When doing battle with the White Witch, Edmund gets a kudos from Lewis for being wise enough to attack the witch's wand rather than herself directly. Sanford does something similar here. Most creationists focus on how bad the odds of evolution happening are, and these arguments have already fatally wounded evolutionary theory in times past (e.g. Behe). To be sure, Sanford covers some of the same terrain here, but he spends more time than anyone else thoroughly interrogating "selection" as a force and explaining what it can and cannot feasibly accomplish. The answer, it turns out, is precious little, not even enough to keep genome from actively degenerating.

I found him giving words to problems I had sensed (if not clearly defined) while studying genetics during my undergrad years. For example, he points out there is a severe disjunct between what selection needs to accomplish (fine-tuning miniscule, "near neutral" mutations with little impact on the genome (or organism) overall) and the tools it has to do it (saying "yes" or "no" to the entire genome (or organism)). Most "near neutral" mutations simply don't have enough overall impact to even be seen by selective processes. To compound that problem, differential survival and reproduction is driven much more by random chance ("noise") than by genomic changes overall. When you add the fact that the genome is accumulating bad mutations at a steady rate, you realize that time makes the problem worse, not better. And if you like that argument, read the book, as there's more where that came from.

To address a potential "authority-bluster" counter-argument, even I was initially wondering if this book could really contain any revolutionary arguments since it hasn't made much of a splash. However, I realized the silence shouldn't have surprised me. At this point in history, evolutionary theory has philosophically retreated into it's frozen, academic fortress. Furthermore, secular materialism (the dominant philosophy animating evolutionary theory) is giving it a constant stream of supplies, such that, evolutionary thinking will likely only topple when it does. Either that, or the secularists might come up with a better theory, more worthy of their support. In this kind of climate, it's no wonder that Sanford essentially ended up preaching to the choir, even if he (and I) wish he could do more. To conclude, this really is a stellar book, with some genuinely top-rate, original thinking. I highly recommend it.

Sanford delivered concise arguments, supported by published research papers from a wide variety of authors. This is easy to read for the interested layman, and provided lots of new information not captured by other authors like Behe.

An interesting book.
Dr. Sanford is clearly very smart, and he knows his material well. And the topic is fascinating, and very possibly supports Sanford's contention that genetic deterioration is the rule in biological systems. But there was, I felt, a lack of accessibility of some of his arguments: too many of the logical links between the data and the conclusions were rushed over. But this is one of the challenges of writing science for the public: sometimes the material itself is difficult. Bottom line: the book is worth reading for exposure to its central thesis, but would have benefited from an editor or two.

This author made my corn on da cob luch. 5 stars!

Very good arguments showing the impossiblity of the typical argument for evolution based on Genetics. Very good read.

Best book for Christian apologetics in the field of genetics, or molecular and cellular biology. JC Sanford is a credible and highly recognized scientist who desires the truth and provides source documents and citations to prove that. His work in his field is unprecedented and his book lays out this information for an easy read.

There are enough nails in the coffin of evolutionary theory to build a battleship. Dr. Sanford adds several more with this powerful book that discredits the so called Primary Axiom that underpins evolution. The book is reasonably easy to read for anyone with a modest scientific education. Dr. Sanford includes a number of helpful analogies, such as improving a text book and building a space ship.

To illustrate the crumbling support for evolution, the book includes a number of quotes from scientific papers, whose authors delicately try to avoid saying how improbable the entire evolutionary facade is. They sound like they are trying to avoid mentioning the black sheep of the family who turned to a life of crime.

If those in support of evolution wish to respond, this book sets the bar in the field of population genetics.

Dr. Sanford nails his colours to the mast with this book. He deserves much support for it. Highly recommended.

This was a thought-provoking book on some often-overlooked aspects of why biological evolution is implausible. It has very high level thinking in it, but as long as you're okay with that, I think you would find it intriguing and helpful. The man who wrote it is a PhD in plant genetics and not directly connected with any official creation organization as far as I can tell, but merely sharing how his own research led him to conclude that evolution, which he had always held to, was impossible.

This book is a devastating treatment of the "primary axiom" of evolutionary thinking. Some amazing stuff here.

not persuasive.




“Pity the man who can spell a word only one way.” “I never met a man so narrow that he can spell a word in only one way.”

i just finished my first pass through, genetic entropy and the mystery of genome, as is my practice with significant reading, i’ll read it again in a few days.

what sticks now in my mind, is how mental models can mislead us. certainly the model of mendel’s library where dna is the letters in a book, the organism is a common and useful one. but it’s commonality hides a real problem, it doesn’t do justice to the system it’s trying to explain.

biological systems are complex, nucleotides, dna sequences, genes, operons, complexes, chromosomes, nucleus, cell, tissue, organ, individual, group, species, ecological niche, world. To boil it down to letters and a book, oversimplify to the point of potential confusion.

look at just the protein coding sequences for a moment. a functional protein can be encoded by any number of sequences, how many variants of alpha hemoglobulin are there? a better analogy is that various words, or even words in various languages code for similar meanings, the meanings being the proteins. it is the usefulness of that nucleotides sequences as a functional protein that really matters, not the exact sequence of letters, several to many alleles exist for every gene. simply put, words are far too constraining a symbol for the dna, it is much more like all the synonyms in many latin alphabet languages, the letters are nucleotides, the words various alleles and the meaning is the protein’s functional shape. the meaning of a sentence is the protein complex with lots of subunits like a ribosome. the cell is a book, written in thousands of different languages but still doing the necessary things to be alive. libraries are organisms, made up of different collections of books.

another problem with the book is that distinction that of selection only at organism level and mutation only at the nucleotide. in fact, the fundamental level of selection is the topic of a big argument in evolutionary theory. there is selection at the level of error correction on the dna backbone(which strand is canonical) at the level of protein analogs, there is competition and selection at the level of both sperm and viability of fertilized egg(most fertilized eggs do not reach gastrulation, some lethal developmental mutation kills them, as a prof once joked, our first and most important exam). selection appears to happen on any number of levels.

mutation happens at several levels(epigenetic) as well, not only the dna backbone, but the only one that matters is at the functional level, ie protein for those sequences that code for it. if the protein works, if the meaning of the word is close, the the mutation is neutral, it is only with a functional change that a mutation is significant, or really can be said to have even occurred. this is why most mutations are silent.

anyhow, it was interesting reading.

Read for evolution class. Not a fan

There is no genetic entropy. The selection part of Reproduction, change and selection ensures that.

New information from mutations is trivial.

A-C-G -> A-C-G-A-C-G -> A-C-G-A-T-G

That's new information in 2 mutations.

only 1 mutation needs to be slightly beneficial to become part of an entire population in a few generations.

Tetrachromatic vision is an example of a beneficial mutation