Refuting Evolution: A Handbook for Students, Parents, and Teachers Countering the Latest Arguments for Evolution [Paperback]

Jonathan Sarfati (Author), Ken Ham (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0890512582 | ISBN-13: 978-0890512586 | Publication Date: May 1999

A creationist response to the National Academy of Science’s Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science. The latter, distributed nationwide to thousands of public school teachers, is an effort to saturate students with evolutionary concepts. Refuting Evolution is a cogent rebuttal, carefully examining the points raised in the NAS booklet: science and religion; natural selection; bird evolution; astronomy; the age of the earth, etc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 143 pages
• Publisher: Master Books (May 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0890512582
• ISBN-13: 978-0890512586
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (92 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #338,850 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #13 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Science & Religion
  • #22 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Theology > Philosophy
  • #43 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Science > History & Philosophy > General

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

196 of 258 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Refuting Evolution: A Handbook for Scientific Illiterates, August 22, 2006

By 

Carl Flygare (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Refuting Evolution: A Handbook for Students, Parents, and Teachers Countering the Latest Arguments for Evolution (Paperback)

Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover. The illustration gives everything away. A menacing hammer labeled "SCIENCE" is crashing through a glass window that represents evolution. Implicit in the image is a promise totally unfulfilled by the contents of this book - that 'science' (as mangled and misused by the author) somehow refutes evolution!

Cynically intended to separate uncritical creationists from their money and the actual facts, this aggressively mediocre publication is typeset in a large 'Weekly Reader' font and format that keeps your fingers constantly busy flipping from page to page. Which is appropriate since "Refuting Evolution" is essentially content-free.

If Jonathan Sarfati has any honest cards to play in the seemingly endless game of whack-a-mole that scientists are forced to play with Young Earth Creationists (YECs for short), he should write them up and submit them for peer review in a credible scientific journal. He won't because science is hard work and Sarfati can make an easy living by taking unfounded pot shots at evolution.

The threads of error woven into Sarfati's tapestry of nonsense are numerous and perverse. Here are a few highlights:

Sarfati postulates that a lack of helium escaping from the atmosphere of the earth supports its 'youth.' He deliberately ignores the evidence NASA, and many others, have accumulated on helium escape that deflates this lighter-than-air YEC balloon.

He also trots out the discredited canard about ocean salinity supporting a young earth interpretation. Unfortunately this creationist gambit conveniently omits well known mechanisms, such as basaltic lava quenching, that removes sodium from the ocean.

Another whopper posits that radioactive potassium and uranium are "easily dissolved" in water and that the leaching of these parent radionuclides from rocks supposedly disrupts radiometric dating calculations. Even if this was the case - and it isn't, the minerals these elements form has everything to do with weathering and solubility - this weak argument ignores lunar samples obtained by Apollo astronauts from earth's airless and waterless moon.

Physics, chemistry, and geology falsify Sarfati's hand-waving, assertions, and 'Jesus just-so' stories. How about biology?

Here Sarfati resorts to what I like to call the creationist 'argument from low self-esteem' - he attempts to invalidate the molecular phylogenetics that show an extraordinarily close relationship (98% commonality) between human and chimpanzee DNA - and fails spectacularly.

From chromosomal fusion and pseudogenes to retroelements and transposons the scientific reality of evolution is expressed in the DNA of every person on earth (including Sarfati). These relics (literally) are millions of non-coding segments of DNA, snippets of our genome that eloquently document common descent with uncommon clarity and incontrovertible evidence.

Specifics include how human chromosome 2 resulted from the fusion of two separate chromosomes (corresponding to chimpanzee chromosomes 2A and 2B) after the lineage leading to modern humans split from the one leading to contemporary chimpanzees.

Transposable elements, also known as transposons and retroelements (aka 'jumping genes'), such as Alu elements, HERV-K, CMT1A, and GULO provide exacting confirmation of human evolution and our ancestral affiliation with other primates.

Pseudogenes (including unitary pseudogenes, duplication pseudogenes and retropseudogenes) also supply eloquent evidence for evolution. Comparisons of pseudogene sequences across species reveal a consistent pattern. Human pseudogenes are most similar to those in chimpanzee DNA, and are highly similar to those of other primates. Species as divergent as rodents and humans also display some degree of ancient pseudogene similarity - additional evidence of our shared evolutionary history with kindred primates, and more distantly related mammals.

Genomics research addresses the evolutionary relationship between humans, chimpanzees and gorillas. Mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences both show that humans and chimpanzees are more closely related to each other than either is to gorillas. Genome-wide comparison of the human and chimpanzee genomes spectacularly confirms that the genes, chromosomes, transposable elements, and pseudogenes of humans and chimpanzees are strikingly similar.

