Share <Embed>

£13.99

RRP: £14.99
You Save: £1.00 (7%)

FREE Delivery .

Only 1 left in stock.
Available as a Kindle eBook. Kindle eBooks can be read on any device with the free Kindle app.

Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 2 images

Follow the author

D. C. Stove

Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution Paperback – 1 Jun. 2009

by David Stove (Author)

60 ratings

See all formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Amazon Price

New from

Used from

Kindle Edition

"Please retry"

£11.04

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

£17.62

—

Paperback

"Please retry"

£13.99

—

Arrives: Saturday, Dec 12 Details

Fastest delivery: Tuesday, Dec 8 Details

Note: This item is eligible for click and collect. Details

Whatever your opinion of ‘Intelligent Design,’ you’ll find Stove’s criticism of what he calls ‘Darwinism’ difficult to stop reading. Stove’s blistering attack on Richard Dawkins’ ‘selfish genes’ and ‘memes’ is unparalleled and unrelenting. A discussion of spiders who mimic bird droppings is alone worth the price of the book. Darwinian Fairytales should be read and pondered by anyone interested in sociobiology, the origin of altruism, and the awesome process of evolution. --Martin Gardner, author of Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Debunking Pseudoscience

Special offers and product promotions

Amazon Business : For business-exclusive pricing, quantity discounts and downloadable VAT invoices. Create a free account
Buy this product and stream 90 days of Amazon Music Unlimited for free. E-mail after purchase. Conditions apply. Learn more

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items when the Enter key is pressed. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

David Stove

4

Hardcover
£34.25
Only 1 left in stock (more on the way).
David Stove

7

Paperback
£14.13
David Stove

4

Paperback
£39.99
David Berlinski

594

Paperback
£9.99
Ahmed Paul Keeler

12

Paperback
£11.95
Edward Feser

217

Paperback
7 offers from £13.49

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Stephen C. Meyer

766

Paperback
£16.41

Product details

Paperback : 345 pages
ISBN-10 : 1594032009
ISBN-13 : 978-1594032004
Dimensions : 15.24 x 2.08 x 22.86 cm
Publisher : Encounter Books; New Ed edition (1 Jun. 2009)
Language: : English

Best Sellers Rank: 735,861 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 2,039 in Biological Evolution
- 2,093 in Popular Maths
- 4,410 in History & Survey of Philosophy

Customer reviews:
60 ratings

Product description

Synopsis

What is culture? Why should we preserve it, and how? In this book, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends Western culture against its internal critics and external enemies, and argues that rumours of its death are seriously exaggerated. He shows our culture to be a continuing source of moral knowledge, and rebuts the fashionable sarcasm which sees it as nothing more than the useless legacy of 'dead white European males'. He is robust in defence of traditional architecture and figurative painting, critical of the fashionable relativists and urgent in his plea for our civilization, which more than ever stands in need of the self-knowledge and self-confidence that are the gift of serious culture.

Customer reviews

5 star		60%
4 star		19%
3 star		7%
2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star		14%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

awz1

Darwinism does not apply to humans

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 May 2018

Verified Purchase

Some very good arguments against darwinism being applied to humans. Stove clearly demonstrates that even if darwinism is true for all plant and animal life forms, it is not so with relations to humans. This is made vividly clear through interesting examples of human social behaviour. Stove also has a very witty and capturing writing style.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

J. Wilson

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 August 2016

Verified Purchase

This man is really funny. I wish I could afford more of his books.

Helpful

Comment

Bianca

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 April 2016

Verified Purchase

Perfect

Helpful

Comment

Abid Lawliet

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 October 2016

Verified Purchase

Thanks

Helpful

Comment

Contrarian

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 July 2008

Verified Purchase

David Stove was a well known Australian contrarian opposing intellectual fashions such as feminism, Marxism and, in the final years before his suicide in 1994, Darwinism. Stove's strength - his wit and ability to draw out the absurdity in the prevailing paradigms of the intellectual world - are well set out in Darwinian Fairytales. He draws attention to the intellectual environment within which Darwin lived, the influence on the Origins of Species of the flawed ideas of Thomas Malthus on population, the political objective of Darwin's works and the failure of Darwinists to confront the dilemmas inherent in the application of evolution by natural selection and adaption to humankind.

The political context of the Origins, both prior to publication and, in the long term, to the development of the pseudo-science of Eugenics reflected the pomposity of the Victorian intelligentsia who believed they led the world, carrying Social Darwinism and "enlightenment" to foreign climes as a "favoured race".

