Frozen Evolution book review

Dan Graur reviews Frozen Evolution: Or, That's not the Way It Is, Mr. Darwin: A Farewell to Selfish Gene by Jaroslav Flegr in The Quarterly Review of Biology.

And thank Dan for that, because I know what an awful book that is. As Dan says

I regard this book review as a public service. Life is much too short to waste it on bad books. So, do not even touch this sloppily written, unprofessionally translated, inadequately conceived, improperly edited, dubiously syntaxed, and horribly pompous and tedious stream‐of‐consciousness monologue masquerading as a scholarly work.

I few years back I saw a message somewhere on the web that Flegr was looking for people to review his book, which is in part about epistasis (a topic of my research), so I asked him, and he subsequently sent me a copy. However, I was never able to get through it (apologies), because the writing is indeed sloppy, and the core idea as I perceived it - that because epistasis makes a mutation have different effects on different genetic backgrounds, a mutation can't lead to workable changes in the genome in sexual species, since recombination makes the genetic background in the offspring different from that of both parents - is patently crackpotty. Better things to do, kind of thing.

I have one final piece of advice for those masochists who will imprudently decide against my very strong admonitions to read this book. Have a fun experience by using a “crackpot‐index measure” (see e.g., F. J. Gruenberger. 1964. Science 145:1413–1415) to compare Frozen Evolution against a checklist of the most significant attributes of scientists and quacks. I am looking forward to finding out whether your conclusions will be similar to mine, which I shall keep to myself for the present time.