Customer Reviews

Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science examines the philosophical foundations of the statistical arguments used to evaluate hypotheses in evolutionary biology, based on simple examples and likelihood ratios. The difficulty with reading the book from my/a statistician's perspective is the reluctance of the author to engage into model building and even less into parameter estimation. The first chapter nonetheless constitutes a splendid coverage of the most common statistical approaches to testing and model comparison, even though the advocation of the Akaike information criterion against Bayesian alternatives is rather forceful. The book also covers an examination of the "intelligent design" arguments against the Darwinian evolution theory, predictably if unnecessarily resorting to Popperian arguments to correctly argue that the creationist perspective fails to predict anything. The following chapters cover the more relevant issues of assessing selection versus drift and of testing for the presence of a common ancestor. While remaining a philosophy treatise, Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science is written in a way that is accessible to laymen, if rather unusual from a statistician viewpoint, and the insight about testing issues gained from Evidence and Evolution makes it a worthwhile read. In fact, it is very well-written, with hardly any typo (the unbiasedness property of AIC is stated at the bottom of page 101 with the expectation symbol E on the wrong side of the equation, Figure 3.8c is used instead of Figure 3.7c on page 204, Figure 4.7 is used instead of Figure 4.8 on page 293, Simon Tavaré's name is always spelled Taveré, vaules rather than values is repeated four times on page 339). The style is sometimes too light and often too verbose, with an abundance of analogies that I regard as sidetracking, but this makes for an easier reading. As detailed in my ([...]) review, I have points of contentions with the philosophical views about testing in Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science as well as about the methods exposed therein, but this does not detract from the appeal of reading the book. (The lack of completely worked out statistical hypotheses in realistic settings remains the major issue in my criticism of the book.) While the criticisms of the Bayesian paradigm are often shallow (like the one on page 97 ridiculing Bayesians drawing inference based on a single observation), there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the statistical foundations of the book. I therefore repeat my earlier recommendation in favour of Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science, Chapters 1 and (paradoxically) 5 being the easier entries. Obviously, readers familiar with Sober's earlier papers and books will most likely find a huge overlap with those but others will gather Sober's viewpoints on the notion of testing hypotheses in a (mostly) unified perspective.

This is a very technical book on the application of various theories of probabilities (Bayesian, likelihood theory etc) in respect of the claims of "Intelligent Design" and the theory of evolution. It is a matter of academic interest whether Elliot Sober's arguments are correct because they are couched in the technical language of symbolic logic. Insofar as one can understand the general drift, he appears to have shown that the Intelligent Design argument is founded on very weak evidence (including evidence to even support the theory). Sober then tried to apply the same formula in respect of evidence concerning the theory of evolution (and natural selection) and concluded, through a series of logical exercises, that the evidence may not be as conclusive as the evolutionary scientists would like us to believe. One of the main theses of Elliot Sober in this book is that there are many ways of ascertaining truth. He thinks that just because Intelligent Design is a flawed hypothesis does not mean that the existence of God has not been proved. But similarly, even if evolutionary theory is flawed (as Sober tries to show) it does not mean that God, therefore, exists. The existence or otherwise of a theistic being is a matter that is examined from many more viewpoints than just the evolutionary theory. I think that unless you are interested in formal logic, and want to test Sober's technical declarations and exercises, you may find this a difficult book to grind through.