Refuting Evolution: A Handbook for Students, Parents, and Teachers Countering the Latest Arguments for Evolution

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 143 pages
• Published by: Master Books May 1999
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0890512582
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0890512586
• Book Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Weighs: 5.4 ounces

Product Description
A creationist response to the National Academy of Science’s Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science. The latter, distributed nationwide to thousands of public school teachers, is an effort to saturate students with evolutionary concepts. Refuting Evolution is a cogent rebuttal, carefully looking at the points raised in the NAS booklet: science and religion; natural selection; bird evolution; astronomy; the age of the earth, etc.

Reader Reviews
Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover. The illustration gives everything away. A menacing hammer labeled "SCIENCE" is crashing through a glass window that represents evolution. Implicit in the image is a promise totally unfulfilled by the contents of this book - that 'science' (as mangled and misused by the author) somehow refutes evolution! Cynically intended to separate uncritical creationists from their money and the actual facts, this aggressively mediocre publication is typeset in a large 'Weekly Reader' font and format that keeps your fingers constantly busy flipping from page to page. Which is appropriate since "Refuting Evolution" is essentially content-free. If Jonathan Sarfati has any honest cards to play in the seemingly endless game of whack-a-mole that scientists are forced to play with Young Earth Creationists (YECs for short), he should write them up and submit them for peer review in a credible scientific journal. He won't because science is hard work and Sarfati can make an easy living by taking unfounded pot shots at evolution. The threads of error woven into Sarfati's tapestry of nonsense are numerous and perverse. Here are a few highlights: Sarfati postulates that a lack of helium escaping from the atmosphere of the earth supports its 'youth.' He deliberately ignores the evidence NASA, and many others, have accumulated on helium escape that deflates this lighter-than-air YEC balloon. He also trots out the discredited canard about ocean salinity supporting a young earth interpretation. Unfortunately this creationist gambit conveniently omits well known mechanisms, such as basaltic lava quenching, that removes sodium from the ocean. Another whopper posits that radioactive potassium and uranium are "easily dissolved" in water and that the leaching of these parent radionuclides from rocks supposedly disrupts radiometric dating calculations. Even if this was the case - and it isn't, the minerals these elements form has everything to do with weathering and solubility - this weak argument ignores lunar samples obtained by Apollo astronauts from earth's airless and waterless moon. Physics, chemistry, and geology falsify Sarfati's hand-waving, assertions, and 'Jesus just-so' stories. How about biology? Here Sarfati resorts to what I like to call the creationist 'argument from low self-esteem' - he attempts to invalidate the molecular phylogenetics that show an extraordinarily close relationship (98% commonality) between human and chimpanzee DNA - and fails spectacularly. From chromosomal fusion and pseudogenes to retroelements and transposons the scientific reality of evolution is expressed in the DNA of every person on earth (including Sarfati). These relics (literally) are millions of non-coding segments of DNA, snippets of our genome that eloquently document common descent with uncommon clarity and incontrovertible evidence. Specifics include how human chromosome 2 resulted from the fusion of two separate chromosomes (corresponding to chimpanzee chromosomes 2A and 2B) after the lineage leading to modern humans split from the one leading to contemporary chimpanzees. Transposable elements, also known as transposons and retroelements (aka 'jumping genes'), such as Alu elements, HERV-K, CMT1A, and GULO provide exacting confirmation of human evolution and our ancestral affiliation with other primates. Pseudogenes (including unitary pseudogenes, duplication pseudogenes and retropseudogenes) also supply eloquent evidence for evolution. Comparisons of pseudogene sequences across species reveal a consistent pattern. Human pseudogenes are most similar to those in chimpanzee DNA, and are highly similar to those of other primates. Species as divergent as rodents and humans also display some degree of ancient pseudogene similarity - additional evidence of our shared evolutionary history with kindred primates, and more distantly related mammals. Genomics research addresses the evolutionary relationship between humans, chimpanzees and gorillas. Mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences both show that humans and chimpanzees are more closely related to each other than either is to gorillas. Genome-wide comparison of the human and chimpanzee genomes spectacularly confirms that the genes, chromosomes, transposable elements, and pseudogenes of humans and chimpanzees are strikingly similar. Human mitochondrial DNA diversity, X-chromosome diversity, Y-chromosome diversity, and diversity of DNA sequences in all chromosomes unambiguously reveals that the evolutionary cradle of humanity is located in sub-Saharan Africa, and also tracks subsequent migrations across the entire globe - initially to the Middle East and Asia, then Europe, Australia, and the Americas. So much for 'science,' ala Sarfati but then this book really isn't about science at all. "Refuting Evolution" is a desperately shrill and pandering mishmash of fundamentalist theology and amateur hour apologetics, based on a literal misreading of Genesis and other parts of the Bible. 'Truthiness' is no substitute for the truth; scientific facts, however well supported and tested by experiment and inference, are routinely feed to Sarfati's faith-based shredder to justify his absolute and dogmatic faith in an allegorical creation myth. Earth to Sarfati - evolution is a solidly established and widely accepted scientific theory with vast explanatory and predictive power, based on a solid foundation of supporting evidence. Get over it. You may as well deny gravity (Newtonian or General Relativity). Worship as you please and find spiritual solace in Genesis if you must - but don't pimp science to prop up your irrational and medieval worldview.