10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fresh look at intelligent design, June 15, 2008
This review is from: Exposing Darwinism's Weakest Link: Why Evolution Can't Explain Human Existence (Paperback)
Exposing Darwinism's Weakest Link by Kenneth Poppe is the latest book promoting Intelligent Design (without ever using that term) in the Christian canon. The reviews on Amazon about this book fall into two categories: Christians raving and giving it 5 stars, and evolutionists poking holes in the book and giving it one star. I hope that my review will be a bit more balanced. I have a difficult time reconciling the six days of creation in the Bible with the billions years of fossil history, and this is a true struggle for a Christian. I have a logical mind; I seek out facts, analyze data, and look for answers based on what I find. That's an exceptionally difficult job in the world of evolution/creationism. Most books are apologetics for either side without giving credence to any opinion other than theirs. Dissenters are considered idiots with no ground to stand on. I enjoyed reading Poppe's book, because as a science teacher, he has a better understanding of what recent discoveries are and what science (without distortion) says. I find his view of creation to be very credible: days weren't necessarily 24 hour increments, so the big bang, and development of creatures found in the fossil record stand as accurate. However, evolution as explained by die-hard Dawinists doesn't stand up to the actual fossil record. Poppe uses several examples to prove his point, some of them using statistics that were a little over my head. My one complaint with the book is that Poppe gets a little vitriolic at times, falling into the same trap as previous apologists. He talks down to anyone having a differing opinion than his own, and even though I agree with him, it grated on my nerves. The Christian community needs a book like this written without bias or anger toward the opposition in order for them to read it without feeling attacked. Poppe is a very intelligent man who makes understanding creation and intelligent design easier for Christians, and I am grateful for all that I learned from this book.
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10 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Abysmal -- full of straw men and red herrings, March 16, 2008
This review is from: Exposing Darwinism's Weakest Link: Why Evolution Can't Explain Human Existence (Paperback)
Do not waste your time reading this book, let alone waste your money purchasing it. Having recently read a number of the anti-evolutionists (Spetner, Milton, Geisler & Bocchino, Rhodes and Muncaster), I ordered Poppe's book because it was so new, and, I erroneously thought, might contain some new and interesting arguments against evolution. It does not. Poppe follows many of the above authors in several fallacious arguments, and even exceeds them in some categories. Most annoying is Poppe's multitude of statements that could only withstand scrutiny if he provided some citation or evidence to support the claim -- but he never does. The entire book refers to not a single scientific journal article, and takes National Geographic as almost the sole source of information about human evolution. Below are some comments on the various chapters:
Chapter 1. Poppe immediately reveals his lack of understanding of how evidence is evaluated in science in this opening chapter. He asks his readers to check "could happen" or "couldn't happen" next to a list of ten statements about evolutionary events -- based purely on the reader's opinion. Then he informs us that if there is JUST ONE CHECK in the "couldn't happen" column, `Darwinism' is doomed to immediate failure. Boy, that's scary: an entire field of science is doomed if some person with no science background decided that they don't THINK some event could have happened.
Of course, Poppe's biggest error in chapter 1 is the idea he repeats frequently throughout the book: that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever in support of human evolution from other primates. I suppose that he has decided the 23 or so known hominid species, that show multiple levels of intermediate features between primitive apes and modern humans, with the most human-like being the most recent, do not count as evidence. Or perhaps he does not recognize as evidence the chromosome number of humans being one pair less than that of the great apes -- and the human chromosome 2 shows striking evidence that it is a composite of two ancestral chromosomes.
Chapter 2. This chapter seems to be a synopsis of attempts to discredit a number of scientific fields that anti-evolutionist writers typically lump together with evolution, such as the Big Bang, the formation of the Earth, the appearance of the first living organism, etc. Along the way, Poppe trots out the usual tired claims, such as "no transitional fossils". I would like Mr. Poppe to explain to me -- just as an example -- how the dozens of fossil species on the dinosaur side and the bird side of Archaeopteryx could NOT be transitional fossils. Poppe concludes this section with the well-worn assertion that the evolutionary edifice is crumbling, and with the passing of some elder statesmen of the field (e.g. Mayr) "no brilliant young minds are currently coming out of science to carry evolution forward." Remarkable -- personally I consider some researchers such as Michael Lynch, David Jablonski, and Sean Carroll to be eminently brilliant...maybe Poppe can tell us why these stars of the discipline do not count.
