Evidence for a purely Darwinian account of human origins is supposed to be overwhelming. But is it? In this provocative book, three scientists challenge the claim that undirected natural selection is capable of building a human being, critically assess fossil and genetic evidence that human beings share a common ancestor with apes, and debunk recent claims that the human race could not have started from an original couple.
Science and Human Origins
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About the Author
Ann Gauger is senior research scientist at Biologic Institute. She received her Ph.D. in developmental biology from the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Douglas Axe is director of Biologic Institute and received his Ph.D. from Caltech. He previously held postdoctoral and research scientist positions at Cambridge University and the Babraham Institute. Casey Luskin is research coordinator at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He earned his M.S. in earth sciences from the University of California, San Diego, and conducted geological research at the Scripps Institution for Oceanography.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
By Jon Gillett
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
I guess everybody thinks they have a monopoly on reality, but these guys do a good job of making the case that for many who think they've got it all figured out, the reality is that their core beliefs about Darwinism are rooted in misinformation.
Chapters three and four are particularly strong. Chapter 5 requires more time to really understand than I am able to give it now, as I read the book in a few hours, but the author is obviously intelligent. I have recently read books by evolutionary biologists Richard Miller, Richard Dawkins, and Jerry Coyne, and at the end of the day what it looks like to me is they are bright guys, but they have a deep need to believe the Darwinian story and both interpret and present the evidence in a very biased manner.
Reality is that much of the evidence used to support Darwinism over the last several decades has turned out to be incorrect and in some cases even fraudulent. Haeckel's drawings, Piltdown man, exaggerated claims about the quality of even recent fossils, etc. reveal a scientific community that needs to believe, and really wants everyone else to, not because of where the facts clearly lead, but because Darwinism is their only acceptable alternative.
You can rail against the idiocy of clearly uneducated individuals like me who question evolutionary dogma, but the simple truth is that the evidence isn't very strong, unless you strictly filter it all through a Darwinian lens and/or only read biased sources. And Richard Miller's protestations aside (he says "Evolve That!" Is not a valid argument, but it seems pretty solid to me) there are clearly questions the Darwinists have no idea how to answer. That doesn't mean the theory couldn't be true, but it's kind of sickening to think of how many people believe simply because they've never taken a close look at the other side of the story.
Chapters three and four are particularly strong. Chapter 5 requires more time to really understand than I am able to give it now, as I read the book in a few hours, but the author is obviously intelligent. I have recently read books by evolutionary biologists Richard Miller, Richard Dawkins, and Jerry Coyne, and at the end of the day what it looks like to me is they are bright guys, but they have a deep need to believe the Darwinian story and both interpret and present the evidence in a very biased manner.
Reality is that much of the evidence used to support Darwinism over the last several decades has turned out to be incorrect and in some cases even fraudulent. Haeckel's drawings, Piltdown man, exaggerated claims about the quality of even recent fossils, etc. reveal a scientific community that needs to believe, and really wants everyone else to, not because of where the facts clearly lead, but because Darwinism is their only acceptable alternative.
You can rail against the idiocy of clearly uneducated individuals like me who question evolutionary dogma, but the simple truth is that the evidence isn't very strong, unless you strictly filter it all through a Darwinian lens and/or only read biased sources. And Richard Miller's protestations aside (he says "Evolve That!" Is not a valid argument, but it seems pretty solid to me) there are clearly questions the Darwinists have no idea how to answer. That doesn't mean the theory couldn't be true, but it's kind of sickening to think of how many people believe simply because they've never taken a close look at the other side of the story.
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful
By Eddy del Rio
Format:Paperback
I bought mine at a conference where I heard the substance of the book presented by some of it's authors. As a physician, I find it a fine contribution for those who appreciate *critical thinking* on the matter of the claims of Neo-Darwinism to explain the "Origin" and complexity of life. In general, I have found insufficient skepticism among evolutionary scientists. To be sure, when you see reviews (here on Amazon) so diametrically opposed as this book has, you can be sure that you should ignore any recommendations to not read the piece. If you disagree with the existence of an Index Librorum Prohibitorum, then you'll want to be sure and read this short but cogent work.
