Tenth place is apparently worthy of a medal to the Discovery Institute

I mentioned this on Homologous Legs Mini a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been super-busy recently, so I never got around to fleshing this story out a little bit on the main blog.

Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design is a book that some of you may be familiar with – I’ve talked about it before. It, and it’s author, Stephen C. Meyer, are apparently one of the hottest things in the Intelligent Design movement at the moment, and most pro-ID blogs have been hailing the book as one of the greatest ever written on the subject.

Recently, the people who think this way got another boost to their my-opinion-is-correct-o-meter – Signature broke into the Top 10 books in the Science category on Amazon for 2009. Of course, as to be expected, Evolution News & Views is jumping for joy. But is it such a great victory?

Signature did get into the Top 10 in the Science category, but what place did it receive? 10th place. Sure, sure, that’s admirable – a lot of science book were published this year, so getting to the Top 10 is pretty special – but I don’t think it constitutes a huge win for the ID movement. Why? Because 5th place was Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True, 4th place was Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, and 2nd place was Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution – all books that go absolutely against what the Discovery Institute is all about.

This puts Signature‘s victory in the shadows, in my opinion. Books that have religious themes, especially Christian apologetics books, which is arguably what Signature is on some level, sell rather well in the US. Being one of the wealthiest nations in the world, its population buys books online by the bucket-load, so any religious apologetics text that has been hyped and talked about in the Christian community, as this book was, is sure to sell well online – a very large proportion of online sales on Amazon most likely come from the US. As such, we can’t conclude from the placement of Signature on the Amazon Top 10 list that people who weren’t Christians were picking it up, being convinced of the existence of an Intelligent Designer, then telling their atheistic friends to grab a copy as well – a vast majority of people who bought this would have been Christians re-affirming their religious beliefs surrounding creationism and intelligent design.

This point is made even clearer when you factor into the mix the placement of the three pro-evolution books on the Top 10 list. Dawkins’s book was placed 2nd (2nd!), and it was released on the 22nd of September – meaning that the sales that pushed it up so far on the list occurred in less than one or two months, as the list is calculated from orders up until October. Signature was released on June 23, and so had at least double the time period to amass the sales that got it to 10th place.

Consider the fact that Richard Dawkins is one of the most controversial people in the minds of US citizens today – most religious people see him as a “militant atheist” who hates them all, and most people in the US are religious – and the placement of The Greatest Show on Earth is even more amazing. The ordinary person in the US is not a fan of Dawkins, yet his latest book, which is entirely focused on evolutionary theory, a topic either not welcome to or known about by the public, still sold more copies than Signature did. Dawkins broke eight places higher on a bestseller list on a topic the public is hostile to, as compared to a book written about a topic the public laps up.

I don’t know about you, but I think this is a far greater victory for Dawkins, Coyne and Wright than it is for Meyer and the Discovery Institute.