The new book by Robert Shedinger, Darwin’s Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished, is a deeply researched and fascinating volume which, like the author’s previous work (The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms, 2019), digs up facts and figures about Darwin’s work which you won’t find elsewhere. The fact that Shedinger avoids the hagiographic tradition of treating Darwin as an inviolable icon is all to the good, chiming as it does with a tendency post-1985 to look honestly at the disabling empirical deficits which reveal Darwin in retrospect to have been engaged more in some rather idiosyncratic Nature mysticism than in evidence-based science.

The fact that the author is a professor of religion (at Luther College) does not in any way define him as what American linguist S. I. Hayakawa once termed the “snarl word” of creationist. The present reader, in company with a host of agnostic biologists and cosmologists, simply finds in Darwin a complete dearth of convincing scientific evidence. For myself and other scholars, the issue of religion is quite irrelevant, a misleading canard which should never be referenced in a properly scientific debate.