153 of 248 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
An attack on science that fails to engage with contemporary literature
July 1, 2012
By P. Mcbride
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I have reviewed this book fairly extensively on my blog. So, for those interested in a more detailed discussion of the scientific issues dealt with in the book than I can do on Amazon. EDIT: The link is provided in the comments, as links can't appear in the main text.
In this book Gauger, Axe and Luskin purport to deal with broad issues of human origins in a scientific context - our common descent within the primates, the ability of natural selection to produce novel function, the hominin fossil records and ancestral population sizes (whether we could or could not have gone through a population bottleneck of two people for a literal Adam and Eve. They spectacularly fail to manage what they set out to achieve, which is to provide a scientific justification of Christian principles.
I realise there will be people who will argue that because this is an Intelligent Design book, I am wrong to bring up Christianity, because it is a purportedly secular movement. However, the introduction and four of the five chapters in this book *explicitly* set out their arguments in this context, and the final chapter talks about a literal Adam and Eve. This is an overtly Christian book, and while there is nothing wrong with that, it is also clear that this means that the authors are presenting a one-sided case about human origins.
Even a one-sided case would be fine - provided the authors deal with the scientific arguments at hand properly. However, the book achieves no such thing. Chapter One provides a broad overview of the book. In Chapter Two (Douglas Axe) sets about to disprove that Darwinian evolution can produce novel proteins. However, the argument is based on a flawed concept of evolution - that if we can't evolve one contemporary protein into another, then evolutionary novelty cannot happen by mutation and selection. The problem with this argument is that evolution does not occur with targets in mind, and transitions between one chosen protein and another are not expected. It is easy to imagine lots of proteins that could evolve but haven't. That one particular, preordained change is unlikely to happen is not evidence against evolution, and does not address the enormous existing subdiscipline that deals with evolutionary constraints.
In Chapter 3, lawyer and MSc (earth sciences) Casey Luskin argues against all of the world's expert palaeoanthropologists that there are in fact massive, unbridgeable gaps in the fossil record that disprove common descent of humans and chimpanzees. He argues that most of the record is primarily very much dominated by arboreal apes, and then there is a sudden transition into terrestrial humans. Even ignoring his unfair treatment of Homo habilis, Luskin is wrong to suggest that modern humans appear significantly unchanged as Homo erectus, and that we are effectively no different from erectus. In fact, erectus shows a doubling of cranial capacity over its evolutionary history, which means that early erectus is very unlikely to have been "human" in the way Luskin wants - a creature created in the image of God, with capacity for thought, and art and so forth. This also sets up a later failure by Ann Gauger in the last chapter.
Chapter 4 is also authored by Luskin, however in this chapter he challenges the concept of junk DNA and personally attacks Christian geneticist Francis Collins. The junk DNA argument he presents is massively ignorant of the literature, and is one long strawman. He argues that evolutionary biologists used to think that all non-coding DNA was junk but they were all wrong and now we know that all DNA is functional. Every part of this statement is wrong. The concept of junk DNA was established through population genetics by Ohno in 1972. Ohno argued that we could only have a maximum of 30,000 functional genes and the rest of the genome (his estimate was 90%) was not under purifying selection. The reason is that the more function in the genome, the more room for things to go wrong with mutation. Because we all have mutations that arose in us if they all affected functional parts of the genome, we would evolve to extinction. This is because most random mutations to functional parts of the genome make them worse, not better. Luskin is completely ignorant of this, and makes no argument as to how the whole genome could be functional. Even though we have known about functional non-coding DNA for longer than we have known about junk DNA, he still claims that scientists thought all non-coding DNA was junk. He lists a bunch of functions in non-coding DNA that nobody disputes, but these functions simply do not apply to the 90% of the genome that lacks any known function (yes, Ohno was about right 40 years ago!). While we continue to find new functional sequences in the genome and while this is cool and exciting, we just have to remember that most of these finds account for tiny fragments of our genome, and all of them added up over decades still add up to less than a couple percent of the genome, and that any argument against junk DNA needs to explain how Ohno was wrong. There are also other issues here like pervasive transcription and chromosomal fusion, but like the rest of the chapter, Luskin only provides one side of complex issues and pretends to have a scientific consensus that literally does not exist. It is either dishonest or ignorant.
