Occasionally, I indulge myself in reviewing a book on Amazon. I suppose it is just a creative outlet as is a blog. Some of this will be repetitive to readers of this blog. The review follows.
I am a truth seeker. I do not care if evolutionary theory is "true" or not, although I do believe a supreme being's hand was behind the creation of the world. More on that later. A book titled "Why Evolution is True" seems like an evangelistic tract for the religion of evolution. That's what this book is. It does a decent job of being a primer on evolution, but the author went too far as he offered evolutionary science as proof that creationism has no basis in fact. His science was not the greatest either: "...so they must have..." (p.8), "...making the entirely reasonable assumption..." (p.10), "...probably descended from..." (p. 11), "Our intuition is to say..." (p. 34), "...they could be evolutionary cousins..." (p. 36). The terminology of the preceding comments comments (I could have provided more.) are in the realm of hypothesis, not proof as the author states. It is subtle persuasion he uses that is not necessarily backed up by scientific fact. I was disappointed by this aspect of the book, although I learned a number of things, hence three stars instead of one. I was fascinated by his explanation of the fossil record and extinction, just to mention two.
Some years ago, I saw a PBS nature special set in South America. Somewhere off in a jungle, the Amazon as I recall, a moth with a proboscis that unfolded to 12 inches sucked life giving nectar from a plant that had a narrow 11 1/2 inch stem. The only way the unusual moth could survive was to drink the nectar from the unusual plant. The narrator mentioned this illustrated evolutionary adaption. Can someone tell me how the moth grew the mouth to reach the nectar without dying first? If the plant started out with so long a stem, how did the moth know how to adapt without dying first? If the moth always had the long snout, why did the plant need to evolve and what told it to do so? Using Coyne's entirely unscientific term, to me, it is an "entirely reasonable assumption" that both the moth and the plant with the nectar were created that way.
Years ago, I visited with a doctor who became a believer when he was working on a cadaver in med school. He found that the human eye had a tendon attached with a pulley which allowed the eyeball to move in the socket. He was amazed, but it was as he saw that where the tendon crossed the pulley, there was a lubricating gland that kept the tendon and the pulley from wearing out. His conclusion was that there was a designer who would place that gland there to lubricate the tendon and the pulley. There is nothing in Coyne's book that addresses type of an issue.
Obvious every doctor or scientist who has seen this has not come to the same conclusion. My two examples are not scientific, but do make one wonder (which is the genesis [pardon the term] of science). Could it just have evolved that way? Was it created? Rather than stating scientific thought as end all, or religious dogma as the end all, I think there is much more for us to learn. Humility in the face of the wonders of the world should be in order, not rigid dogma (scientific or religious) I do not believe the world and everything in it was created in six days, but I do not believe that science has all answers either. If it did, science would cease to be science. A brilliant theologian once said, "Science that excludes religion is poor science. Religion that excludes science is poor religion."
If you are a member of Netflix, rent the DVDs "Incredible Creatures that Defy Evolution." There are three of them. There is no way that these animals could have evolved because they needed just the right circumstances (like your moth) to survive and reproduce.
ReplyDelete