BrianLopez
(Independent Christian Researcher (and IT Technician))
1
Hi all,
I am not a scientist. If I want to better educate myself on evolution as a whole (not as a student who would be taking university coursework and read through textbooks), which books best respond to those who dissent (?) or reject evolution in one way or another? Back in February of this year, I asked Dr. Swamidass by email for some recommended resources that respond to evolutionary science rejection. He recommended the following:
*Why Evolution Is True* by Jerry A. Coyne (2010)
*Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body* by Neil Shubin (2009)
thenaturalhistorian.com
Would you recommend other powerful, authoritative books (or other written resources)? Would you recommend, for instance, Kenneth R. Miller’s books? Do you regard Dr. Miller as a powerful counterpoint to YEC or ID? Before I read the first two books above later this year and consider buying Dr. Miller’s latest written works, I wanted to give this post a try.
I don’t know that a book intended specifically as an argument against creationism is your best choice. It would be as good or better just to become familiar with mainstream science. That’s what Your Inner Fish is about, for example.
I would strongly recommend Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale, Jonathan Losos’s Improbable Destinies, and for more technical but I think still comprehensible sources, Coyne & Orr’s Speciation and Erwin & Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion.
Libraries, incidentally, are good for saving money on buying books.
Well its best to know the basics first and that will involve reading textbooks. If you want to ditch books for the most part, I’d suggest you try out Mohammed Noor’s video lectures on evolution: the clips are relatively short and quite easy to follow. In addition you need to know a bit of biochemistry, especially that involving proteins and nucleic acids, two types of biomolecules commonly used in evolutionary biology research.
If you can’t get those books, you can try out blogs like Sandwalk. You can learn about nucleic acids, mutations, proteins, etcetera, buzzwords in many evolution discourses on that blog.
I haven’t read any book authored by Ken Miller, but from reviews I think its a good one and worth reading.
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BrianLopez
(Independent Christian Researcher (and IT Technician))
4
I don’t know that a book intended specifically as an argument against creationism is your best choice. It would be as good or better just to become familiar with mainstream science. That’s what Your Inner Fish is about, for example.
I would strongly recommend Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale , Jonathan Losos’s Improbable Destinies , and for more technical but I think still comprehensible sources, Coyne & Orr’s Speciation and Erwin & Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion .
Libraries, incidentally, are good for saving money on buying books.
Thank you for your recommendations. I agree that it would be better for me to familiarize myself with mainstream science instead. I’ll look into those works.
Do you recommend Dr. Miller?
I’ve gone digital as much as possible. I no longer buy hardcovers or paperbacks unless necessary. I dont have space and since my area of unaccredited specialty is in the humanities, digital has worked fine for me for the past several years. No more physical libraries for me to visit either, unless I would do an MA or PhD in Religious Studies, and Im not there yet. Also going to a library, I would not be able to easily refer back to a book much later after returning it if I no longer have it on hand to review it on demand. I heavily rely on books in PDF editions and PDF theses, Kindle editions, and Logos editions. For Evolution, I’ll stick to Kindle editions.
Well its best to know the basics first and that will involve reading textbooks. If you want to ditch books for the most part, I’d suggest you try out Mohammed Noor’s video lectures on evolution: the clips are relatively short and quite easy to follow. In addition you need to know a bit of biochemistry, especially that involving proteins and nucleic acids, two types of biomolecules commonly used in evolutionary biology research.
I concede that getting acquainted with the basics and building up on mainstream knowledge would be more appropriate. Thanks for the recommendations and your opinion on Dr. Miller.
Besides that, anything by Nick Lane is interesting and very engaging. His latest book The Vital Question is about both the origin of life, the evolution of endosymbiosis and mitochondria, and about evolution of eukaryotes and eukaryote complexity.
A lot of “response to creationists” type work is not that wonderful, and framing the thing as a contest between evolutionary theory and creationism tends to get it wrong in any event. Creationism isn’t even involved, in any way, in the scientific view of things; it’s not at the table, it’s not part of the discussion. So the best thing is to understand evolutionary theory on its own terms, at which point, if you’ve done your homework correctly, the creationist objections will no longer make much sense. Understand the consensus, and THEN try to understand the critique; don’t start with the critique.
An example of how the creation/evolution “controversy” approach tends to mess people up is in the way that, since Lenski’s E. coli work has been cited so often in support of certain aspects of evolutionary theory, creationists tend to see it as “the experiment designed to prove that evolution is real.” It’s not. And seeing it that way invites the silliest criticisms of it.
Apart from the general recommendation of textbooks (Vertebrate Life is a favorite of mine), one other recommendation: the very, very best preparation in my opinion is a good overview of the diversity of life – not just big animals but all animals, down to the tiniest invertebrates; not just those, either, but all living things: prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes, fungus, plants, the whole shebang. The schools used to sometimes teach biology as a kind of catalog-like march through the phyla, and while I do understand why this approach has fallen from favor, it has something to recommend it: it is only when one takes in living diversity in all its scope that one can begin to understand why biologists have come to the views they now hold about the descent of living things. When you’re just looking at a lamprey and a squirrel, or a human and an orange tree, common descent may seem absurd. View the whole spectrum that unites those things under the grand banner of life, and the picture is very different. This is not a case “against” creationism: it is, instead, a matter of attempting to understand living things themselves.
