Rating: 
Summary: interesting philosophy, atrocious science
Review: An interessting thing has happened with biology. Everyone accepts that it takes 4 years of calculus to understand quantum mechanics, or that a graduate degree in engineering is required before you can design a skyscraper. But when it comes to understanding the most complex part of our planet, the origin and evolution of life, we can trust a lawyer. Johnson himself states "biologists have always said that the basics tenets of evolution can be understood by anybody." Sure, this is true, in the same way anyone can understand that quantum mechanics involves the inherent unpredictability of things at very small (sub-atomic) scales. But to say that this level of understanding allows a lay person to accurately critique the theory is like saying a 3 year old who knows her A B C's can comprehend and critique Shakespeare. Johnson's grasp of science (or lack thereof) demonstrates how true this is. For example, he mentions Archaeopteryx, and succinctly says that scientists now consider it a true bird, not an evolutionary link. Not only isn't this true (many scientists classify Archaeopteryx as a dromaeosaur dinosaur), but he completely neglects to inform the reader of the myriad of other bird-like dinosaurs and dinosaur-like birds that have been found in the last 20 years (over 40 of them, including Eoalulavis, Rahonavis, and Unenlagia). Johnson's philosophy is a bit more interesting. He argues, and I agree, that scientists claiming that "religion and science are completely separate ways of unerstanding the world" are being disigenuous. It's true that religion and science both seek to explain the world, and sometimes they come into conflict. Unfortunately for Johnson, in this case his religion (which is not shared by the majority of judeo-christians) is being routed by the scientific evidence, leading to the simple conclusion that he is wrong, and so is his conviction of faith.
Rating: 
Summary: A biologist makes short work of Johnson in debate.
Review: PBS sponsored a debate between Phillip E. Johnson, the author of this book, and a leading Biologist. The purpose of the debate was to pit two of the most respected supporters of Creationism and Evolution against each other. The outcome was what I would expect; when I read this book I found that some of the arguments did not seem to add up. The Biologist made short work of the Johnson and clearly responded to every challenge he brought before him. Johnson, on the other hand, supported his belief by some immature interpretation of biblical scripture and the belief that Evolutionists were agents of evil. Last time I checked it is still on the PBS web site. You should see it for yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: knee jerk reactions indicate the full force of this book
Review: You can tell from the detractive reviews here that they have not read the book. The book is about the philosophy of science...guys get it! Dogmatic materialism is exactly what this book exposes and we see it illustrated so humorously here in the reviews. These guys really should get a clue that they are actually HELPING Mr. Johnson make his argument with their reviews... Comical!
Rating:
Summary: Not too bad a book as some may say
Review: The evidence for evolution is large, but I don't feel it is fair to dismiss anyone who questions evolution. After all, we are all intersested in the truth, of which surly there is only one. the hostile reviews I feel detract from the argument. If you disagree with certain point (as I have done) then you have to first consider if it were true, and take it apart until you can reason no longer. You may find a different answer in the end. THERE IS NO POINT BEING HOSTILE TO PEOPLE WHO QUESTION EVOLUTION, if we ever come to a point where people who question ideas are completely ignored, I would hate it (and I stongly belive in evolution). After all we all wnat the truth.
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Summary: Making the world safe for lazy scientists.
Review: As an earlier reviewer of this book pointed out, allowing the assumption of supernatural intervention into the scientific method would provide a haven for lazy scientists, and would only slow the progress of scientific research. Effective scientists can--and often do--believe in God. They just need to do that on their own time, so to speak, and not while they are researching possible mechanisms for observed natural phenomena. The nineteenth-century physicist Michael Faraday is a very good example of this. The views that Phillip E. Johnson puts forth in this book are not.
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Summary: Same old tired story...
Review: Blah, blah, blah...I get so tired of reading the same old tired story: "Darwin evil, Bible good." This book seems to be filled with half-truths, mistakes, misunderstandings, and faulty logic. (I say "seems" because I just couldn't bring myself to finish it; the first few chapters, combined with selective samplings of the rest, demonstrated to me that there is nothing new here.) The main thrust of this entire book is basically a fallacious appeal to consequences. I'll have to agree with Eugenie Scott's review of the book: Johnson has too little an understanding of evolution and science in general to mount an effective attack. If you're interested in learning more about the fact and theory of evolution, read Gould, Dennett, Eldredge, or Dawkins. If you want to read a desperate, grasping-at-straws defense of comfortable childhood fables, read Johnson.
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Summary: One little example of the evidence Johnson says isn't there.
