Feedback for March 2000

2. If God supports the existence of the physical world, then why is it ridiculous that he directs some seemingly random events? I grant that it adds nothing to a scientific explanation, but the author is trying to show that random events are not inconsistent with the existence of God, and I think this is correct. It is not a scientific point, but a theological one, and a properly theological point at that. It is in conflict with the religious views of some scientists and not in conflict with the religious views of other scientists, but that's not a scientific matter.

3. Dawkins' books are popularisations. If you want to deal with the actual calculations, you'll need to read technical literature after first mastering a good population genetics textbook. The literature is extensively mathematical, and only someone who is totally unaware of that literature could even make the statement "bio majors can't do math" come off their keyboard without grimacing. Here's a primer to get you going: Thompson, James N. 1997. Primer of genetic analysis: a problems approach. 2nd ed. Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Spetner's arguments are spurious at best. A general discussion of these things is found in Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations . A fuller review of Spetner's arguments, by a person who is open to anti-Darwinian arguments, can be found at Gert Korthof's site. His conclusion: "If Spetner demonstrated anything, it is that population genetics is the most falsifiable part of evolution theory."

4. Behe has been dealt with many times both on this site and again and elsewhere.

• Cosmology Tutorial, by Ned Wright, Prof. of Astronomy, at UCLA.
• Introduction to Cosmology, hosted by the NASA Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) mission.

The common approach to science by creationists is to simplify everything as much as possible, usually too much. They treat cosmology in the same way, always presenting oversimplified caricatures of what scientists really think, and then ridiculing a cosmology that they invented to be ridiculous, rather than anything that resembles reality.

In a nutshell, Big Bang cosmology is nothing more sophisticated than noticing that if the universe is expanding (which it certainly appears to be doing), then if you take the expansion backwards, everything winds up in one spot. How it got that way is anybody's guess, but that it was that way (or close to it) is pretty hard to avoid. But we can create physical descriptions of the early universe, based on experiment & theory. That physical description constitutes the fundamentals of Big Bang cosmology; it "predicts" the relative abundance in the universe of hydrogen and helium, the presence of the ubiquitous cosmic background radiation (CBR), the fact that the CBR has a precisely thermal spectrum, and the present state of expansion of the universe. It predicts the creation of matter from energy, as a "phase transition"; matter "freezes" out of the energy in much the same way as ice freezes out of liquid water. It is neither as simple, nor as silly as creationists make it out to be. The websites I gave here will provide more detailed introductions & discussions.

I also recommend the book "The First Three Minutes" by Stephen Weinberg. Currently out of print once again, it is probably the best description for the early stages of Big Bang cosmology that you can fidn for lay readers.

"The Babel fish," said the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.

"The argument goes something like this: I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'

" 'But,' says Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'

" 'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

" 'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next pedestrian crossing."

-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

It is also true that there are vague and uncertain cases where one species and another can interbreed or the process of speciation is incomplete or stalled. This, too, is independent of the definition used and is expected on evolutionary theoretic grounds.

It really doesn't matter what the definition is, speciation occurs. The different definitions merely draw different lines between them. The argument of creationists is wordplay, as so many of them are.

As you noted in another response, Quine was saying that belief in physical objects is like belief in Homeric gods. I find this philosophical view rather distasteful and founded upon an arcane "language-first" approach to philosophy, which in recent decades borders on and leads to an unhealthy postmodernism. Science is the very antithesis to this linguistic turn, which is why postmodern critics go to such lengths to misunderstand and attack science, and in this respect they are blood-cousins to creationists.

That science developed historically from certain beliefs about the nature of the universe is not to say that modern science now rests upon them. The philosophy of the medieval scholastics is emphatically not the basis of current science, and indeed the modern work on biology and chemistry tends to lead sus away from an Aristotelian binary classification of things. Things achieve a threshold and then they have salient properties that we can recognise.

