Just wondering if anyone here had read this book. If so, thoughts? I have the audiobook version, and so far, it’s fascinating. Unfortunately, I don’t really have the ability to read it (or listen to it) critically, or compare it to the modern evolutionary synthesis. A few atheistic evolutionary responses that I read dismissed it as ID re-packaged, but others’ thoughts (especially from those holding the TE/EC perspective) would be greatly appreciated.
Blessings,
Jay
I haven’t read the book or seen the materials, but some folks in the “Celebrating Creation by Natural Selection” Facebook group have complained that he’s just another engineer who thinks he understands biology better than biologists (this seems to happen a lot, for some reason).
In my two years at BioLogos, I’ve learned to be extraordinarily careful of non-specialists who publish books claiming to have single-handedly discovered the secret to harmonizing science and faith (again, there’s an awful lot of them out there). Institutions, communities, and expertise are really, really important, and we ignore them at our peril.
Yep, it looks like Creationism 2.0
Perhaps it’s mathematical snobbery – a culture of the “nothing buttery sort” that so many of us need to repent of in sackcloth and ashes.
Is sackcloth available today in department stores?
Sorry – rabbit trail Merv has struck again. I haven’t read the book this thread is about.
So, just like Bill Nye. 
Bill Nye doesn’t think he understands biology better than biologists. See that part you left off? And it is possible for an engineer to understand biology.
Uh, yeah, I left that part off intentionally. Because it was a joke.
Okay. It’s hard sometimes to tell around here what is a joke.
Next time I’ll use a winky face. 
Haven’t read the book but did just look through some of the blog. It looks like he favors something akin to ‘natural genetic engineering’.
One issue for now: The author seems to think that the ENCODE project, which examined the sequences of transcribed DNA, demonstrated that there is very little or no junk DNA. Some of the papers published from the project ascribed ‘function’ or ‘biological activity’ to any portion of the genome that was transcribed into RNA. However, that a portion of the genome is transcribed is no indication of its status as ‘junk’ or whether it is dispensable. Gratuitous transcription (transcriptional noise) has been know for some time. There is also a solid theoretical and evidential basis for the understanding that most of our genome is composed of junk sequences.
Here is a link to a Scientific American blog that summarizes some of the discussion and includes links to other sources like Moran (‘Sandwalk’), T. Ryan Gregory (‘Genomicron’), Ed Young ('Not Exactly Rocket Science), and John Timmer (Ars Technica article).
Added: A fun post by Michael Eisen, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at UC Berkeley.
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