Although he professed no religion himself Stove placed Darwinism in the category of a secular religion. "Genetics has merely provided the new religionists with the precise locality of their gods, on the chromosomes of the sex cells." However, the moral and intellectual arrogance, bordering on madness, of the new Darwinist socio-biological priesthood in the era of post-modernist deconstruction leaves them as vulnerable to attack as their monotheist religious predecessors.

Darwinism, he concludes, is irrelevant to human life. It does not describe or explain it. Darwin knew it, Huxley knew it and modern day Darwinists know it too but have deserted science for pseudo-science and the advocacy of atheism, suppressing truth in the process.

This book would have received five star status had not Stove's polemics and wordiness got in the way of a straightforward read. Nonetheless it is an excellent book which should be read as a corrective to the mythical world of Dawkins's meme which has perpetuated the errors of Darwin and Malthus for a century and a half and produced countless deaths of those considered not fit to survive.

11 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Dr. Peter Davies

A victory of altruism over selfishness

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 April 2008

Verified Purchase

I enjoyed this book. Well written, sharp, and very logical. Devastating dissection of the notion of "selfishness" as applied to genes. Very clear demonstration of how altruism is a fact in the world, and not a problem or error.

This book is a very significant challenge to Darwinism and its offshoot, "sociobiology." It exposes a severe mismatch between the predictions of evolutionary theory and life as it actually is.

Well worth reading

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

David M. Williamson

Reproductive words

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 March 2008

Verified Purchase

I've read several works challenging Darwinism and Evolution. This book is a collection of essays and therefore there is a lot of repetition throughout with the same arguments repeated over and over again. This became very tedious and made me wonder whether the writing was mimicking the replication of the alleged selfish genes that the Author challenges. The author also had an annoying habit of using a whole paragraph to write what could be stated in a sentance.

The strong point of the book was the blunt criticisms of Dawkins.

10 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

P. M. Fernandez

An intriguing contribution to the debate about evolution

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 September 2007

Verified Purchase

This was a very interesting read. The late David Stove was not a creationist, or even a Christian - he describes himself as "of no religion". However, he lays various charges at darwinism - both as it was presented by Darwin and his contemporaries and as it is presented today by neodarwinists. The heart of these is that, insofar as it is used to explain humans, it is "a ridiculous slander on human beings." He points out that:

- human life is not a "continual free fight" in the sense that Darwin envisaged necessary as a driver of natural selection;

- the human population has never increased to the limit of the food available, which is what Darwin understood to be the driver of evolutionary development;

- contrary to the darwinist concept, more privileged (better educated, richer, more socially advanced) humans have generally shown themselves less successful at reproducing than those less privileged;

- the "discovery" of memes is not a scientific advance akin to the discovery of genes, but simply a truism - "Sometimes such things as beliefs, attitudes, etc., are transmitted non-genetically from one person to another";

- if altruism is linked to the number of shared genes (a widely held position), then people should be as altruistic towards their egg or sperm cells as they are to their offspring;

- although neodarwinists claim that they don't believe in purposiveness, their language about genes contradicts this. "For every once that Dawkins says that genes are not purposive, he says a hundred things ... which imply that genes are purposive."

This quick summary of some of Stove's points doesn't do the book justice. His writing is literate and funny. On every other page was a quotable paragraph. There were issues where I felt that his arguments failed to reflect "the state of the art" in darwinism. But suffice it to say that his book makes a great many points which undercut darwinism as it relates to humans.

43 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	AbeBooks Books, art & collectables	ACX Audiobook Publishing Made Easy	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Audible Download Audiobooks	Book Depository Books With Free Delivery Worldwide	DPReview Digital Photography	Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations

Amazon Home Services Experienced pros Happiness Guarantee	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities	Kindle Direct Publishing Indie Digital & Print Publishing Made Easy	Prime Now 2-Hour Delivery on Everyday Essentials

Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands	Amazon Warehouse Deep Discounts Open-Box Products	Amazon Business Service for business customers	Whole Foods Market We Believe in Real Food

	Amazon Second Chance Pass it on, trade it in, give it a second life

Select Your Cookie Preferences

Follow the author

Similar authors to follow

Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution Paperback – 1 Jun. 2009

Special offers and product promotions

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Customers who bought this item also bought

Product details

Product description

Synopsis

Customer reviews

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.