Chris Mooney has a nice post up debunking Stephen Meyer on the history of science and the value of peer review. I’ll pile on here: even if scientific revolutions are important, this isn’t a problem for peer review. I work in philosophy, where people often try to strike out in radically new directions (say, in the case of experimental philosophy), but here’s how those efforts work: some academics kick around a new approach amongst themselves, and then they start publishing papers that try to work through that approach in small ways, and then other people talk about the papers and discuss whether they think it works. Revolutions can happen piecemeal.

I do have a quibble with the post, though: Mooney claims science books are mainly for popularization. While I agree they’re not the main vehicles of scientific progress, I think they serve another purpose: summarizing large bodies of scientific work for academics in related but distinct specialties. I see books like Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, and Pinker’s The Language Instinct cited regularly by academics in other fields. I assume this is because when academics are forced to specialize, they can’t become as intimiately familiar with fields that relate to theirs as they are with their own, so they need someone to summarize, and books can be a very effective way to do this. Contra Mooney, I don’t see that reports from bodies like the NAS exist to fill this role in every case, though they may certainly be helpful.

The important difference between these books and Meyer’s vision for what science books should be is that these books largely aren’t original. I don’t know that there’s a single important idea in The Selfish Gene that is original to Dawkins. Books are not the place for original scientific inquiry because they depend on long bibliographies documenting how their ideas have passed the test of peer review.