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Rating: 
Summary: One of the worst putatively academic books ever written
Review: "Darwin Retried" amounts to little more than Mr. Macbeth's committing the fallacy of taking a failure of imagination as an insight into necessity time and time and time ... again. One's belief that something is impossible does not make that thing impossible. Mr. MacBeth does not make a serious effort to understand the neoDarwinian position or is of such limited intellectual ability he simply cannot understand it. The author is a Harvard trained lawyer. (This book is definitely not a ringing endorsement of HLS.) However, he does not apparently understand the difference between making an argument qua lawyer and making one qua academic. In court, one can appeal to the authority of an expert or experts in order to advance one's point. Such is the pragmatic nature of court precedings. In academia appealing to authority is unacceptable. One must say why those authorities to whom one's appealing are right; reasons must be provided, since X's saying 'Y is true' is independent of the truth of Y. I find that someone decided to publish this book very troublesome. Mr. MacBeth's gossamers of arguments, clumsily expressed half-truths, misunderstandings, and muddleheadedness do not lead us to doubt the pith of neo-Darwinists' claims anymore than a lunatic's eschatological ramblings lead us to prepare for an apocalypse. I'm sorry that this was ever published, and if you read this, you will be too. All theories should be carefully assessed and challenge. However any assessment and challenge simply won't do. Mr. Macbeth's work is one that simply won't do.
Rating:
Summary: One of the worst putatively academic books ever written
Review: "Darwin Retried" amounts to little more than Mr. Macbeth's committing the fallacy of taking a failure of imagination as an insight into necessity time and time and time ... again. One's belief that something is impossible does not make that thing impossible. Mr. MacBeth does not make a serious effort to understand the neoDarwinian position or is of such limited intellectual ability he simply cannot understand it. The author is a Harvard trained lawyer. (This book is definitely not a ringing endorsement of HLS.) However, he does not apparently understand the difference between making an argument qua lawyer and making one qua academic. In court, one can appeal to the authority of an expert or experts in order to advance one's point. Such is the pragmatic nature of court precedings. In academia appealing to authority is unacceptable. One must say why those authorities to whom one's appealing are right; reasons must be provided, since X's saying 'Y is true' is independent of the truth of Y. I find that someone decided to publish this book very troublesome. Mr. MacBeth's gossamers of arguments, clumsily expressed half-truths, misunderstandings, and muddleheadedness do not lead us to doubt the pith of neo-Darwinists' claims anymore than a lunatic's eschatological ramblings lead us to prepare for an apocalypse. I'm sorry that this was ever published, and if you read this, you will be too. All theories should be carefully assessed and challenge. However any assessment and challenge simply won't do. Mr. Macbeth's work is one that simply won't do.
Rating: 
Summary: A lawyer's verdict: Darwinism guilty of many logical errors
Review: I first read this book in 1980, and was quite impressed with its critique of Darwinism as a logical construct. Macbeth took up the study of Darwinist argumentation as a avocation. He does not appeal to any religious authority to contradict Darwinism, nor does he reject the idea of evolution in toto. Rather, he finds the evidence and arguments for Darwinism to be deeply flawed. Questions are begged, evidence is fudged, and extrapolations are unwarranted. The first edition of this book (1971) came well over a decade before Michael Denton's pivotal critique, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986), and well before the theistic Intelligent Design Movement, spearheaded by Phillip E. Johson's book, Darwin on Trial (1991; revised edition, 1993). (Johnson is also a laywer, and a professor of law at UC-Berkeley.) MacBeth has also published a small booklet of interviews on the topic called, Darwinism: A Time for Funerals (1985). This is a thoughtful and fair critique well worth reading. Let me end with a quote from the author: "Any profession [he has biology in mind] that does not supply its own criticism and iconoclasm will discover that someone else will do the job, and usually in a way it does not like." Douglas Groothuis, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Philosophy Denver Seminary
Rating:
Summary: justice
Review: I haven't read this book. I was reading the reviews to decide whether or not I should read it and saw that the previous reviewer decided to review it twice (giving it a single star twice) and decided in the interest of fairness to nullify that by adding a 5 star. I decided to check out this book because it was referenced by Jacques Barzun in his Dawn to Decadence history. And any book that generates the hostility witnessed in the previous review must be pretty good.
Rating:
Summary: One of the worst putatively academic books ever written
Review: My review is given below. Please refer to it.
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