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Summary: Simple and to the Point
Review: This book, goes head-to-head with every point of macro-evolution. It separates micro-evolution, which everyone accepts including creationists, from macro-evolution which states that we all came from the accidentally combination of chemicals.It's a simple read, lots of information and well referenced. A great book to get you started in your own research of the facts, versus just relying on your high school education or the media.
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Summary: This Book Spares Us of "Fallaceous Methods"
Review: This book is a handy compendiuum of the many fallacies of evolution. One critic compared the evolution of biological complexity to the diversification of languages. His reasoning skills are no better than his spelling (Fallaceous instead of Fallacious). Languages do not "evolve" in the same way that living things are supposed to. Languages are simply "horizontal" variants of each other. That is why a child can easily learn another language. In fact, if anything, modern languages are degenerates of their former selves. Compare, for instance, the richness of Elizabethan English with its modern counterpart. Finally, the equating of organic evolution with the diversification of languages only begs the question of how humans are supposed to have acquired the neuro-anatomical equipment for processing ANY human language. As Sarfati's book makes it clear, there is no escaping the gross failings of evolutionary theory. No wonder the critics clutch to the most egregious absurdities in trying to discredit Sarfati's excellent book.
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Summary: Good overview of creationist position
Review: It is disappointing to see that, as is usually the case, many of the reviewers of books about creation/evolution don't think they actually have to read the book to write a review. It makes me wonder if they ever read their science text books. Having read both Refuting Evolution and Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science, I have concluded that Sarfati does a good job with what is actually a fairly easy task, criticizing the NAS indoctrination manual for teachers. It is important to remember that the purpose of Sarfati's book is to refute the specific 'evidence' presented by the NAS. In doing so, he ends up presenting a good, easy to read overview of the creationist position. A word of warning: I purchased Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science directly from the National Academies Press and ended up being added to their email newletters. To this point I have not been able to remove my email from their lists. I guess I should have stayed with Amazon.com.
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Summary: Fallaceous Method
Review: A central methodological thinking error of Sarfati's book, typical of the creationist genre, is the mistaken belief that large, intricately complex structures necessarily imply a creator. Rather than speculate about distant subjects such as ancient species origin, let's look at something clearly knowable and only 2,000 years old. My Ph.D. is in linguistics and I have taught or directly supervised instruction in over two dozen languages. Each language is an extremely, elaborately complex, multi-systemic structure. Two thousand years ago, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, etc., didn't exist. They exist today, each as a highly complex structure, but none was created, nor was its direction of development directed by anyone. Each simply evolved from spoken Latin; the evolution of each is known and documented. It is manifestly unnecessary to postulate the existence of a creator to account for multi-layered, highly organized structures.
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Summary: Evidence of Sarfati's Critics' Total Incompetence
Review: This book provides a good overview of the many fallacies of evolution. Of course, not written for a highly technical audience, it cannot possibly consider every nuance of every issue in detail. Nevertheless, those who criticize it, besides not knowing how to spell, are simply repeating long-discredited hearsay pseudo-arguments against it. Thus, for instance, creationist scholars have long shown that, despite the loss of helium from Earth's atmosphere, the remaining quantity STILL is not compatible with an old Earth. Likewise, the old canard about the albitization of seafloor materials accounting for salt loss keeps making the rounds, despite being exposed as conjectural a long time ago. Finally, the notion that the absence of flowing water on the moon exempts isotopic dates from fatal problems is laughable. It would only be true of waterborne movement of isotopes was the SOLE factor influencing the concentration of radiogenic and nonradiogenic isotopes in rock. In fact, there are many anomalous isotopic dates from the moon, no less than from Earth, and some of these are actually greater than the supposed 4.5 billion age of both. Furthermore, the lack of atmosphere on the moon means that a new set of rationalizations is available to deal with unwanted dates.
