I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested to see the evidence on which evolution is based. You can judge for yourself if it is "a theory in crisis," as creationists like to claim. I have been waiting for a book like this; like many others, I have read quite a few books about evolution but there was not a good book I could recommend that summarized the evidence for skeptics. I was very excited when I heard about Why Evolution is True and I was not disappointed when I read it.
Most of the evidence that is useful for convincing skeptics of evolution's truth is presented in chapters 2, 3, 4, and 8. I'll just say that it's a great book and very accessible to the general reader, and then I'd like to sum up a few of the major lines of evidence.
Chapter 2: The fossil record
First, radioactive dating is accurate despite creationist claims: many samples contain multiple radioisotopes, so "dates can be cross-checked, and the ages invariably agree." Other methods of cross-checking radioactive dating also show it to be accurate.
>> "The appearance of species through time, as seen in fossils, is far from random. Simple organisms evolved before complex ones, predicted ancestors before descendants. The most recent fossils are those most similar to living species. And we have transitional fossils connecting many major groups."
>> Fossils of some species are so abundant that hundreds or thousands of samples of organisms that lived over a period of millions of years can be collected and you can directly observe evolutionary change happening. He also illustrates a series of fossils that represent a land mammal species evolving into whales, with several intermediate forms.
>> "When we find transitional forms, they occur in the fossil record precisely where they should [in time]. The earliest birds appear after dinosaurs but before modern birds." There are many more examples of this.
>> "No Precambrian rabbits, or any other anachronistic fossils, have ever been found."
Summary: "There is no reason why a celestial designer, fashioning organisms from scratch like an architect designs buildings, should make new species by remodeling the features of existing ones." But that is just what the fossil record shows.
Chapter 3: Vestiges, embryos, and bad design
>> Vestigial organs: blind animals that live in the dark underground or in caves have tiny, useless eyes; why should they have any at all unless they evolved from seeing ancestors? Whales have pelvis bones, and occasionally one is born rudimentary rear legs, which makes sense only if they evolved from land animals. Humans have appendixes, which do more harm than good, but they are helpful for digesting leaves in our primate cousins. Humans have a vestigial tail, complete with a series of small tail bones; occasionally, a baby is born with a small tail external to the body that must be surgically removed. All these organs make sense in light of evolution, but why would an intelligent designer include them?
>> Dead genes (genes that are included in an organisms' DNA but don't do anything): "Virtually all species harbors dead genes, many of them still active in its relatives." Humans have the genes for making tails, but they are normally deactivated. Humans, unlike some other animals, cannot produce vitamin C; we have the genes to do it, but one gene has a mutation - and it's exactly the same mutation that occurs in other primates. "Why would a creator put a pathway for making vitamin C in all these species, and then inactivate it?...Why would the same inactivating mutation be present in all primates, and a different one in guinea pigs?"
>> Embryology: "at one stage of development mammals have an embryonic circulatory system like that of reptiles; but we don't see the converse situation. Why? Because mammals descended from early reptiles and not vice versa." Human fetuses develop a furry coat of hair at around six months after conception, but then lose it before birth; "fetal monkeys also develop a coat of hair at about the same stage of development" which "hangs on to become the adult coat."
>> Bad designs: "Flatfish are born as normal-looking fish that swim vertically, with one eye placed on each side of a pancake-shaped body. But a month thereafter, a strange thing happens: one eye begins to move upward. It migrates over the skull and joins the other eye to form a pair of eyes on one side of the body...the flatfish tips onto its newly eyeless side, so that both eyes are now on top." "We know that...flatfish evolved from 'normal' symmetrical fish." Why would a designer, who can start from scratch, design a flatfish this way? On the other hand, if a flatfish evolved from "normal" fish, it makes perfect sense. Coyne notes, "yes, a designer may have motives that are unfathomable. But the particular bad designs we see make sense only if they evolved from features of earlier ancestors." The bad designs presented in the book are not just random bad designs; they are bad designs that are perfectly understandable if you look at the anatomy of related species and recognize that they are both remodeled versions of a common ancestor. "If a designer did have discernible motives when creating species, one of them must surely have been to fool biologists by making organisms look as though they evolved."
