Saturday, March 28, 2009

What I Have Been Reading

Yeah, I know, I have been an absentee blogger lately. I just can't seem to find the time to sit down and crank out substantive posts, nor did I want to do lazy posts where you just link to some article and write "Check out this craziness."

Anyway, one of the things I have been doing lately is reading lots of books. One I just finished is Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne. Coyne, a professor at the University of Chicago, has given us a useful primer on evolution and the evidence that supports it to the extent that Coyne feels confident enough to label evolution "true."

Of course, this book will not persuade die-hard Biblical Literalists or Harun Yahya types. In fact, in the opening of Chapter 9, Coyne describes how after he gave a presentation a few years ago to a group of businessmen in Chicago, one of the members of the audience went up to him and said, "I found your evidence for evolution very convincing-but I still don't believe it." This book is not for people like that. Instead, Why Evolution Is True serves as a useful primer for lay persons such as myself who are interested in science but do not have an educational background in biology and evolutionary theory.

1 comment:

tina FCD said...

Thanks, I might check it out.