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Summary: Informative response to NAS dogma
Review: Sarfati does a nice job responding to the indoctrination by NAS in the book Teaching about Evolution. He exposes what evolution really is an anti-God philosophy not objective science. As usual the evolutionists use straw man tactics to try to undermine creationists by saying they believe in fixity of species and implying the Bible teaches geocentrism. Its a shame pages had to be wasted to refute arguments like this but NAS wants the opposition to look as bad as possible so tactics like this should not be a surprise. Sarfati rather easily refutes the so called key evidence for evolution like whale evolution, archaeopteryx, mammal-like reptiles, ape men and embryology by showing what in reality is little evidence interpreted with a lot of imagination. The transistionals that we should be finding if evolution really happened like ichthyosaurus, bats, pterodactyls, turtles, flying insects, birds, etc. are criminally absent. First evolutionists tell us that evolution happens to slow for us to see it. Then they see the fossil record with new forms popping up without a hint of evolutionary history they have to come up with nonsense like punctuated equilibrum to explain how evolution happens rapidly. If evolutionists want their theory to be called real science why silence the opposition? Maybe its because the evidence really isn't as strong as they want you to believe and they know if they gave creation a fair hearing it would win easily.
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Summary: Evbidence of Creationist Incompetence
Review: Like most creationist books that I've read, this one is full of elementary errors in astronomy, chemistry, geology and the nature of science. For example, when arguing for a "young" Universe, Sarfati (p. 113) claims that no stage 3 supernova remnants exist in our or neighboring galaxies. However, 166.2+2.5, 180.0-1.7, 189.1+3.0, 279.0+1.1, and 290.1-0.8 are just five undisputed examples of these "nonexistent" remnants. Sarfati (p. 113) also claims that a "lack" of helium escape from the atmosphere supports its "youth." However, recent NASA images show helium and other gases being SWEPT from the Earth's atmosphere into deep space. One event occurred on September 24-25, 1998 after a solar coronal mass emission. So, why don't creationists use heavier gases (e.g. argon) that won't readily escape into space when they try to date the Earth's atmosphere? Perhaps, it's because the atmospheric 40argon/36argon is consistent with an ancient Earth (Dalrymple, 1984, p. 83; Krauskopf and Bird, 1995, p. 576) and it cannot be distorted to support their interpretations of Genesis. Using poorly known numbers from his allies, Sarfati (p. 114) argues that salt concentrations in ocean water should be much higher if the oceans were billions of years old. This argument also fails. When hot basaltic lavas erupt onto the seafloor, they remove sodium from seawater as they quench. This process, called albitization, refers to the accumulation of sodium in the cooling rocks during quenching. Because creationists ignore this important sodium-removal mechanism, their salinity calculations underestimate the age of the oceans. Sarfati (p. 110) also claims that radioactive potassium and uranium are "easily dissolved" in water and that the leaching of these parent radionuclides from rocks supposedly can disrupt radiometric dating calculations. However, as taught in any introductory chemistry course, (doesn't Sarfati hold degrees in chemistry?) water solubility and the ability of uranium, potassium, and other elements to weather out of minerals depend on the compounds that contain the elements and the oxidation state of the elements. For example, uranium (IV) is generally insoluble in water, but (UO2)+2 is highly soluble (Langmuir, 1997, p. 495-496). Potassium chloride is very soluble in water, but potassium muscovite is not and it's low on Goldich's weathering series. Even if Sarfati's accusations were true, they're irrelevant to radiometric dates on rocks from the airless and waterless Moon.
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Summary: A very concise refutation of the tenuous claims of evolution
Review: Dr. Sarfati has done an excellent job concisely refuting the various claims of unscientific evolution. Much of his evidence is backed up by numerous scientific articles and books. He gives very clear and detailed references so that his readers may check out his claims for themselves. I was very impressed by the quality of this book.
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Summary: Far More Intelligent Than its Critics
Review: This book shows many of the fallacies of evolution. Look down below and see that the intelligent-sounding critics don't know what they are talking about. For example, albitization as an "explanation" for the disappearance of salt in the ocean has been shown to be inadequate long ago. Showing that a given material can easily be leached by water is only one of the many flaws of radiometric dating methods that can be cited. There is a world of difference between presently-occurring events that can be checked directly by empirical evidence, and past events whose occurrence and direction of change can only be inferred. Finally, evolutionary beliefs go back at least to ancient Greece. Thus the notion that "everyone had to be a creationist" centuries ago is ludicrous in the extreme.
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Summary: Exposes the Dogma of Evolution for What it Is
Review: Unless you have been living under a rock, all you have probably heard was that evolution is a proven fact of science. At least that is what the embittered rationalistic critics of this book would have you believe. But it just isn't so. Sarfati masterfully exposes just a few of the fatal flaws of contemporary evolutionary theories. WARNING: If you are one who takes comfort in rationalistic fairy tales, STAY AWAY from this book.
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