Book Reviews

[lilphil1989]

Count me in too!!

[Purple Rabbit]

This isn't getting anywhere. We have a stand-off between reading 'fleas' and reading critics on theism. Anyone with a breakthrough suggestion?

[Darwinian]

What the hell's a flea? Apart from an annoying insect of course.

[leo-rcc]

What the hell's a flea? Apart from an annoying insect of course.

http://atheistforums.org/thread-422-post...ml#pid6988

The definition is only one page back.

[CoxRox]

Here's a suggestion: 'The Origin of Life' - Paul Davies (Independant: ''Delightful- Davies succeeds not only in being provocative and controversial, but in maintaining the rigourous scientific approach of the physicist...a classic example of how to present a scientific case, and an insight into the way good scientists work.'

[Darwinian]

I nominate..

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould

I've got a copy somewhere that I have still to read.

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The Burgess Shale of British Columbia "is the most precious and important of all fossil localities," writes Stephen Jay Gould. These 600-million-year-old rocks preserve the soft parts of a collection of animals unlike any other. Just how unlike is the subject of Gould's book.

Gould describes how the Burgess Shale fauna was discovered, reassembled, and analyzed in detail so clear that the reader actually gets some feeling for what paleobiologists do, in the field and in the lab. The many line drawings are unusually beautiful, and now can be compared to a wonderful collection of photographs in Fossils of the Burgess Shale by Derek Briggs, one of Gould's students.

Burgess Shale animals have been called a "paleontological Rorschach test," and not every geologist by any means agrees with Gould's thesis that they represent a "road not taken" in the history of life. Simon Conway Morris, one of the subjects of Wonderful Life, has expressed his disagreement in Crucible of Creation. Wonderful Life was published in 1989, and there has been an explosion of scientific interest in the pre-Cambrian and Cambrian periods, with radical new ideas fighting for dominance. But even though many scientists disagree with Gould about the radical oddity of the Burgess Shale animals, his argument that the history of life is profoundly contingent--as in the movie It's a Wonderful Life, from which this book takes its title--has become more accepted, in theories such as Ward and Brownlee's Rare Earth hypothesis. And Gould's loving, detailed exposition of the labor it took to understand the Burgess Shale remains one of the best explanations of scientific work around. --Mary Ellen Curtin

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[Purple Rabbit]

I now count 8 nominees. To have some meaningful discussion about a book enough people have to read it and enough people must want to read it. So let's stop at these 8 suggested books and vote about it. The book with the most votes will be read by the votees and discussed in a new thread. The other books can be nominated in another round.

Nominees so far:
1. The Devil's Delusion - David Berlinski
2. Godless - Dan Barker
3. The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality - André Comte-Sponville
4. Kluge, the haphazard construction of the human mind - Gary Marcus
5. Freedom Evolves - Daniel Dennett
6. God: The Failed Hypothesis - Victor Stenger
7. The Origin Of Life - Paul Davies
8. Wonderful Life - Stephen Jay Gould

Adrian can you put up a poll for this?