Chapter 4: Biogeography
>> "If we dig into shallow layers of rocks in a given area, we should [and do] find fossils that resemble [but are not identical to] the organisms treading that ground today." The further back you go in time, the more dissimilar the fossils look from animals alive today. "Creationism is hard-pressed to explain these patterns: to do so, it would have to propose that there were an endless number of successive extinctions and creations all over the world, and that each set of newly created species were made to resemble older ones that lived in the same place." That's quite a stretch...
>> Oceanic islands (islands which were never connected to a continent) have some peculiar patterns of species. "They are missing major groups of organisms, and the same ones are missing on different islands. But the types of organisms that are there often comprise many similar species - a radiation - and they are the types of species, like birds and insects, that can disperse most easily over large stretches of ocean. And the species most similar to those inhabiting oceanic islands are usually found on the nearest mainland, even though their habitats are different." This pattern does not exist on continental islands (islands that were at one time connected to a continent). There is a straightforward evolutionary explanation: the species that were able to colonize the islands split into multiple species once they got there. "Why would a creator happen to leave amphibians, mammals, fish, and reptiles off oceanic islands, but not continental ones? Why did a creator produce radiations of similar species on oceanic islands, but not continental ones? And why were the species on oceanic islands created to resemble those from the nearest mainland?" Furthermore, species from the mainland that are introduced on oceanic islands do quite well there, so it's not as if they were omitted because they are somehow unfit for island living.
Chapter 5: Directly observed evolution
>> "Every single [dog], purebred or mutt, descends from a single ancestral species - most likely the Eurasian gray wolf - that humans began to select about ten thousand years ago."
>> Bacteria can have generation time as short as 20 minutes, making it ideal for evolutionary experiments. Evolution of bacteria has been observed in real-time in laboratories, including a single species splitting into two. Another experiment "showed the evolution of a complex biochemical pathway that enabled bacteria to grow on a previously unusable food" - the type of biochemical pathway that creationists have claimed cannot evolve.
>> In the wild, bacterial germs have evolved resistance to drugs in the past few decades.
Chapter 8: Human evolution
>> "We share 98.5 percent of our DNA sequence with chimps."
>> Coyne presents a series of fossils that are intermediate between chimp and humans, in which older fossils are more ape-like and they become more and more humanlike as they become more recent. Creationists claim all the fossils are either humans or apes, not intermediate, and they are separated by "a large and unbridgeable gap." "But the whole folly is exposed by the fact that creationists can't agree on exactly which fossils are 'human' and which are 'ape.'...Nothing shows the intermediacy of these fossils better than the inability of creationists to classify them consistently."
In summary
"Every fossil we find, every DNA molecule that we sequence, every organ system that we dissect supports the idea that species evolved from common ancestors. Despite innumerable possible observations that could prove evolution untrue, we don't have a single one. We don't find mammals in Precambrian rocks, humans in the same layers as dinosaurs, or any other fossils out of evolutionary order...Despite a million chances to be wrong, evolution always comes up right."
Finally, Coyne points out that the opposition to evolution is not due to a lack of evidence, for there is plenty of that, but mainly due to fears that the moral fabric of society will fall apart if people believe that humans descended from ape-like ancestors. "That just won't happen, as we know from the many European countries whose residents wholly embrace evolution yet manage to remain civilized." Time and time again, the imagined catastrophic effects of people knowing the truth about this or that are mostly or entirely misplaced. Humans, of course, have a great capacity for good as well as evil regardless of whether they believe in evolution or not. In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker described the fierce battle some people put up to deny that human behavior is influenced in any way by their genes, believing that if it were true, then personal responsibility would disappear and racism would be justified. These fears, too, were baseless. Pinker also points out that in Galileo's time, people thought the moral order of the universe was based upon the earth being the center of the universe and the sun and stars revolving around it; it was thought that Galileo's challenge to geocentrism would threaten the moral order - a laughable and bizarre concept today. Surely evolution threatens morality no more than heliocentrism does, and I expect one day people will view the denial of evolution much like we view the irrational moralistic opposition to the idea that the earth circles the sun.
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Reviews with images
Bad shipment
The content of the book is educational yet easy to read. It doesn’t bore but doesn’t also feel like a summary of everything we’ve read or been told. My only issue is that the book came to me damaged and if it expensive I would have been truly upset but because it’s cheap and the binding and cover are also fragile i can let it pass. Great book so far and images within the text are great references.
Top reviews from other countries
katie sethna
... gently by the hand and explains why Creationism and Intelligent design are simply false
Reviewed in India on January 28, 2016