A Review: "Evolving Certainties: Resolving Conflict at the Intersection of Faith and Science"

 

 

*The review was posted on-line by Amazon.

This 2018 publication was of poor study with grandiose ambitions. We expect accuracy on simple facts before going along with the author's great claims. Here is a sadly typical error in the first sentences of Chapter 5 "The Biological Revolution" : "After a short, unsuccessful stint studying medicine at his father's insistence, he turned to theology, but did not complete his degree."

Charles Darwin was enrolled in 1825 to study medicine at Edinburgh university. He was 16 years old. Darwin made several studies of marine life while at Edinburgh under the encouragement of Dr. Robert Edmund Grant. Two of Darwin’s original discoveries were made in 1826; that the so-called "ova of Flustra" were in fact larvæ, and that the little globular bodies which had been supposed to be the young state of Fucus loreus were the egg-cases of the worm-like Pontobdella muricata. Darwin had read papers on these observations to the student’s “Plinian Society” founded by Professor Jameson. Prof. Grant referred to these in print when he later became the Professor of comparative anatomy and zoology at London University, (1827-1874).

Two years later, Darwin had given-up medicine. His academic science work was successful, but he could not stand the sights, sounds, and smells of the surgery.

Darwin's disappointed father sent him to Cambridge to prepare for the clergy. Darwin was admitted to Christ's College on 15th October 1827, gaining his BA on 26 February 1831, his MA in 1836 and an honorary doctorate in 1877.

And moving from those several errors on the first page of that chapter to the last, we find another doozy. Defoe wrote, "There is general agreement among biologists that natural selection by itself is insufficient to explain the development of new animal body plans. " Defoe's source given in Footnote 130 miscited Deborah Haarsma's August 25, 2014 introduction to a review of the Intelligent Design Creationism book, "Darwin's Doubt" by Steven Meyer. The review was published by the Christian apologetic organization BioLogos. There is no such competent "general agreement among biologists." On her January 19, 2015 review Physicist Haarsma paraphrased geneticist Darrel Falk quoting creationist philosopher Steven Meyer.


Save time and money. I'll suggest some more popular reading. One of my core requirements is that the authors do not wander off into religious discussions. This is why books by Dawkins, Harris, Coyne, or Prothero are not listed.

For the basics of how evolution works, and how we know this, see;

Carroll, Sean B. 2020 "A Series of Fortunate Events" Princeton University Press

Shubin, Neal 2020 “Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA” New York Pantheon Press.

Hazen, RM 2019 "Symphony in C: Carbon and the Evolution of (Almost) Everything" Norton and Co.