A little over a week ago, I was taken aback by the announcement that Macmillan was planning to let college instructors edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them. A rather alarming idea, especially in light of the current trend to ignore scientific fact. The NY Times has just published an article about Christian biology textbooks that put an interesting spin on evolution. "These books are promulgating lies to kids," said Jerry Coyne, an ecology and evolution professor at the University of Chicago.
I'm so glad that Dr. Coyne's own book, Why Evolution Is True is published by Viking/Penguin, which evidently believes that authors wrote what they did because they wanted it that way. Dr. Coyne is, however, visited with much interesting mail, as his blog notes just today. I'm sure it will be even more colorful after the Times article, so I ordered his book, which Richard Dawkins has been recommending for a while now. If he has to open all that mail and blog about it, the least I can do is read his book.
Meanwhile, the peerless Richard Dawkins is now really famous. He's on South Park! Okay, yeah, it's fake, but hey, for a moment there, it was grand.