In the last chapter, Ann Gauger makes an argument for a literal Adam and Eve. However, she too ignores the best reasons that we know the human population never bottlenecked to only two individuals, instead arguing about one single paper from the 1990s. Even this argument is badly flawed, because it requires Adam and Eve to be at least 4 million years in the past. However, Luskin argued in Chapter 3 that `humanness' has only existed since Homo erectus - about 1.8 million years in the past. Like I said, the possibility of Adam and Eve at 4 million years ago is only based on one point, and the bulk of scientific evidence shows that the hominin lineage has never experienced a bottleneck of this type.
Gauger then makes the only original claim in favour of intelligent design, in the last couple pages of the book. However, like the rest of the book the argument contains no positive evidence for this position, and is only predicated on doubt about naturalistic evolution.
The book will still probably be read by many people seeking to disprove evolution. I urge those people to consider why all of the scientists who work in these fields collectively come to different conclusions than do the authors of this book. It is not because of an atheist conspiracy, as many of those scientists - including Francis Collins and Francisco Ayala who are singled out in this book - are themselves Christians. They accommodate their beliefs with an uncompromised view of the science. This is because they have engaged openly with the evidence of their discipline and concluded that evolutionary principles best explain human origins. If this book offers any solace to those seeking evidence against evolution for their faith, the solace should be as incomplete as the arguments made in the book.
In this book Gauger, Axe and Luskin purport to deal with broad issues of human origins in a scientific context - our common descent within the primates, the ability of natural selection to produce novel function, the hominin fossil records and ancestral population sizes (whether we could or could not have gone through a population bottleneck of two people for a literal Adam and Eve. They spectacularly fail to manage what they set out to achieve, which is to provide a scientific justification of Christian principles.
I realise there will be people who will argue that because this is an Intelligent Design book, I am wrong to bring up Christianity, because it is a purportedly secular movement. However, the introduction and four of the five chapters in this book *explicitly* set out their arguments in this context, and the final chapter talks about a literal Adam and Eve. This is an overtly Christian book, and while there is nothing wrong with that, it is also clear that this means that the authors are presenting a one-sided case about human origins.
Even a one-sided case would be fine - provided the authors deal with the scientific arguments at hand properly. However, the book achieves no such thing. Chapter One provides a broad overview of the book. In Chapter Two (Douglas Axe) sets about to disprove that Darwinian evolution can produce novel proteins. However, the argument is based on a flawed concept of evolution - that if we can't evolve one contemporary protein into another, then evolutionary novelty cannot happen by mutation and selection. The problem with this argument is that evolution does not occur with targets in mind, and transitions between one chosen protein and another are not expected. It is easy to imagine lots of proteins that could evolve but haven't. That one particular, preordained change is unlikely to happen is not evidence against evolution, and does not address the enormous existing subdiscipline that deals with evolutionary constraints.
In Chapter 3, lawyer and MSc (earth sciences) Casey Luskin argues against all of the world's expert palaeoanthropologists that there are in fact massive, unbridgeable gaps in the fossil record that disprove common descent of humans and chimpanzees. He argues that most of the record is primarily very much dominated by arboreal apes, and then there is a sudden transition into terrestrial humans. Even ignoring his unfair treatment of Homo habilis, Luskin is wrong to suggest that modern humans appear significantly unchanged as Homo erectus, and that we are effectively no different from erectus. In fact, erectus shows a doubling of cranial capacity over its evolutionary history, which means that early erectus is very unlikely to have been "human" in the way Luskin wants - a creature created in the image of God, with capacity for thought, and art and so forth. This also sets up a later failure by Ann Gauger in the last chapter.
