I cannot thank Dr. Sanford enough for the case he presented in this humble book. Not only was it well sourced, well written, and easy for the "lay" reader to understand, Dr. Sanford approached the issue as objectively as possible, with very little bias. I have not yet formed a complete opinion on this topic, but I appreciate the way he came to his conclusions. If you are looking for better answers than you have gotten before, this book will put you on track.

John Sanford is no joke, he points out what all the other biologists are afraid too. But then again, he is an inavator not in fear of losing tenior or his job. He can expose evolution for the fraud it is without fear of repercussion.

Mutations lead to disease, aging, birth defects and lose of information. Evolution is based on random mutations with natural selection to increase variation, diversity and complexity. The book is an analysis on the genetic level of how evolution between types of organisms is not possible. Very good!

Helpful, interesting.

Sanford discusses the claims and challenges of current population genetics from a biological and mathematical perspective.

It can get repetitive in a very few places, perhaps due to now being in its fourth edition, as if content was added and not rewritten. But overall a page turner.

Those of you “forced to read it”—any recommendations for an alternate viewpoint on this topic? Thanks.

Very helpful for understanding the challenges the genetic information presents for evolution.

Overall, this book offers a very strong argument for a young Universe.

Because mutations accumulate so quickly in the genome and such a devastating proportion of them are either neutral or negative, it is quite simply impossible for life to have existed for billions of years.

On the other hand, I will agree with other reviews I saw in that Dr. Sanford could have greatly benefited from having an editor or two go through this book.

A critique of modern genetics

Lots of food for thought, rethinking a lot of what I have learned in population genetics and molecular genetics courses as a biologist.

The bad news before the good news!

There is nothing valid about the science described in this book. It is a parade of conceptual and factual errors. It's proselytizing masquerading as science, nothing more.

I am an electrical engineer / PhD student. I did not study Biology beyond high school. It was not easy for me to spot Mr. Sanford's intellectual dishonesty as he cites non peer-reviewed sources , misquotes and quotes out context other research, and heavily relies on unscientific non peer-reviewed publications by other creationists as supposed evidence.

To understand what kind of book this is, here is a short extract of the book:

On Page 52, the author writes: "Because natural selection is not a magic wand but is a very real phenomenon, it has very real capabilities and very real limitations. It is not all-powerful" , which is some sort of Freudian slip. Did he mean to say that natural selection is not like God (all-powerful) in that it is real? Ironically, this is how he explains the creation of life as he writes in the postlude - Page 187: "Even as we cannot create life, we cannot defeat death. Yet I assert there is One who did create life and who designed the genome. I do not know how He did it, but somehow He surely made the hardware, and He surely must have written the original software. He is called the Author of Life (Acts 3:15 - NIV). I believe the Author of Life has the power to defeat death and degeneration. I believe this is the Good News. It is my personal belief that Jesus is our hope…I humbly put before you this alternative paradigm for your consideration - Jesus is our one true hope"

Notes on citations:
In total, the author cited 124 sources. Upon examining his sources around 28 (almost a quarter of citations) of them were from non peer-reviewed sources with 13 sources published in a symposium titled "Biological Information - New Perspectives" where the papers were mostly authored by other known creationists such as:
t1. John Baumgardner who is an American young earth creationist and geophysicist.
t2. Michael J. Behe is a Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He is a fellow of the Discovery Institute.
t3. Gerald R. "Jerry" Bergman, a young-earth creationist affiliated with the Institute for Creation Research. He has a doctorate in human biology (1992) from Columbia Pacific University, a non-accredited correspondence-school that the Marin County Superior Court ordered to cease operations in California in 1999. Bergman is a prolific writer with, according to Answers in Genesis, over 600 articles (none in peer-refereed scientific journals, of course, but quite a few for Answers Research Journal) and 20 books to his name.
t4. Wesley Brewer is a Computational Engineer / Data Scientist at Computational Solutions LLC.
t5. Werner Gitt is an engineer. He Was head of the Department of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology -- he ran part of IT. He is not a biologist.
t6. Philip M. Holladay Professor of Mathematics and an expert in "A Mathematical Look at Life Spans in the Old Testament" at Geneva College, which is "Christ-centered academic community that provides a comprehensive education to equip students for faithful and fruitful service to God and neighbor" according to their official website.
t7. Robert J. Marks II is an electrical engineer and a faculty member at Baylor University, which is a private Christian university in Waco, Texas.
t8. George Montañez is a PhD computer scientist who earned his masters at Baylor University where Robert J. Marks teaches.
t9. Chase W. Nelson is the Gerstner Scholar in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.
t10. Walter ReMine is an electrical engineer.
t11. John Corrigan "Jonathan" Wells is an American biologist, whose prayers convinced him to devote his life to "destroying Darwinism", he was against the scientific and medical consensus that HIV causes AIDS.

When attempting to link Darwinism to racism, the author cites a book titled "From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany" by Richard Weikart, a senior fellow for the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute.

Perhaps the most telling of the quality of this book is the author's use of non peer-reviewed mathematical simulations as evidence that that have "rigorously falsified" and "formally falsified" the well established concept of genetic epistasis: Page 112, 114 - "The mutation-count mechanism has now been rigorously falsified by means of numerical simulation experiments (Brewer et al., 2013a)" , "The synergistic epistasis mechanism has now been formally falsified using numerical simulation experiments (Baumgardner et al., 2013)" , "Both of the two primary escape mechanisms which theorists have traditionally used to rescue the Primary Axiom are artificial, contrived, and are profoundly unrealistic biologically. They have now both been rigorously falsified (Brewer et al., 2013a; Baumgardner et al., 2013)." , "This has now been extensively documented using biologically-realistic numerical simulations (e.g., see Gibson et al, 2013)"

I meant to give it 6 stars for the robust content and the enormous effort on the author's part in simplifying the complex content. The level of difficulty should have been more consistent throughtout, but it wasn't. The reason is the literature cited had details in which the devil resides. That's why I can't give it 7 stars. Some reviews in this section give some undue numbers of stars. Read it for yourself. (Oh, the book format is kinda cheesy, so never 7 stars. 6 stars would do. Oh.. 5 is max?)

Very good discussion regarding the issues of random mutation and natural selection.