There are better things to spend 2.99 on than the Kindle version of this book. Really virtually anything other than this book is worth 2.99. The author has no experience in science and the result is his critique of science is devoid of virtually any credibility. As such it would be a bit like leaving your cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment to a detective novelist. To say Leonard's book should be taken with a grain of salt gives undue credit to the power of salt to ease the swallowing of the foulest of meals.
The writing is shockingly amateurish with two or even one sentence paragraphs throughout and the scholarship is even more concerning. The author cites not one reference to the primary scientific literature to back his arguments. Instead the entire thesis is built off of a handful of popular science books whose conclusions are found to run counter to the author's religious agenda. The arguments themselves are hardly anything new but represent the same creationist critiques that have been unproductively leveled against evolution for nearly two centuries. Leonard's idea of "iterative creation" is a rehashing of the progressive creationism model proposed by the French anatomist Georges Cuvier two centuries ago. Had the author had a better grasp of the history of the creationism-evolution debate he would have properly recognized that his thoughts on this matter were hardly novel.
The rest of the either misrepresentations to serve ideological points the author attempts to make or the blatant errors made in ignorance of biology in the book are simply too numerous to mention in full. Here is but a partial listing.
- Leonard characterizes science almost exclusively as some hierarchical enterprise in service of a centralized authority. He makes statements such as, "Will critics dare challenge the exact words of Stephen Hawking, or question my ability to comprehend their significance?", suggesting that any questioning of his credibility could only possibly come from those beholden to scientific authority. The reality is that scientists, including Steven Hawking, are challenged by one another all the time.
- The reader is not spared the same overarching creationist mischaracterization of evolution as one dependent on a particular theory for the origins of the universe or of life. Leonard succinctly describes his "big picture" in algebraic form as "Life = Big Bang + abiogenesis + speciation + natural selection". This frankly is silly. Life is not some additive consequence of these theories. Life has it's own intrinsic scientific definition independent of any theory of its history much less a theory of the entire universe.
- Leonard says, "Speciation is the scientific term describing macroevolution, the theoretical process by which the creation of a distinct, morphologically unique living organism occurs." Within science this not typically how macroevolution is defined. Macroevolution is in essence a pattern of biological diversity above the taxonomic level of species brought about primarily through three processes; microevolution or change in the genetic composition of populations across generations, speciation or the process by which population lineages diverge from one another and the loss of those lineages or extinction. Leonard early in the book calls the reader to heed the advice of Epitetus in saying “First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak” but in light of this and innumerable other misrepresentations of science I would advise the author to heed Epitetus' advice himself.
- In discussing the Permian extinction Leonard says, "Arguably, Lystrosaurus, a pig-like animal that survived the Permian extinction only 250 million years ago, could be considered the ancestor of all modern fauna." Nothing is further from the truth. First off Lystrosaurus could be thought of as "pig-like" in only the most superficial sense and while fossils of Lystrosaurus are indeed incredibly abundant in post Permian deposits, millions of terrestrial species, including many thousands of vertebrates, also survived the Permian. Lystrosaurus, despite it's successfully surviving the greatest mass extinction event in the history of the earth, is an evolutionary dead end and the ancestor of no living species let alone the ancestor of ALL modern fauna. I might add taken at face value this statement would mean Leonard would have us believe Lystrosaurus is the ancestor of not only all vertebrates, including fishes, but invertebrates as well, or at least he would have the reader believe this is what evolutionary biologists think when it is decidedly not. Leonard gets virtually all of his thoughts on the Permian from an excellent book by Michael Benton which I would highly recommend over Leonard's book if you are interested in what the science actually says. (
When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time (Revised edition)
- Leonard makes many statements that parrot common misinformed claims that creationists have been making for decades. Take the naive argument that so called "living fossils" refutes evolution.
"Considering that the coelacanth allegedly hasn’t evolved in 340 million years, that information is significant, because it means while most species were supposedly diversifying in form to a remarkable degree, producing over a million new species of animals, other species weren’t changing at all, experiencing stasis for hundreds of millions of years."
