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42 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Despite endorsements, bad even by creationist standards, December 25, 2000
By A Customer
In the chapter on "Chance," Hanegraaff quotes a well-known passage in _Origin of Species_ in which Darwin admits to shuddering every time he contemplates the eye. He omits, or is ignorant of, the following paragraph, in which Darwin argues that the various intermediate grades of eye which exist in nature, from a simple eye spot to the most complex box camera eye, show that a complex eye can develop from a very simple one by small steps. This seems pretty typical of Hanegraaff's method, with arguments that sound good if you don't know what he's leaving out -- whether he's giving facts, or quotes, out of context. Of course, his discussion of chance includes no discussion -- not even a bad one -- of natural selection. Nor does it include any recognition that the origin of life and the subsequent evolution of life are separate problems. Indeed, this confusion among the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the evolution of life once it existed, are a central feature of the book's "Empirical Science" chapter, and well as the one on "Chance." Hanegraaff evidently does not think his subject -- or his readers -- worthy of clear and careful thought.A chapter on "Fossil Follies" misrepresents _Archaeopteryx_, ignores the vast array of mammal-like reptiles, and cannot even be bothered to consider the renowned (or notorious) horse series. It regurgitates earlier creationist misunderstandings of Punctuated Equilibrium without bothering to find out the differenced between Eldridge and Gould's theory and Goldberg's saltational notions. It does not note, of course, that any evolutionist would tell you that the fossil record has never, in any case, been the main support of evolutionary theories. Instead, the "nested hierarchy" (the way organisms fit neatly into groups which fit into larger groups, which fit into still larger groups), the use of similar designs for dissimilar ends (e.g. the greater similarity between the bones of bat wings and whale flippers than between bat and bird wings) and dissimilar designs for similar ends (e.g. bat wings and bird wings, or the primate thumb and the panda's thumb), and biogeography are the main pillars of the theory. In the chapter on "Ape-man Frauds," Hanegraaff discusses Peking man and Java man, and is either unaware, or thinks the reader should be, that both are now classified as _Homo erectus_. He finds ample space to discuss Piltdown man, not used as evidence for human evolution for decades, and Nebraska man, which was show not to be a hominid five years after its discovery and was never used as evidence for human evolution, but finds no space to mention a single African fossil. Australopithecines like Lucy? Habilenes? The Turkana boy? Hanegraaff seems too busy with 80-year-old confusions about pig teeth to worry about fossil finds in the last 50 years. Much of the book's material is devoted to showing the bad moral effects of evolutionary theory. Again, quotes out of context are a major factor (Hanegraaff quotes several unfortunate -- but very typical of his time -- passages from Darwin on race, but ignores well-known quotes from Darwin showing his abhorrence of slavery). Hanegraaff argues that consistently following Darwin leads to racism and slavery, while consistently following the Bible leads to the abolition of both -- but it is the Bible, not the _Origin_, that contains many passages authorizing slavery) and racism. On the basis of Hanegraaff's mere assertion, we are to accept that every evil done in Darwin's name (including those which Hanegraaff merely says were done in Darwin's name) were the true and inevitable consequences of Darwinism, but every evil done in the Bible's name was a perversion or misinterpretation of the Bible. Nothing that could be confused with argument is presented to support either assertion. A chapter of "Recapitulation" is dedicated to a hypothesis of no importance to Darwin himself and rejected by all modern Darwinists. Because recapitulationism -- the idea that an organism, in the course of its development, retraces its entire evolutionary history -- was important to many racists who accepted evolution, Hanegraaff gives it much attention despite its unimportance to the actual theory. Here, as in much of the book, the fallacies of guilt by association and argument from bad consequences form the backbone of his case; a valid argument is nowhere in sight. A chapter on "Empirical Science" argues against a theory in biology by noting that it cannot explain the origin of the universe. It also shows that Hanegraaff knows less about entropy than one would need to learn to pass a freshman chemistry class -- or perhaps, since on this subject he is aware of arguments against his position, he is merely feigning such ignorance. Many natural processes, not involving life, increase order if energy can enter a system and waste heat leave it -- if Oparin's famous experiment assembling biochemicals from simple inorganic chemicals proved nothing else, it proved this. The argument, "entropy prevents increases in complexity," is simply and utterly false. There is more to the book than this -- as even a couple of mainly favorable reviews have noted, the author has trouble staying on topic. But overall the book is very bad, derivitive, illogical, and either unscrupulous or incompetent in its arguments. As an appendix to the book, the author warns creationists against relying on bad arguments; this is the best advice in the book, and if the author had taken it, he wouldn't have written the chapters preceding this appendix.
