Literati get in a right catfight over Darwin

IN PUBLISHING, it’s survival of the fittest. So it’s no surprise that a new book on evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin is resulting in a literary row.

Last week Dr Adam Rutherford, Radio 4 boffin and author of new book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, tweeted that Amazon would not let him post a review of A.N. Wilson’s new tome Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker Inside Science. He isn’t kind. “I have never come across a more incoherent, inconsistent, deranged attempt to analyse Darwin as a man and his science,” Rutherford writes. “If A.N. Wilson has indeed researched this book for five years he has managed to do something impressive, which is to draw conclusions which are so comprehensively batshit as to fall into the category of ‘not even wrong’.”

Rutherford accuses Wilson of a “misguided” association bet ween Darwin, pictured, and Adolf

CAROLINE Flint may have supported the Remain campaign in 2016 but she’s no longer a poster girl for staying in the European Union. The Labour MP will abstain from voting on tonight’s EU Withdrawal Bill, thus risking the ire of Hitler and that “based on this book he would fail GCSE biology catastrophically.”

Amazon at first wouldn’t approve the hatchet job. Then Rutherford posted again deleting the word batshit. “Shame A.N. Wilson didn’t [remove the batshit]”, one of his followers interjected.

Rutherford is not alone in the critique: fellow geneticist Steve Jones said of A.N. Wilson’s book in The Sunday Times: “This book is the founding volume of the Fake News School of Science Writing.”

Wilson, who has written on figures including Queen Victoria and John Betjeman, has an average rating of 1.5 stars from online reviews. Rutherford’s book, which came out on the same day as Wilson’s, has a 4.5 rating, incidentally.

Wilson hits back: “The intemperate responses from some, not all, scientists suggest something weird is going on, as if one has taken away their comfort blanket or, dare one say, their God.”

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn who had called for a three-line whip for his MPs to vote against the Brexit legislation. Flint has even got a new tagline. “I’m No Re-Mona Lisa,” she told The Londoner.