Hi Brian,
if you want to educate yourself on evolution (or anything else, for that matter), I’d recommend reading about evolution itself, not about responses to dissenters. Studying the proponents’ works first should put you in a position to be able to evaluate the arguments of the dissenters for yourself. There’s no point reading the critiques or the responses to them until you are in a position to see if the critiques are justified.
I’d second Dawkins’ The ancestor’s tale, but also Steve Jones’ update of Darwin, Mayr’s What evolution is and Gould’s essay collections.
I’d also recommend a quick grounding in logical fallacies before cracking open even the first book on evolution, because generally only one side (proponents or dissenters) needs to resort to them.
Oh, and the quickest way to find out whether to believe the proponents or the dissenters is to follow their respective references and see who is credible.
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BrianLopez
(Independent Christian Researcher (and IT Technician))
9
Besides that, anything by Nick Lane is interesting and very engaging. His latest book The Vital Question is about both the origin of life, the evolution of endosymbiosis and mitochondria, and about evolution of eukaryotes and eukaryote complexity.
A lot of “response to creationists” type work is not that wonderful, and framing the thing as a contest between evolutionary theory and creationism tends to get it wrong in any event. Creationism isn’t even involved, in any way, in the scientific view of things; it’s not at the table, it’s not part of the discussion. So the best thing is to understand evolutionary theory on its own terms, at which point, if you’ve done your homework correctly, the creationist objections will no longer make much sense. Understand the consensus, and THEN try to understand the critique; don’t start with the critique.
Hi Brian,
if you want to educate yourself on evolution (or anything else, for that matter), I’d recommend reading about evolution itself, not about responses to dissenters. Studying the proponents’ works first should put you in a position to be able to evaluate the arguments of the dissenters for yourself. There’s no point reading the critiques or the responses to them until you are in a position to see if the critiques are justified.
I’d second Dawkins’ The ancestor’s tale , but also Steve Jones’ update of Darwin, Mayr’s What evolution is and Gould’s essay collections.
I’d also recommend a quick grounding in logical fallacies before cracking open even the first book on evolution, because generally only one side (proponents or dissenters) needs to resort to them.
Oh, and the quickest way to find out whether to believe the proponents or the dissenters is to follow their respective references and see who is credible.
Thanks! I agree that I should not only read critiques or responses to deniers or dissenters of evolutionary theory without knowing the science myself. I just wrote a post above acknowledging this point. Thank you, I will be considering What Evolution Is.
BrianLopez
(Independent Christian Researcher (and IT Technician))
11
Well, all,
I agree with the assessment that it’s better to correctly learn the basics and become familiar with mainstream biochemistry, biology, and virology rather than only reading written critiques or responses to YEC or ID in book form. The same applies for anything else in life: a more encompassing and pointed understanding of any particular subject makes one get a more appropriate grasp of it.
The same would then apply to the humanities and the Hebrew Bible (and the Bible, Genesis, the OT, the Classical Greek and Roman Lit., the Second Temple Jewish Lit., the NT, and the Fathers). If one wants to dispute what Genesis 1-11 could mean, one has to learn the basics: Hebrew and Greek ( Greek because of the Septuagint) and the Hebrew Bible as a whole. The basics also include Lexicography, Philology, Grammar, Syntax and Discourse Analysis, Manuscripts, Translation, Iconography, History, and Archaeology.
A whole lot of reading and learning…should we get 2 lifetimes to fulfill all of our curiousity?
Not sure this is true for everyone, but that isn’t what I was saying. I was saying that as creationism, from YEC to IDC, is all composed of critiques of evolutionary theory, one should understand evolutionary theory before understanding critiques of evolutionary theory. If you do that, you will be in no need of critiques of creationism because you will be well equipped to understand how ludicrous all of the schools of creationist thought are without needing any coaching on the matter.
Alas, I have dozens of subjects on which I’d like to be a world-leading expert, and only the one lifetime. But it is possible to be a reasonably well-informed amateur in a field by reading good sources.
But here, the advice is given for a very specific reason. Creationism cannot thrive in the light. Its critiques of evolution are based upon the assumption that its audience will have a poor understanding of biology, and that it therefore is not necessary to be honest in relating the issues. Yes, a truly detailed takedown of some highly specific creationist argument can require expertise; but such situations are rare. Most creationism is transparent, fraudulent nonsense of very poor quality, e.g., most of the books published by the Discovery Institute and its fellows. A bit of it is somewhat more clever fraudulent nonsense.
But you’re not looking to judge something which is a reasoned debate here. There’s reason on the one side only. Thus, the task at hand is fine-tuning one’s B.S. detector. That only comes by understanding evolutionary biology on its own terms, not as deceptively portrayed by the frauds and mountebanks.
LOL yeah. @AllenWitmerMiller taught me this the hard way. Nonetheless, I still disagree with him on whether the ancients got the number of insect legs wrongs.
A whole lot of reading and learning…should we get 2 lifetimes to fulfill all of our curiousity?