Reddit reviews The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
We found 7 Reddit comments about The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
I'll stick to recommending science communication books (those that don't require a deep background on biological concepts):
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For books that everyone studying biology ends up reading, my candidate would be Lehninger's Principles of Biochemistry, by Nelson & Cox but that's a textbook.
Here are some books, articles, websites and YouTube Videos that helped me on my journey from a hardcore creationist to a High School Biology teacher.
BOOKS
The Language of God - By Francis Collins ~ A defense of Evolution by the head of the Human Genome Project (Who also happens to be Christian)
Only a Theory - By Ken Miller ~ Another Christian biologist who accepts and vigorously defends the theory of evolution
Your Inner Fish - by Neil Shubin ~ The wonderful story of how Tiktaalik was found
Why Evolution is True - By Jerry Coyne ~ A simple and thorough treatment of evolution written for the mainstream
The Greatest Show on Earth - By Richard Dawkins ~ A wonderful and beautifully written celebration of evolution
The Panda's Thumb - By Stephen Jay Gould ~ A collection of eloquent and intelligent essays written by SJG. Any of his collections would do but this one is my favorite.
ARTICLES
Crossing the Divide - By Jennifer Couzin ~ an article about an ex-creationist and his difficult journey into enlightenment.
15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense - John Rennie ~ a nice rundown of the major objections to evolution.
WEBSITE
An index of Creationist Claims - Via the TalkOrigins archive ~ an impressive index of the major problems creationists have with evolution, as well as good, evidence based rebuttals.
YOUTUBE VIDEOS/PLAYLISTS
Why do People Laugh at Creationsts? - Via Thunderf00t ~ a scathing review of outrageous sins of logic committed by creationists. Thunderf00t's style isn't for everyone, since he can come off as smug and superior
How Evolution Works - Via DonExodus2 ~ a nice and thorough overview of how evolution works
The Theory of Evolution Made Easy - Via Potholer54
Evolution - Via Qualia Soup ~ short (10 minutes), simple and well made, this is one of my go-to videos to help logically explain how evolution happens.
Scientists agree on your first few points, everything doesn't have the same ancestor, some parts of the evolutionary tree are more like rings or networks, due to endosymbiosis and horizontal gene transfer.
What you'll have to realize for the rest of it is that there isn't any difference within species or cross species, evolution is always the change of allele frequencies in a population. It might be hard to grasp at first, but I'd recommend Beak of the Finch and The Panda's Thumb for some gripping but informative reading on the subject.
One thing about design, at least assuming an all-perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful designer, it should be perfect.
So, imperfections in design either point to a mediocre designer or natural processes. I know of no one arguing that God is merely mediocre in his job.
Steven Jay Gould wrote an essay called "The Panda's Thumb" and published it and many of his others in a book of that title. The panda needed a thumb to strip the leaves from bamboo. But, like other members of the family, all 5 digits were fused together. It would be easy to un-fuse the thumb and allow for stripping of bamboo. Instead, they evolved an elongated wrist bone called the radial sesamoid bone. It works. But, it's a kluge. It's not good design.
Similarly, when humans evolved to stand upright, we got a spine with lots of curves in it. This is structurally less sound than a straight spine. Now, 80% of people experience back pain at some point in our lives. Our knees have similar issues.
There are numerous such examples throughout the biological world in which we live. Evolution produces quite good results and some pretty impressive kluges. But, it does not produce the perfection one should expect from an all-knowing designer. And, good enough rather than perfection is what we see.
Now let's look wider afield. Some argue that the universe is fine-tuned for life. But, is it? If we teleported to a random place in the universe, by far the vast majority of places would kill us in about 30 seconds. Most of the universe is what we refer to as "empty space", not truly empty, but not an atmosphere and not much for us to breath.
But, earth, clearly earth is fine-tuned for life. Well is it? First, there are about 10^22 planets. So, it's not that surprising that one or even many would support life as we know it just by chance. But, looking at our supposedly designed planet we see that more than 99% of all species that have ever lived are extinct. So, while there's still life here now, that doesn't hint at a perfectly designed planet for life, but rather one that is good enough.
So, while I personally do not see anything that I'd call evidence of design, I see a lot of evidence of natural processes.
As Stephen Jay Gould said, "We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction."
I was thinking The Panda's Thumb
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