Book Review: Evolution's Achilles' Heels

Evolution’s Achilles Heels is a gripping, up-to-date (2015), highly illuminating look at the science surrounding evolution versus creation: it is a must-read for every Christian involved in today’s cultural war.  While the publication of Scientific Creationism in 1974 revealed the shallowness of the science behind evolution at that time, Evolution’s Achilles Heels brings forty additional years of fresh research into the scientific discussion.  It shows that those areas of knowledge most commonly considered strengths of the evolution model are actually its most crippling weaknesses.
The topic is of overwhelming practical importance, because while Darwinian evolution has dominated academic circles for 150 years, it has also provided the intellectual justification for the secular humanism dominating the West today, as well as Marxist/Leninist Communism, Nazism, and other forms of socialism. The outcome of evolution’s strictly naturalistic worldview has been linked to racism, slavery, forced sterilization, suicide, abortion, mass murder, euthanasia, and genocide. 
Because the nature of the subject is contentious, it is refreshing to find a gracious, humble, fair-minded approach being used, one quite different from the disdain and bombast often seen in works promoting evolution.  Well edited by Dr. Robert Carter, with an excellent forward by Dr. Carl Wieland, each chapter is written by a Ph.D. scientist both highly qualified in his specialty, and skilled at writing.
Natural selection is the first of the eight topics covered.  While “natural selection” was the only mechanism Darwin proposed to explain the origin of all the diverse life forms on earth, natural selection cannot create any genetic information to pass on to offspring.  Instead, it is a conserving process that actually eliminates the mutations evolutionists require.  The “General Theory of Evolution” claiming the common ancestry of all living things requires the strictly naturalistic creation of entirely new genetic information, a mechanism still vainly sought today.
The chapter on genetics and DNA delves deeply into the biochemistry involved in genetics, and details the hyper-complexity of DNA, now considered a four-dimensional genome.  The multiple, overlapping DNA and RNA codes seem to “defy naturalistic explanation and make it impossible for natural selection to operate as an agent of long-term evolutionary change.”  The author discusses mitochondrial DNA, transmitted through the female lineage, and exposes as false the common assertion that “humans and chimpanzees are 99% identical.” He further points out the impossibility of new gene families ever evolving in the time frame offered by evolutionists.
The origin of life chapter points out that information, not chance, is the key to life, and details the probability of life arising from non-life.  The amazing chemical machinery required to produce even the simplest life is so complex that the probabilities of arising from chance are quite impossible.  Life originating from non-living chemicals, the author concludes, continues to be an “article of blind faith.”
The chapter on the fossil record points out that transitional fossils linking the different kinds of plants and animals have still never been found.  The author discusses “offset fossils,” fossils found in strata confounding evolutionary theory, and gives examples of exceptionally well-preserved fossils that cannot be explained by an evolutionary timeline.  Rather than the fossils showing descent with modification from simple to complex, the greatest “evolutionary innovations” appear suddenly in the fossil record, without precursors, the very antithesis of Darwinian evolution.  Diversification through time is simply not seen. Examples of fraud or suppression of evidence on the part of the evolutionary establishment are presented, and many examples of living fossils that refute evolutionary theory are discussed, including the coelacanth, the Wollemi pine, and jellyfish.
The geologic record chapter takes apart the three major uniformitarian assumptions of Charles Lyell that still dominate the teaching of geology today, including: blithely dismissing the biblical account, assuming that all geologic features can be explained by slow or gradual processes, and emphasizing features that seem to require long periods of time. The author briefly discusses the superiority of the biblical account in explaining most geologic features, and gives examples, including dinosaur graveyards, rapid petrification, experimental coal formation, and polystrate fossils.
The chapter on radiometric dating includes a helpful review of basic nuclear chemistry, discusses the unrealistic assumptions required to employ the various methods, and demonstrates their unreliability when tested on samples of known age, such as rock formed during recent volcanic eruptions.  The cosmology chapter, while technical, gives a straightforward review of astrophysics and the state of cosmology today, where the biggest weakness of evolutionary cosmologists is their admitted inability to test the various models.  The fully materialistic system of cosmic evolution, it appears, is far more a philosophical worldview than an empirical science.
The concluding chapter on ethics and morality emphasizes the profound effect that the evolution model has on human behavior: it produces a worldview that human life is purposeless, futile, and expendable.  Most of the horrors seen over the past century, including hundreds of millions of deaths, can be directly linked to the acceptance of evolution as “science.” Most alarmingly, the evolutionary doctrine which the great body of current evidence shows to be antique, and based in atheistic presuppositions more than science, continues to be taught in schools and universities all around the world.  Most students continue to be indoctrinated in a worldview that predictably leads to violence, death, and destruction.
Altogether, Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels is an excellent update on the controversy between evolution and biblical creation, and is an important book for anyone wishing to more clearly understand the roots of the worldview conflicts raging around us.      
G. M. Horning 

Carter, Robert (ed.); Evolution’s Achilles Heel; Creation Book Publishers, 2015.


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