Chapter 4 is also authored by Luskin, however in this chapter he challenges the concept of junk DNA and personally attacks Christian geneticist Francis Collins. The junk DNA argument he presents is massively ignorant of the literature, and is one long strawman. He argues that evolutionary biologists used to think that all non-coding DNA was junk but they were all wrong and now we know that all DNA is functional. Every part of this statement is wrong. The concept of junk DNA was established through population genetics by Ohno in 1972. Ohno argued that we could only have a maximum of 30,000 functional genes and the rest of the genome (his estimate was 90%) was not under purifying selection. The reason is that the more function in the genome, the more room for things to go wrong with mutation. Because we all have mutations that arose in us if they all affected functional parts of the genome, we would evolve to extinction. This is because most random mutations to functional parts of the genome make them worse, not better. Luskin is completely ignorant of this, and makes no argument as to how the whole genome could be functional. Even though we have known about functional non-coding DNA for longer than we have known about junk DNA, he still claims that scientists thought all non-coding DNA was junk. He lists a bunch of functions in non-coding DNA that nobody disputes, but these functions simply do not apply to the 90% of the genome that lacks any known function (yes, Ohno was about right 40 years ago!). While we continue to find new functional sequences in the genome and while this is cool and exciting, we just have to remember that most of these finds account for tiny fragments of our genome, and all of them added up over decades still add up to less than a couple percent of the genome, and that any argument against junk DNA needs to explain how Ohno was wrong. There are also other issues here like pervasive transcription and chromosomal fusion, but like the rest of the chapter, Luskin only provides one side of complex issues and pretends to have a scientific consensus that literally does not exist. It is either dishonest or ignorant.
In the last chapter, Ann Gauger makes an argument for a literal Adam and Eve. However, she too ignores the best reasons that we know the human population never bottlenecked to only two individuals, instead arguing about one single paper from the 1990s. Even this argument is badly flawed, because it requires Adam and Eve to be at least 4 million years in the past. However, Luskin argued in Chapter 3 that `humanness' has only existed since Homo erectus - about 1.8 million years in the past. Like I said, the possibility of Adam and Eve at 4 million years ago is only based on one point, and the bulk of scientific evidence shows that the hominin lineage has never experienced a bottleneck of this type.
Gauger then makes the only original claim in favour of intelligent design, in the last couple pages of the book. However, like the rest of the book the argument contains no positive evidence for this position, and is only predicated on doubt about naturalistic evolution.
The book will still probably be read by many people seeking to disprove evolution. I urge those people to consider why all of the scientists who work in these fields collectively come to different conclusions than do the authors of this book. It is not because of an atheist conspiracy, as many of those scientists - including Francis Collins and Francisco Ayala who are singled out in this book - are themselves Christians. They accommodate their beliefs with an uncompromised view of the science. This is because they have engaged openly with the evidence of their discipline and concluded that evolutionary principles best explain human origins. If this book offers any solace to those seeking evidence against evolution for their faith, the solace should be as incomplete as the arguments made in the book.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Self-contradictory
As unpersuasive as Bart Simpson's "I Didn't Do It, Nobody Saw Me Do It, There's No Way You Can Prove Anything! Read more
Published 14 days ago by Febble
4.0 out of 5 stars
Natural Selection exposed
By the end of the 20th century scientism had become the religion of the west, it's so odd to hear Darwinists assert an ideology as brute facts. Read more
Published 18 days ago by talkfight
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very accurate and complete rebuttal of the theory of evolution!
This helps debunk the myth of evolution and shows that it is completely impossible for millions of accidental mutations to create complex life (or any life for that matter). Read more
Published 1 month ago by sjustices
1.0 out of 5 stars
Once Upon A Time God Created......
Rather deceitful isn't it...that these 3 creationists fail to mention their only source of
information for their views on how humans evolved... Read more
information for their views on how humans evolved... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Charley Horse
5.0 out of 5 stars
origins
A must read for all who desire to better understand origins. How much of what we read in science is actually the truth. Read more
Published 3 months ago by john
1.0 out of 5 stars
Unfortunately, pseudoscience again
I've been following the evolution - creation wars for about 40 years. It often ends up with "my PhD is smarter than your PhD" and few lay persons can really tell which side has the... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Jon F Peters
1.0 out of 5 stars
You can't get here from there?
Spoiler alert: This is an Intelligent Design effort. It is not a serious book on human origins, it is an apology for the Christian right's world view. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Gregory R. Gendron
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Book
It's interesting that the first reviewer who wrote a fairly lengthy review only had one sentence on the first chapter. Hmmm...I wonder why? Read more
Published 5 months ago by G. Readore
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good info
The book had some interesting articles about the controversy surrounding some fossils and anthropological evidence,that you probably would not find in a typical biology textbook. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Ghsh23
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good read for Lay person
This book was written by top researchers and defenders of the ID,(the theory that certain features in Life, are best explained by design, not random mutation and selection). Read more
Published 8 months ago by JoeJensen
