Crown Clade of Creation

I’ve been writing at Coyote Crossing/Creek Running North for nearly a decade, and in the decade’s worth of archives there are a handful of posts that really seem like they ought to live here. So every month or two I’ll dust one of them off, if it’s not too horribly outdated, and put it here for your delectation or dissection.

This one is a 2006 review of the abysmal “biology” “textbook” Biology: God’s Living Creation, published by the creationists at A Beka Books.

“The sequence of study found in all other current biology texts can implant a subtle evolutionary philosophy in the students’ minds. The Christian teacher will find that the unique A Beka Book approach to biology eliminates the conflict which results when evolutionary philosophy is combined with truth. Students and teachers alike will feel more comfortable when they realize that it is not biology that is in conflict with Scripture, but rather the ungodly philosophy of some biologists.

So reads the prologue of Biology: God’s Living Creation, sent to me as a gift by a friend with a disturbing sense of humor. The controversial textbook — and here I use “textbook” to mean “cruel practical joke played on unsuspecting high school biology students” and “controversial” to mean “filled with lies” — made the news recently when a group of Southern California fundamentalists sued the University of California over UC’s refusal to credit biology classes for which the book served as text. The UC regents were right to so decide: the book is garbage.

Much of the public attention to the book focused on what I will call for lack of a suitable expletive the paleontology section, and for good reason. The second paragraph of that section begins:

“The Bible, the oldest record of man’s past, reveals to us the close working association between created man (Adam) and other living things.”

Anthropology comes under direct attack in the next para, which starts out

“After the days of Noah, when God dispersed mankind throughout the world…”

The text is the usual creationist assortment of misrepresentations (“Supporters of the punctuated equilibrium concept argue that most ‘missing links’ are missing from the fossil record because they never existed,” page 368), non-sequiturs and arguments from authority (page 349 holds a table of prominent historical scientists who were Christian creationists, the most recent being electrical engineer John Ambrose Fleming, who died a very old man in 1945) and flat out lies (“No true ‘missing links’ have ever been found to bridge the gaps between different kinds of organisms,” page 367).

Of that last category, perhaps the most damaging example can be found on page 352:

When a hypothesis has passed the test of many well-designed experiments and has the support of other scientists, it is referred to as a theory.

Despite the colloquial use of the word to mean “wild-assed guess,” a theory in this context is a framework on which the results of tests of hypotheses are related one to the other. A theory is a higher order of truth, above “fact.” It’s provisional, but so, in science, are facts. But leave the quote-mining to the creationists. There’s too much funny stuff in the book, and we’d be here all day.

OK, just one more, question 7 from Section Review 13.1, on page 343:

In a paragraph, explain why the Bible is completely true and accurate when it speaks of scientific matters, although it is not a scientific textbook or treatise. Give examples of truths recorded in the Scriptures many years before they were recognized by scientists.

But to tell the truth, the odious lies in the “paleontology” section weren’t the thing that bothered me the most about the book. They’re so blatant, and easily refuted by any student that has both a questioning mind and Internet access. They’re almost a burlesque of creationist thought, and besides, I’ve become jaded in that respect.

No, the statement that bugs me most in this book is in the section on human physiology.

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