Review: James O. Smith writes in his review of Johnson's book: "...The primary question he asks has not been addressed by any: 'What is the evidence that natural selection can or has the power to produce major changes in morphology or from one species to another?'" There is abundant evidence for this. Please allow me to quote extensively, for example, from an article entitled "A Bug's Life: The Study of Metamorphosis" in the Winter 2000 newsletter from the University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences, which I received in the mail this evening: ----- "You've spread out your picnic blanket and are about to feast on potato salad and fried chicken. Then along come the ants. And bees. And mosquitoes. "There's a reason why these pests seem to be everywhere. They are part of four insect groups--beetles, bees/ants, moths/butterflies, and flies/mosquitoes--that make up more than half of the world's known animal species. The secret to their success? Metamorphosis. "Metamorphosis is a process in which larval, pupal, and adult stages differ greatly, allowing each to occupy a different habitat and consume different food sources. Now two University of Washington zoology professors, the husband-and-wife team of James Truman and Lynn Riddiford, are proposing a novel hypothesis for how metamorphosis evolved. "The researchers believe that a change in hormonal function during embryonic development led to the evolution of a unique larval stage, an innovation that allowed a virtual population explosion among these species in the last 250 million years. 'Metamorphosis really opened up niches that weren't open to insects before that,' says Riddiford. "The earliest insects, which strongly resembled today's silverfish, lacked metamorphosis. Their juveniles looked very much like adults, minus functioning genitalia. After the evolution of flight, more advanced species--such as cockroaches and grasshoppers--developed incomplete metamorphosis. Their immature stages still resembled the adults, but in addition to lacking genitalia they bore wing buds that transformed into functional wings during the molt to the adult stage. "In contrast, the higher insects--species with complete metamorphosis--spend their juvenile life as larvae that bear no resemblance to the adults. Truman and Riddiford explain that what allows them to change from, say, a caterpillar into a butterfly, is the way a group of insect hormones, juvenile hormones (JH), and ecdysteroids interact during embryonic, laval, and pupal stages. "Juvenile hormones, not present in other insects, suppress the development of adult structures. These hormones remain as the larva grows, then disappear to allow growth of imaginal discs, which will give rise to specific adult structures. A complex interplay between JH and ecdysteroids then allows the larva to progress to a pupa, and finally ecdysteroids alone drive the transformation to adult. "Juvenile hormones play such an important role in the embryonic and larval development of metamorphosing insects that they have been used as the basis for insecticides. For instance, JH mimics are used to treat ponds where mosquitoes breed, thereby blocking their metamorphosis. Such treatment also prevents eggs from hatching. "The four major insect groups with complete metamorphosis all are thought to descend from a common ancestor, so it appears the development of metamorphosis in the insect world has occurred only once. 'There are indications that another group, called thrips, has evolved toward complete metamorphosis but so far has fallen short,' says Truman. "In insects with complete metamorphosis, the lack of competition between juveniles and adults for food is a major factor in their success and diversification. Adults can feed on one source, such as nectar or blood, and only lay eggs when there is appropriate food for their young, such as dung, carcasses, fruit, and other relatively temporary sources. "Truman and Riddiford believe that metamorphosis will provide a valuable model for researchers to understand the molecular basis for how shifts in the timing of protein production can lead to the creation of different body forms. That, in turn, could shed greater light on how life patterns have evolved. "'Any innovation that helps you generate species that account for more than half of all living animals is not a trivial innovation,' says Truman." ----- The evidence for macroevolution by means of natural selection is there. You only need to be willing to look for it patiently, as generations of research scientists like Professors Truman and Riddiford have been. This book's author Phillip Johnson has shown himself unwilling to do so, for reasons that seem to have little to do with logic, less to do with the rules of evidence, and even less to do with the successful methods of empirical science. Caveat lector.
Rating: 
Summary: Does anybody like lawyers?
Review: I read the reviews that disagree with Johnson and would like to point out that the primary question he asks has not been addressed by any: "What is the evidence that natural selection can or has the power to produce major changes in morphology or from one species to another?" The argument that Johnson should have been published in scientific journals if his argument is so strong demonstrates the bias in such journals. One can only imagine how far one's career in biology might extend if he or she set out to discredit Darwinism today. Johnson's point is very clear: they simply don't want to hear it. Scientific American refused to publish Johnson's rebuttal to Gould. I too am a scientist but am embarrassed by the arrogant browbeating that goes on in addressing the salient issues of Darwinism. It is as bad as the medieval church ignoring the claims of scientists of the day. It is easy to say that religion is bad because it controls the discussion, excommunicates those who don't agree for reasons of conscience, and ignores the empiric data. If that is true, modern biology is a bad religion.