So humans, since they have evolved, must have reached some threshold (of language, neurological complexity, social structure, whatever) in order to exhibit the properties we now observe. But a continuing mistake in sciences that deal with anything in which we are both objects and subjects, like biology, is to think that our observational capabilities somehow endows those properties with a certain specialness. That we observe and evaluate ourselves is special to us, but if science is about delineating and understanding the natural world, then that is one fact among many. Very many. The capabilities of flowers are also facts in the world. Science should deal with them, and with us, on a par.

Certainly I must ascribe to flowers human abilities to make the point I made. But I do this only for rhetorical effect - like Dawkins and his selfish genes, I do not really think that flowers have theologies any more than he thought genes have selfish impulses. We are oddly unique, as are they, and only by adding the premise that self-evaluation is somehow a priviliged natural property can we then say that we are "uniquely unique" as opposed to the ordinary uniqueness every organism has, if you get my drift.

As a scientifically oriented philosopher, I do not think humans are all that special in the universe. As a human, I think I and my conspecifics are the single most important things around. Science is a mode of knowing the world, and how we come to a rapprochement between the scientific and human perspectives is a matter of personal choice and accommodation. But qua science, humans are just another large hairy mammal, with a weird sexual system and expensive brains that call for an evolutionary explanation.

Thanks for taking the time to disagree with me so well.

If you're interested in studies of correlations of isotopic dating methods, with each other and position in the geologic column, I'd recommend Harland et al.'s A Geologic Timescale 1989 or Odin et al.'s Numerical Dating in Stratigraphy (the latter isn't currently in print but should be found in any decent university's geology library).

Oh, and finally: if you look more closely at the the "Hawaiian basalts" argument, you'll find the creationists' claims on that topic to be highly misleading. The dating that they reference was actually performed on mantle rocks carried in the flow, and never expected to yield the age of the flow itself. See the lower half of an old talk.origins post of mine for more detail.

A science is roughly any human enterprise to know things as they are on the basis of evidence and experiment. Darwinism is definitely that, in every respect. See the Evolution and Philosophy FAQ on metaphysics

But beware: not everything that calls itself Darwinism is so. A good many wild philosophies go by that name. These things run in cycles - the current fashion is to use the term Darwinism for artificial life research a lot. Moreover, many religious writers use it as an ad hoc justification for their views, especially on the Internet. If you want to understand the range of views that go by the name "Darwinian", see the "So You Want to be an Anti-Darwinian: Varieties of Opposition to Darwinism" FAQ for a guide.

You ask some good questions, but unfortunately this is not a good place to look for answers.

There are, of course, a great many ways in which believers reconcile their faith with science. Here are some links which could be of interest. I have included links to a number of ex-creationists. For completeness, you may wish to look also at Christian traditions in which creationism is not even an issue. Good luck!

• Glen Kuban, Christian and ex-creationist.
• The Testimony of a Formerly Young Earth Missionary, by Dr. Joshua Zorn.
• Glenn Morton, evangelical Christian and ex-creationist.
• John Polkinghorne is an extraordinary figure; a genuinely world class scientist (physics) who then made a career change to priest (Anglican). He was never a creationist, and is fairly conservative theologically.
• Terry Gray, Christian and biochemist.
• The American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) is a fellowship of men and women of science and disciplines that relate to science who share a common fidelity to the Word of God and a commitment to integrity in the practice of science. (Quoted from their page.)

Kent Hovind's "challenge" is not about "evidence of evolution". I suggest the reader read it again. To win, someone must reproduce the Big Bang from scratch. I would tend to think that this project might cost more than $250,000 and also tend to make moot the entire challenge, not to mention our little planet.

Does Kent Hovind really have $250,000 ready for disbursal to a successful challenger? There is no evidence to support even the existence of such funds. Hovind is unlikely to have or hold on to such funds, given his record of income tax avoidance. Who makes up the judging committee? Hovind says "trained scientists", but provides no names.

Hovind's "challenge" is just another rhetorical device.

People have tried to correspond with Hovind about his "challenge".

• Kent Hovind's Challenge to Evolutionists

There seem to be as many problems in taking Hovind's challenge seriously as in taking Hovind's "Ph.D." seriously.

