Reply #4: Donald Prothero's review is pure gold

[skepticscott]

Creationist garbage by someone with no relevant professional training, November 30, 2009
By Donald Prothero
I concur with the comments by the other 1-star reviewers, and would like to point out that Meyer has NO degree in biology, biochemistry or molecular biology--and it shows. His arguments are full of holes, and his command of facts is not even worthy of a frosh biology student. He does NO research in molecular biology, does not know anything about the actual data or how it was collected, and apparently doesn't even understand the primary literature when he bothers to read it. Likewise, his arguments about the "Cambrian explosion" are pure garbage. He has NO degree in paleontology, has never traveled to the key outcrops or collected the fossils, and wouldn't know one fossil from another if he had. There is no longer any "Cambrian explosion," just a Cambrian "slow fuse," from the earliest fossils of the major invertebrate phyla in Doushantuo, China, 600 m.y. ago, to the soft-bodied but large Ediacarans, to the earliest Cambrian "little shellies" of 550 m.y. ago, which are tiny but show the first sign of skeletonization. The large shelly fossils like trilobites don't appear until the third stage of the Cambrian, 520 m.y. ago, some 80 m.y. after the first members of their phylum. Hardly an "explosion"! This is all well documented in the paleontological literature but creationists like Meyer don't care to read anything up to date or change their lies to reflect what scientists really know--a classic example of lying to their audiences and intellectual dishonesty. The entire premise of the book is "I can't explain how this happened, therefore no one can, therefore the 'intelligent designer'/God did it". That may convince their audiences, but that is not how science works. Scientists don't just give up and say "some god/intelligent designer did it" when a problem is hard--they buckle down and work harder. And if you read any number of good trade books by actual scientists (not frauds like Meyer) on the biochemical research on the origin of life, you'll find they've made HUGE progress on nearly every step of the problem. They haven't created life in a test tube yet--but they are very close. But reading garbage like this by a non-scientist without an inkling of honesty, you would never know it.