Reception
Darwin on Trial has sold over 250,000 copies. Causing "an uproar in some scientific and literary circles," Darwin on Trial alerted national media to the creationist movement and their fight against the theory of evolution. In the year after Darwin on Trial was released, many articles about the controversy were published in popular newspapers and magazines across the country. Johnson said in an interview in California Monthly that he fully expected to be labeled a "kook" by the academy, but he was "pleasantly surprised by the support he's received from people familiar with his book on the Berkeley campus."
The book initially received more attention from popular media than from the scientific community, although soon after the book was released Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education responded to it, saying "scientific creationists" like Johnson "confuse the general public, by mixing up the controversy among scientists about how evolution took place, with a more general question of whether it took place at all". Stephen Jay Gould gave a harsh review in Scientific American, and the controversy caught the attention of Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg. Johnson has since added an epilogue to the book titled "The Book and Its Critics", in the latest edition of Darwin On Trial.
Read more about this topic: Darwin On Trial
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)