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20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Big Disappointment, June 10, 1999
By A Customer
I bought this book not because I seriously entertained the possibility that evolution didn't happen. I settled that years ago when I took the time to understand the issues at hand. One thing creationists fail to understand is that if you are trying to explain something, call it X, you either come up with a plausible mechanism or explanation of X, or you simply say I don't understand. If a machine breaks down, we either find the problem and fix it or we say we don't know and replace it.I was frankly very dissapointed with the book. Not only is it shallow and trite in the treatment of evolution - it isn't even defined in the text - but it revels in taking quotations out of context. One example of a quotation taken out of context is the one by Monod that chance is the sole source of order in evolution. If he bothered to read the passage in context, he would have understood that Monod was simply making the observation that evolution depends upon mutations to occur in a statistically unpredictable non-directed way which is in turn sorted out by natural selection. For the life of me, I cannot understand how creationists think that evolutionists are so stupid to think that evolution occurs by chance like monkeys typing away and producing sonnets. It ought to be mounted on the rooftops - NATURAL SELECTION IS NOT CHANCE. Natural selection is the cumulative effect of small gradual changes built up usually over long periods of time. The so-called impossibility of producing long complicated strings like the haemoglobin molecule from DNA changes in a short time has been proven false, as is claimed in the book (and using statistics from Behe's book). This has been demonstrated in the lab such as selected RNA strains time and time again. Refer to good examples in "Selection - the Mechanism of Evolution" by biologist Graham Bell. Another quotation famously by now out of context is the one by Colin Patterson. Patterson was pointing out that transitional forms are not found at the specific level - the level of species but have been found between major groups - e.g., Reptiles and Mammals.This is true for at least two reasons. First, it is difficult to define a species in paleontology because all you have to go by with different forms is the bones. Second, statistically it is more likely that large wide ranging species will be fossilized - therefore, transitions will generally only be found between one set of large wide ranging species to another later large wide ranging species and as such there is room for plently of change to occur in between. There isn't sufficient appreciation of how poor the fossil record really is and how remarkable the transitions are given this fact. Almost none of the species alive today are found in fossils. A minor point on the Archaeopteryx - it is a transitional form because it shares features common to either reptiles or birds but not both, and it is irrelevant to this that the latest one has a bony sternum - there are still plenty of purely reptilian features to the skeleton - see any competent paleontology text. I could go on and on with the mistakes and misunderstandings in the book without dealing with all the inflammatory rhetoric in the book. For example, Hanegraaff says that enthropy does not work on living things without the mysterious property of teleonomy. What does he mean? In plants, photosynthesis happens as a well known yet still to be fully understood chemical process in the cloroplasts. Basically sunlight is used to transform carbon dioxide into basic sugars with oxygen as a byproduct. Complex but nothing mysterious. Every argument almost with out exception put forth by creationists and anti-evolutionists have been based on misunderstandings and taking scientific statements out of context. I'm sorry to say but this book will make no impact on rational curious seekers of the truth. Actually, I feel sorry for people like Mr. Hanegraff who populate their world with such flat and impoverished views. I challenge him to not be threatened by the grandeur of evolution.
