#1848: Dean Koontz

Dean Koontz is a rather famous author of fiction. He is also a creationist, something that occasionally shows up in his novels, for instance Breathless (2010), where the following is stated by one of the main characters:

“They say – here are fossils showing the horse in its stages of its evolution. But they’re only assuming the fossils are related. These fossils may more likely be of different species instead of stages of the same one [yes, it’s the “no transitional fossils” argument]. They prove nothing. The other species became extinct. The horse didn’t. And the assumption that these fossils are arranged in the correct order, showing progression in certain features, can’t be supported with evidence. Neither carbon dating nor any method of fixing the period of a fossil is precise enough to support that arranged order. Again, they’ve been assumed to belong in that order, but mere assumptions do not qualify as science,” and later: “[b]ut the tiniest worm on earth could not have evolved from a one-celled organism in four billion years even if there had been a mutation in every one of those millionths of a second.”

Anyone with a minimal understanding of evolution would presumably discover some errors in these assertions. What is, of course, particularly sad is that readers who don’t know the basics of evolution might be fooled into thinking that Koontz has the faintest idea about what he is talking about.

But then: these passages are from works of fiction; can we really conclude anything about Koontz’s own beliefs from them? Well, Koontz also contributed a jacket blurb to Stephen Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt. That’s right: that Stephen Meyer. Koontz says: “Meyer writes beautifully. He marshals complex information as well as any writer I’ve read and far better than most. This book – and his body of work – challenges scientisim with real science and excites in me the hope that the origin of life debate will soon be largely free of the ideology that has long colored it.” Yeah. Thinking that what Meyer is doing has anything to do with “real science”, and that it is the scientists, and not the creationists, who are driven to errors by ideological bias: That qualifies you for an entry here.

Diagnosis: Perhaps not as hardcore as many, and no one would presumably take him seriously as an expert; but few creationists reach a larger audience than Koontz, and if his readers ever were fooled into thinking that he has any idea of what he is talking about, then that would be a problem.