts of ways to clone yourself with your boner marrow, or log on to Amazon dot com and purchase a sprog via male order, but taking that approach to procreation seems like the wood has moved from the groin to the head. I mean, you'd be a bit of a nut job to want to harvest progeny via a bone marrow transplant wouldn't you?
Still, I digress. And I blame it all on Eve's Bite. This is just the kind of random thoughts it generates. It's sweeping. It's liberal in its conservative attacks on a few highly vocal sections of society - the ones that proudly proclaim they are all about tolerance and respect, and then act completely the opposite when conservatives, and often common sense, get in the way of the "me, me, me" mentality.
So I suspect the groups under fire will pedantically point out all of the faults in the book - and there are a few - and this will give them the "right" (because everything is a right nowadays) to dismiss the rest of the information, which is a fairly good portrayal of how the pendulum has swung a wee bit too far the other way.
It's a bit of a race now to see if the average person (Wishart's target audience) figures this out, or if the usual suspects keep giving the pendulum a bigger push. Even though it's all uphill now, they seem to identify with Atlas. Either Atlas just loved Herculean tasks, or he was gay liberal atheist. And if the celestial sky is indeed falling, who better to bear the weight than those who have been seeking to tear it all down?
So, I promise you Google seekers, I'll do a review soon. In the meantime, I'd like to leave you with a thought, not from Ian's book, but from New Zealand's own idiot/savant (and I suspect the mix is not 50-50). I think Idiot sums up the whole issue very nicely, and his thoughts should provide firm encouragement for others to read Ian Wishart's new book, if only to understand exactly what Idiot means (clue: he means what he says)
A couple of years ago, scientists in the US achieved an enormous breakthrough: they took stem cells from a mouse, artificially differentiated them into sperm, and fertilised an egg with the result. Now, they've begun duplicating the process in humans, successfully differentiating human bone marrow stem cells into spermatagonial cells, the precursors of sperm. It's only the first step, and there's still a long way to go, but if it pans out it will see us able to differentiate both sperm and eggs, vastly increasing the range of infertility problems which can be treated, as well as allowing gay couples to have kids using only their own genetic material...
...This means that more people will be able to satisfy their desires. Sounds pretty good to me.
Yep, sounds just peachy Idiot. Didn't I just mention the "me, me, me" (or "I, I, I") mentality? Here's where I insert the whole "freedom without responsibility speech", but it's too late at night for that. Which is why Idiot's title to the above post was so appropriate - and rather ironic given how Darwinism is used as a weapon whenever a liberal atheist discusses religion. So what was the title? Fucking the Natural Order. Genus! That just works for me.
Coincidentally, I think that would have been an apt title to Ian's new book. It's just that Conservatives are (usually) a little more circumspect, and obviously more metaphorical.
Related Link: Eve's Bite