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40 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
About FACE on the facts., February 4, 1999
From the size of the bibliography, you would think this should be a scholarly, well researched book. But Hank Hanegraaff (HH) makes it clear that as Christian evangelist he's out to discredit evolution because it is unbiblical. He wants to give the reader easily memorized answers to defend the One True Faith. This is just the sort of subjective, sensational book that would result from that approach.HH recaps common, discredited creationist arguments from his creationist sources. Face's best value is as a classic collection of the egregious tactics used by creationists. It is a negative tutorial on critical thinking and scholarship. Ad hominems, red herrings, straw men are represented. HH uses out of context quotations of authorities, even evolutionists, intended to mislead the audience into thinking they agree with the author. He quotes irresponsible statements from scientists as if they were authoritative. Unsupported assertions oversimplifications and bold misstatements are the centerpieces. Out of date, discredited science is used either to bolster the author's arguments or as a straw man to ridicule. He omits relevant facts. He employs the "after this, therefore because of this" fallacy to blame every social ill and idea he finds troubling on evolutionism. He asserts that how you view your origins determines how live your life. Are we to believe that all the millions of people who accept evolution lead despicable lives? HH expends much ink in support of "evolutionism is racist." He tries hard to sell the logical fallacy: some evolutionists are racists, therefore evolution is a racist ideology. Evolution, like many other ideas has been abused by people who wish to oppress others. Christianity is among those ideas so abused. Even the founder of HH's version of Christianity, Martin Luther is infamous for his vitriolic anti-semitism, and anti-peasant diatribes. HH invokes special pleading to argue that Christian abusers are different as they were disobeying Jesus. Clearly the scientific study of historic events is not inherently racist. This is not to agree that Darwin was quite the racist that the author says he is. Many of the ideas considered in The Descent of Man are appalling in light of modern knowledge, and have been discarded by science, such as the idea that the races could be different species. Others are held to be true today, such as the idea that differences between races are small and overwhelmed by individual variation. Right or wrong, Darwin was struggling to honestly evaluate the alternatives. In any case the theory of evolution does not stand or fall on the personal attributes of Charles Darwin, but on the validity of the current hypotheses and evidence. HH's arguments to that end fail as well. It is obvious that in writing this book HH has consulted few if any primary scientific sources. Space will allow me to cite only a few of the abuses. HH says that Pithecanthropus (now Homo) Erectus is a fiction based on a single skullcap a few teeth and a femur. and that the Selenka expedition and Keith's 1911 paper on it is the definitive word on the subject. Many more Erectus have been and continue to be found over a wide geographical range and are dated from half a million to over 1.5 million years old. They are certainly important human relatives if not our direct ancestors. He employs the ridiculous creationist tale that the damaged skulls of Peking Man ("pure fantasy") fossils found at one site prove that they were actually monkeys whose brains were eaten by ancient Chinese gourmets. Anyone comparing Peking Man (a variety of Homo Erectus) to a monkey can see the difference This whole 'monkey' business is probably an exploitation of a mistranslation from French of the word for 'simian' in a 1930 paper by Teilhard de Chardin. Some creationists still argue that the holes in the skulls show that the creatures were being hunted by modern humans, but this is weak. HH also tells us that the fossil record fails to support evolutionary theory - there are no intermediates. The truth is we have intermediates at every hierarchical level of the fossil record. Good species transitions are rare, but there are around two dozen solid examples of gradual transitions in various mammals from the Pleistocene (the last ice age). At a higher level we have a series of genera showing the transition from reptiles to mammals, in correct chronological and phenotypical order over a long period. HH trots out the old, discredited creationist thermodynamic arguments. He will not accept that local reductions of entropy are not a violation of the second law, and in fact do occur. The sun's energy increases the entropy of the universe while driving weather on earth and causing the formation of ice, a local reduction in entropy. Evolution is no more in violation of the second law of thermodynamics than is any other process of life (or refrigerators). HH misapplies information theory to evolution: "random deviations in genetic material will not increase genetic information." However natural selection operating on these deviations does increase genetic information on how to grow a fit organism. An intelligent designer is not required - just a process able to favor a more useful gene. HH's effort to paint punctuated equilibrium as little more than the hopeful monster theory (instantaneous change) is contradicted by his quote from Gish, who almost explains it right as intermittent, accelerated gradualism, even if he doesn't believe it. There is a chapter devoted to recapitulation. If you want to understand the issue of recapitulation beyond HH's all or nothing arguments, I recommend the book by Gould which HH cites: "Ontogeny and Phylogeny". For a balanced, broad, readable history of the subject of evolution I recommend "Evolution : The History of an Idea" by Peter J. Bowler. For a study on the relationship between dinosaurs and birds read "The Mistaken Extinction" by Lowell Dingus and Timothy Rowe.
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