Thursday, April 30, 2009
Books to Fight Creationists With
Little Green Footballs has a post on which books to read to defend against the arguments of creationists. I have read the Prothero book and would recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. I have not read Jerry Coyne's book yet but have it on my list to buy. Mark Issak's The Counter-Creation Handbook is actually a compilation of web posts that showed up on the TalkOrigins site as An Index to Creationist Claims, but having it in book form would be worthy investment. I am unfamiliar with John Brockman's book but it would probably be a good read.
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Protheros book is very good.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't a big fan of Coyne's book. I actually returned it to Amazon since I finished reading it before my thirty days was up and didn't want to keep it. Perhaps it was my expectation, I was looking for a one stop source of all the converging lines of evidence for common descent, but Coyne doesn't do a great job explaining it. He has a whole chapter on biogeography, but I think he really drops the ball by focusing on islands and not Australia. The island species radiation is all small enough that any creationist would have no problem accepting it but within some undefined created Kind. Australia on the other hand, with the radiation of the marsupials, is a dead give away. He has one paragraph on ERVs. Frankly, I think Falk's "Coming to Peace with Science" did a better job explaining the evidence for common descent, and even that wasn't great.
Still, everyone on the web raves about this book. So maybe its just me.
I will have to give it a read.
ReplyDeleteRelics of Eden is excellent, as are both of Ken Miller's books, Finding Darwin's God and Only a Theory. (Well, actually, I'm only half-way through Only a Theory, but what I've read has been good.)
ReplyDeleteI have read both of them and, in a sense, they are bookends in that they provide different evidence for evolution and the second book is a bit more politically based, since it works off of the Dover trial.
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