• Bartelt Critiques Hovind's "Dissertation"

Wesley

The argument severely digested in the Creation Online page is that if the galaxy were as old as a few billion years, then there should be a lot more supernova remnants (SNR) visible in our own galaxy. Davies goes to quite a lot of effort to show this, but his paper suffers from one major flaw. It's an entirely theoretical construction that probably does derive the actual number of physically existing SNR. However, his study all but ignores the problems encountered trying to observe such beasts. Davies, and the abridgement, both say that there are no "stage 3" SNR. That is not true, there are several known. Davies severely overestimates the observable lifetime of an SNR, and so naturally overestimates the number we would expect to see.

I spent a decade working in a radio astronomy group, and one of the projects I workeed on was looking for radio SNR. You might think it peculiar, but you can look right at an SNR and not see it at all. It is virtually impossible to distinguish a stage 3 SNR from the background clutter, so instead of expecting the exorbitant 5000 called for by Davies, I would expect to see anywhere from say 0 to 10, maybe. The same is true for stage 2 SNR; Davies assumes that they can be seen from much farther away than is in reality the case. There is no appreciable discrepancy between the observed distribution of Galactic SNR and the age of the Galaxy.

[Since Tim wrote the above a very detailed FAQ debunking the supernova claims of Mr. Davies was added to this Archive.]

In general, punctuated equilibrium is highly misunderstood and widely misquoted. See our article on Punctuated Equilibria for more details.

If you had quoted the whole sentence from our opening page, it would be clear that the words refer to the usenet group. Our opening page introduction goes on to describe the difference between this FAQ website, and the newsgroup debate forum.

This archive presents the mainstream science perspective on the matters under dispute in the discussion group. Other websites provide contrary views, and we have many links to such sites. A few web sites are particularly directed to matters discussed in talk.origins. This is the oldest such site, but no website has an official connection with the usenet group.

We are of the opinion that the best information is from the perspective of mainstream science, and that is what we try to supply. This is spelt out in our home page and our more detailed welcome page. We have added a special note to the feedback page, asking people to read our welcome page before complaining of bias. We are biased, most definitely, and with good reason.

I am also happy to use this feedback area to help those of our readers who still have difficulty comprehending this simple point. Debate is great, and there is a newsgroup for that purpose. There are many recurring misconceptions in the newsgroup. We collect useful information addressing those misconceptions. We don't provide a hosting service for anyone who has a viewpoint. We are happy that people with alternative views also have advocacy web sites. We link extensively to those alternative views, but we do not attempt to speak for them.

Please go back and read that opening page again. Thank you.

Initially, it is thought, the original "protocells" divided due to mechanical instability, and so each daughter cell was a random sample of part of the parent cell's molecules. Moreover, it is also thought that primitive genetic material was not tightly restricted to parent-child lineages, but that it often escaped the cell walls and was incorporated into other cells. In this way, quite a lot of viable mutations were spread over many different cell types. It was something of a massive parallel experimental laboratory. Even today, asexual cells exchange genes in one of three ways: conjugation, where two cells attach to each other and exchange all or part of their genes; transformation, where free-floating genes are released from cells (which may be dying) and taken up into the genetic material of other viable cells; and transduction, where vectors such as viruses insert foreign genes into the genomes of cells as a byproduct of their trying to replicate themselves. Such viruses, called retroviruses, often take up some of the genetic material of their hosts and leave copies in the next host infected.

Selection acted on early organisms to tighten up the genetic replication process until a high degree of accuracy was attained. In asexual lineages like bacteria, this would have been important because random mutations would have tended to introduce deleterious errors, whereas in sexual and other gene-exchanging organisms, such errors could be overcome and lost in recombination (organisms that were heterozygotic - had both alleles or alternative genes - would be better off than homozygotes for the mutant gene).

A point to make is that processes such as mitosis are not identical in all cell types. The Tree of Life is divided roughly into three domains (eubacteria, archeabacteria and eukaryotes). Plants and animals are eukaryotes, and they are the result of a fusion between two distinct cell types. Their mode of cell division is different to the mode of, say archaebacteria, which are much closer in "design" to the original cells.