The modern coelacanth is represented by a single genus, Latimeria, and this genus represents the last line in what was a much more diverse group of fishes. Coelacanths as a group are indeed quite old, dating to the Devonian (circa 400MYA), but modern Latimeria is a derived Coelacanth whose evolution can be traced back to about 70 MYA or not long prior to the extinction of the dinosaurs. (see Casane, D. and Laurenti, P. (2013), Why coelacanths are not ‘living fossils’. Bioessays, 35: 332–338 for a scientific description of why it is misleading to say that modern Latimeria is a species that evolution forgot).
- In discussing species Leonard becomes even more rambling and divorced from scientific reality. He claims that all bears, from Sloth Bears in South Asia to Polar Bears in the high Arctic, should be included within a single bear species or worse that all cichlids, a diverse family of fishes representing hundreds of species spanning the globe, should likewise be lumped into a single species. Leonard again uses entirely erroneous terminology saying, "Inventing a new term like “clade” to replace the word “species” seems like nothing more than a feeble attempt to confuse the issue." The truth is the term clade is in fact not a synonym for species in science anymore than macroevolution is a synonym for speciation. He claims that the isolation needed for speciation can not happen in aquatic species. It can. He says scientists have no clue how to define species. They do, typically as independent metapopulation lineages. He makes claims about ring species in Palearctic gulls that entirely ignores data published on this problem over a decade ago (see Liebers, D., de Knijff, P., & Helbig, A. J. (2004). The herring gull complex is not a ring species. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 271(1542), 893–901). In short virtually nothing he has to say on the topic of species and speciation is actually informed by the available science.
- Leonard's descriptions of the most fundamental concepts in evolutionary biology miss the mark. He says, "Natural selection is a scientific theory that describes the process by which living organisms subtly change or “mutate” from generation to generation...". This is not what natural selection is however. He is merely describing the process by which heritable variation arises in populations. Selection is the process by which the environment acts on that variation and the resulting response across generations in the genetic constitution of the population. Such concepts are fundamental to understanding what evolution says and what it does not and no critique on evolutionary biology should be taken seriously unless someone demonstrates a sound understanding of these concepts.
These are but a handful of the misrepresentations and even outright falsehoods in Leonard's book taken mostly from biology, a field I happen to be somewhat familiar with as an assistant professor of genetics and researcher in evolutionary biology. I could get into his absurd arguments suggesting that evolution claims that entirely different species are invariably the result of hybridization. That is not what what evolution claims. Then there are the claims that the existence of God may be proven simply by disproving evolution or that God's existence may be assigned a probability and no doubt that physicists, biochemists, mathematicians and cosmologists could easily expose the naivety of Leonard's arguments with regards to the Big Bang and the origin of life but I may be belaboring the point.
Science denial, or worse, outright ignorance of science is not a compelling counterargument for God but unfortunately Leonard follows time-honored creationist thinking. God is simply not a scientific question or a basis for a scientific hypothesis. The Bible isn't a science textbook or yesterday's newspaper. An ill informed criticism of evolution or the Big Bang is hardly a proof of God as many believers are capable of preserving a faith in God that is not contingent on the validity of any scientific theory.
Perhaps however the most erroneous characterization of science is that science is to be judged by intuition and that uninformed common sense is the final arbiter of all things. Andrew Shtulman's book Scienceblind is an excellent description of why these appeals to common sense so often touted by creationists fall short in creating a real understanding of nature
Scienceblind: Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World Are So Often Wrong
. Leonard begins his book by saying,
"My efforts have been confined to applying logic and common sense to the information I gleaned from dozens of books written on the subject, resulting in this attempt to produce a comprehensive counterargument."
Never mind for a moment that Leonard not once cited the primary literature on any topic but only gleaned what he needed from popular science books, the larger point is our common sense is woefully ill equipped to deal with nature. Science is a set of methodologies that allows us to transcend our intuition and its not easy, rather it is an endeavor that requires some commitment to scholarship. Leonard's common sense seems the only thing he has brought to this book however and arguments from ill informed incredulity are no replacement for cogent, evidence-based arguments and real scholarship.
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