From Genesis to Genetics: The Case of Evolution and Creationism

Previous reviewers have indicated that this book is a rehash of high school biology, to over-simplistically paraphrase them. But I needed a rehash of high school biology and how it relates to geological data. The book also introduced to me stuff that was entirely new. Using the book, I was able to put together a rough timeline of how the present-day bible came to be. This timeline is verifiable using other sources, and it is essential for arguing that, if one creation story in Genesis is to be considered, then BOTH contradictory stories in Genesis should be considered. Yes, the book could delve into this and aspects of biology more deeply, but it would have to be 1000 pages long. And yes, it was well worth sacrificing a weekend to read it.

This book describes the way creationists approach evolution. If they can find just one thing that evolutionary biologists have yet to explain, they figure that one thing is enough to throw the whole thing out. Such a view is just wrong, and shows an abysmal understanding - or abuse - of science. There are more than enough transitional fossils to convince a fair minded skeptic, but no creationist would ever agree to classify anything as a transitional fossil. Not Archeoptryx, not Acanthostega (sp?), not the mammal-like reptiles. The beautiful documention of the evolution of the mammalian jaw from the reptilian jaw should convince anybody, but it will never convince a creationist. Of course, there is a lot that scientists don't know about evolution. But there is a lot that we DO know, and there is just too much evidence to simply toss out evolution. This is a theory that will not go away, although I wouldn't be surprised to see it change as we learn more about genetics.This book is not written for creationists, but for people who might be sympathetic to their cause. If people would learn more about the nature of science, they would be offended by the utter dishonesty and lack of integrity you find in scientific creationism.

What a breadth of knowledge this man has! What humanity! What generousity of spirit! I read it in one sitting because I found it so fascinating. It was worth sacrificing a weekend.

Why do we need another book that seems to explain 19th century scientific issues to a high school level audience ? The very real and serious undermining of science education that has been accomplished by various cultural movements in the United States seems to have forced us to retreat to this kind of reinforcement of basic scientific reasoning that previously could have been taken for granted. The core of this book is a quick 20,000 foot high overview of the fossil record, Linnean taxonomy, the common cell structure, vestiges of evoltuon in embryological development, vestigal structures in fully developed organisms, layers of sediment, radiocarbon dating, and modern genetics. We get a good, if very simplified, presentation of the evidence that entire species of living things have appeared and gone extinct over the eons. Moore also reviews the reasons why Biblical scholars have different interpretations of Genesis. Unfortunately, Moore never seems to fully appreciate why these modern lines of thought might not be convincing and might present a problem for a lot of people. Between the lines you can sense the real frustration in this book, of science educators faced with the task of trying to teach to an audience relatively unaware of the tradition of causal models and scientific descriptions of the natural world, and better prepared to debate metaphysics than evaluate scientific theories. Just as the transmission of heritable characteristics through reproduction requires a stable genome, the transmission of culture, whether it be scientific or religious in nature, requires a grounding of trust. The message we get from Moore is that his audience can't even be assumed to trust him that a Biblical narrative has a wholly different character than a scientific decription, they have to see it for themselves. And of course he doesn't trust his audience to even know that much. Moore explains why each set of findings is better predicted by an evolutionary account than by the account in Genesis, even if it could be reconciled in some way with Genesis as an afterthought. He is more sympathetic to "faith" than anti-religious authors like Richard Dawkins, but he doesn't give his audience much credit at all. Many aren't ever going to be convinced to stop trying to reconcile Genesis with science in some sense. There's an element of futility in some of Moore's arguments to take a view of faith as something useful and almost quaint. We see how all sorts of predictions made by evolutionary theory were eventually validated by observations, and how the whole puzzle gradually has come together in the 20th century to eliminate nearly all the pieces that were missing in the 19th century when Darwin and Wallace first proposed a basic natural mechanism for natural selection. Although it is all pretty much laid out here for them, I can't imagine that very many people who think it is their Christian duty to oppose evolutionary theory will be persuaded very fa