As to sexual modes of reproduction in multicellular organisms like us, note that for around the first two thirds of the existence of life on earth, all life was either single-celled, or colonial like an algal mat. Sexual reproduction evolved sometime before the Cambrian, say, around 600 million years ago. Life evolved, so far as we can tell, around 3.8 billion years ago. My guess is that sex evolved from the single cell gene exchanging processes that probably go back to the earliest cellular life, and that the organs evolved later to make it more efficient.

The driver of biodiversity is ecology. As you get organisms in different environments dealing with each other, they evolve to cope with the demands placed on them by their ecological interactions. A minimal ecology is three or more organisms. It wouldn't take a lot of diversity in the initial "pond" (more probably, in my view, an underground chamber through which organic molecules flowed) to kick off a process of increasing diversification, especially if the conditions living things found themselves in changed as they spread out.

See also my comments in the October 1999 Feedback

Matter freezes out of the energy of the Big Bang in much the same manner as ice freezes out of liquid or vapor water. AS the pure energy early universe expands & cools, it is eventually cool enough to allow matter ("frozen energy") to form. A series of similar steps changes that primordial matter into the forms we are used to seeing now.

And you ask " ... so which sounds more plausible to you energy with no intelligence whatsoever or energy with intelligence because maybe this energy that we are seeing here is God." The theory of evolution is quite indifferent to the answer, and works quite well in all of its forms, regardless of which you choose. I personally do not like the concept of God, and I find the Universe makes far more sense without such a useless complication. However, as you can see by the "God and Evolution" article, there are those who disagree.

Despite your request for no more websites, here's one anyway: Ned Wright's Cosmology Tutorial. If you want to learn more about cosmology, this is a good place to start.

Most speciation occurs because a population of a certain species is isolated geographically (allopatry) or at the periphery of a species' range (peripatry). It therefore has its own sampling of the genes of the wider species, and since it is a smaller group than the whole species, it tends to have different genes (alleles) than the original species.

Over time, alleles that are rare in the main species but happen to end up in the small population have a better chance of being reproduced and becoming linked to other genes that may also be rare in the parental populations. Eventually, the "constellation" of genes in the isolated population are quite different to that in the parental ones.

Natural selection then is able to relatively optimise the gene combinations in the isolate to form apparently different traits and adapt the members of the isolate to their perhaps different local conditions. The end result is a new species.

This is called peripatric and allopatric speciation. Repeating it several hundred times is enough to give some radically distinct life forms. Most distinctive groups are formed only once, in a particular speciation event, from which they then radiate into many species and usually many different habitats.

The initial origin of genetic novelty - of the alleles in a population - is mutation, but mutation doesn't form new species; it is just the raw material from which new species get formed by drift and selection. There are exceptions, of course - almost everything in biology has exceptions. Some species (mainly in plants) are known to be formed by sudden mutations, by hybridisation, and by natural selection operating on a single population (sympatry) to separate slightly different forms to the point where they can't interbreed, but this is not the dominant mode.

I have edited the original question to cut down on the length of question 1, and point out that I have already answered that question in another response, on this page, with links to the original source. And it's not supernovas they are talking about, it's supernova remnants.

Question 2: It isn't the pressure that determines whether or not something will flow out of the rocks, it's the pressure gradient, or in other words, the difference in pressure across the rock. If one side of the gas or oil pocket feels the same pressure as the other side, it won't go anywhere, regardless of the total pressure. Gas & oil don't come flowing out in a hurry because there is not a sufficient pressure gradient to push them out. I also note that while there was a reference to a paper in Science, there was no indication as to which issue (it has been in publication for over 100 years).

Question 3: The saltiness of the oceans has nothing to do with the age of the Earth, and everything to do with the chemical residency time of sodium chloride (salt) in solution in the oceans. This argument comes originally from Henry Morris, and can be found in his small book The Scientific Case for Creation (1977). Table 1, pp 55-59 presents 70 "uniformitarian estimates" for the age of the Earth, and of those 32 are based on the influx into the ocean of one or the other material. The estimates on the age of the Earth run from 100 years (!!) for aluminum to 260,000,000 years for sodium. It's an entirely bogus trick, which should be fairly obvious. Who would suggest that this is a reasonable way to estimate the age of the Earth, when the result is 100 years?? The average and standard deviation of these 32 "uniformitarian estimates" on the age of the Earth works out to be about 17,600,000 ± 53,400,000 years, which looks like a not much worse than 50/50 bet that the Earth does not exist yet. I'm impressed.