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Summary: Clever rhetoric, but confused, confusing and simply wrong
Review: Johnson wants to gore two oxes in his book. His ultimate target is the naturalistic worldview science uses to describe and explain the universe. Because scientists are interested in explaining the world in terms of natural causes, a science that admits supernatural causes like divine intervention is a contradiction in terms. Evolution, which holds that life on Earth resulted from the unguided process of natural selection, which has no ultimate purpose in mind, is Johnson's second ox, but it is only a means to an end. Johnson's strategy is to prove that evolution cannot explain how life got here, to open the door for the interventions of a Creator, and a "theistic science" that takes the Creator and his purposes into account. This is no Bible-thumping tirade about the inerrancy of Scripture. Johnson claims to disavow such "creation science," and describes his purpose as examining evolutionary theory critically yet objectively. Johnson tells us he is a Christian who believes that "a God exists who could create out of nothing if He wanted to do so, but who might have chosen to work through a natural evolutionary process instead." But not 50 pages into this book, Johnson's "objectivity" is blown. He gives no credence even to theistic evolution - that God "created" via evolution. Nearly 70 percent of the book is devoted to the same, tired claims of creationists that have been repeatedly and decisively refuted, as in Phillip Kitcher's Abusing Science and Douglas Futuyma's Science on Trial, from which this book takes its name. Here are a few examples: natural selection is a tautology; the fossil record is incomplete; there are no transitional fossils; mutations are harmful; natural selection is not creative; microevolution does not explain macroevolution; natural selection only produces variation within the "kind;" organs like the vertebrate eye, structures like wings, and molecules like DNA are too complex to have arisen gradually by natural selection; scientists make "evolution" mean whatever they want in order to make it unassailable; and scientists are an intolerant priesthood who contradict and stumble over themselves in desperate attempts to save their cherished, atheistic theory from what is apparently nothing but refuting evidence. Johnson also loses control of his professed goal of keeping terms and concepts clear, and stacks the deck in his favor. Thus, "creationists" are the good guys: even someone who believes evolution occurred but that God guided it in some way becomes a creationist. "Darwinists" are rank atheists, a minority of scientists who believe evolution occurred through unguided, natural processes (never mind that most scientists believe this is exactly how evolution occurred). Rather than distinguish them, Johnson plays on the many meanings of the word "evolution." And "Darwinism" can mean Darwin's original theory of evolution by natural selection, the "synthetic theory" (the union of genetics with natural selection), gradual evolution, or just evolution itself; Johnson does not distinguish. Although well-read, he also demonstrates an inadequate understanding of evolutionary theory. Thus we get such assertions as "testing Darwinism by the molecular evidence has never been attempted," and that non-adaptive changes in organisms play no part in evolution. We are asked in this book to examine evolutionary theory critically. Returning the challenge, one must read this book critically and ask, what is going on here? Johnson claims that the evidence is truly against evolution. So, he asks, why do scientists continue to subscribe to it? And to what does the evidence actually point? Johnson's answer to the second question, slyly threaded throughout the book, is that life was created. Why won't science accept that? That lies in Johnson's answer to the first question: atheistic Darwinists have a stranglehold on science (and government and law and education), and "Darwinists identify science with a philosophical doctrine known as naturalism." This, he says, while not explicitly denying the existence of God, "does deny that a supernatural being could in any way influence natural events, such as evolution, or communicate with natural creatures like ourselves." Science won't disavow naturalism because "it gives science a virtual monopoly on the production of knowledge, and it assures scientists that no important questions are in principle beyond scientific investigation." There are two outstanding problems here. The first is that Johnson confuses methodological naturalism with philosophical naturalism and outright atheism. In their methodology, scientists don't deny that supernatural beings could influence natural events; they assume that supernatural beings, if they exist, do not influence natural events. To assume otherwise is to make the world safe for lazy scientists, because one can invoke the work of supernatural beings to explain all phenomena, not just the ones whose causes are not so obvious. But that does not commit scientists to the belief that God cannot intervene, or cannot communicate with creatures like us, or does not exist. It disqualifies revelation as evidence, for revelation cannot be observed and tested independently by more than one person. Science as an enterprise may be "a-theistic," but scientists are not necessarily atheists. The second problem is Johnson's assertion that naturalism assures us that "no important questions are in principle beyond scientific investigation." The argument is that if science cannot address a question, it is not important. Johnson dislikes evolution because he believes it makes things purposeless. The question of God's purpose for man is very important to him. Many scientists have the same question. But they recognize that it and other important questions - about ethics, for example - are not amenable to scientific investigation. Johnson calls for a Kuhnian "scientific revolution" that would give God a role in science and produce a "theistic science." But in sounding the call for revolution, Johnson reveals himself to be as overcome by naturalism as the "Darwinists" he accuses of perpetrating atheism upon unsuspecting Americans. He seems to believe that if science cannot investigate and provide answers about the existence of God, his purpose for human beings, or the proper moral order, then these areas of inquiry are simply a waste of time. A better self-refutation of his entire book could not be made.
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Summary: Get rid of evolution everywhere
Review: Johnson should be applauded for putting Darwin on trial. Evolution is the main tool in the humanists agenda. If they can prove evolution, the next step will be to confiscate our guns and close the churches. Here in Kansas the Board of Education has taken evolution out of the school curriculum, so that's an important step. Everyone should read this book and get evolution out of the schools everywhere.
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