Chapter 3 is a little puzzling. It goes into lengthy discussion of characteristics that we humans display, which Poppe assures us are far above `animalistic'. He then concludes that this list alone is enough to demonstrate that we as a species could not have arisen by naturalistic means and must have had a Divine Designer. I guess this means that since we have behaviors that are very different from animals, we must have been designed. Flawless logic.
Chapters 4 through 7 seem totally irrelevant to Poppe's goal of trying to discredit evolution. Chapter 4 talks about the probability of random formation of a protein; he gets the basics correct, but nobody knows enough detail about the actual conditions 3 billion years ago to actually do these calculations. So Poppe supplies a meaningless low-probability narrative here. Chapter 5 waxes endlessly (well, it seemed endless!) about phi, the intriguing quantity of 1.618. I can discern no relationship between this and his overall story. In fact, Chapters 6 & 7 follow the same trend: Poppe explains to us all sorts of fascinating factoids about the chemical and physical properties of water, and of wave mechanics, but they have no relation to the theme of this book, so as far as I can tell, these chapters are useless.
Chapters 8 and 9 are the core of his book. Poppe valiantly tries to marshall anything he can think of as arguments against human evolution, but most of the time it consists of simply pointing out the various unvoidable consequences of a) an incomplete fossil record, and b) fallible humans doing the paleo work. Yes, it would indeed be nice if we had a lot more early hominid fossils from the period from 4 to 10 million years ago. Yes, it is unfortunate that there have been hoaxes in the past. Poppe seems to think that the sparseness of the fossil record from the early hominid time period is a huge blow to the story of human evolution, but his is most emphatically wrong. The limited number of fossils of this age is in no way an argument against human evolution.
In Chapter 8, Poppe reveals his inability to grasp that hominid evolution most likely is quite "bushy" rather than a linear relay among species. In particular, he draws a false analogy with models of personal computers, claiming that since we cannot put all the fossil hominid species in a linear sequence, then the entire story is doomed. Wrong. Poppe shows his lack of understanding of cladistics in a severely distorted account on page 115, concluding that hominid cladistics is impossible. I would like Mr. Poppe to tell us that if this statement is true, then how can he explain the cladistic analysis in the 2004 publication by Strait & Grine in Journal of Human Evolution?
In numerous locations throughout the book, Mr. Poppe beats the drum of "no new genetic information is possible." Notably, Mr. Poppe NEVER offers any sort of definition of what counts as information. This tiresome argument was the foundation of the disastrous Stephen Meyer 2004 article that generated so much discussion. For Mr. Poppe, I have to say "Where have you been for the past 30 years?" Has Mr. Poppe not heard of gene duplication? Alternative splicing? In critiquing the Meyer article a couple of years ago, I checked to see how many publications mentioned "gene duplication" in the 10 years leading up to 2004, and found > 4000. Is Mr. Poppe entirely unaware of these >4000 articles? Just for fun, let's ask Mr. Poppe to tell us why an article in a recent issue of Science (Xiao et al., March 14 issue, page 1527) is NOT an example of increased genetic information from an entirely natural process.
Finally, Poppe continues to infer that there is no hope of discerning a general transition across the range of fossil hominids. He infers on page 119 that so many fossil species have been dismissed as potential ancestors that is leaves "us with no ancestors even in the eyes of paleoanthropologists." In contrast, I have read publications by Chris Stringer, Tim White, and Pamala Willoughby from 2006 and 2007, all clearly affirming an evolutionary sequence: Homo erectus - Homo heidelbergensis - Homo sapiens. These arguments do not capture all of the misunderstandings and misrepresentations in Poppe's book. The evidence remains solid and although we will probably always wish for more fossils, the ones we do have illustrate the human evolution story nicely.
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