Question 4: Star clusters are not expanding, so the genesis of the question is somewhat perplexing.

Question 5: The stability of Saturn's rings was settled in 1980 & 1981, when the Voyager I & II spacecraft passed through the Saturn System. The discovery of shepherd satellites solved the stabilty problem. The rings of Saturn are not unstable, because they are held in place by numerous small satellites in the ring system. This has proven to be the case as well for the rings of Jupiter, Uranus & Neptune.

Question 6: The characteristic cooling times of the outer planets are much longer than the age of the solar system, so the fact that they are losing heat faster than the sun puts in heat, is not a problem. They simply have not had time to cool off yet. Likewise, the mass loss rate of Io is trivial, and even if it has been going on for billions of years (which may not be the case), it would hardly have had a noticable effect on the mass of Io.

Question 7: A problem well known in the study of galaxy dynamics, and called the winding dilemma. It turns out that the dilemma pretty much vanishes once you recognize that the spiral arms are not made up of a spiral pattern of moving stars, but rather a spiral pattern that moves through the stars, as a density wave. It is also evident that spiral galaxies do not in fact retain the spiral shape over billions of years, which also dulls the edge of the creationist argument.

Another gaggle of creationst arguments put to rest.

Creationists like a variable speed of light, because it would allow for higher rates of radioactive decay, and skew radiometric ages to look a lot older than they really are. in a standard cosmological framework, the variabilty of the speed of light lasted for only a short stretch early in the big bang, and came to an end long before it would ever be an isssue in radiometric dating. But creationists need the speed of light to be variable now, or at least during historical time. And therein lies the rub, as Shakespeare would say. The only creationist attempt to argue this centers around the work of the Australian physicist & creationist Barry Setterfield [see Lambert Dolphin's "On the constancy of the speed of light". But the data analysis is extremely unconvincing. So much so that even arch-creationists like D. Russell Humphreys, who certainly is no friend to evolution, argues against the Setterfield hypothesis as well.

Here are webpages that feature abstracts of some of the real papers on the cosmological variability of the speed of light. They are all hosted by the same source, the Los Alamos preprint server. There are other papers, but these should serve to get the point across that there are legitimate reasons for considering a cosmologically variable speed of light, but not the way creationist do it.

• Cosmologies with Varying Light-Speed by John Barrow; has been published in Physical Review D, 1999
• A time varying speed of light as a solution to cosmological puzzles by Andreas Albrecht & Joao Magueijo; has been published in Physical Review D
• Cosmology with a time-varying speed of light by Andreas Albrecht; from the conference proceedings of COSMO98

Certainly soft-bodied invertebrates are found in the precambrian; but jawless fish are not. I think you may have mixed up the first ancestors of the chordates with their descendants. The article speaks of the progenitors of the chordate phylum, the phylum to which any "jawless fish" belongs. However the article does not imply the existence of such "fish" in the precambrian. They are a later development

But even according to a simplistic definition of information, mutations can give rise to new information. Mutations may cause a section of genetic material to be lengthened or shortened, for instance. See the articles Are Mutations Harmful?, The Evolution of Improved Fitness, Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics, and the December 1998 Post of the Month.

No biological definition of evolution that I am aware of is cast in terms of intelligence. Given that a great many living species exist for which discussion of "intelligence" makes no sense (plants, fungi, etc.), it would be fairly silly to define evolutionary change in terms of intelligence.

Let's see... true things about evolution. That would make an overlong list. I'll just give some of my favorites.

