Laelaps

Earlier today PZ wrote a brief review of Jerry Coyne's upcoming book Why Evolution is True. I'm not particularly interested in reading it, I doubt it's going to have much information I haven't seen before, but I decided to look into it all the same. (To tell you the truth, I feel that my book, when finished, is going to be much better than most books about evolution presently on the market. But that's just me being arrogant.)

Now part of marketing a book about evolution is making it seem new and original. There is a long list of popular books on evolution that have been published over the years (the now-out-of-print Evolution for John Doe being one of my personal favorites), and it can be hard to make your own work stand out. This is especially true in a year when there will be a flood of volumes published in an attempt to cash in on Darwin's legacy. Why Evolution is True does not seem to be an exception, but I was very puzzled by a statement made in the product description. It reads;

In all the current highly publicized debates about creationism and its descendant "intelligent design," there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned--the evidence, the empirical truth of evolution by natural selection. Even Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, while extolling the beauty of evolution and examining case studies, have not focused on the evidence itself. [emphasis mine]

I know it is sometimes customary to belittle the work of other authors to make your own work appear more grandiose, but this is just ridiculous. Gould and Dawkins did not focus on the evidence for evolution? What was Wonderful Life and The Structure of Evolutionary Theory? And what about The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale? Both authors had their own books dealing with religion/creationism (Rocks of Ages for Gould and The Blind Watchmaker for Dawkins), but to suggest that they never emphasized the positive evidence for evolution is absurd.

Who wrote the blurb, I don't know. Probably someone in a marketing department somewhere. Nevertheless, it does bother me that the work of two excellent popularizers of science has been effectively whizzed upon to promote a new book (particularly since Dawkins is publishing a book about the evidence for evolution, Only a Theory?, next year as well!). This may all be a minor point and is probably not worth getting too worked up about, but if you're going to reference the work of other people I should hope that it would be done right.