Human mitochondrial DNA diversity, X-chromosome diversity, Y-chromosome diversity, and diversity of DNA sequences in all chromosomes unambiguously reveals that the evolutionary cradle of humanity is located in sub-Saharan Africa, and also tracks subsequent migrations across the entire globe - initially to the Middle East and Asia, then Europe, Australia, and the Americas.

So much for 'science,' ala Sarfati but then this book really isn't about science at all. "Refuting Evolution" is a desperately shrill and pandering mishmash of fundamentalist theology and amateur hour apologetics, based on a literal misreading of Genesis and other parts of the Bible.

'Truthiness' is no substitute for the truth; scientific facts, however well supported and tested by experiment and inference, are routinely feed to Sarfati's faith-based shredder to justify his absolute and dogmatic faith in an allegorical creation myth.

Earth to Sarfati - evolution is a solidly established and widely accepted scientific theory with vast explanatory and predictive power, based on a solid foundation of supporting evidence. Get over it. You may as well deny gravity (Newtonian or General Relativity). Worship as you please and find spiritual solace in Genesis if you must - but don't pimp science to prop up your irrational and medieval worldview.

78 of 107 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Evbidence of Creationist Incompetence, October 18, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Refuting Evolution: A Handbook for Students, Parents, and Teachers Countering the Latest Arguments for Evolution (Paperback)

Like most creationist books that I've read, this one is full of elementary errors in astronomy, chemistry, geology and the nature of science. For example, when arguing for a "young" Universe, Sarfati (p. 113) claims that no stage 3 supernova remnants exist in our or neighboring galaxies. However, 166.2+2.5, 180.0-1.7, 189.1+3.0, 279.0+1.1, and 290.1-0.8 are just five undisputed examples of these "nonexistent" remnants.

Sarfati (p. 113) also claims that a "lack" of helium escape from the atmosphere supports its "youth." However, recent NASA images show helium and other gases being SWEPT from the Earth's atmosphere into deep space. One event occurred on September 24-25, 1998 after a solar coronal mass emission.

So, why don't creationists use heavier gases (e.g. argon) that won't readily escape into space when they try to date the Earth's atmosphere? Perhaps, it's because the atmospheric 40argon/36argon is consistent with an ancient Earth (Dalrymple, 1984, p. 83; Krauskopf and Bird, 1995, p. 576) and it cannot be distorted to support their interpretations of Genesis.

Using poorly known numbers from his allies, Sarfati (p. 114) argues that salt concentrations in ocean water should be much higher if the oceans were billions of years old. This argument also fails. When hot basaltic lavas erupt onto the seafloor, they remove sodium from seawater as they quench. This process, called albitization, refers to the accumulation of sodium in the cooling rocks during quenching. Because creationists ignore this important sodium-removal mechanism, their salinity calculations underestimate the age of the oceans.

Sarfati (p. 110) also claims that radioactive potassium and uranium are "easily dissolved" in water and that the leaching of these parent radionuclides from rocks supposedly can disrupt radiometric dating calculations. However, as taught in any introductory chemistry course, (doesn't Sarfati hold degrees in chemistry?) water solubility and the ability of uranium, potassium, and other elements to weather out of minerals depend on the compounds that contain the elements and the oxidation state of the elements. For example, uranium (IV) is generally insoluble in water, but (UO2)+2 is highly soluble (Langmuir, 1997, p. 495-496). Potassium chloride is very soluble in water, but potassium muscovite is not and it's low on Goldich's weathering series. Even if Sarfati's accusations were true, they're irrelevant to radiometric dates on rocks from the airless and waterless Moon.

38 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Science? Science fiction!, August 24, 2007

By 

Carson Durant "Control-Z" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Refuting Evolution: A Handbook for Students, Parents, and Teachers Countering the Latest Arguments for Evolution (Paperback)

Sarfati's science is abysmal. Period. Victoria University of Wellington should be ashamed of itself if this is the kind of "scientists" it is turning out, although I suspect Sarfati's religious pathology would misconstrue the facts of scientific reality no matter where he earned his degrees.

REFUTING EVOLUTION is so full of elementary errors in astronomy, chemistry, geology and the nature of science, that I half-suspected Sarfati to be an 'agent provocateur' really working in the service of science and that he was only offering up this book as 'disinformation' to make the Creationists look bad by assuming they were either too ignorant, too lazy, or too complacent to bother researching his laughable (and patently inaccurate) claims.

The more I read, however, it began to dawn on me that Sarfati actually believed the fantasies he was doling out even though they go against all the basic findings of elementary science. This is downright frightening, to see how religious fanaticism (a kind of mental pathology) should have such a stanglehold on what might otherwise turn out to be a strong and rational mind. It's a pity to see such potential wasted in the service of supernaturalism, magical thinking, and science fiction! What else is Sarfati deliberately and rigorously pretending not to know?