• Inheritance is particulate, not blending.
• Inheritance is not perfect. Changes can and do happen in heritable information.
• More organisms are produced than can be sustained under prevailing ecological conditions.
• Those heritable variations which correlate with differential survival of organisms tend to have higher proportional representation in the population.
• The distribution of traits in a population can be influenced by chance effects, such as population bottlenecks and sampling from a limited pool of variants.
• Fossils are the traces of organisms that were once alive.
• Fossil forms show that extinction of species happens. Certain fossils represent organisms common enough, large enough, and distributed in areas where if they were present through the present day could not have been overlooked.
• Fossils are distributed in a stratigraphic pattern indicating change in fossil assemblages over time.
• Fossil assemblages show that mass extinctions have happened at widely different times in the earth's history.
• The canonical genetic code is consistent with the theory of common descent.
• Patterns of differences in sequences of proteins and heritable information support the idea that these differences have accrued since the time of a last common ancestor.
• Evolutionary interrelationships have been used to advantage in medical research.
• The principles of natural selection have been used to advantage in computational optimization and search.
• Species have been observed to form, both in the laboratory and in the wild.
• A novel symbiotic association has been observed in the laboratory.

Wesley

More generally however, we are not simply trying to change the minds of creationists. We are trying to supply a useful information resource which can be used by anyone, from any background.

it should also be noted that the original "chimera" (mixed organism) was made by a Chinese farmer who wanted to maximise the sale price - he knew that fossils with tails got more than those without. A few scientists were taken in by it, but not for long [thanks to Chris Brochu for this information].

I contend that we are in exactly that situation with living things. For all we know they may very well be designed, but nothing in what we know about them requires that they are. We have no (scientific) background information that suggests that they need to be designed. In fact, we have a scientific background theory that explains why complex specified organisms exist - natural selection - and nothing in that theory requires agency or direction.

On the other hand, if we were to admit an unspecifiable and unknowable agent into the causal process, where would it stop? We could not even evaluate if the empirical evidence was giving us any information about the phenomena we observed at all. That way madness lies (recall Descartes' Evil Demon), and certainly the end of science.

If you say that you have nonscientific reasons to think things are designed, well neither I nor any scientific method can disprove it. But there are, by definition, no scientific reasons for thinking something is designed unless we have a (methodologically natural) knowledge of the agents that produced it.

As to "bad design", as Terry Pratchett once said, bad design is evidence of a blind watchmaker :-) There are subfunctional features or maladaptive features of many organisms, and it is not (just) a subjective assessment. A spine that fails to properly support the organs and weight of an animal is bad design no matter who looks at it. Any second year engineering student could compute the stresses and come up with a better solution.

Diamond, Jared M. 1998. Guns, germs and steel: a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. London: Vintage.

Rindos, David. 1984. The origins of agriculture: an evolutionary perspective. Orlando: Academic Press.

How novel.

The "burn in hell" award
+8

This can only be awarded by C'ists. You score six if, in response to a posting of yours, a C'ist claims you are a pawn of Satan, part of a Satanic conspiracy, Satan himself or will burn in hell for your beliefs.

The talk.origins Home Game

I started opposing anti-evolutionists in response to the manifold lies and distortions present in the Scientific Creationism literature. I work toward truth and keeping error out of science classrooms. If I indeed find myself in a very very hot place for eternity, I am confident that it will be because of a lapse in some other regard, not in taking the evidence as it appears to be.

Wesley

Having said that, there are several books by Ronald Numbers and Robert Pennock that are illuminating on this topic. In my own opinion, and I am no expert on the history of (American) creationism, it arises from the conflict between three movements: the antimodernism of fundamentalism, which began around 1895; the increasing stress in the humanities on textual interpretation, which ironically derives from biblical hermeneutics; and the continually increasing reliance in science upon non-intentional mechanisms, which upsets folk biology, and folk psychology let alone religious beliefs.

Some references:

Ammerman, Nancy Tatom. 1987. Bible believers: fundamentalists in the modern world. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Numbers, Ronald L. 1992. The creationists. New York: A. A. Knopf.

Numbers, Ronald L. 1998. Darwinism comes to America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Pennock, Robert T. 1999. Tower of Babel: the evidence against the new creationism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. First chapter is online at MIT Press